Last Guard by Nalini Singh

Chapter 7

A: The designation from which it all begins. I, fortunate to be privy to the writings of a seer of legend, do find it my sad duty to share that this is the designation with which it will all end one day.

—Iram’s Almanac of Designations, Annotated with Thoughts of the Author (1787)

PAYAL HAD PRETENDEDto be sorry for her actions during the psychiatric evals ordered by her father. Only six years old and she’d already learned that her natural tendency to tell the truth was a handicap. But she’d never actually been sorry. The man she’d killed had been a torturer who’d been brutally hurting a boy worth a thousand of his cruel mind.

Payal had never permitted her mask to drop during childhood. Had she done so, however, she’d have spit at the name of that so-called teacher. As a child, she’d have danced on his dead body and not cared.

Yes, that caged part of her was quite, quite mad.

Taking a seat in a chair across from Canto, she checked the seal of the water bottle, then unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the bottle. He put away the glass he’d been about to offer her, before unscrewing his own bottle and drinking down half of it in gulps that made his throat muscles move in a way that caught her attention, held it.

His neck was strong, his skin touched with a hint of perspiration, the color appearing darker where—

Going motionless as she realized her small obsession, Payal shored up her shields.

She couldn’t give way to such primal impulses. They came from the murderous girl who crooned in her head in the quietest hour of night, wanting freedom. Wanting to live.

Capping the water with hands that wanted to tremble, she put it on a small table to the side. Canto had already placed his own bottle on the same table. Uncapped.

Payal resisted the temptation to use her telekinesis to lift the cap from where he’d forgotten it on top of the cooler and screw it on. It’d be a good use of the micro-Tk skills she’d had to learn to pass her training modules, but it would also be giving in to her compulsion for order. Order was how she stayed sane, but she refused to permit it to become another kind of madness.

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.”