Her next comment was rote, words to buy her time. “An interesting location. How did you discover it?”
“I’m a Mercant.” It seemed an answer as flat as her question had been. Then his shoulders locked and he shifted his chair to face her. “Payal, we are not doing this.”
“You asked me to come here.”
“No, we’re not going to pretend to be two strangers having a conversation about the fucking desert or the weather.”
Chapter 6
“Our histories tell us that anger can be either a weapon or a weakness, Canto. Decide what it will be for you.”
“No, Grandmother. Sometimes, I just want to be angry. I don’t want to pretend to be civilized—because I’m not, and never will be. And I’ll never wear masks.”
—Conversation between Canto Mercant and Ena Mercant (2063)
PAYAL COULD FEEL the heat blazing off Canto—but that had to be her imagination, for they stood in a sunlit desert. Yet the urge to go closer to his flame was a tug. It had always been there, since she was that feral little girl. The boy who’d given her food and who’d stealthily passed over a folded-up piece of paper bearing answers to a test she was meant to fail, he’d meant something to her.
Some part of her insisted on seeing that same boy in this man. But he wasn’t. He was a Mercant. A man whose job it was to gather information—so it could be used against his targets. “We’re strangers now,” she said as coldly as she could, and took a step to the left, putting more distance between them. “The girl I was, she’s dead. She had to die so I could survive.” A simple, inexorable fact.
Canto’s eyes shifted to pure black, the galaxies eclipsed by emotion. “What did they do to you?” Rage thrummed in every syllable.
“It’s all in the past.” She glanced at her timepiece, steeling herself so her arm didn’t tremble. “Why don’t we talk about why we’re here today? I don’t have endless time.”
“You mean the extinction of Designation A?” It was a near-growl. “Yeah, why don’t we?”
“Using the word ‘extinction’ is a touch hyperbolic.” She had to keep this rigidly practical. “The PsyNet has its issues, but much of it has to do with the damage done by Silence, and by the rise of the Scarabs.” Deadly, unstable Psy who were unleashing their abilities on the Net in a fury of violence.
When he didn’t respond, she couldn’t help herself from glancing at him.
It was as big a shock as the first time she’d laid eyes on him, her stomach muscles clenching reflexively. She couldn’t understand it, why he had this impact on her when they’d both grown and changed so much in the years between what had been and what was now. His cheekbones were striking, his cardinal eyes extraordinary—it was as if he held the universe in his eyes.
Even had she forgotten everything else about him, never would she mistake those eyes for those of any other cardinal. The eyes and the cheekbones weren’t the whole of it, however. His skin held a glow that said he often spent time out under the sun, and his eyes were subtly tilted, his jaw square. His short hair was silky black, but the unshaven bristles on his face held a dusting of gray.
Binh Fernandez had been of mainly Filipino and Turkish descent, with a smattering of other genetic factors. The Mercants, meanwhile, had multiple lines of descent through their family tree, but the primary one through Ena was Caucasian—however, that split again in the Mercant matriarch’s offspring.
It was the rare Psy who was full-blooded in any genetic sense. Not when their race was about psychic power above all else. Matches were on the basis of increasing the chances of powerful offspring.
Payal didn’t know much about the Mercant—Magdalene—who’d carried Canto in her womb. She needed more data on Magdalene. More data on him. Data made sense of the world. Data would help her understand why she felt the impact of him like a kick to the stomach.
Data would stop the feral girl inside her from screaming for freedom.
It had to be a remnant of their childhood interaction, especially those final minutes when she’d locked her hand around his and held on, just held on. She’d known that pain lay on the horizon for both of them, but for those murderously stolen minutes, they’d been free of punishment, free of being watched.
Just free.
But that had been in a different lifetime. Canto’s impact on her would fade as soon as she learned more about him and his motives. People were never what they appeared on the surface; while Canto Mercant was beautiful in the structure of his features and in his musculature, physical beauty had nothing to do with personality and ethics.
Payal’s brother was considered handsome and sophisticated, one of Delhi’s most eligible bachelors. Yet Lalit’s version of recreation was to cut bloody lines into the skin of crying men and women who couldn’t fight his telekinetic strength.
What she needed to know was the core of Canto Mercant.
Monster or manipulator? Messiah or deluded?
Ally or threat to be eliminated?
Her power crawled under her skin, ready to strike out at the first sign of aggression.
CANTO couldn’t read her, this enigma of a woman who’d once killed to protect him. She gave every appearance of being distant and cold, yet there were moments when he could swear emotion licked the air, a wild dark wave viciously constrained.
His muscles knotted with a sense of wrongness.
He’d been older, he reminded himself, more likely to hold on to his sense of self. But the girl he’d known … even so young, her will had been titanium. He wouldn’t have thought anything could force her into a shape she didn’t choose.
He hated the idea of her being coerced and smothered into a form acceptable to her father. “Thank you,” he said, his voice rough.
“For what?” She didn’t look at him as she asked the question, her eyes on the palm fronds that waved in the slight breeze.
“For stopping that teacher from murdering me.”
Payal’s dark eyes—no stars now, nothing but endless black—landed on him. “Would he have gone that far, do you think? We were, after all, the children of important people. Certainly they must’ve needed to get authorization before terminal action.”
“They had so much power—were bloated with it.” A deep psychic corruption. “My father also hadn’t come to see me since abandoning me in that place. To him, I was a genetic mistake he wished would vanish without a trace.”
“My father had me tested for psychotic and psychopathic tendencies after the school reported what I’d done.” Payal’s tone was dangerously even. “He’d already decided to take me back, see if I could be brought up to an acceptable standard.”
“Wrong fucking child to test.” It came out harsh as crushed stone. “Is he truly so blind that he doesn’t see which one of his children is the problem?”
“The fact that I’m CEO and Lalit isn’t is the answer to your question” was the cool response, before she shifted the direction of the conversation. “The PsyNet has begun to heal since the re-emergence of the empaths.”
Canto forced himself away from their private history, away from the compulsion of Payal Rao, and toward the heartbreaking clarity of the water that fed the oasis. “I thought I was imagining that.”