Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 43

You won’t betray us, Katya, no matter what the cost.

He was more right than he knew, Katya thought two hours later, pain beating at her temples. Reaching out, she whispered her fingers over Dev’s cheekbones, conscious he’d wake to anything but the most butterfly of touches. Even then, he shifted.

“It’s just me,” she whispered, as the exquisite ache in her heart threatened to tear her wide open. This, she thought, was love. She’d never felt it before but she knew. This feeling, it went soul deep, and it ravaged even as it healed. Devraj Santos had become an integral part of her. She couldn’t let him go after Ming—she had every faith in his abilities, but she refused to lose him to a fool’s errand.

There was no way to save her.

She’d realized that the instant after Dev had said she could live out her whole life without anyone being the wiser. True. Except that her whole life might only equal another month . . . if she was lucky. The thing with being in a prison was that after a while, your skin got pasty, your body got weak, and your mind began to beat itself against the walls in a vain effort to escape.

She was Psy.

She couldn’t survive being permanently cut off from the Net.

The biofeedback alone wasn’t enough. She had to be some part of the fabric of a neural network. Psychic isolation . . . It would drive her mad, increment by slow increment.

Her fingers lifted to her nose. Dev hadn’t seen it. She’d hidden it. But there, in Sunshine, her nose had bled again. Just a little. But more than on the plane. It had been easy to shrug off the incident as being a consequence of the bitter cold—yet even then, part of her had begun to wonder. And now, tonight, as her skull threatened to implode from the agony of a sudden spiking headache, she accepted the truth—her brain was already starting to lose the battle. Her mind had begun its slow, steady beat against the walls of its prison.

Even if she somehow managed to hang on to her sanity, Ming had assured her end. She’d told Dev she was remembering more and more. She hadn’t told him she’d remembered the final session.

Talons sinking into her mind, deep, so deep she knew she’d never get them out. “It hurts,” she said tonelessly. It wasn’t a complaint. He’d ordered her to tell him her reactions. She didn’t understand why, when he could simply read her mind, but she wasn’t going to rebel without reason. That brought pain so excruciating, one more episode might snap the final, fragile threads of her very self.

“Good.” A “snick” that she heard with her psychic ear. “It’s done.”

She waited.

“Open your psychic eye.”

It took her almost a minute, she’d been forced to keep herself contained for so long. All she saw was blackness. Then, as her eye adjusted, she began to make out the spiderweb linked to every part of her mind. Those thin threads fed back to thicker, darker, obscenely jagged roots.

Chilled, she moved around those talons. . . and slammed into an impenetrable black wall. Panic gripped her throat but she didn’t make a sound. Instead, she padded around the walls until she was back at her starting point. “I’m locked inside my mind.” It was the worst kind of nightmare. Even the rehabilitated, those Psy who’d had their minds destroyed by a psychic brainwipe, had access to the Net. Ming might as well have buried her alive.

“We wouldn’t want your aberrant mental state affecting the Net.” A small pause as he took a seat. “Your personal shields are under your control—you’d be useless otherwise. Telepathy appears to be your only offensive capability.”

So, she thought, ignoring his deliberately belittling words, she could still do that much at least. But it wasn’t the same—she’d never been so alone, her mind surgically excised from the herd.

“Why does it hurt?”

“An incentive to complete your mission within a particular time frame. The longer it takes, the less chance you have of actually obtaining any useful information before the Forgotten realize what you are.”

“Incentive?”

“If you complete your primary task and return to me by the date imprinted in your mind, I’ll consider removing the controls that are effectively starving parts of your brain into cell death.”

“Those parts won’t regenerate, no matter what. That’s no incentive.”

“On the contrary—all the parts that’ll fail before the deadline are nonessential. After that point, your motor skills and ability to reason will go, followed quickly by the involuntary controls.”

“Like breathing?”

“What else?”

She sucked in air, savoring something that was going to be lost to her soon enough. “If I come back, if I complete the primary task, you’ll allow me to access the Net again?”

“I might even decide to retain you as one of my operatives.” Coal black eyes with the rarest specks of white stared into hers. “You’d be a most effective assassin—after all, you don’t exist.”

Katya spread her fingers over the steady pulse of Dev’s heartbeat as the pain of the headache dissipated, leaving only a dull bruise. More pain would come soon, but it didn’t matter. She’d never complete the primary task. Not consciously. But she knew damn well that Ming wouldn’t have left that to chance. How could she guard against a threat she couldn’t see, couldn’t even guess at?

If she were truly selfless, she’d slit her own throat.

Dev’s eyes snapped open, startling her into a little gasp. “Dev?”

“What were you thinking?” Gold glittered in the depths of the rich brown that had come to mean everything to her.

“A nightmare,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. “That’s all.”

He tugged her until she was almost under him. “I’ve got you. Sleep.”

Heart thudding in reaction, she put her hand on his shoulder, let him tuck her close, and tried to find sleep. The thoughts that had somehow awakened him, she shoved to the back of her mind. Suicide, she realized belatedly, would destroy Dev. He’d blame himself. That was simply the man he was—protective to the core. She’d have to find some other way to save him from the loaded gun that was her mind.

Because killing Devraj Santos was simply not on the agenda.