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

The same pressure was a heavy weight on Canto’s mind—and his region wasn’t as bad as Payal’s. Anchor zones were meant to overlap by at least a quarter, so that when one A tired, the As around them took the load. It was done so instinctively that neither party was ever aware of it—or that was how it was meant to work.

“There’s no longer any downtime built into the system,” Payal continued. “If anchors were machines, we’d be overheating.” She leaned back in her seat, her obsidian gaze unblinking.

It should’ve been eerie, but Canto had often seen the same inky black in the mirror. Usually when he’d pushed his telepathy too far, or if his emotions were running high.

“Is this a recent problem?” Payal asked, her gaze still distant as that beautiful mind worked at a speed far faster than the vast majority of the population.

“No.” Careful not to accidentally brush against her even though he wanted to steal that contact, he touched the screen of the organizer to bring up a chart. “Occurrence of As in the population.”

Payal went silent as she examined the bleak downward curve.

He could almost hear her thinking. And there he went, being a quasi bear again by feeling smug that she was already comfortable enough with him to retreat that way—on the other hand, she was a cardinal Tk who could snap his bones in half with a thought. He had to stop thinking of her as 3K, stop searching for hints of that wild girl.

Her next question was abrupt. “When did you become aware of the problem?”

“I initialized late,” he said to her. “Not until age nine. Probably why I began hearing the NetMind—things were leaking through because of the delayed initialization.”

Obsidian eyes on him, her attention a laser. “As far as I know, anchor initialization starts at age five, with the top edge being age seven.”

“Yeah, I was an outlier.” Unaware of the A ability slumbering inside him, waiting to wake. No one had ever worked out a way to test children at birth to see if they were or weren’t anchors. Initialization just happened at a certain age, the Substrate opening up to them as their minds became the weights that kept the fabric of the Net in place.

“Might be because I came into it so late, but I was curious.” It had also given him a focus that took him away from the hospital rooms that had so often been his home. “The more I researched anchors—and there wasn’t much, even with the weight of my family’s resources behind me—the more it didn’t make sense.”

Magdalene had sat quietly with him, teaching him how to run the searches—because Ena had decreed that he was to do the legwork himself. She hadn’t been born yesterday, his grandmother. She’d known he needed a mental distraction—and time to come to terms with the mother who’d contracted him away.

Payal leaned toward him. “How so?”

His skin grew tight, his muscles tense in readiness, not for an attack but for contact. A small part of him still couldn’t believe she was real. He wanted to break every rule in the book and touch her, make certain she was here.

Shoving aside the irrational need, he said, “I’ve never accepted the known wisdom that anchors are rare and always have been. That doesn’t make sense in any self-supporting system.”

He continued when she didn’t interrupt. “But I had nowhere to go from there—until two years ago, when the weeds in the Substrate began to multiply at a suffocating pace.” The layer of the Net in which anchors did their work was meant to be a pristine blue ocean aglow with an inner light. It shouldn’t be dull and infested with fibrous brown material dotted with hooks that constantly caught onto anchor minds. The things were a bitch to shake loose.

“I assumed the fibers were an extension of the rot in the Net.”

“Yeah, probably.” Canto scowled. “Doesn’t change that it’s a screwed-up situation.”

Payal stared at him. “Afterward—did you ever try to return to Silence?”

“Nope. Was too pissed off.” A broken boy rejected by the only family he’d ever known, his body betraying him more and more with each day that passed.

Then had come Arwen, and it was all over. No one in the family had ever figured out the mechanics of it, but Canto had enclosed Arwen in his shields seconds after Arwen’s birth. His shields were anchor tough—perfect to protect a baby empath. But having an untrained E inside his shields had nixed any attempt at Silence. Those same shields, however, had protected him from exposure.

He waited to see if Payal would take the opening, venture deeper into the past, but she shifted her attention to the organizer once more. “If your figures are correct, the shortage of As didn’t begin with the implementation of the Protocol—but it did speed it up. Was it because of our unstable Silence, our mental instability?”

“No.” It was accepted fact in the corridors of power that anchors were more susceptible to murderous insanity than the rest of the population, but when he’d crunched the numbers in detail, they hadn’t borne that out.

“Anchors do have higher levels of mental instability,” he told her, “but in the vast majority of cases the only negative impact is on the A in question. Designation A produces murderers at the same rate as most designations.” He showed her that data file.