However, all that had to wait. The first thing she had to do was share her empathic breakthrough with the others. It was as well that she’d discovered the key to soothing the infected when she did—the outbreaks continued unabated across the world in the next week.
Empaths—all Gradients, with a focus on those on the brink of natural emergence—were awakened on a wholesale level during the same period. Not all could accept the truth of their nature so quickly, but those able to open their minds to their new abilities after any existing blocks were removed, were given basic training, and sent out to join the fight. Yet despite the appearance of countless minds sparking with color, color that had slowly begun to infiltrate the formerly cold black fabric of the Net, the infection couldn’t be slowed, much less eradicated.
The infection might have hesitated to approach the concentration of Es at the compound back at the start, but it had grown more aggressive. While empaths remained immune, having even multiple Es in a limited area was no guarantee of safety for those around them. And the simple fact was, no matter if every E in the world was brought to active status, it would never equal the one-to-one ratio from the compound.
An entire section of the Net in Paris had to be evacuated when the infection surrounded it in a liquid black cage. Twenty-four hours later, that section collapsed, rotted through; the resulting shock wave left a thousand dead, many more injured. New York, too, hadn’t escaped injury—Ivy and Vasic had been responding to at least two outbreaks a day, even with the humans and changelings throwing their weight behind the containment effort and with all the active Es in the city working on a rotation.
The infection was winning, millions staring down the barrel of death.
Chapter 52
Interpersonal violence between Psy has dropped to rates so low, it eclipses that during Silence. And as we all now know, given the recent investigative reports, the Silence stats were manipulated by Council after Council and cannot be trusted.The fact that it has taken the threat of near-certain annihilation to bring us to peace is a bittersweet irony.Editorial, PsyNet Beacon SAHARA HAD A genius level IQ. That’s what she’d been told as a child forced to struggle with math when she’d rather have been out dancing. Math and Sahara had never made their peace, but in other ways, her brain was a finely honed machine.
It had been worrying on a problem for a considerable period of time.
“Eben Kilabuk,” she said, and placed an image of the empath on Kaleb’s desk, having commandeered the space since he was at a meeting. “Phillip Kilabuk.” She laid the photo of Eben’s dead, infected father below the boy’s.
“Christiane Hall. Marchelline Hall.” Empathic mother and infant. “Miki Ling.” The caretaker cousin. A low-level M-Psy murdered by one of the infected. Her autopsy had shown no signs of the disease in her own brain.
“Miguel Ferrera.” Twenty-five-year-old male, Gradient 4.1, commercial telepath.
She took several more photos, laid them out. All of survivors. Then she removed the Es and rearranged the remaining survivors into two groups. On one side, she placed those like Miki Ling, people connected to an empath and thus assumed to be, or have been, protected by the empath’s immunity in some way.
On the other side, she placed the random outliers, such as Miguel Ferrera, who had no empaths in his family tree and had, in fact, had no contact with his biological family for over two years.
Then there was Phillip Kilabuk. His brain had been riddled with infection though he was the father and custodial guardian of an E. Proximity to an E, familial and genetic connections to an E, Phillip Kilabuk had had them all and it hadn’t saved him.
There was no pattern. And yet . . .
Eyes narrowed, she logged into Kaleb’s system using the password he’d given her—her beautiful, dangerous man had access to every database under the sun—and began to run down every scrap of data she could find on each one of the people represented by the photographs. Banking information, medical histories, university transcripts . . . that was just the start.
The work was tedious, might take days or even weeks, but she could sense something in the information she already had, akin to a tiny stone in the bottom of a shoe, an irritation that simply would not go away. She had to find that stone, because in the irritation might lie a critical answer.
Chapter 53
Heroes are often the quietest people in a room, the ones least willing to lay claim to the title. These men and women simply go about doing what needs to be done without any expectation of gratitude or fame. It is in their nature to protect and to shield and to fight against darkness, whatever form it may take.New York Signal EXHAUSTED DOWN TO the bone, Ivy nonetheless put Rabbit on a leash during a mercifully peaceful afternoon, and she and Vasic took him out, their intended destination a Central Park clothed in sparkling white snow. It wasn’t fair to their pet to be cooped up now that he was back to his usual energetic self.
“It’s so quiet.” Ivy had quickly become used to the frantic energy and wild vitality of New York, but that vitality was nowhere in evidence today; people’s faces were strained and their eyes downcast. “How many have left the city, do you know?” she asked Vasic.
“A tiny percentage in comparison to the city’s population.”
“People have jobs, lives they can’t just leave,” she murmured, thinking aloud. “And word’s out that pretty much nowhere is safe.” Her parents’ region of the Net was holding strong at the moment, but Ivy continued to worry. “I wish I could cover my parents in my empathic shield and your great-grandfather, too.” She hadn’t yet met Zie Zen, but Vasic had told her a lot about the extraordinary man.
Vasic, dressed in his “civilian” clothes of jeans and leather-synth jacket—though the T-shirt wasn’t black today, but dark blue—put his arm around her waist, his fingers at her hip. “Neither of the three would thank us for abandoning hundreds of thousands to shield them, regardless of how much we might want to ensure their safety.”
Ivy sighed, having had that exact conversation with her parents. “Yes.” It took her a few seconds to realize her Arrow was stabilizing her using Tk as she walked on the icy sidewalk. Those sidewalks should’ve been cleared of snow early that morning, but systems were breaking down all over the world.
As were the systems in Vasic’s gauntlet. While he hadn’t been using its weapons capability since the command failure during the attack by Ming’s men, the program had come on spontaneously during an outbreak. He’d suffered a small overload in the fight to shut it down.
The burns had been minor and treated on-site. It didn’t matter—Ivy had felt her heart crack in two when she saw the wounds, though she’d fought not to let her panic and fear show. He’d known. He always knew. Holding her tucked against him, he’d told her that Aden had found a surgeon willing to attempt the risky operation to remove the critical malfunctioning components.
Only if we don’t hear back from Samuel Rain before time runs out, he’d told her. The surgeon is exceptional. She’s known to be a maverick with a reputation for accepting risky cases and coming through with flying colors, but she’s not Rain.
Ivy’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point at the sustained silence from Rain, but she agreed with Vasic’s choice. Her stomach a lump of ice, she knew there was a high risk the surgeon might kill him. Samuel Rain might as well . . . but if the engineer wasn’t brain damaged, the risk was lower.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t still unacceptably high.
Shoving that brutal truth to the back of her mind on this sunny afternoon when she was out for a walk with her man, she tugged his hand off her hip to lace their fingers together. “You should wear color,” she said when Rabbit, nimble and curious, paused to scrutinize the window display of a menswear shop. “With those gorgeous eyes, any vibrant shade would look good on you.”