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

In point of fact, all her public-facing records listed her as a Tk.

Canto Mercant shouldn’t have the data on her true status. She certainly hadn’t known the Mercants had an anchor in their midst. Not only an anchor but a hub, born to merge into the fabric of the PsyNet. Chances were Canto Mercant was a cardinal.

Non-cardinal hub-anchors were rare inside an already rare designation.

Setting aside her organizer on her desk, she used her intercom to contact her assistant: Ruhi, bring me our files on the Mercants.





Before



Severe behavioral and psychic problems that manifest in physical disobedience. No medical issues found to explain sudden bouts of uncoordinated motion, loss of balance, and apparent migraines that lead to blackouts.

Full re-education authorized by legal guardian.

—Intake Report: 7J

THE BOY FOUGHT against the psychic walls that blocked him in, made him helpless. His brain burned, a bruise hot and aching, but he couldn’t get through, couldn’t shatter the chains that caged his child’s mind.

“Stand!” It was a harsh order.

He’d long ago stopped trying to resist the orders—better to save his energy for more useful rebellion—but he couldn’t follow this one. No matter how hard he tried, his legs wouldn’t move, wouldn’t even twitch anymore.

He’d been able to drag himself through the corridors earlier that day, even though pain had been a hot poker up his spine, and his legs had felt as numb and as heavy as dead logs. Now he couldn’t even feel them. But he kept on trying, his brain struggling to understand the truth.

Nothing. No movement. No sensation.

Each failure brought with it a fresh wave of terror that had nothing to do with his tormentor.

“You think this is a game? You were warned what would happen if you kept up this charade!”

A telekinetic hand around his small neck, lifting him up off the schoolroom floor and slamming him to the wall. The teacher then walked close to him and used an object he couldn’t see to physically smash his tibia in two.

He should’ve felt incredible pain.

He felt nothing.

Terror might’ve eaten his brain had he not become aware that the man who’d hurt him was stumbling back, clutching at his neck, while children screamed and small feet thundered out the door. Thick dark red fluid gushed between the teacher’s fingers, dripped down his uniform.

As the man stumbled away, the child crumpled to the ground, the trainer’s telekinesis no longer holding him up.

No pain, even now.

He should’ve been scared, should’ve worried. But his entire attention was on the wild-haired little girl who’d jumped up onto a desk to thrust a sharpened toothbrush into the teacher’s jugular. “Run!” he cried. “Run!”





Chapter 2



“The boy has encompassed the newborn in his shields.”

“Is the infant under threat?”

“Unknown.”

—Ena Mercant to Magdalene Mercant (February 2054)

CANTO HAD NO way to confirm if Payal Rao had read—or even received—his message. He’d embedded a subtle tracker in the e-mail so he’d know when it was opened, but it had been neutralized at some point in the process. It had been a long shot regardless—Payal wasn’t the head of the biggest energy conglomerate in Southeast Asia and India because she was anything less than icily intelligent.

Two of the other hub-anchors he’d contacted had already responded to him, wary but interested. But for this to work, they needed Payal. Canto and the other hubs on his list were outliers in their designation because of how functional they were in external spheres. Payal, however, was the one who’d automatically garner immediate respect from the most ruthless players in the Net.

He looked once again at the image of her he had onscreen, though he’d told himself to stop obsessing years back, when he’d first done a run on her. She was of Indian descent. And she was a cardinal. Those were the only two traits she shared with 3K. That small girl had been a storm of emotion and passion, nothing about her contained and sophisticated.

Children changed, grew up. But for 3K to be Payal Rao, she’d have to have had a total personality and temperament transplant. No, she wasn’t the one for whom Canto searched—and fuck, yes, he knew 3K had to be dead, but he couldn’t stop looking. She’d saved him. How could he just abandon her?

But whoever 3K had been, her family had scrubbed her from the system with such brutality that even the might of the entire Mercant network hadn’t been able to locate her. Canto might have begun to doubt his memories and believe her a ghost—but he had a scar over his left tibia that was a physical reminder of the warped “school” that had been his home for five hellish months that had altered the course of his life.

Payal Rao, in contrast, had been educated at a private girls’ school in Delhi. Because he was obsessive, he’d checked the records, even located the class photographs.

There she was on the attendance rolls and in the images. The photos from her earlier years were blurry and of low-resolution—that had raised his suspicions until he’d looked back and seen that all the school’s uploads from that period were of the same low quality. Her name had also shown up on athletic and extracurricular lists.

According to Canto’s grandmother, Payal had even been considered for a Council position at one point. “Nothing official,” Ena had said. “But Santano Enrique noticed her intelligence and ambition. In the end, the Council decided that Gia Khan and Kaleb made the better candidates. My guess is it’s because Payal appears to have a black-and-white view of the world. Gray isn’t her strong point.”