Tangle of Need

Chapter 57

VASIC WAS IN a remote, night-shrouded part of Nunavut, Canada, talking with Aden about their progress in tracking Henry, when a shudder rocked him. Initially, he thought the Cape Dorset region had experienced an earth tremor.

Then Aden shook his head. “Something’s happened in the Net.”

A split second later, having opened his psychic eye, Vasic dove into the slipstream of the PsyNet as Aden did the same. The Net was the biggest data archive in the world, millions, trillions of pieces of data uploaded into it each and every day. But rather than the relatively smooth rivers of information Vasic was used to seeing, this section of the Net was twisted, crumpling in on itself.

Shield! he telepathed to Aden.

Around them, the star-studded black of the Net was literally collapsing, taking the hundreds of minds anchored in this section with it. He expanded his shields to protect as many minds as he could, but while he was a powerful Tk-V, Aden was the stronger telepath, able to shield a far greater number.

Straining in his physical body, he focused on holding the shields on those he’d managed to grab from the edges of the disaster zone, not thinking about the ones who’d been caught in the collapse. Severed from the Net, they would’ve died a quick and violently painful death.

Aden, he telepathed when he saw the edge begin to expand in a rippling wave. His telepathic abilities weren’t enough to hold back the continuing cascade of destruction and protect at the same time.

I’ve called the others.

But someone else arrived before the rest of the squad, and his power was so vast it blinded. He single-handedly built a buttress around the collapse, sealing up the breach, until Vasic could release the minds he’d protected.

Krychek’s not only a cardinal Tk.

A dual cardinal, Aden replied. Impossible.

Except that much telepathic power was nothing less than cardinal level.

“It’s holding,” Krychek said on the psychic plane, the conversation protected from leaking into the PsyNet by shields of impenetrable black. “Can you get into the collapsed section to check the extent of the damage? I need to maintain this suture until the Net seals itself.”

Aden checked with Vasic, got a risk assessment identical to the one he’d made. “Yes.”

“I’ll leave this small window open for you.” Kaleb indicated the coordinates. “Go.”

Diving into the twisted wreckage, Vasic at his back, Aden maintained heavy shielding as he navigated broken pathways that threatened to cut and shove into his mind, the blackness of the Net somehow jagged and devoid of life. “Stop.” He made Vasic check his biofeedback link, as he did the same.

Only when he was satisfied that their link to the Net was holding, regardless of the fact they were now in a “dead” section, did they continue. It didn’t take them long to find the locus and the cause of the unprecedented network failure. The Net had imploded into a sharp point at that location, as if the psychic fabric had been sucked into a vortex.

“The anchor for this region,” he said to Vasic, “is dead.”

“His death alone wouldn’t have caused this. There are multiple fail-safes.” Vasic went closer to the frozen vortex, the mangled fabric of the Net having created a natural plug … too late to save the men, women, and children caught within. We need to find the body.

Returning through the window Krychek had left, they informed him of the lack of survivors, watched him start to finalize the seal. “The anchor is dead,” Aden said. “We’ll work to locate the body.”

Dropping from the psychic plane, he waited for Vasic to open his eyes. The Tk-V brought up something on the computronic gauntlet on his arm as soon as he did so. “I’m accessing the anchor files for this region.”

Aden waited, aware Vasic was searching for an image he could focus on for a teleport.

“There.” An instant later, the Tk-V teleported them directly in front of a two-story cottage on the edge of Cape Dorset. The lack of neighbors was unusual for a Psy—but not for an anchor. Many members of Designation A craved isolation.

It was because, an anchor had once explained to Aden, they were constantly surrounded by others on the Net. Unlike with ordinary Psy, an anchor could not shut off that awareness—it was an inbuilt component of their ability to hold the Net in place. Their relative seclusion on the physical plane was a psychological coping mechanism.

Light spilled from the cottage, and when Aden made his way to one of the windows, using the shadows outside to his advantage, he saw no hint of danger. I’ll ring the doorbell.

Wait until I’m inside.

Vasic heard the clear tones of the bell echo through the house a second after he teleported into the room visible from the window. When there was no other sound or movement, he let Aden in. Working in practiced silence, they checked the first floor and found nothing, before heading up to the second.

There. Aden nodded at a drop of what looked like blood on the carpet that covered the steps.

Halting, Vasic looked more carefully and saw two other drops. Whoever did it, passed this way.

The body was in the corner room the anchor had used as his office. From the dents and the blood splatter, he’d been flung violently to the wall at least twice. “This is the work of a Tk,” Vasic said out loud, after scanning the room for listening devices, the scanner—able to be adapted to many tasks—built into his gauntlet.

Aden didn’t say anything until he’d walked over and checked the anchor’s throat for a pulse. “Death confirmed. His skin, however, is warm. Fits with the timeline.”

Vasic ran his eyes over the dents the anchor’s head had made in the wall. There was blood, yes, but the killer had had enough on him to drip, which meant he’d been up close and personal with his victim. “Catastrophic fracture in Silence?”

“You’re certain it was a Tk?”

“Pattern of the victim’s injuries added to the high-impact damage to the wall makes it highly probable.” He looked at the blood-splattered mess on the desk where it appeared the anchor had been working prior to the attack. “Either the uncontrolled violence is stage dressing, or someone is using an unstable Tk for his or her own purposes.”

A flicker at the corner of his eye. Swiveling, he found Kaleb Krychek in the room with them. Though the fact wasn’t well known, the former Councilor was one of the rare Tks who could go to people as well as places, and he’d obviously zeroed in on either Vasic or Aden.

Dressed in a pristine suit, his face bore no marks of strain as a result of the power he’d expended on the Net. “The information I was able to gather from the NetMind,” he said, taking in the carnage, “indicates the fail-safes were all murdered seconds before the anchor’s death, by killers who broke into their homes armed with laser weapons. It happened so fast, the NetMind couldn’t stabilize the fracture.”

Aden rose from his crouching position beside the body. “That would require a coordinated effort. The names of the fail-safes aren’t broadcast, and while their security is nowhere near that of an anchor”—the reason why non-teleport-capable assassins had been able to breach their homes—“each is passively monitored.”

Which is why, Vasic thought, the entire network had been eliminated around the same time. Any warning and contingency plans would have come into play. The Psy had backups upon backups when it came to anchors—Designation A was the foundation of the entire psychic framework that kept their race alive, the Net far too big to be stable without them. Kill the anchors and the Net would suffer a total collapse, taking everyone with it.

ADEN watched Vasic begin to move around the office. Quiet, calm, icily focused. “Could this be the work of one of the other former Councilors?” he asked Kaleb.

“It would make no logical sense—fracturing the Net fractures their power base.”

“An individual who knew the parameters of the failure ahead of time could ensure the safety of his allies and the deaths of his enemies.”

Kaleb’s eyes, living pieces of the PsyNet, locked on Aden’s face. “Yes. However, such indiscriminate carnage better fits the tenets of Pure Psy—my fellow ex-Councilors tend to be much more targeted in their assassinations.”

Aden thought of the lack of support the group had received in the Net after their recent humiliating defeat at the hands of the coalition of changelings, humans, and Psy—most of the population believed Pure Psy shouldn’t have stepped out of the Net, that the aggression contravened their stated aim of Purity. Given Pure Psy’s increasingly extreme ideology, that lack of support might well have been taken as sedition.

“Even with depleted numbers,” he said to Kaleb, “the group has the capability to organize such an attack.”

“And their general has the discipline.” Kaleb turned from Aden to Vasic. “Have you found it?”

“No.” The other Arrow looked up from the transparent computer screen he’d brought up. “There’s no message here, and nothing on the Net from anyone claiming responsibility or threatening more violence.”

That, Aden knew, didn’t mean further murders weren’t planned. Kaleb’s next words made it clear the cardinal telekinetic had come to the same conclusion. “Protecting every anchor across the world is a statistical impossibility.”

“Agreed.” There were too many of them, strong and weak, critical and peripheral. “However, we can send out an alert to each region, advise the authorities in charge of the anchors to beef up security.”

“Warn them of the possibility of a strong Tk being involved,” Vasic added, his eyes on the bloody dents in the wall. “At least 8 on the Gradient.”

“That’s going to be problematic. There are very few people stronger than a Gradient 8 Tk.”

Kaleb was right—which meant more anchors were going to die unless they ran the architect of this attack to ground. “If this is the start of a Pure Psy campaign,” Aden said, considering how to narrow down the possible targets, “certain regions are more likely to be hit.” Nikita Duncan and Anthony Kyriakus hadn’t only been part of the coalition that had defeated Henry’s fanatics, they’d also been vocal in their anti-Pure Psy views. More crucially, their region was becoming a magnet for those whose Silence was fractured or otherwise suspect—anathema to Pure Psy’s aim of absolute purity.

“This location would seem to argue against Pure Psy involvement,” Vasic pointed out. “It has no strategic or political importance.”

“I’d theorize this was a training run in a quiet region of the Net.” Aden acknowledged his theory had a flaw, in that it required the aggressors sacrifice the element of surprise, but that didn’t disqualify it—not when irrational behavior was becoming a hallmark of Pure Psy operations. “We shouldn’t discount it being the work of an unknown group, but it’s reasonable to give Nikita and Anthony specific warning.”

Kaleb nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

Vasic broke his silence. “Preliminary reports are coming in—four hundred and seventy confirmed dead so far.”

And the region that had collapsed, Aden thought, was tiny, with a sparse population. A single sector collapse in San Francisco would take tens of thousands of lives with it.

“At least eighty-five of the dead are children.”

Aden met Vasic’s eyes in a silent warning, but Kaleb wasn’t paying attention to the Arrow who was both Silent and broken. “I have to go,” the former Councilor said after a ten-second pause. “Release the general security notice, Aden.” He blinked out in the next breath, his power so vast the teleport took him little to no effort. The only other person in the Net as fast was Vasic, and he’d been born with the ability. Kaleb had learned it as a Tk.

“He could have done it himself,” Aden said, staring at where the cardinal had stood. “We’d never know with the speed he teleports.”

“Yes.”

KALEB teleported into Nikita’s office to find Anthony Kyriakus already there. Since Anthony was a telepath with no teleport-capable ability, that meant he’d either used one of his Tks to arrange an immediate ’port … or he’d been with Nikita at the time of the attack. Very late for a political meeting.

Unbuttoning his suit jacket, he took a seat beside Anthony, on the other side of Nikita’s desk. “A de facto Council?”

“I have no reason to want the Net to suffer a catastrophic failure,” Nikita said instead of answering, her ruler-straight black hair brushing her shoulders. “Neither does Anthony. Neither do you.”

“So certain?”

“You want to control the Net, Kaleb. Broken, it’s useless to you.”

He said nothing to that, betrayed nothing. Nikita thought she understood how his mind worked. She didn’t, but it was to his advantage to let her misapprehension continue. “There’s still no sign of Henry, and Shoshanna has bunkered down somewhere in England behind heavy shields.” None of which would protect her when the time came. “Tatiana and Ming are the wild cards.” Kaleb had his suspicions about Ming’s involvement in the Pure Psy assault in California, but the military mastermind had been very careful to bury his tracks.

“There are others who have reason to want to damage the Net,” Anthony said, and the three of them went through much the same conversation he’d had with Aden and Vasic.

Aden, he thought with a corner of his mind, was the center around whom the Arrows rotated. While the telepath wasn’t the most powerful member of the squad in terms of raw psychic ability, he was the one the rest of the Arrows looked to for leadership. He also had the support of Vasic, the only teleporter in the Net faster than Kaleb himself. To own the squad, Kaleb would have to have Aden’s loyalty. And he would. Because Kaleb had plans Nikita couldn’t even guess at, and having a squad of lethal assassins behind him would make things both deadlier and smoother when he played his endgame.

“Now that the violence has a shape, will your foreseers be able to predict the next strike?” Nikita asked Anthony.

“I’ve given the order, and I’ll forward any pertinent information, but chaos on this scale skews and warps the timeline.” Anthony glanced at Kaleb. “We’ll ensure our anchors are well protected.”

“I can offer you a certain number of my troops.” He knew the two ex-Councilors had limited military resources of their own, would find it near impossible to cover the anchor network in the area.

“Thank you,” Nikita said, “but I’ll decline.”

Anthony’s response was much the same. Kaleb hadn’t expected anything else—if he were on the other side, he wouldn’t trust himself either. “The offer remains on the table, should you change your mind.”

Rising, he buttoned up his suit jacket at the same time that he soothed the panic of the NetMind. The neosentience was scared, and while Kaleb didn’t feel, he had learned to differentiate the moods of the DarkMind and NetMind both. Now he gentled the NetMind and reined in the DarkMind, the darker sentience stronger in the wake of the murderous violence. “If you’ll excuse me. I need to return to my own region.”

A second later, he teleported into another room on another continent. “Ming,” he said. “Tatiana, I see you’ve heard about the attack.”