“He’s one of us.”
“Yes.” Stefan had been shifted out of Arrow training as a result of a psychological issue that made him no less valuable as a telekinetic and no less trustworthy. In the past five years, he’d assisted in the defection of a number of Arrows by helping to fake their deaths. “What’s Stefan’s solution to the problem?”
“You have to teach your brain to handle sexual stimuli,” Judd told him. “Under Silence, we were taught to maintain strict discipline even under severe duress, including torture. However, none of us were taught how to handle pleasure, especially the extreme pleasure of true intimate contact.”
“There was no need.” The dissonance would’ve crippled them before it ever got this far.
“Exactly. It means we have a blind spot—it also means we don’t have any bad habits or training to overcome.”
The latter, Vasic realized, was extremely important. “No need to split our attention in order to fight previous programming.”
A nod from Judd. “Right now, in the absence of any other instruction, your mind reverts to the most instinctive aspect of your ability. For most Tks, it’d be random destruction.” The other man shot him a quick, amused glance. “You’re unique, but the same principles apply.”
“I could train my brain to go only to certain locations.” Such as from one bed to another. “It’s not the best solution, but better than ending up on ice or on rocks.”
“There’s another option.” Judd pushed back strands of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “Your core ability is still Tk, so you should be able to teach yourself not to ’port at all in that situation. Neither Stefan nor I,” he continued, “are able to maintain control while sharing skin privileges with our mates. Perhaps if we’d been taught so since childhood—”
“I doubt that would alter the situation,” Vasic interrupted to say. “True intimacy demands we lower our barriers.”
“Yes.” The single word held a staggering depth of emotion. “So, because we can’t curb the surge of telekinetic power,” he said, “we’ve learned to redirect it in a specific way.”
“Into water?” Vasic guessed, seeing where Judd was going.
“Yes. Stefan’s surrounded by the sea and even his strength won’t do more than cause a ripple or two.” The other man paused to watch a pack of wolves lope across the clearing below. “I do the same by filling in the bath with water. It’s steam by the end.” A grin and a shrug. “Not to say I don’t still lose it now and then, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before. I figure the more practice I get”—laughter in his eyes now, at a training regime that was clearly no hardship—“the better I’ll become at handling the energy surge.”
Vasic considered the genius of the idea. “Stefan’s solution utilizes the same training protocols and pathways as Silence, but with positive reinforcement”—sexual pleasure—“instead of negative.” Using what had been forged in pain and torture for a far more beautiful end.
“It does take time, so you might be traveling for some time yet,” Judd added. “And your instinctive ’porting ability may make things more difficult, but I think you have the mental strength and the psychic discipline to be successful.”
Vasic thought it over. “To begin, I’ll set my brain on a loop of isolated locations.” Going bed to bed might be impossible this quickly, and even using one or two of his favorite remote locations would require meticulous care, but Stefan’s inspired plan had given him an idea as to how to do it—not to build something new, but to use what was already there.
“I’ll utilize one of the data memorization techniques we were taught,” he said, thinking it through, “hook it into the same system that allows my senses to continue to function even if I have to sleep in the field.” Both skills were basic building blocks of an Arrow’s training.
Judd nodded slowly. “Yes, that should work. Tell me if it does?”
“Of course.” It might be an option that could assist another Arrow down the line. “Is Stefan safe?” As the most isolated of them all, the other man had little access to help if he needed it quickly.
“Yes, but perhaps you should visit Alaris, speak to him. With the situation in the Net changing as fast as it is, he should know we have his back if something goes wrong.”
“I’ll go after this.” Due to an inexplicable quirk of teleportation, teleporters didn’t suffer any ill-effects from the huge changes in pressure involved in ’porting to the ocean floor and back up.
Shifting on his heel, Judd led them back into the trees. “You said you had more than one question.”
“How did you know what to do?” Vasic had gone on instinct to this point, and Ivy didn’t seem displeased, but he wanted to be certain he was doing everything he could to pleasure her . . . because touching her gave him pleasure so intense, he had no hope of ever describing it.
“I’ll send you my research file,” Judd said, “but you know what I’ve learned? If you listen to her, you’ll be fine.”
Vasic thought of the little noises Ivy made in bed, the way she dug her nails into his back when he touched her just right, and felt his body pulse. “I want this for the others, Judd.” Their brethren deserved the same happiness, the same steep learning curve anchored in pleasure rather than pain.
Judd’s eyes met his. “I never thought you’d make it to this point. I’m fucking glad you have. We’ll get the others here, too—we’re Arrows.”
“We never give up on a target,” Vasic completed, and for the first time since he’d been taught it, the assertion wasn’t one of darkness, but of hope.
? ? ?
IVY and Sascha spent a large chunk of the day visiting and interviewing the nonempathic survivors around the world, thanks to Vasic’s ’porting ability, while Jaya and Alice remained at the apartment and collated the data in a search for patterns.
“The survivors,” Jaya said over a take-out dinner late that night, “all have fractures in their Silence and they accept those fractures, even when the resulting emotions aren’t pretty.”
Ivy threw Abbot another nutrition bar where the blue-eyed Arrow sat with Vasic and Lucas. The three men had ceded the couches to the women, pulling up chairs for themselves. “The woman of darkness that we saw,” she said to Jaya afterward, “she was so sad and so angry.”
“The embodiment of rejection.” Sascha stared at her food without eating. “Silence teaches Psy to stifle all emotion, but at the heart of it, it’s always been about the aggressive, violent, angry emotions—and the PsyNet is impacted by the subconscious as well as the conscious.”
All the dark emotions, the ugliness, Ivy thought, had been shoved aside, buried, and in that festering soup had grown the infection. “That doesn’t give us a cure, though.” She pushed away her meal. “No one can simply embrace the whole gamut of emotion after a lifetime of being trained to do the opposite.”
Vasic’s eyes met hers for a piercing instant.
That wasn’t a complaint, Ivy said, blowing him a telepathic kiss.
I know. A caress in the ice of his voice. It’s an unavoidable fact.
Yes, it was. Her Arrow had opened his heart to her, but he continued to fight a pitched battle against his darker emotions. Anger, rage, loss, it was all trapped inside that great heart, and it made Ivy ache. But she couldn’t force those emotions out into the open. No one could. Only Vasic, when he was ready.
Jaya poked at her noodles. “A violent shift like that could also cause shock, a stroke, an aneurysm.”
“The other thing,” Alice said, leaning forward, “is that I can’t believe there are so few people in the Net who’ve embraced their emotions.”
At that instant, the charismatic intensity of the scientist’s gaze reminded Ivy of Samuel Rain—a spark of genius lived in them both, and both had been wounded in ways that sought to bury that genius.