“No, but we’re all different individuals.”

“We’re anchors,” Canto said, a sense of stretching deep inside him. “No one but another A will ever understand who we are and what we do. No one else even considers the board on which the game is played. We must be our champions.”

Payal would be their champion. Intelligent, calculating, ruthless—and capable of a far fiercer allegiance than she would ever acknowledge—the woman the world knew as the hard-nosed Rao CEO was going to stand for Designation A.

Chapter 17

If you control the anchors, you control the Net.

—Bjorn Thorsen (2081)

PAYAL FOUGHT HER need to look at Canto; the gravitational pull of him acted as a tide on her senses. To feel such a visceral compulsion toward anyone, it was a new thing, a craving unknown. She never took her attention off Lalit or her father, but that wasn’t the same. She didn’t want to look at them. She had to look at them. With Canto Mercant, want was very much a component of her response.

Want. Desire. Hunger.

All words for a single potent emotion. For Payal, such violence of need equaled a chaos of the mind that could leave her vulnerable to her father’s or brother’s machinations. Even knowing this, every part of her wanted to reach out to Canto, a painful ache deep within her that only he could assuage.

Her eyes wanted to go to the gift he’d given her.

Food.

Again.

Not just food, a thing she’d asked for as a child.

He hadn’t forgotten.

All these years and he hadn’t forgotten.

That awareness had threatened to break all the restraints on that screaming, obsessive girl in her mind. Panic had set in. It still fluttered in the back of her throat, a small trapped creature that wanted to show itself in fluctuations in her breath, splotches of blood on her face.

Payal kept it in check with teeth-gritted will—and by refusing to make eye contact with Canto. Those galaxies made her want too much, made her dream. She wasn’t in a position to dream, would never be in a position to dream even if her father and Lalit were both gone.

Because the meds only stabilized the imbalance in her brain—and what was wrong with her wasn’t only organic. She was quite certain a strong component of it came from the PsyNet.

And the neosentience of the Net was now quite fragmented and mad.

“Tell us about the Ruling Coalition plan you mentioned.” Ager’s voice broke the silence, shattering the ice that crawled over her inner landscape as she tried to reinitialize the defenses that kept her robotic and uninvolved with the world.

“It’s called Project Sentinel.” The black strands of Canto’s hair glinted in the sun now just angling into the shelter, catching her eye despite her every attempt to maintain visual detachment. “The Ruling Coalition wants to break off a test section of the PsyNet. It’s an experiment to see if the smaller section will be more stable and less prone to fractures.”

Payal thought of another deal she’d just made. “Did they get the idea from the Forgotten?” When Arran and Suriana looked blank, she said, “Not all our ancestors agreed with Silence. The ones that didn’t left the PsyNet, and as their descendants are still alive, they must have their own network.” Psy brains needed the biofeedback generated by a psychic network. Cut that off and those brains died—an established biological fact.

“I’ve never heard of them,” Suriana said softly.

Ager coughed. “The Council liked to pretend they didn’t exist. But back when I was a young’un, a few of the old-timers used to keep in sporadic contact with Forgotten relatives. Wasn’t allowed, but people are people.”

Canto’s constellation eyes met hers, and those dreams, they threatened to awaken all over again. “How do you know about them?”

“I’ve done a number of deals with Devraj Santos.” The leader of the Forgotten and a man whose gold- and bronze-flecked brown eyes appeared to be undergoing a transformation that made her wonder if enough Psy genes had coalesced in him to create a cardinal. “Rao also keeps excellent histories.”

It had turned out that she and Santos were—very—distant cousins, linking up at an ancestor who’d left the PsyNet with the defectors. “The Forgotten also don’t hide their heritage as they once did,” she added. “I’ve heard that the Council used to hunt them.” Likely because anyone with psychic power outside the Net was a threat.

“Now the Council’s defunct and we have bigger problems.” Canto leaned forward, his forearms braced on his thighs and his gaze direct. “I think you’re right that the Ruling Coalition looked to the Forgotten, but it won’t have been the only factor.”

He paused to take a drink before continuing. “Per Sentinel, Kaleb Krychek would shift his mind into the initial experimental section and go with the broken piece—the island, so to speak. We all know he’s powerful enough to hold the piece together if it’s about to go into cataclysmic failure—but he’s not an anchor. He can only hold back a collapse, not create a foundation.”

“They taking an anchor with the island?” Arms folded, Arran leaned against one side of the open end of the shelter.

“That’s the plan, but there’s a problem that seems to have escaped everyone’s notice, probably because anchors just keep on with the job.”

He showed the others the graphic representation of Designation A in the Substrate that he’d already shown Payal—the lack of overlaps between anchor zones, the sheer thinness of the coverage. As Suriana, Arran, Ager, and Bjorn asked their questions, Payal sat back and distracted herself from obsessing over Canto by processing what she thought of the others.

Each had an element to them that could be dangerous if used against the group, but it was inescapable that the most dangerous person in the group was Canto, who held all their attention even now. He had that unknown quality that turned people into followers. It was a rare thing, but she’d seen it in both Devraj Santos and Ivy Jane Zen, the high-Gradient empath who was the president of the Empathic Collective.

She’d also seen it in a local human guru who used his charisma to leech money from his followers.

The difference between a user and a leader was what they did with the adulation.

Mercants had never had a reputation for selflessness.