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

A telepathic message slipped into her mind via the channel she’d set up for the Ruling Coalition. Alert to Ruling Coalition from Aden Kai: Attacking Scarabs captured in seventy-five percent of cases. One large eruption of the virus. An E is taking care of that. Situation contained.

So quickly, Payal thought, but when she glanced at the time on her phone, it was to see that two hours had passed. Yet neither Lalit nor her father had tried to contact her. It appeared they were finally beginning to understand what she did. While she could understand her father considering that a plus now that she was on the Ruling Coalition, it could augur nothing good when it came to her brother.

Lalit would see her newfound power as an insult to him.

Rising, she ate a nutrient bar, then stripped the bloody sheet off her bed and put it in the laundry basket she’d teleport to the cleaning team later. That done, she made sure her makeup was undisturbed. Given all that had occurred, she needed an injection of the meds as soon as possible, so this meeting wasn’t negotiable.

Already, her head throbbed.

For once, her father didn’t make a production of giving her the medication. He was too busy on an audio-only call, and though she saw his need to interrogate her, he allowed her to come and go in a matter of three minutes. She had no trouble swapping out the vial for another one.

Her pain was brutal by the time she got into her apartment and injected herself, but she was able to save ten percent of the vial to give to Canto. Such a small amount wouldn’t make much of a difference to her, and she could blame continuing anchor duties—and duties to the Ruling Coalition—on any necessary increase in her dosage.

She teleported the vial and its precious cargo onto Canto’s desk. Not all teleport-capable telekinetics could do this kind of a fetch or send, but Payal had understood the psychic mechanics of it from childhood. And given the small mass of the vial, it took little of her depleted energy resources.

I have it, baby. The pure clarity of Canto’s voice in her mind, the bond between them awash in primal protectiveness.

Payal hugged that sensation around herself; she could protect herself, had done so all her life, but to know that he thought she was worth protecting? It meant everything. The sensation triggered another thought, and as she returned to her work, she found herself gnawing on a question that had first emerged in her mind during their meeting with Sophia Russo.

The NetMind had done so much to protect the Es. Why hadn’t it protected the anchors? They were as critical to the survival of the Net. Just as without Es there would eventually be no sane Psy, without As there was no PsyNet. The psychic fabric would ripple and fold and collapse.

Which left only one answer: the NetMind had done something.

From all she’d learned since her induction into the Ruling Coalition—thanks to her newfound access to a number of top secret databases—the neosentience had made too many long-game moves to have dropped this one ball so badly. But whatever it had done, they couldn’t see it. So Payal would look and keep looking until she found the answer.

The first thing she did was log into Canto’s private database on Designation A and start reading. He’d collated a lot of information. It scrolled in her mind, piece after piece after piece. Until by the time she lay down to sleep, her brain was on autopilot, moving the pieces from one place to the other, checking details, finding connections.

Connections.

It was the first word she thought of when she woke. “But there are no overlap zones,” she muttered as she readied herself for the day.

The problem occupied her mind as she chose a skirt in black that hugged her hips and came to the knee, and paired it with a sleeveless silk shell with a high neck, in vivid red. Black heels and a wide black belt finished off the outfit.

She kept her makeup nude today, but for the pop of red on her lips. Her hair, she pulled back into a neat bun. Canto? Are you awake?

Yes. I’ve been trying to figure out a solution to the connective tissue problem.

Connective tissue.

Payal halted in the act of doing her makeup, the answer almost within reach, but it slipped away before she could capture it. Frustrated, she nonetheless let it go for the time being. Nikita’s sent out a notice about another Coalition meeting. I’d better log in. Come with me.

KALEB knew the meeting was necessary, given the devastation throughout the Net. There was just too much damage, too many broken pieces, too many tears. He’d still rather be out there trying to fix the damage than in this comm meeting.

“We stand on a cracked eggshell,” Payal said in her blunt and precise way.

“No,” he responded. “There is no way to repair a cracked egg. We will repair this.” Because Sahara had asked him to save the world, and he’d made her a promise. It was a promise the twisted darkness inside him would go to the ends of the earth to keep—the only thing he wouldn’t sacrifice was Sahara.

That was why he’d finally made the call that the Net had to be cut into pieces. There’d been no other way to maintain its damaged psychic fabric. That the plan had proved flawed wasn’t a failure—but that they had no backup was; the occlusion had bought them time, nothing more.

Payal gave him a long glance, then inclined her head a little. “Perhaps I should call us a cracked vessel. In Japan, there is an art called kintsugi—the masters of the art use gold and other fine metals to mend such cracks, so that the resulting artefact is more beautiful because of its scars, not regardless of them.” Starless eyes held his. “We just need to find our gold.”