He’d have thought it a desperate attempt to find control in a situation where they had no control, but she’d always looked so content when she worked with her grids and organized those leaves.

She’d clearly noted a pattern about adult Canto—because, his anger about it aside, she treated him with suspicion due to a dangerous and skilled cardinal who was a stranger. As a threat. Full stop.

His mobility level didn’t factor into her equations as a negative when it came to her assessment of his strength. It wasn’t that she didn’t see the chair. Her comment about his successful surgeries had made that clear. But Payal hadn’t fixated on it like so many Psy. To her, it was just one element of the whole pattern that was Canto.

His chest expanded on a rush of air.

He hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d been holding his breath on a psychological level, waiting for her to hurt him. Because she could.

Fuck.

Canto had stopped being concerned about the opinions of others long ago. The PsyMed psychology specialist his grandmother had made him see had told him that his “distancing behavior” was a coping mechanism for the “unusual circumstances of his life to date.”

In other words, Canto didn’t give a fuck because his father had slated him for death when he proved imperfect. The Mercants had brought him back from that enraged and broken edge, but he still cared for the opinions of very few.

Payal Rao would always be one of those people.

Foolish and illogical and goddamn stupid when he hadn’t seen her for decades, but it was what it was; he’d been forever altered by her courage and refusal to surrender. The only way his emotions toward her would change for the worse was if she proved to have become a monster.

Head of the Rao empire, Canto. That doesn’t happen by being kind and generous.

His grandmother’s voice, what he imagined Ena might say were she able to hear the direction of his thoughts. But the thing was, Canto knew Payal could be dangerous. He was alive because she was dangerous.

When she raised her head at last, her eyes were obsidian. Heavy processing power, psychic and/or mental. “That’s why I’m tiring quicker,” she said, as if they were midconversation, her voice clipped. “Because there’s almost no overlap in my entire country. The secondary anchors can’t take the weight a hub-anchor is built to handle, so the hubs are under unrelenting pressure.”

The same pressure was a heavy weight on Canto’s mind—and his region wasn’t as bad as Payal’s. Anchor zones were meant to overlap by at least a quarter, so that when one A tired, the As around them took the load. It was done so instinctively that neither party was ever aware of it—or that was how it was meant to work.

“There’s no longer any downtime built into the system,” Payal continued. “If anchors were machines, we’d be overheating.” She leaned back in her seat, her obsidian gaze unblinking.

It should’ve been eerie, but Canto had often seen the same inky black in the mirror. Usually when he’d pushed his telepathy too far, or if his emotions were running high.

“Is this a recent problem?” Payal asked, her gaze still distant as that beautiful mind worked at a speed far faster than the vast majority of the population.

“No.” Careful not to accidentally brush against her even though he wanted to steal that contact, he touched the screen of the organizer to bring up a chart. “Occurrence of As in the population.”

Payal went silent as she examined the bleak downward curve.

He could almost hear her thinking. And there he went, being a quasi bear again by feeling smug that she was already comfortable enough with him to retreat that way—on the other hand, she was a cardinal Tk who could snap his bones in half with a thought. He had to stop thinking of her as 3K, stop searching for hints of that wild girl.

Her next question was abrupt. “When did you become aware of the problem?”

“I initialized late,” he said to her. “Not until age nine. Probably why I began hearing the NetMind—things were leaking through because of the delayed initialization.”

Obsidian eyes on him, her attention a laser. “As far as I know, anchor initialization starts at age five, with the top edge being age seven.”

“Yeah, I was an outlier.” Unaware of the A ability slumbering inside him, waiting to wake. No one had ever worked out a way to test children at birth to see if they were or weren’t anchors. Initialization just happened at a certain age, the Substrate opening up to them as their minds became the weights that kept the fabric of the Net in place.

“Might be because I came into it so late, but I was curious.” It had also given him a focus that took him away from the hospital rooms that had so often been his home. “The more I researched anchors—and there wasn’t much, even with the weight of my family’s resources behind me—the more it didn’t make sense.”

Magdalene had sat quietly with him, teaching him how to run the searches—because Ena had decreed that he was to do the legwork himself. She hadn’t been born yesterday, his grandmother. She’d known he needed a mental distraction—and time to come to terms with the mother who’d contracted him away.

Payal leaned toward him. “How so?”

His skin grew tight, his muscles tense in readiness, not for an attack but for contact. A small part of him still couldn’t believe she was real. He wanted to break every rule in the book and touch her, make certain she was here.

Shoving aside the irrational need, he said, “I’ve never accepted the known wisdom that anchors are rare and always have been. That doesn’t make sense in any self-supporting system.”

He continued when she didn’t interrupt. “But I had nowhere to go from there—until two years ago, when the weeds in the Substrate began to multiply at a suffocating pace.” The layer of the Net in which anchors did their work was meant to be a pristine blue ocean aglow with an inner light. It shouldn’t be dull and infested with fibrous brown material dotted with hooks that constantly caught onto anchor minds. The things were a bitch to shake loose.

“I assumed the fibers were an extension of the rot in the Net.”

“Yeah, probably.” Canto scowled. “Doesn’t change that it’s a screwed-up situation.”

Payal stared at him. “Afterward—did you ever try to return to Silence?”