Sitting up, Payal locked eyes with him. “They put us in that place to die, Canto. Yet here we are, alive and thriving, and they’re both dead.” A feral smile from the wildness in her. “We’re going to win this, too.”

“Yes, we fucking are.” No way was he ever letting her go. He wanted to fill her life with joy to the brim, then more. Wanted to love her until she expected it, until she took it for granted.

Their kiss was a wild tangle interrupted by tremors at the edge of their minds.

Separating, they looked inward, saw the ripples in the Net. Another fracture. Not in their zones and not large enough that they had to respond to assist. But it was enough to break the moment in two, because they were anchors, and it was their duty to hold the Net in place.

A keen filled Canto’s mind, the whispered tears of other anchors carried by the Substrate. He hadn’t been able to hear them before he began to set up the anchor network, but it was as if with contact had come a connection. “All our anchors are on the verge of a total breakdown.”

“It’s crushing to not be able to do the one thing you were born to do.” Payal’s eyes held no stars, the night air blowing her unbound hair back from her face.

“How could the NetMind have allowed it to get this bad?” Canto wasn’t blaming the neosentience—never would he do that. He just didn’t understand why it had made this choice. “It protected the Es. Why not do the same for the designation without which the PsyNet can’t exist? Do you think it was devolving long before we realized?” It had been so vibrant, so young during his childhood, a vast and growing neosentience.

A sudden burst of starlight in the obsidian of Payal’s gaze. “I want to check something.”

SHE dived into the Substrate without waiting for an answer because she knew Canto would follow her here to this place that was their psychic home. The weeds tangled her up, thicker than ever.

Then there he was: her Canto. Whose language of love was food and physical contact, and who understood that hers was a feral possessiveness that meant she touched their bond constantly.

“I can’t believe how fast these things have taken over the Substrate,” he said, pushing away one of the thorn-heavy weeds. “How long’s it been? Twenty, twenty-five years since it first began?”

Sparks of light in Payal’s brain, coalescing into a stunning whole. “How old are the variant Es? The ones who clean the PsyNet?” She’d been told of them as part of her Ruling Coalition briefing, and Canto knew because Mercants liked to know things.

“I can find out,” Canto said. “Why?”

“Because the NetMind would never abandon us.”

“You think these aren’t weeds?” Canto’s mind danced in and out of the rough brown strands. “I don’t know, baby. The things do nothing but take up space in the Substrate.”

“Are we sure? Have we ever truly looked at them?” She ran her hand along one of the weeds. It sparked with light as the weeds always did when an anchor brushed them. “Remember how Arran mentioned he got stuck in a cluster and had to fight his way out?”

“It’s dangerously aggressive.”

“What if it wasn’t trying to hurt him?”

“Payal, wait!”

But her mind saw the possibilities, and she knew Canto would rescue her if she needed rescue. Because she was his person. She dived straight into the midst of a heavy thicket of weeds, not fighting when they wrapped around her psychic presence. It felt like being wrapped up in ropes, but only at first.

Payal! I can’t see you anymore!

I’m fine. I think I know what to do. Because the ropes were now part of her psychic presence, part of her anchor.

Opening herself out with those ropes attached to her, she spread and spread. All the little thorny hooks gripped the Substrate to give her more stability as she sent her anchor energy out along each of the interlocking ropes in a way that turned her into the center of a huge psychic organism.

She touched Shanta’s zone, overlapped it to the very center. She touched Prabhyx’s zone, overlapped that, too. Then the As on her remaining sides. She was now the biggest anchor in the entire Substrate.

CANTO’S breath caught.

She was glorious. The fibrous “weeds” had softened and taken on the blue glow of an anchor mind in the Substrate, Payal the nucleus of a huge living cell that had veins and arteries that flowed with energy. The NetMind had given them one final gift before the Psy race burned it out with their terrible choices and their inability to embrace their natures. “You’re magnificent.”

“I feel bigger. Stronger.” Energy pulsed along the veins and arteries, a stunning light show that cleared out all the smog that had erased the clarity of the Substrate.

He forced himself to pay attention to the practicalities. “The thorns, they only attach to the Substrate if an anchor is feeding them energy.”

“Yes. But they’re not feeding off me. More … amplifying.”

A sudden cold fear in his gut. “Can you disengage?”

“There’s no need,” she said. “These weeds—we need another word—are now a part of my anchor point. They allow us to spread ourselves far thinner, because the anchor point will hold as a result of all the tiny anchor points created by the thorns along the way.”

Canto’s mind was pulling him back to his anchor point—because even while he existed in the same physical space as Payal, his anchor remained locked in place. “We need to talk more about this.”

“I’ll follow you to your zone.”

Canto allowed himself to whiplash back to his zone, only relaxed when her mind appeared after his, as normal. Her anchor point might have bloomed into an unearthly entity, but it hadn’t tangled her up in ropes she couldn’t escape.

As she stood watch, he moved into a thicket of weeds.

They closed around him, the tendrils becoming a part of his mind, until he saw why Payal wasn’t worried. He now controlled these tendrils, and as they unfurled, his anchor point grew and grew.

And grew.

“You’re a constellation, Canto,” Payal whispered before whiplashing back to her zone.

The next time they spoke, it was telepathically, both of them in their bodies on the physical plane in Vara, their minds entwined in a dance of glowing blue.

Did you see the small white sparks on the weeds?