Last Guard by Nalini Singh
Chapter 8
As we walk into a world with emotion, we must accept that for some of our people, it is too late. They were born in Silence, raised in Silence, scarred by Silence. To expect them to forget or “get over” a lifetime of conditioning and interact at the emotional level that may become the norm is cruel—and the Psy have too much cruelty in our past already.
—PsyNet Beacon editorial by Jaya Laila Storm (Medical Empath and Social Interaction Columnist)
CANTO COULDN’T STOPhimself from watching Payal. It was no longer about the shock of coming face-to-face with the phantom he’d been hunting for so many years; it was her. The line of her profile, the way she’d allowed her spine to soften in her concentration—but most of all, the intensity with which she looked at the data.
As if absorbing it into her brain for later recall.
Telekinetic memory.
This wasn’t only that. This was Payal Rao, the woman who’d become the CEO of a family where loyalty meant nothing and betrayal was to be expected. She’d had to be smarter, tougher, more ruthless.
And alone. Always.
His hand fisted—at the same instant that she said, “How accurate is this model?”
“Margin of error of a percent at most,” he replied, the numbers burned into his brain after all the times he’d checked and rechecked his data. “I did the survey twice to confirm.”
Payal didn’t respond, her attention on the model.
It gave him time to study her.
She appeared as absorbed as she’d been as a child when she’d drawn precise grids on the screen of her bulky old organizer, the act appearing almost meditative. And once, when they’d been permitted outside for exercise, he’d watched her pick up leaves that had fallen to the ground, begin ordering them by size and color.
“Everything fits together, like a puzzle,” she’d said when he joined her. “But the pieces have to be in the right places.” Deep frown lines between her eyebrows, the tangle of her hair half falling over one eye. “I like to put the pieces in order.”
He’d have thought it a desperate attempt to find control in a situation where they had no control, but she’d always looked so content when she worked with her grids and organized those leaves.
She’d clearly noted a pattern about adult Canto—because, his anger about it aside, she treated him with suspicion due to a dangerous and skilled cardinal who was a stranger. As a threat. Full stop.
His mobility level didn’t factor into her equations as a negative when it came to her assessment of his strength. It wasn’t that she didn’t see the chair. Her comment about his successful surgeries had made that clear. But Payal hadn’t fixated on it like so many Psy. To her, it was just one element of the whole pattern that was Canto.
His chest expanded on a rush of air.
He hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d been holding his breath on a psychological level, waiting for her to hurt him. Because she could.
Fuck.
Canto had stopped being concerned about the opinions of others long ago. The PsyMed psychology specialist his grandmother had made him see had told him that his “distancing behavior” was a coping mechanism for the “unusual circumstances of his life to date.”
In other words, Canto didn’t give a fuck because his father had slated him for death when he proved imperfect. The Mercants had brought him back from that enraged and broken edge, but he still cared for the opinions of very few.
Payal Rao would always be one of those people.
Foolish and illogical and goddamn stupid when he hadn’t seen her for decades, but it was what it was; he’d been forever altered by her courage and refusal to surrender. The only way his emotions toward her would change for the worse was if she proved to have become a monster.
Head of the Rao empire, Canto. That doesn’t happen by being kind and generous.
His grandmother’s voice, what he imagined Ena might say were she able to hear the direction of his thoughts. But the thing was, Canto knew Payal could be dangerous. He was alive because she was dangerous.
When she raised her head at last, her eyes were obsidian. Heavy processing power, psychic and/or mental. “That’s why I’m tiring quicker,” she said, as if they were midconversation, her voice clipped. “Because there’s almost no overlap in my entire country. The secondary anchors can’t take the weight a hub-anchor is built to handle, so the hubs are under unrelenting pressure.”
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.
“The Net needs anchors,” he said as she examined the information, “and will always need us regardless of emotion.” Canto leaned back in his chair. “Silent anchors are just as good as non-Silent anchors—the Council never cared to discipline us, especially since anchor shields mean that nothing leaks out, even if we do feel emotion.” Had Canto initialized prior to banishment to the death chamber disguised as a school, no one could’ve stifled his telepathy, no one could’ve chained his mind.
He could’ve helped Payal, helped the other children.
PAYALglanced up from the organizer … and her control broke. He was so close, close enough that she could touch him, this man who was the last person she’d ever truly touched. “What happened to your jaw?” His skin was dark with bristles there, and she had the irrelevant thought that it would feel rough against her fingertips.
“The scar?” He rubbed his fingers over the lower right side of his jaw. “Accident when I was trying out a robotic suit.” A heavy scowl. “Why?”
“You didn’t have it when we last met.”
“You didn’t have that dot on your left cheekbone.”
“Lalit stabbed me with a pencil,” she said without any change in her tone, the incident one she’d long put behind herself. “I broke his fingers in self-defense—he wasn’t expecting such a fast response.”
Canto’s muscles went rigid, the line of his jaw brutal. “No one ever teach him that the strong are meant to protect the younger or weaker?” A sudden glitter in his eyes that made her breath catch and spawned an odd sensation in her abdomen. “Or the ferocious are meant to protect whoever the hell they damn well want.”
Her, he was calling her ferocious. Perhaps she had been. Once. “I’m a cardinal Tk. My father expected me to take care of myself. The weak don’t thrive.”
“You’re also five years younger than your asshole brother,” Canto said in a voice so deep and rough it was a growl that brushed over her like fur. “How in the fuck was that a fair fight? It’s not like he’s psychically weak. A better-trained Gradient 9.1 Tk against a much younger cardinal? Your father should’ve kicked his ass for laying a finger on you.”
A rising scream in the back of her mind, a vicious torrent of forbidden emotion.
