Last Guard (Psy-Changeling Trinity #5) by Nalini Singh

Having reached into a side panel of his chair to pull out a paper-thin large-format organizer, Canto brought up a file on the screen. “Look.”

She took the organizer. On the screen was an image of the PsyNet as it had been pre-Honeycomb. “Where are the empaths?”

“Several levels up.” He moved his chair so he was right next to her, the warmth of him a quiet assault against her senses. “This is the basic structure of the Net—the bones, so to speak.”

Payal tried not to breathe in his scent. It made her skin prickle, her pulse want to kick. “I see.” She used every trick in her arsenal to narrow her focus to the organizer. What he’d sketched out was the Net without all the surface chatter—a sea of black with only the finest faded pinpricks to show the minds that existed on the layer above … except … “Why are there fluctuations in the fabric?”

Reaching out with a hand partially covered by a glove, Canto tapped one of the fluctuations, a point where it appeared that the fabric of the Net was being sucked inward. Like a whirlpool frozen midmovement. “This is you.”

Payal went motionless.

“I always thought we could all see each other,” he said in that deep voice that held a gravelly edge. “I only recently realized I’m not normal there. But that’s not the point. Do you see the pattern?”

Payal’s mind saw patterns as others saw the sky or grass. “Your modeling is incorrect,” she said with the same bluntness that had led to the robot moniker. Such honesty had been part of the insane girl, too, and it frustrated her that to interact with the world, she had to so often stifle her natural tendency.

“Why?”

“There are no overlaps between anchor zones. There should be overlaps.”

“Yes, there should.”

She was so involved in examining the model that it took a moment for his quiet agreement to penetrate. Looking up, she met those extraordinary eyes that held the universe, and once again she was nearly lost, falling into them as she had when they were children.

“We’ll go walking under the blossoms.” A rasp of air through his abused throat. “Or maybe I won’t be able to walk. But I’ll be there.”

“Can we eat cakes as well? The small pretty ones they have in the windows of the bake shops?”

“Payal?” A rough softness to Canto’s question.

Hauling herself back from the brink, she broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact while fighting off the keening need from the part of her forever impacted by those fleeting minutes so long ago. “I know there’s no overlap in my region due to a recent death.” An older anchor had passed away three weeks earlier. “Are you telling me there are zero overlaps across the Net?”

“Seventy-five percent lack of overlaps between anchor zones.”

“Impossible.” Payal snapped her head to face him. “That would mean a single anchor death could plummet the Net into a fatal spiral.”





The Architect



The occurrence of Scarab Syndrome in the general population continues to climb.

Patient Zero is maintaining coherence, and Memory Aven-Rose, now permanent primary empath on this team, has significantly increased her success rate in stabilizing new cases, but she can only attempt to stabilize those we find.

I have grave concerns that the graph charting patients, though upward-trending, isn’t as steep as it should be—despite our efforts, a number of those with Scarab Syndrome are falling through the cracks.

While my job is medicine, not politics, I do believe that a large percentage of those lost patients are being scooped up by the bad actor known as the Architect, their aim being to use the patients’ growing psychic powers with no thought to the mental decline and death that is the inevitable result of untreated Scarab Syndrome.

—Report to the Psy Ruling Coalition from Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo

THE ARCHITECT HAD plenty of contacts inside the PsyNet, including many who agreed with the old way of things. After all, what had happened since the fall of Silence but the disintegration of their race?

The Ruling Coalition might be trying to sell the idea that the problems had begun in Silence and that what they were now experiencing was the destructive aftermath, but the intelligent saw through that smokescreen. It was in the Coalition’s interest to say such things, part of their grand plan to keep the populace weak and cowed.

The Architect didn’t much care for the masses, not when the Psy were so much lesser than she and those of her kind.

Scarabs.

The new power.

The new people.

The Psy would be nothing but slaves for her to rule once she achieved her benevolent dictatorship. She’d inducted so many more soldiers into her network over the past weeks, had spread infinite tendrils through the PsyNet. She was also getting better at persuading her newborn children as they came to their true consciousness.

No longer would her kind be imprisoned and poisoned by so-called medics. No longer would her kind be made lesser so that the Psy could feel strong. No longer would she and her children be anything but world-annihilating powers.

Now the weak ones in power were saying that the PsyNet needed to be broken into pieces in order to be saved. She could not permit that. How could she rule over the entire race if the PsyNet was no longer whole?

No, that course of action had to be stopped.