Tangle of Need

Chapter 47

KALEB FOUND HIMSELF at a dead end in the Net, but instead of backing away and attempting to navigate around the section, he examined every aspect of the blockade. It was a black wall. No fractures, no data. Dead space, the Net truncated.

Such barricades formed naturally in areas with low population densities. The NetMind shunted the individuals in the zone into the nearest active channel in an exercise in efficiency most people never realized—because the NetMind augmented the Net link of the affected to ensure those men and women felt no strain at being psychically positioned outside their geographic area.

The problem with this truncated section was that it was almost but not quite far enough away from a relatively dense population matrix. Any gain in efficiency resulting from shifting the minds in this sector wouldn’t have been enough to justify the NetMind’s output.

Which meant the neosentient entity hadn’t created this roadblock.

It took him three hours to wedge open a small doorway in the wall of black without tripping the inbuilt alarms. Slipping through, he closed it behind himself, concealing the doorway for later access. The barricade proved to have been nothing but a firewall meant to discourage anyone from continuing to follow the trail—because it was hot again on this side.

Even as he swept through the slipstream in search of his target, part of his brain continued to sift and sort the millions of pieces of random data that floated past. Rumors, whispers, business information, snippets of fading conversation, it was all filtered out so it wouldn’t clog his mind. Until a single fragment made him pause.

…pushed the anchor down the steps, but his death…

Not halting his psychic pursuit, he touched the NetMind’s curious presence, asked it to follow the fragment. The vast neosentience returned to him in a split second with the report that the fragment was all that remained. The rest of the conversation had degraded, its energy absorbed back into the Net.

Regardless, only one anchor had died in that manner in the preceding weeks. And since the mode of his death had not been made public, the fragment appeared to infer the male had been murdered. What Kaleb couldn’t reason out was why. As he and Aden had discussed, the death of an anchor offered no one in the Net any advantage.

Following that logic, it was likely the murder was tied to something that had nothing to do with the victim’s position as an anchor. That other reason was often cold, rational money—the anchor’s heirs might simply have wanted to hasten the speed of their inheritance.

Kaleb sent Aden a telepathic message, taking care not to disturb the trail in front of him. It glowed a faint silver to his psychic senses, and he was almost certain this was it … when it disappeared with total abruptness.

I’ll follow up. Aden’s telepathic voice.

Kaleb responded automatically. Contact me as soon as you discover anything. He scanned his surroundings for any hint of the silver thread. But it was gone as if it had never existed.