CARESSED BY ICE

“Destiny?”


“You’d better believe it. So what are we going to do to make it happen?” Her expression shifted without warning and she dropped off him, breaking all contact. “Your eyes . . . the pain, it’s worse than before, isn’t it?”

“It—”

She held up a hand before he could tell her it didn’t matter. “It’s not nothing, not when I can see blood spots in the whites of your eyes.” Her voice trembled for a second before she got it under control. “How bad?”

He couldn’t lie to her. “At the current rate, it’ll soon cause permanent damage to my brain.” A hard, rough form of rehabilitation, apt to leave him a vegetable.





CHAPTER 36


In the darkest core of the PsyNet, the pure black walls of the Council chambers streamed with data, endless silver columns too fast for the eye to see but legible to the psychic mind.

“We’ve lost control of PineWood,” Nikita said. “Parrish—the alpha—is dead, and someone’s not only deprogrammed the rest of the pack, he or she has armed the hyenas’ minds against further interference. Trained personnel may be able to break those blocks, but it will take considerable effort. It’s not worth our time.”

“Sascha?” Shoshanna asked.

“No.” Nikita was certain of that. “She doesn’t have the necessary skill set.”

“Neither does Faith NightStar,” Marshall pointed out.

“Which leaves us with an unknown.” Kaleb, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet to that point. “If I’m not mistaken, programming and deprogramming skills are taught exclusively to certain branches of our armed forces.”

“Correct.” Ming’s icy blaze. “It has to be one of the elite soldiers.”

“Someone outside the Net?” Nikita knew full well that, contrary to what the masses believed, there were some Psy who were not hooked into the PsyNet. Not renegades like her daughter, but those who had never uplinked at all . . . because they had another option. The existence of the “Forgotten” was one of the Council’s many dirty secrets.

“Not necessarily,” Kaleb said. “I think it’s becoming obvious we have a serious internal threat.”

“The Ghost.” Marshall’s star went a cold, cold white.

“He has to be operating with an associate or associates,” Nikita added. “One Psy can’t be so skilled in both psychic and physical warfare. The lab explosions were very precise, involving a high degree of technical knowledge—wholly dissimilar to the expertise required to siphon data from secure PsyNet databases.”

“Then there are the assassinations.” Tatiana spoke up. “We’ve lost several top scientists.”

“I’m checking my databases for possible renegades.” Ming was silent for a minute. “Over the past ten years, we’ve lost one Arrow and seven soldiers with the requisite skills—in circumstances that made recovery of their bodies impossible.”

“Who was the Arrow?” Tatiana again.

“Judd Lauren.”

Nikita recalled the case. “I think we can safely cross him off the list. The entire Lauren family has been dead for over a year.”

“Is that certain?” Marshall asked. “We never found bodies.”

Nikita knew the wolves. “The SnowDancers don’t leave bodies to find. I can’t see them giving sanctuary to any Psy and particularly not a Psy of Judd Lauren’s abilities. He would have been a clear threat—their rule is to kill first and ask questions of the corpses.”

“Talking of the wolves,” Shoshanna said, “Brenna Kincaid is still listed on the Tech Association database as an active Level 1, which means she’s alive.”

“Give it more time—they’ll be killing each other soon enough.” Tatiana’s cool tone. “Ming, what about the other seven soldiers you lost?”

“I’ll trace them,” Ming said. “But I agree with Councilor Krychek—certain other recent events would seem to suggest an internal problem.”

“What’s happening with the chat room situation?” Tatiana asked.

Marshall highlighted a file from the scrolling streams of data. “Henry is in charge of that particular issue.”

But it was Shoshanna who answered. “We’ve taken care of it. Those who were openly discussing incendiary matters have been counseled to cease and desist.”

Nikita wondered if “counseled” was a euphemism for the mildest form of rehabilitation, which left most of the higher brain functions intact while deleting large sections of memory. She had to admit it was a good choice. They couldn’t afford an unseemly number of disappearances after the recent rash of murders caused by anchors who’d escaped their handlers. “That leaves the ones operating below the radar.”

“I have the NetMind searching,” Kaleb said, referring to the unique sentience that lived in and made order out of the chaos of the PsyNet.