Shield of Winter

Chapter 30

How much more can we take? Pure Psy murdered hundreds of thousands, and now we’re cannibalizing ourselves in madness. Our race appears headed for extinction.

Letter to the Editor signed “Lost and Without Hope,” PsyNet Beacon

KALEB MET WITH Vasic and Ivy Jane near eleven p.m. their time, having caught five hours of sleep in the interim. The empath was adamant about relocating to an infected zone, and Kaleb agreed with her logic. Leaving her and Vasic to canvas the other Es to see if they wanted to follow the same route, he teleported to Nikita Duncan’s office in central San Francisco.

“I received your message,” he said to both her and the male who stood looking out of the plate glass windows to the left of Nikita’s desk.

Anthony Kyriakus turned, his dark hair silvered at the temples and his bearing that of a man at the head of one of the most influential families in the Net. “Anchorage?”

“Handled for now. I’ll have Silver send you a report.” While Kaleb didn’t consider either of the ex-Councilors an ally in the sense that he trusted them, the three of them currently had the same end goals in mind. “Is there a problem?”

Nikita brought up a financial overview on a wall screen without rising from her desk, the glossy black of her liquid-straight hair brushing her shoulders. “Share prices for stock in Psy companies have dropped precipitously after the events in Alaska.” Slanted eyes of deep brown focused on the screen as she used a remote to highlight several significant drops. “This could undermine the entire government structure.”

Ruling Coalition aside, that government was truly more of a dictatorship at present, but Kaleb saw her point. He could only lead the PsyNet to where he wanted it to go if he had the support of the major corporations. “Options?” Nikita was a ruthless businesswoman—it’d be foolish not to take advantage of her skill set.

Leaning back in her chair, she steepled her hands in front of her. “If NightStar is willing,” she said with a glance at Anthony, “I suggest we leak visions of a future when all is calm.”

In other words, lie. Not a bad short-term solution.

“Anthony?” Kaleb turned to the man whose family line had produced more foreseers than any other; the most accurate and gifted F-Psy in the world was a Kyriakus. That same family line had produced the woman he’d left curled up warm and sleepy and sated in their bed, which technically made Anthony and Kaleb family.

The two of them had a silent understanding to ignore that awkward fact.

Now, Anthony said a curt, “No.” When the older male’s eyes met Nikita’s, Kaleb had the feeling he’d walked into the middle of an argument.

Interesting.

“NightStar can’t risk staining its reputation.”

“In that case”—Nikita broke the intensity of the eye contact to face Kaleb—“I suggest we begin to buy up devalued stock and allow that to leak. It’ll be assumed we know something the populace doesn’t, that we might even be purposefully orchestrating the deaths for our own gain.”

Which, Kaleb thought, would drive those prices right back up. “It’ll work as a stopgap solution.”

“We need to come up with a strong long-term financial strategy.” The lights of San Francisco glittered behind Anthony as he continued to speak. “I assume you were responsible for the turnaround earlier today by a conglomerate that sought to gouge profits?”

“An Arrow,” Kaleb told them and it was a deliberate reminder of the fourth part of this Ruling Coalition. “As for a long-term economic solution, I think Nikita’s the most capable of drafting something workable. Nikita?”

A cool nod. “It’ll involve one-to-one discussions with the mostinfluential businessmen and women in the Net. Where they go, others will follow.”

Sheep, Kaleb thought again, but admitted silently that that dangerous lack of independence was changing. Irritants or not, Silent Voices was also a sign of a society that was reclaiming itself. “I’ll put the share buys in operation now.”

It was as well that all three of them acted at once on their stopgap plan. When a lower Manhattan street erupted into an insane bloodbath five hours later, the share market wobbled, but didn’t dive.

The casualties were minor in the scheme of things—forty-five dead with twenty in comas. It appeared another insidiously fine tendril of infection had just brushed one small section of the street, taking everyone in its path with it. The good news was that Kaleb and Aden’s hypothesis about the infection being slower to eat away at the fabric of the Net—in comparison to the speed with which it moved in the brain—was proven correct. As with Anchorage, there’d been no Net rupture.

“We have to start thinking of containment,” Kaleb said to Sahara an hour later, as the two of them went over every detail of both outbreaks in his study. “It’s time to prepare for the worst-case scenario.” The empaths had been awakened too late, were too raw and untrained, and Kaleb couldn’t wait for them to find their feet.

Sahara sucked in a breath where she sat on the other side of his desk, dark blue eyes shadowed. “Cutting away the infected tissue to stop the gangrene from killing the entire Net.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “The gossamer filaments of infection—we can’t know how deep they’ve burrowed. Outwardly healthy sections could be petri jars of infection.”

“That’s the biggest problem.” Before he started to make the surgical cuts that would rend the Net into an unknown number of segments, he needed to know how to identify the enemy.

“The DarkMind,” Sahara began.

Kaleb shook his head. “It’s having trouble distinguishing those fine tendrils from its own self-image.” Born from the same self-hate that had driven an entire race to abandon its emotions, the infection and the DarkMind were kin. “But I’ll keep trying to get it to focus.”

Kaleb met the gaze of the woman Judd called Kaleb’s mate. The humans called her his lover. Kaleb simply called her his. And he needed to know that she understood, that she was with him. “If the empaths find a solution before I figure out how to pinpoint the tendrils of infection, I’ll back them every inch of the way.” Because this wasn’t about power or politics but the people Sahara had asked him to save.

Rising from her chair, she came to wrap her arms around his neck from behind, her cheek pressed to his. “How long can we give the empaths?”

“At this rate, maybe a month.” After which, the PsyNet would cease to exist except as fragments scattered across the world. A few would survive, and possibly merge back into a larger unit at some stage, but the infected sections would eventually all erode and collapse, snuffing out the lives of millions.

The problem was, Kaleb was beginning to see signs that the majority of the Net was infected.