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.”

“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.