Their sadness. Their heartbreak.

The PsyNet was dying. And they were dying with it.

Chapter 19

The volcanic eruption came without warning, and it led to the death of an entire city. Included in that number were twenty members of Designation A. It is said that the loss changed the face of the designation forever.

—From Disasters of the Ancient World by Antonio Flavia (1957)

EIGHT HOURS AFTER the meeting, Payal lay awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling. In her fist was a small white stone she’d stolen from the oasis when Canto wasn’t looking. A stone he’d touched, held. Her larceny had been an impulsive emotional act that had nothing of reason in it, another sign of the deleterious effects of her response to him.

She squeezed the stone hard … and teleported herself back to the desert, barefoot, and wearing only a sleep tee and pajama pants. Moonlight kissed the oasis, so she was in the same hemisphere—and from the position of the moon, not so very far from Delhi. Padding down the path, the sand gritty under her soles, she checked the areas she’d altered while he’d watched with interest. None of them had been changed back.

Sitting down on a fractionally misaligned paving so she wouldn’t have to look at it, Payal soaked in the peace and quiet. No wind stirred the trees or made the sands whisper closer. No other voices split the air. If she’d tripped a silent alarm, no one came to kick her out.

In front of her lay a small area she’d fixed so it was harmonious to her mind.

“It’s compulsive, your need for mathematical perfection.” Her father’s voice when he’d discovered her arranging her childhood belongings exactly so on her shelves. “Coloring between the lines will never get you anywhere. Our race likes rules, but the people who gain power are the ones who understand that the rules need to be bent and broken.”

Pranath Rao had never seemed to understand that though his daughter far preferred to color inside the lines, she saw all the options, the decision-making system in her mind a multilayered and multidimensional matrix. Her preference for order over chaos wasn’t heavily weighted in that matrix.

Rising, she went to the next little garden area. It had been planted with care but remained out of alignment. She knew Canto wouldn’t mind the small alterations she wanted to make to bring it back to harmony. This place was his, but … it felt a little bit hers, too. It was a terrible thing, this emotional response, another strike at the walls that protected her sanity, but she couldn’t make herself teleport home.

She began to work.

Sitting back with a satisfied sigh some time afterward, she looked at her sand- and dirt-covered hands, then up at the night sky. The galaxies of Canto Mercant’s eyes dazzled her inner vision. The part of her that had learned to survive in Vara hissed at her to remember that he was a Mercant.

Don’t trust him, it whispered.

It was silenced by the furious echo of the wild-eyed girl she’d once been. He’d bleed for you! she yelled over the warning whisper. The intensity of Canto’s loyalty was a kind of subvocal hum that disturbed the tiny hairs on her arms and caused her ears to attune themselves to the deep timbre of his voice.

“You’re imagining it,” she told herself. “You’ve never been great at reading emotional cues.”

The girl inside her remained stubborn, mutinous. That girl had no doubts.

Canto Mercant would not betray Payal Rao.

The knowledge kept on causing breaks in the wall of her mind, kept on making her want to retreat from her own request to him. She’d made that request in a blind panic, stunned by how fast her walls were crumbling. Now, as she sat in the cold night air, hugging her knees to her chest, she was afraid, so afraid that she’d given up the only thing in her life that had ever made her feel … good. Just good.

The insane girl inside her smashed her fisted hands against the iron bars of the cage Payal had built to keep her contained, wanting out, wanting freedom. Wanting Canto. Bending her head toward her knees, her eyes hot and her throat thick, Payal rocked back and forth.

A telepathic knock had her jolting. She recognized the mental signature as that of Arran Gabriel. Prior to ending their first meeting, the six of them—in what they’d decided to name the Anchor Representative Association or ARA for short—had exchanged telepathic conversation in order to make such contact more seamless.

Arran, she said, guard raised. How may I assist you?

I’ve been thinking, he said in a mental voice far colder than the angry heat of his physical presence, and I still can’t work out if Canto is for real. So I reckoned I’d ask the most rational person in the room. You figure this for a con?

Payal wondered if she should disclose her conflict of interest. No, the past was between her and Canto, a private thing. She could answer Arran’s question using pure robotic reason, her own terrifying sense of trust no part of the equation.

Mercants always plan multiple moves ahead in multiple dimensions, she said, but right now, Canto is planning for Designation A. The foundation of the PsyNet is in trouble. There’s no faking that. Anchors must be part of the solution—Canto and the Mercants gain nothing from this gambit that we all also do not gain.

Huh, Arran said. Guess so.

He ended the communication as abruptly as he’d begun it.

But the interaction had been enough to break her out of her cycling thoughts. After taking one last look around the oasis, she returned home to sleep and prepare for what was to come, the small white stone clutched safely in her hand.

She slept with the heaviness of exhaustion and woke to the feel of a massive pressure wave at the back of her brain. The gravity of it was familiar, the conclusion inexorable: the PsyNet in her region was buckling under bombardment from multiple sources.

Leaving Krychek and other powerful minds to deal with the assault on the main level of the PsyNet, she dived into the Substrate. The grid with which she made sense of this space wasn’t broken. It was warped.

Severely.

Net failure imminent.

She shifted into anchor mode, her entire attention zeroing in on that warped section that was no longer a healthy glowing blue, but a dull and muddy green.

As if the warping had cut off the blood flow to critical arteries.

Weaving through it all were the strange and thick fibers of dull brown that had begun to grow a couple of decades earlier. As far as Payal knew, none of the As had ever been able to get rid of the fibers, and the stuff was clogging up the flow of the Substrate.