VISIONS OF HEAT

Early the next morning, Faith shored up her shields against the endless mass of the PsyNet and took a step out of her bedroom. As she’d expected, the chime of the incoming call didn’t cease. The M-Psy were checking up on her well before her three-day rest period was officially over. If she didn’t answer, they’d likely take it as justification to enter her home.

In the past, that knowledge had settled her—if a vision went wrong, they’d be there to pick up the pieces. But today, the lack of privacy, the lack of her ability to live any kind of a real life, made her—She had no word to describe her reaction. No word that didn’t imply feeling, the one thing she couldn’t embrace.

She pressed the answer key on the touch pad. “Yes?”

The composed face of one of Xi Yun’s underlings looked back at her. “You didn’t answer our two earlier calls. We wished to ensure you were conscious and rational.”

Because F-Psy had a habit of becoming irrational and mad.

Faith realized the M-Psy always subtly pointed that out, never letting her forget the threat looming over her head.

Tell a child something often enough and she starts to believe it.

Sascha’s words whispered through her mind and refused to let her return to the isolated, accepting state she’d been in before she’d breached the fence. And run headfirst into the most dangerous predator she could imagine.

“While I accept your need to ensure my safety, I gave notice that I would not be available for three days. That period doesn’t end till this evening. Is that so difficult to understand?” Her voice was cold, a knife forged in the fires of isolation. “Or would you like me to have you transferred and replaced with someone who understands my statements?” She’d never threatened any such thing in the past, but the nameless awakening thing inside of her would not be quiet over this latest threat to her independence.

The M-Psy blinked. “My apologies, Foreseer. I will not make this error again.”

He’d also log in her unusual behavior and put her down for a complete physical. Faith turned off the communication console without another word, conscious that she’d shot herself in the foot. The only places where she’d be safe from monitoring now would be in her private areas and even that wasn’t certain. It would’ve been far more logical to have kept her mouth shut.

Or would it?

She stilled and considered her behavior. She was a twenty-four-year-old F-Psy who produced with near perfect accuracy. She was worth billions, not the millions Sascha had guessed at. And she knew that her psychic strength offered her immunity from a lot of things that might otherwise be issues.

Such as being interned at the Center, her mind wiped clean in a process of “rehabilitation.”

Put that way, arrogance was almost a given. Merely because they’d subjugated their feelings, it didn’t mean that her people were no longer cognizant of distinctions of class, wealth, and power. For the first time, she considered the untapped reservoir of her own political power. Perhaps she even had enough to delete all monitoring of her, aside from when she was in the chair. Maybe not at once, but slowly?

Glancing at the object on which she’d spent so much of her life, she made her decision. Instead of sliding onto it, she returned to her bedroom and lay down on the bed. She was going to use this free time to surf the PsyNet, to look for information she’d never before considered might exist—because her keepers had surrounded her in so much cotton wool that it had become a prison.

They’d gone so far as to warn her against too much exposure to the Net, telling her that her mind was more vulnerable than those of other designations and therefore more easily breached. In response, Faith had built ever stronger firewalls and rarely ventured outside them. But if Sascha Duncan wasn’t a flawed Psy, then maybe Faith NightStar wasn’t a weak one. Flickers of memory rippled through her mind. Vaughn had touched her, kissed her, had never hidden the intense nature of his personality. But she’d begun to learn how to cope. And if she could handle a jaguar . . .

Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and opened her mind to the dark velvet night of the PsyNet. Stars glittered in the darkness, but these flickering lights were alive, the unique minds of millions of psychic beings. The instant she stepped out into the Net, her mobile firewalls rose to protect her surfing psyche. Those without firewalls were vulnerable to sabotage and possible ambush, as cutting off the roaming mind from the physical brain was a sure way to ensure an irreversible coma. Most Psy were fanatical about their firewalls. Faith had gone straight to obsession.