He shifted in his chair to lean toward her, the action drawing her gaze to the muscles of his shoulders as the scent of him—warm, oddly rough—wafted over her. “It was less a decree than a subtle change in culture born at the top. The aim of Silence altered from mental survival to perfection.”

“I see.” Returning the organizer to him, she said, “You exhibited physical defects as a young child—as judged by the PsyNet. I had mental defects on that same judgment. I know that at least one A in my region suffers from a degenerative condition.”

Canto nodded, his scent wrapping around her until she inhaled it with every breath. She should’ve pulled back, but she didn’t. A test, she told herself, to see if she could maintain control even when pushed to the extreme.

Nothing to do with the need to be closer to the only person in this world who had ever seen her.

“My census is nine-tenths complete,” he said in that voice deep and gritty, “and it looks like roughly sixty percent of current anchors have some level of what Silent Psy would consider a defect.”

Sixty percent?

The number smashed through her compulsion with Canto, snapping her to icy attention. “Have As always displayed a high incidence of physical and/or psychic defects?”

A hard shake of his head. “The statistics I’ve unearthed say we were at about the same rate as the general population. It was only after Silence that anchor young began to be born either sick or with hidden genetic defects. Not all, but a slowly growing majority.”

The grim darkness of his expression echoed the violent rage in her mad heart.

Anchors were considered so critical that their initialization signs were part of the mandatory post-birth briefing … but such signs didn’t show until approximately one month prior to initialization. Up to that point, a nascent A appeared no different than any other young child.

“A lot of children have accidents by age five,” Payal mused with a determined clinical coldness; anything else would lead to the escape of the manic thing that lived in the back of her head.

The medications the M-Psy had put her on after her father removed her from the school had helped, but she’d been too feral by then to make it out had she not initialized soon afterward. Gritting her teeth and digging in her feet, she’d grabbed hold of the lifeline that was the strong, stable permanence of the Substrate.

Seeing you fight gives me the courage to fight. Quiet, solemn words. Don’t give the monsters the satisfaction of seeing you give up. You’re better than all of them, 3K.

Did Canto remember saying that to her one rainy day when he found her huddled sobbing in a corner, her spirit whimpering in pain? No one else had ever seen her as anything good, anything worthy.

His words had forever changed her.

His faith in her was why she’d survived—and why she’d fought to pretend to be sane—but she’d been a small child with only so much willpower. Without the Substrate, she’d have flown apart into a million tiny pieces.

“Had.” The hardness of Canto’s voice as he spoke that single word was a hammer. “A lot of children had a way of having accidents by age five. The fall of Silence broke the chain of death.”

“You’re being perplexingly optimistic for a man who is part of a family rumored to know all of the Net’s most terrible secrets.” Payal couldn’t understand him. “Perhaps you have a surfeit of empaths in your zone. They tend to shoot out rainbows and flowers even to those of us who prefer cold reason. I suppose they can’t help it.”

CANTO almost choked on the water he’d just drunk. Coughing, he wondered what Arwen would make of being described as shooting out rainbows and flowers. A second later he scowled at the realization—not for the first time—of how much his cousin had shaped him. Softened him.

Because Payal was right; his statement had been one colored by hope.

Anger was a metallic taste on his tongue as he thought of all the children who’d been eliminated from the population for so-called imperfections. All the children who hadn’t had Ena Mercant in their corner. “Did anyone fight for you?” he found himself asking, needing her not to have been so painfully alone.

“In my family, only the strong survive.”

Canto’s hand spasmed on his water bottle.

Needing to do something—anything—for her, he went to the temperature-controlled storage cabinet and, putting aside the water, pulled out a couple of nutrient bars. He handed one to Payal after returning to his spot by her side. “The teleport would’ve burned a chunk of your energy. You should refuel. Especially since your anchor zone is also sucking you dry.”

She stared at the bar in her hand as if it were a strange, unknown object.

“It’s sealed,” he said without scowling—he understood that her issues with trust went to the core. They weren’t children anymore, and she’d been relying only on herself for a very long time.

He had to get it through his thick skull that she might never fucking trust him.

A hard swallow before she curled her fingers around the bar. “Why do sick As keep being born?” she asked, her voice tight. “Pre-agreement genetic testing of procreation partners should make such matches impossible.”

Canto had seen the testing record for his mother and Binh Fernandez. It had been a thing of art in its detail. Yet it had forecast none of Canto’s future physical issues. “I have a theory that we only start to sicken after birth—when the first trickle of the PsyNet begins to run through our minds.” A slow, relentless drip into pathways built to one day mainline the Net. “It’s filthy with rot and we’re caught in the stream. No other Psy engage with the Net to the same depth as As.”

“I had a tumor, too,” Payal told him without warning, almost as if the words had shoved themselves past her rigid control. “In my brain. Medics discovered it a month after my removal from the school.”

That was powerful information to have about the Rao CEO. Canto grabbed hold of the small indication of trust—and secreted away the data in a private file about 3K that he would never ever share with anyone else. This? Him and Payal? Theirs was a private bond.

Years of lost time between them, a heavy weight of the unknown, he took the organizer and brought up a profile labeled Hub-3. “This anchor suffers from recurring skin cancers, while this one”—a profile labeled Hub-4—“has a disorder that causes severe breathing issues that can’t be linked to any particular diagnosis.”