Last Guard by Nalini Singh

Chapter 20

The stars are moving. Leaving … migrating.

—Faith NightStar, Cardinal Foreseer, PsyClan NightStar/DarkRiver leopard pack

PAYAL WRESTLED WITHthe warping, trying to pull the lines of the grid back into shape.

The system did not move back into alignment.

Then a pair of arms formed of starlight joined hers, the hands closing over her fists. Warm, masculine, a hint of roughness. Canto. He made no attempt to take the lead, just fed his energy into her actions. It was the most intimate she’d ever been with any being, yet she felt no shock, nothing but a sense of rightness so pure it hurt.

Together, they wrenched the first line into alignment.

Muddy green morphed into glowing blue along that line.

How bad is it?His voice was music in her mind.

Catastrophic.Payal could sense all the lives being impacted by the carnage, each and every one a flickering pinpoint of light in her awareness. We’re going to have casualties. The people at the very center of the wound in the Net would’ve died before Payal could respond, their minds crushed by a roaring wave of data as pieces of the Net impacted one on top of the other.

But we can save those who remain if we fix this.A repair below impacted the space above and vice versa. That was why anchors had quietly mirrored every upper-level repair.

Just part of their job. Nothing to mention or make a fuss over.

Arran will replace me when I have to return, Canto told her. Then Suriana, followed by Bjorn. Ager last, because they are the oldest with the least energy to spare. I’ll work on increasing the network for future incidents.

Payal fought the visceral urge to reject such potent psychic contact with anyone but him. She needed every bit of help she could get. Held in Canto’s starlight arms, she worked with a focus that burned blue fire.

She knew the instant he fell away, the vastness of his power sucked back to his anchor point. Arran arrived on his heels, his power angry in a way that made it turbulent. But he didn’t try to take over and that was all that mattered. There was also no sense of an embrace with him; he simply stood with her and fed power where she needed it.

Relieved at the lack of intimacy, she worked on. Canto had helped her with the most difficult part, the twisted center. Arran assisted her to smooth out the surrounding section. Then he was gone, Suriana slipping into the void left behind.

Her energy was as gentle and as soft as her voice.

Weaving her power with Payal’s, she helped until the matrix was back in place. Battered and heavily patched, with the odd remaining kink, but good enough to keep people alive. Tell Bjorn and Ager to stand down. She threw the thought out to Canto, certain he was still listening for her.

Canto would always now listen for her. It was an illogical but confident belief.

Done, he responded at once. We’ll talk after you’ve recovered.

After managing to thank Suriana for her assistance, Payal dropped out of the Substrate and straight into her physical body. It ached, as if all her muscles had cramped. Stabs of pain shot down her jaw at her first breath, her tendons pulled taut for far too long as she unknowingly gritted her teeth.

The last thought she had was that she was glad she turned her room into a walled castle every night before she went to bed. No one would violate her sanctuary while she was unconscious.

Because her mind was fried, her power close to flatlining.

Her anchor point would hold, but barely.

The veil fell.

CANTOhad gotten to work as soon as his anchor point hauled him back to his zone. If he couldn’t help Payal one way, he’d find another. His first act had been to touch base with ten other anchors who had the mental strength and capability to assist should it be required—Bjorn had agreed to watch the situation and send in those anchors as needed.

That set up, Canto hacked into Vara.

His family didn’t advertise his ability to hack into various databases and locations, preferring to keep that particular trick up their sleeves for exigent circumstances. The Mercant information network was fed by living informants—data hacking had too many pitfalls to be useful as part of normal operations.

Driven by his obsession to confirm beyond any doubt that Payal wasn’t 3K, Canto had tried to get into Vara many times over the years. He’d failed. Over and over again. Now that he’d witnessed how Payal’s mind worked, it was clear that the beautiful layers of code that protected Vara were her work.

Had her code been left alone, he’d have been out in the cold. But Lalit Rao had, seven days earlier, used his administrator access to create a back door into the system—likely so he could slip in and out were he ever shut out of legal access to Vara.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t as good as Payal, and Canto had found that door. He’d never used it, had instead intended to tell Payal of the weakness at their first meeting so she could fix it—a calculated offer of trust.

Then she’d said “7J” and it had all flown out of his mind.

Fate must’ve been looking out for them both, because his forgetfulness meant he could slip into Vara and watch over Payal at a time when she wasn’t able to protect herself.

There.

He was inside.

Throwing up the security visuals on his screens, he zeroed in on the section he knew held her apartment. The information had come in via an informant long before they’d reconnected, when he’d simply been doing his due diligence on an influential PsyNet family. That informant—a relatively new hire—had since lost his position inside Vara due to his slapdash work. Canto’s current informant was violently loyal to Payal—a loyalty Canto had seen reflected over and over again in members of staff both junior and senior.

Payal had no idea how much her people loved her for her fairness and kindness.

Compliance out of fear and compliance out of devotion were two very different things.

Today, Canto spoke telepathically to his contact inside Vara. Sunita. I need you to keep an eye on Payal’s quarters. Tell me if anyone tries to enter. An older member of staff, Sunita had sung like a gleeful canary when it came to Lalit and Pranath Rao, but her lips had always been tightly zipped on the subject of Payal. This is for her safety.

He needed a pair of eyes on the ground in case the system sensed his intrusion and rejected him.

Yes, I will do that, Sunita replied with her usual formal way of speaking. There is disruption in Vara. Miss Payal missed two big meetings. Is she in trouble?

She’s fine, but she needs to rest.His pulse rapid and his gut tight, he’d looked in the Substrate three times in the past five minutes, confirmed each time that her anchor zone was holding steady. 3K had to be okay for that to be the case. We just have to give her the time she needs to recover.

I will watch, Sunita promised.

A ping on Canto’s system alerted him to another hack in progress. Frowning, he glanced at the data and realized Lalit Rao was attempting to get into Payal’s private files while she was incommunicado. The man wouldn’t succeed—he didn’t have a brain half as dazzling as his sister’s.

Canto would stand guard regardless. Lalit would not hurt Payal while she was down. Only another anchor might ever understand what she’d done, the death she’d courted by standing so close to the vortex, but that took nothing away from her courage and her ferocity.

Sending a targeted worm through the system, he set it to corrupting the other man’s files. The security subsystems would soon hit Lalit with an emergency alert that should distract him for hours.

Canto could’ve asked Genara to teleport him into Vara since he now had the necessary visuals, but right now he was more useful to Payal as a dangerous ally hidden in the shadows.

He was also fully capable of killing Lalit Rao from a distance.

It was amazing how much current could be fed through a single point if you shut off the safety features. All Canto would need was for Lalit to make contact with a computronic point—such as Payal’s secure doorknob. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would get the job done.

Never again would anyone hurt or hunt Canto’s 3K.