Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 6

An hour after Katya asked him for a promise of death, Dev pushed a plate across the break-room table. “Eat.”

Not touching the food, she pinned him with eyes more gold than green at that moment, streaks of brown bursting from the pupils. “Will you keep your promise?”

He knew when he was being played. But most people wanted favors of a far less final kind. “I’ll kill you if it proves necessary.”

She paused, as if considering his words, then picked up the fork. “Thank you.” While she ate in small, birdlike bites, he wondered what the hell he was going to do with her. Dev knew full well what he was becoming, but he wasn’t—not yet—so much the monster that he’d throw her back to the wolves. But neither could he permit her to become intimate with Shine.

Katya might look fragile, might appeal to instincts born in the darkness of a childhood that had ravaged his soul, but she was Psy—and Psy cared for their physical appearance only to the extent that it got the job done. It was her mind that he had to consider—she couldn’t be allowed near any computers, any sources of data, certainly none of their most vulnerable.

Pushing away the still mostly full plate, the woman at the center of his thoughts shook her head. “My stomach can’t take any more.”

“Another meal, in an hour.”

Her expression remained unchanged, but he saw her fingertips press down hard against the edge of the tabletop. “You’re used to giving orders.”

“And having them obeyed.” He made no effort to hide his nature, his will. It was what had gotten him this far, and it was what would protect the Forgotten from the Council’s murderous attempts to stamp them out forever. “Can you handle some questions?”

“Would you stop if I couldn’t?”

“No.” He had to assess the level of threat—outwardly, she was as fragile as glass, but then again, most poison didn’t look like much either.

In contrast to the majority of people when faced with him in this grim mood, she didn’t break eye contact. “At least you’re honest.”

“Compared to?”

A shake of the head, one answer she wouldn’t give him. “Ask your questions.”

“Are you in the Net?”

She blinked. “Of course.” But her tone was unsure, her forehead furrowing.

He waited as her lashes came down, as her eyes moved rapidly behind the delicate lids. An instant later, they flew up. “I’m trapped.” Her fingers curled into the table, nails digging into the wood veneer. “He’s buried me in my mind.”

“No. If he had, you’d be dead.”

The harsh words acted as a slap. Katya jerked up her head, saw the cold distance in the eyes looking into hers, and knew there’d be no gentleness from him. He was no longer the Dev who’d brushed her hair and let her touch him. This man wouldn’t hesitate to fulfill her promise. But she hadn’t asked this man.

Paradoxically, the ruthlessness of him made her spine straighten, a new kind of resolve rising up out of her battered soul. Where she would’ve softened for Dev, she didn’t want to surrender and give the director of the Shine Foundation the satisfaction. “Yes,” she said, forcing herself to still the panic. “The biofeedback has to be coming through.” The logic of it was irrefutable—she wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes without that feedback from the neural network that every Psy linked to instinctively at birth. “But I don’t think I can enter the Net itself.”

“Doesn’t mean someone can’t find a way inside you.”

Her stomach revolted. It took everything she had to keep down what she’d eaten. “You think he already has,” she whispered, looking into that pitiless face. “You think I’m nothing but a puppet.”

Heading back up to his office after Katya—and yes, he found himself thinking, that name suited her far better than Ekaterina—began to slump from exhaustion, Dev considered who might know the answer to the mystery that was Katya Haas. He had a network of spies and informants that was as byzantine as the PsyNet. However, a direct channel to that net was the one thing he hadn’t been able to achieve. But, he thought, DarkRiver counted more than one full-blooded Psy among its numbers—chances were very high that an open line of communication existed somewhere.

Looking down at the frenetic energy of New York, he weighed his next move. If Katya had been dumped at his home as a warning, then the powers in the PsyNet already knew she was alive and were—as she herself had said—controlling her. However, he had to consider the converse possibility—that she’d been rescued and left at his home because her rescuer knew the Forgotten would never cooperate with the Council. If so, any ripple in the pond could put her life in danger.

“Dev?”

He turned to find Maggie, in the doorway. “What is it?”

“Jack’s on his way up.” Her eyes were sympathetic.

Dev’s gut twisted, his mind filling with images of William, Jack’s son. The last time Dev had seen him, Will had still been a laughing, energetic little boy. Now . . . “Show him in when he arrives.”

Sleet began to fleck the window as Maggie withdrew, every blow more cold and brittle than the last. Moving away from the sudden darkness, Dev returned to his desk. To his responsibilities. There was only one decision he could make when it came to seeking information about Katya—she wasn’t as important as the thousands of Forgotten he’d pledged to protect. A ruthless line, but one he could not cross.

Several floors below, her eyes closed in sleep, Katya found herself back in the spider’s web.

“What is your secondary purpose?”

“To gather information on the Forgotten, to discover their secrets.”

“And if you fail to find any useful data in the designated time frame?”

Fear rose, but it was dull, a feeling she’d endured so long, it had become a bruise that never faded. “I must shift all my focus to the primary task.”

“What is that task?”

“To kill the director of the Shine Foundation, Devraj Santos.”

“How?”

“In a way that makes it clear he was assassinated. In a way that leaves no room for doubt about who did the task.”

“Why?”

That threw her. “You didn’t tell me why.”

“Good.” A single, ice-cold word. “Your job isn’t to understand, simply to do. Now repeat what you are to do.”

“Kill Devraj Santos.”

“And then?”

“Kill myself.”

A pause, a rustle of fabric as he crossed his legs, his face as expressionless as when he’d shut her in the dark again though she’d begged and pleaded on her hands and knees.

“Please,” she’d said, scrabbling to hold on to his legs. “Please, don’t. Please, please!”

But he’d kicked her away, locked the door. And now he sat—a god on his throne while she huddled on the floor—speaking to her in that cool voice that never changed, no matter how much she screamed.

“That task is the sole reason I’m leaving you alive.”

“Why me?”

“You’re already dead. Easily expendable.”

“If I fail?” She was so weak, her bones seeming to melt from the inside out. How could she possibly kill any man, much less one reputed to be as lethal as the director of the Shine Foundation?

There was no immediate answer, no movement from the spider who’d become the only living being in the endless pain that was her universe. He was a true Psy. He didn’t make gestures or movements without purpose. Once, she’d been like that. Before he’d torn into her mind and snapped the threads of her conditioning, wiping out all the things that had made her who she was.

Before he’d killed her.

“If you fail,” he finally said, “Devraj Santos will eliminate you from the equation. The end, for you, will be the same.”

Katya gasped awake, her clothing sticking to her skin, her head pounding. Fear and horror clawed at her chest until she kicked off the blankets, certain something was sitting on her ribs, crushing her bones.

Nothing.

Nothing but madness.

Shoving a fist into her mouth, she curled onto her side, wrestling with the jagged fragments of a dream that had drenched her body in the sick chill of fear-sweat. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t connect the pieces, couldn’t figure out what it was the shadow-man had wanted her to do.

She just knew that when the time came . . . she’d do it. Because the shadow-man never left anything to chance. Most especially his weapons.

Letter dated December 3, 1970

My dear Matthew,

It’s as I thought—the attempt to condition rage out of our young is failing. But that isn’t the most disturbing news. Today, I read a confidential report that says the Council has begun to consider the effective elimination of all our emotions.

My hand shakes as I write this. Can’t they see what they’re asking? What they’re destroying?

Mom