“The entire kitchen staff.” She turned, able to see it now. “Whoever it was came in and managed to kill them off one by one. The woman alone figured it out, tried to escape.”
“Yeah.” Stepping back, he closed the door.
“Where are the bodies?” Her mind jerked from one wall to the next, trying to make sense of an evil that defied understanding. “You don’t think they’re outside, beneath the snow?”
Dev shook his head. “I’m guessing EarthTwo sent in a cleanup crew.”
Neither of them said anything more until they’d walked through the remaining buildings they could access. One was a gym, and it was pristine. The next five buildings had clearly been dormitory facilities. Shattered objects, broken windows, blood and chaos reigned here, most of it concentrated around the beds.
“Night,” she whispered. “They were asleep. That’s the only way anyone could’ve gotten so many of them—there had to be telepaths in the group. They’d have warned the others if they’d been awake.”
“Unless . . .”
She looked up from her contemplation of a bunk bed that seemed to have been snapped in half. “Unless?”
“Unless we’re talking about more than one killer.”
A wave of darkness, a crackle of memory, and the floodgates opened.
“There’s been a major incident, sir.”
“Details?” That voice, Ming’s voice.
A pause. “The female?”
“She hasn’t got enough mind left to understand. Tell me the details.”
“EarthTwo received a telepathic and electronic Mayday from its operation in Sunshine, Alaska, approximately two hours ago. The management asked for Council help, as such assistance is a negotiated part of their contract with us. We were able to mobilize a small Tk unit and teleport to the location.”
“How many dead?”
“One hundred and twenty.” The speaker could’ve been talking about stocks and bonds, so calm was his tone of voice. “The population numbered one hundred and fifty. Three were seriously injured, while six managed to find hiding places.”
“That leaves twenty-one.”
“Yes, sir. It appears various members of the team broke Silence at approximately the same time, though not in a central location. They attacked each other and the nonfragmented members of the expedition. Of the twenty-one who survived the initial incident, ten died attempting to attack the Tk team, while eleven were neutralized and put into involuntary comas.”
“Sunshine?”
“An isolated outpost. We can send in a team to clean up the immediate mess, but we’d have to take a significant number of Tks off higher-priority tasks in order to fully erase the settlement.”
“Viability of the work without telekinetics?”
“There’s always a risk of detection with flying in—the op may attract unwanted attention.”
A long silence. “Were all the staff members at Sunshine Psy?”
“Yes.”
“Have EarthTwo log that the encampment was abandoned after the outbreak of a lethal airborne virus. That should keep anyone else from wanting to go in for the time being.”
“Katya!” Dev shook the woman in his arms, having carried her outside to the cold when she refused to respond to him in the dormitory.
Her eyes fluttered. “Dev?”
“It’s me, baby. Come on, come back.”
“I remembered,” she whispered, her voice husky.
“Tell me in the car.” Only when he’d settled her in the backseat and crawled in to take her into his arms did he breathe again. “Your eyes . . .” It was like she’d ceased to exist, or gone so deep that he couldn’t see her anymore. He’d thought no terror could come close to what he’d experienced as a child. He’d been wrong.
She hugged him, pressing kisses to his jaw. “I’m sorry—I think I must’ve slipped into some type of a trance state.”
He let her soothe him, needing the caresses, needing to know that she was alright. “Tell me.” Stroking his hand up her spine, he closed his hand over her nape.
Horror spread its fingers through his chest as she began to speak, the invasion hard and pitiless. “Over twenty people went insane at once?”
“More than that—some would’ve been killed when they first turned on each other.”
“How is that even possible?” He pulled her into his lap, needing to feel the living warmth of her weight. “I’ve heard that Psy are breaking in higher numbers, but we’re talking about a case of mass insanity.”
“I didn’t believe the rumors,” she said. “Not until I heard that.”
He waited.
“A number of our—mine and Ashaya’s—contacts reported that there were stories of certain parts of the Net going ‘dark,’ like something was collecting there, something that ate up or buried the fabric of the Net.”
“The influence of the DarkMind?”
“Yes, that’s a possibility. I just don’t know.” She shook her head. “No one could ever actually point to an example, so we didn’t pay it that much attention. We couldn’t—we had to focus on what we could actually see and change.”