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

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.

But that was a problem for another day.

The rest of her zone would be fine with nothing but a ghost anchor for a short period. But no matter how much energy she fed into the matrix, she couldn’t correct the warp. It hadn’t, she belatedly realized, been caused only by the newest attack—this was a mutation in the Substrate, part of the rot in the Net.

When she rose up out of the Substrate, it was to see a huge mind working on the breach—a mind that wasn’t Kaleb’s obsidian, but darker, more cloaked in shadow. Aden Kai, leader of the Arrow Squad. Only recognizable because he wasn’t in stealth mode.

She could see what he was trying to do, knew it wouldn’t work, not given the extent of the damage in the Substrate.

Payal didn’t like touching unknown minds, but this was an extenuating circumstance; she made the effort to send a message to the man working with such merciless concentration in front of her: You need Krychek, too. The Substrate is badly damaged, and I require a bigger window of time to fix it.

In truth, she wasn’t certain she had the raw psychic energy to do such a massive repair on her own—but she couldn’t pull in her sub-anchors. With her focused on the repair, her subs were bearing the bulk of the zone’s load.

The mental voice that replied to hers was black ice. Who are you, and how did you telepath me through blackout shields?

I’m the hub-anchor for this region, and I sent the message through your biofeedback link. It was a clunky way to talk even for anchors, so this second message she sent through the telepathic pathway he’d opened. I have to fix the Substrate or your repair will collapse. Get Krychek.

She returned to the foundations of the Net without waiting for an answer. As she did so, she thought of Canto … and was reaching for him before she’d processed the need that was a bruise inside her. Once again, he was too far away for her to touch. But she did hit another familiar mind.