“You’re not.” Payal’s voice, so flat, so without tone, so wrong. “The problem is that as soon as it heals, it fractures again. The fractures have now begun to cascade one after the other, which gives the impression that the empaths aren’t helping at all.”
A rustle of fabric. A soft waft of air that brought with it a subtle scent. It was … nice, he supposed with an inward grimace. But it held none of the passion and intensity of the girl who’d sharpened a toothbrush into a knife because she intended to escape, or the wonder of the girl who’d told him about walking under blossom trees with a dreamy light in her eyes.
“The truth,” Payal continued in that toneless voice, “is that half the Net would already be dead and desiccated without the empathic network—their Honeycomb, as I believe they prefer for it to be called.”
Her mind, the acute sharpness of her intelligence, hadn’t changed. “You’ve studied it.”
“I’m an anchor.” A faint rebuke.
He’d take it. He’d take any emotion he could get from her. Because he had the sickening feeling that while she’d saved him … no one had saved her. Payal had had to fight for survival every day of her existence, and she’d done so by withdrawing so deep within her core of steel that the girl she’d once been had no voice.
She turned to face him. “Haven’t you kept an eye on the grid that underlies the Substrate?”
“I can’t,” he admitted with a grimace. “Turns out not all anchor minds work the same. When I look into the Substrate, I see the wider picture, and what I see reveals extreme stress, buckled sections, others that are stretched thin.”
Payal paused, seeming to chew that over. But her question had nothing to do with the foundation of the PsyNet. “How did you know I was an A?”
Most of the other As had assumed he had the knowledge because he was a Mercant. But that wasn’t Payal Rao: cool, contained, and ruthlessly intelligent. “I can link A minds in the Substrate back to their PsyNet presence.” This wasn’t about lies. Especially between them. “After that, I used my usual skills to put a name to the target mind.”
The stars had returned to her eyes and those stars bored into him. “No one has ever claimed to be able to identify anchor minds on the PsyNet.”
“I’m not delusional,” he grumbled with a scowl. “And I didn’t say I could ID anchor minds on the PsyNet—I said I can ID them in the Substrate.” A place accessible only to Designation A. “Think about it—when was the last time anyone asked anchors anything about how our minds work?”
She continued to regard him with a vague air of suspicion. He wanted to growl at her—his grandmother was right; he’d been hanging around the bears too much. But he felt more at home with the rowdy changelings than he did with all Psy outside of his family.
Payal was the sole exception.
What they had here, now, it was awkward and it made his guts twist with a sense of frustrated fury, but he still didn’t want to pull away. He wanted to get closer, see inside her. Figure out if that wild girl was just buried … or had been erased out of existence.
“Let’s head to the shelter,” he muttered when she didn’t respond. “I want to show you a set of specs.”
PAYAL turned to walk up with Canto. “Were you ever Silent?” This level of emotional depth hadn’t grown in the time since the fall of Silence. It appeared too ingrained an aspect of his personality.
“No.” A grim smile, his eyes glittering. “That was one of the many issues that got me thrown into that place—my Silence was erratic as hell.”
As Payal considered that, she couldn’t help noticing that he wasn’t using either the hover capacity or the drive built into his chair to ease his way up the incline. His muscles were defined against the olive brown of his skin as he maneuvered the chair along the path, and a tracery of strong veins ran under that skin, his jaw set in concentration.
Another data point: this was a man unused to taking no for an answer from himself or from others.
He might prefer jeans to suits and speak with a confronting frankness that eschewed any attempt at sophistication or manipulation, but that was because Canto Mercant fed his determination and energy into other areas.
He was dangerous.
Her fingers curled into her palm, holding on to the sensory memory of a piece of dried apple being pressed into her hand behind the backs of the teachers. A part of her—a quite insane part she’d kept caged for decades—wondered if any element of that protective, kind boy existed in the no-doubt sophisticated surveillance operative he’d become.
Not that it mattered.
Childhood’s end had come for both of them long ago.
Upon reaching the shelter—the roof of which held multiple solar power panels—he went to the refrigerated cooler in the corner and removed two bottles of water. A fine layer of ice had formed on the outside of each.
She accepted one, the cold welcome against her palms. Had she been alone, she’d have put the bottle against her neck or cheek, but a robot didn’t do that. A robot displayed no weakness. A robot was never vulnerable.
Payal had spent too long building her public persona to allow it to fracture now.
He already knows.
It was a whisper from the maddened heart of her.
He’s seen you at your absolute worst, with the blood of another living being on your face and hands.
Chapter 7
A: The designation from which it all begins. I, fortunate to be privy to the writings of a seer of legend, do find it my sad duty to share that this is the designation with which it will all end one day.
—Iram’s Almanac of Designations, Annotated with Thoughts of the Author (1787)
PAYAL HAD PRETENDED to be sorry for her actions during the psychiatric evals ordered by her father. Only six years old and she’d already learned that her natural tendency to tell the truth was a handicap. But she’d never actually been sorry. The man she’d killed had been a torturer who’d been brutally hurting a boy worth a thousand of his cruel mind.
Payal had never permitted her mask to drop during childhood. Had she done so, however, she’d have spit at the name of that so-called teacher. As a child, she’d have danced on his dead body and not cared.
Yes, that caged part of her was quite, quite mad.
Taking a seat in a chair across from Canto, she checked the seal of the water bottle, then unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the bottle. He put away the glass he’d been about to offer her, before unscrewing his own bottle and drinking down half of it in gulps that made his throat muscles move in a way that caught her attention, held it.
His neck was strong, his skin touched with a hint of perspiration, the color appearing darker where—
Going motionless as she realized her small obsession, Payal shored up her shields.
She couldn’t give way to such primal impulses. They came from the murderous girl who crooned in her head in the quietest hour of night, wanting freedom. Wanting to live.
Capping the water with hands that wanted to tremble, she put it on a small table to the side. Canto had already placed his own bottle on the same table. Uncapped.
Payal resisted the temptation to use her telekinesis to lift the cap from where he’d forgotten it on top of the cooler and screw it on. It’d be a good use of the micro-Tk skills she’d had to learn to pass her training modules, but it would also be giving in to her compulsion for order. Order was how she stayed sane, but she refused to permit it to become another kind of madness.