Last Guard by Nalini Singh
Chapter 15
Project Sentinel is authorized to proceed.
—Unanimous decision of the Ruling Coalition
CANTO WAS USEDto waiting. A man couldn’t work in surveillance and not build a tolerance for patience. He was also good at absorbing a lot of information and processing it down to the most critical factor.
But Payal screwed with his calm, turned his patience to dust.
His eyes went to the box that held the cake.
He’d done something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what and it was messing him up. He’d held on to her dreams for an eternity, waiting for the day when he would see her again; to be able to give her this small piece of what she’d wanted, it had made his fucking heart jump like an excited cub’s.
“Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Get it together, Canto.”
Checking on the time, he saw that several minutes remained until the others would begin to arrive. He moved out of the shelter and down to where Payal crouched by a bed of succulents, quietly rearranging the stones. Last night, after she’d left, he’d looked at what she’d done and hadn’t been able to see anything of substance.
Yet he’d known she hadn’t simply been moving stones around without reason, so he’d taken an image and had his computer analyze it. It had linked her design back to a precise mathematical model.
Patterns and grids were the baseline of Payal’s mind.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?” he asked roughly, because this mattered. She mattered.
Payal moved three stones before responding. “I can’t—” She broke off, started again. “I function in this world because I work inside a defined set of parameters, within a framework of rules that keep me from becoming erratic and without reason.”
Canto waited, unable to see where she was going.
“You …” A quick obsidian glance, the stars erased. “When we’re together, it speaks too much to the child I once was.” Another stone placed before she rose to her feet. “She wants to break out, wants to take control.”
Canto bit back his knee-jerk reaction and stared out at the water. He wanted to tell her that was bullshit, that she didn’t need all those rules and fences around her mind. She was dazzling in her brilliance, a bright star that had been constrained into an unnatural shape.
But Canto wasn’t only the boy who’d almost died because his father considered him a mistake. Canto was also the man who’d spent years harboring a child empath inside his shields. Arwen had altered the core of his nature, taught him things without ever once giving instruction. One thing Canto knew was how to listen.
Yesterday and today, what had Payal told him?
That she had a chemical imbalance in her brain that made her feel out of control, obsessive, and without reason. The medications she took helped equalize her brain chemistry to standard levels—and her focus and concentration, the rules she’d made for herself, took her the rest of the way to being the kind of person she wanted to be.
“I’m a risk to your stability,” he ground out, the words grating against his insides like sandpaper.
Payal released a shaky breath. “I thought I could handle it, that I could separate our time together from the rest of me … but I can’t. Being with you, it weakens the walls I keep between myself and the unstable part of my psyche. I need distance.”
Canto felt as if she’d stabbed him in the heart, the hilt thudding home against his skin to leave a bruise black and blue. Sucking in the pain, he said, “The anchor work?”
“I won’t back away from that.” A solemn promise. “But us …” A long breath, an exhale. “Whatever this is, it threatens to fracture my foundations. Please help me maintain those foundations.”
The last sentence broke him.
He’d promised to stand by her side no matter what, but this was the hardest possible thing she could’ve asked of him—to help her maintain shields that would keep her distant and separate from him. No more would she reach out a hand and hold on tight to his. Instead, she’d pull back behind the shield of robotic coldness with which she faced the rest of the world.
“Canto?” It was the softest he’d ever heard her voice, and when he looked up, her face was stark in a way he’d never seen.
He jerked his head in a yes. What the fuck else could he do? She needed this. He would not let her down. Not even if watching her reinitiate her shields felt like losing her all over again.
PAYALwanted to reach out and grab onto the thread she’d just cut, stop it from falling away into the darkness. It took everything she had to remain still and allow the thread to become lost in nothingness.
Loss clawed at her. Inside her screamed the manic, broken girl.
She forced out words of logic, focusing on the one tie to Canto she hadn’t brutally destroyed. “In our last meeting, you were adamant that we need to connect with the Ruling Coalition. Why?”
His shoulders were still rigid, white lines around his mouth, but he didn’t punish her by withholding himself. His response was immediate. “Because they’re talking about breaking the Net into pieces.”
The words slammed a fist through the echoes of emotion, snapping her fully into anchor mode. “With all the collapses of late,” she said after absorbing the data, “all the fractures, the PsyNet is going to tear apart regardless.” She saw it now, why the Ruling Coalition had made a choice of such violence. “Better to do it in a controlled fashion.”
“I don’t disagree with the idea of breaking the Net into smaller pieces—the problem is that it can’t work as posited.”
“Show me.” Payal heard how she sounded, added, “I’m sorry. That sounded like an order.”
Canto was already turning to head back up. “No, it was just you being blunt and honest.” He glanced at her, the galaxies missing from his gaze. “Don’t change that part of how we interact, Payal. Don’t add niceties and politeness to make yourself palatable to me. Speak without filters.”
That, she could do. That was her natural state. It was the politeness and the not accidentally offending people that took work. “All right,” she said, and shoved her hand into her pocket to stop from reaching out to him.
Never had she reached out to anyone as an adult. That was why Canto was so dangerous to her, why she’d decided to push him away. A choice between a precious and rare connection, and her sanity and reason.
Not fair. But the world had never been fair to them.
CANTOhad managed to get his raw emotions under unyielding control by the time he reached the shelter. He’d rage when he was alone. Right now, Payal had asked him to help her maintain her foundations—to help her live as Payal Rao and not a wild and out-of-control falling star—and he would not let her down.
“Here.” Sliding out the large-format organizer he’d put in the case built into the side of his chair, he brought up the plan his grandmother had received from Kaleb. Canto had read the signs in the slipstreams of the PsyNet, knew the Ruling Coalition had to be considering this dangerous solution, and asked his grandmother to feel things out.
She’d just gone ahead and asked the most powerful man in the Net.
It was a measure of Kaleb’s respect for Ena that he’d passed on the classified plan titled “Sentinel”—though he had asked why she wanted to know. When informed that the request had come from a Mercant hub-anchor, Kaleb had apparently become very interested in return.
“He doesn’t know the whole family yet,” Ena had told Canto when she sent him the Sentinel papers. “Had no idea we had a hub in the mix—he wants to meet with you.”
Canto wasn’t ready to talk to the cardinal Tk. Not yet. He had to figure this out with Payal and the other anchors first. This was an A problem, the subject so specific and esoteric that it had been forgotten by the rest of the world. “I think all of us should talk about Sentinel,” he said. “You, me, and the four As who’ve agreed to be part of the advisory panel.”
Payal—who’d once more taken the seat next to him—didn’t look up from her intense focus on the severance plan, her skin no longer pale as it had been when she’d looked at him with such open vulnerability. She was once more Payal Rao, CEO, and her skin held a honeyed glow under the filtered sunlight. Canto had set the walls of the shelter to medium clarity—a setting that allowed in light but muted it to a more comfortable softness.
“The members of the advisory board,” she murmured. “They agree with the decision to face off against the Ruling Coalition?”
“More or less.”
She raised her head.
He rubbed his face rather than give in to the compulsion to touch the curve of her chin. “None of us are used to working as a team—or being so visible—but they’re all intelligent people. I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble.” He’d made sure not to choose anyone so insular and isolated that they’d panic at the idea of being exposed to the world.
“We’ll allay their concerns by making it clear I’ll be the face.” Payal zoomed in on part of the plan. “You’re willing to be my lieutenant? To step in if I can’t?”
“According to my grandmother, Mercants were knights to a king at the beginning of our history and rode into battle at his side,” Canto said. “Only one of us was left standing by the end.” He looked into a face he’d never be permitted to touch. “We’re good at standing by our generals.”
“Such language makes us sound like an army going into war.”
“That’s exactly what we are.” There was no getting around that. “We’re battling for the survival of the entire PsyNet. We are the last guard against a total system failure.” And Payal—strong, determined, unbending against pressure—would go into battle at the forefront, the anchor flag held high.
He’d fight to the death to protect her as she fought for Designation A.
A flicker at the corner of his eye, the first of the advisory board members being teleported in. It was the only non-cardinal in the group: Bjorn Thorsen.
Almost eighty-seven years old with gray hair and gray eyes, his skin white with a tinge of pink, the senior anchor took a look around the oasis, then glanced inside the shelter and did a double take. “You’re an A?”
Payal crossed one leg over the other, while holding the organizer on her thighs. “Yes.”
“Payal Rao, meet Bjorn Thorsen,” Canto said, “professor of mathematics and hub in California.”
Next to come in was Suriana Wirra, a twenty-seven-year-old woman of medium height with skin of darkest brown, softly rounded cheeks, and thick hair she’d pulled back into a single braid. Her teleport was thanks to the second Mercant teleporter, since Genara would’ve flamed out if asked to make all the ’ports.
Shy and quiet, Suriana just nodded as she settled in.
The next person to arrive did so under his own steam: Arran Gabriel, with his black hair and brown skin, his body tightly coiled under his torn jeans and faded black T-shirt, was another telekinetic with teleport-capable abilities. As a result of the latter—and because his family hadn’t held the power of Payal’s—he’d been taken from his family unit at age four and thrown into a strict martial training program.
He’d initialized at age seven, but somehow, no one had realized what was happening, what he was. Arran was the only hub of whom Canto was aware who hadn’t immediately been tagged as an A upon initialization. His experiences had left him angry in a way Canto knew was dangerous. But at twenty-four years of age Arran had that violent anger under vicious control.
The man was now a mercenary with zero acknowledged alliances or connections.
Canto had fully expected Arran to tell him to fuck off. But while emotionally damaged on a deep level, Arran wasn’t a psychopath. His A core wouldn’t allow him to ignore the oncoming annihilation of their race.
Now he grunted in greeting, his gaze flat and starless.
Genara brought in the last of their number right then: Ager Lii. Bent slightly at the back, with one hand leaning heavily on a cane, they were androgynous in appearance and claimed no gender. Their eyes were unusually elongated and their hair a soft and snowy white that hit shoulders covered by the linen fabric of the cream-colored tunic they wore with slim brown pants, their skin papery white and spotted with age.
Most Psy got those spots removed, but Ager had moved beyond that.
They were all here. The general and her lieutenants.
