“We’ll go walking under the blossoms.” A rasp of air through his abused throat. “Or maybe I won’t be able to walk. But I’ll be there.”

“Can we eat cakes as well? The small pretty ones they have in the windows of the bake shops?”

“Payal?” A rough softness to Canto’s question.

Hauling herself back from the brink, she broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact while fighting off the keening need from the part of her forever impacted by those fleeting minutes so long ago. “I know there’s no overlap in my region due to a recent death.” An older anchor had passed away three weeks earlier. “Are you telling me there are zero overlaps across the Net?”

“Seventy-five percent lack of overlaps between anchor zones.”

“Impossible.” Payal snapped her head to face him. “That would mean a single anchor death could plummet the Net into a fatal spiral.”

The Architect

The occurrence of Scarab Syndrome in the general population continues to climb.

Patient Zero is maintaining coherence, and Memory Aven-Rose, now permanent primary empath on this team, has significantly increased her success rate in stabilizing new cases, but she can only attempt to stabilize those we find.

I have grave concerns that the graph charting patients, though upward-trending, isn’t as steep as it should be—despite our efforts, a number of those with Scarab Syndrome are falling through the cracks.

While my job is medicine, not politics, I do believe that a large percentage of those lost patients are being scooped up by the bad actor known as the Architect, their aim being to use the patients’ growing psychic powers with no thought to the mental decline and death that is the inevitable result of untreated Scarab Syndrome.

—Report to the Psy Ruling Coalition from Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo

THE ARCHITECT HAD plenty of contacts inside the PsyNet, including many who agreed with the old way of things. After all, what had happened since the fall of Silence but the disintegration of their race?

The Ruling Coalition might be trying to sell the idea that the problems had begun in Silence and that what they were now experiencing was the destructive aftermath, but the intelligent saw through that smokescreen. It was in the Coalition’s interest to say such things, part of their grand plan to keep the populace weak and cowed.

The Architect didn’t much care for the masses, not when the Psy were so much lesser than she and those of her kind.

Scarabs.

The new power.

The new people.

The Psy would be nothing but slaves for her to rule once she achieved her benevolent dictatorship. She’d inducted so many more soldiers into her network over the past weeks, had spread infinite tendrils through the PsyNet. She was also getting better at persuading her newborn children as they came to their true consciousness.

No longer would her kind be imprisoned and poisoned by so-called medics. No longer would her kind be made lesser so that the Psy could feel strong. No longer would she and her children be anything but world-annihilating powers.

Now the weak ones in power were saying that the PsyNet needed to be broken into pieces in order to be saved. She could not permit that. How could she rule over the entire race if the PsyNet was no longer whole?

No, that course of action had to be stopped.

At the same time, she could see why the Ruling Coalition had come to their foolish decision. Perhaps she’d been hasty in ordering attacks that so significantly weakened critical PsyNet structures. But to fragment the PsyNet? No. Never.

She sat, thought. She wasn’t like her children, many of whom were so out of control that she was the only leash on their violence. Not only was she rational, she had telepathic backups of her personality in place should the awesome Scarab power within overwhelm her at any point. A small price to pay for untrammeled power tempered by reason.

Today, she used that sense of reason to make the decision to ask her children to stand down. The Silence of the Scarabs would lull the Psy into a sense of complacency and security, leaving them all the more vulnerable for the strike to come.

The Architect began to make detailed plans, giving no consideration to the fact that the PsyNet was now so damaged that it was beyond being able to heal itself.

In her mind, the Net sprawled endlessly, a black sky unalterable and unbreakable.

Chapter 8

As we walk into a world with emotion, we must accept that for some of our people, it is too late. They were born in Silence, raised in Silence, scarred by Silence. To expect them to forget or “get over” a lifetime of conditioning and interact at the emotional level that may become the norm is cruel—and the Psy have too much cruelty in our past already.

—PsyNet Beacon editorial by Jaya Laila Storm (Medical Empath and Social Interaction Columnist)

CANTO COULDN’T STOP himself from watching Payal. It was no longer about the shock of coming face-to-face with the phantom he’d been hunting for so many years; it was her. The line of her profile, the way she’d allowed her spine to soften in her concentration—but most of all, the intensity with which she looked at the data.

As if absorbing it into her brain for later recall.

Telekinetic memory.

This wasn’t only that. This was Payal Rao, the woman who’d become the CEO of a family where loyalty meant nothing and betrayal was to be expected. She’d had to be smarter, tougher, more ruthless.

And alone. Always.

His hand fisted—at the same instant that she said, “How accurate is this model?”

“Margin of error of a percent at most,” he replied, the numbers burned into his brain after all the times he’d checked and rechecked his data. “I did the survey twice to confirm.”

Payal didn’t respond, her attention on the model.

It gave him time to study her.

She appeared as absorbed as she’d been as a child when she’d drawn precise grids on the screen of her bulky old organizer, the act appearing almost meditative. And once, when they’d been permitted outside for exercise, he’d watched her pick up leaves that had fallen to the ground, begin ordering them by size and color.

“Everything fits together, like a puzzle,” she’d said when he joined her. “But the pieces have to be in the right places.” Deep frown lines between her eyebrows, the tangle of her hair half falling over one eye. “I like to put the pieces in order.”