“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.

Having reached into a side panel of his chair to pull out a paper-thin large-format organizer, Canto brought up a file on the screen. “Look.”

She took the organizer. On the screen was an image of the PsyNet as it had been pre-Honeycomb. “Where are the empaths?”

“Several levels up.” He moved his chair so he was right next to her, the warmth of him a quiet assault against her senses. “This is the basic structure of the Net—the bones, so to speak.”

Payal tried not to breathe in his scent. It made her skin prickle, her pulse want to kick. “I see.” She used every trick in her arsenal to narrow her focus to the organizer. What he’d sketched out was the Net without all the surface chatter—a sea of black with only the finest faded pinpricks to show the minds that existed on the layer above … except … “Why are there fluctuations in the fabric?”

Reaching out with a hand partially covered by a glove, Canto tapped one of the fluctuations, a point where it appeared that the fabric of the Net was being sucked inward. Like a whirlpool frozen midmovement. “This is you.”

Payal went motionless.

“I always thought we could all see each other,” he said in that deep voice that held a gravelly edge. “I only recently realized I’m not normal there. But that’s not the point. Do you see the pattern?”

Payal’s mind saw patterns as others saw the sky or grass. “Your modeling is incorrect,” she said with the same bluntness that had led to the robot moniker. Such honesty had been part of the insane girl, too, and it frustrated her that to interact with the world, she had to so often stifle her natural tendency.

“Why?”

“There are no overlaps between anchor zones. There should be overlaps.”

“Yes, there should.”

She was so involved in examining the model that it took a moment for his quiet agreement to penetrate. Looking up, she met those extraordinary eyes that held the universe, and once again she was nearly lost, falling into them as she had when they were children.