Part 35 (2/2)
She hesitated with the bar halfway to her mouth. ”Is that a real thing or are you teasing me?”
”It's a real thing, though it's not called that officially,” he said to her surprise. ”We knew we'd need money if we ever defected or went independent. Not all of us want to continue in this line of work.”
But they would, Ivy thought, heart twisting. As long as the Net needed them, the Arrows would surrender their lives to it. For that sacrifice, the men and women of the squad would be pushed to the margins of society and looked upon with fear. Hand tightening on the bar, she took another bite and made a vow that any member of the squad would always be welcome in her home, would be family.
However, all that had to wait. The first thing she had to do was share her empathic breakthrough with the others. It was as well that she'd discovered the key to soothing the infected when she did-the outbreaks continued unabated across the world in the next week.
Empaths-all Gradients, with a focus on those on the brink of natural emergence-were awakened on a wholesale level during the same period. Not all could accept the truth of their nature so quickly, but those able to open their minds to their new abilities after any existing blocks were removed, were given basic training, and sent out to join the fight. Yet despite the appearance of countless minds sparking with color, color that had slowly begun to infiltrate the formerly cold black fabric of the Net, the infection couldn't be slowed, much less eradicated.
The infection might have hesitated to approach the concentration of Es at the compound back at the start, but it had grown more aggressive. While empaths remained immune, having even multiple Es in a limited area was no guarantee of safety for those around them. And the simple fact was, no matter if every E in the world was brought to active status, it would never equal the one-to-one ratio from the compound.
An entire section of the Net in Paris had to be evacuated when the infection surrounded it in a liquid black cage. Twenty-four hours later, that section collapsed, rotted through; the resulting shock wave left a thousand dead, many more injured. New York, too, hadn't escaped injury-Ivy and Vasic had been responding to at least two outbreaks a day, even with the humans and changelings throwing their weight behind the containment effort and with all the active Es in the city working on a rotation.
The infection was winning, millions staring down the barrel of death.
Chapter 52.
Interpersonal violence between Psy has dropped to rates so low, it eclipses that during Silence. And as we all now know, given the recent investigative reports, the Silence stats were manipulated by Council after Council and cannot be trusted.
The fact that it has taken the threat of near-certain annihilation to bring us to peace is a bittersweet irony.
Editorial, PsyNet Beacon SAHARA HAD A genius level IQ. That's what she'd been told as a child forced to struggle with math when she'd rather have been out dancing. Math and Sahara had never made their peace, but in other ways, her brain was a finely honed machine.
It had been worrying on a problem for a considerable period of time.
”Eben Kilabuk,” she said, and placed an image of the empath on Kaleb's desk, having commandeered the s.p.a.ce since he was at a meeting. ”Phillip Kilabuk.” She laid the photo of Eben's dead, infected father below the boy's.
”Christiane Hall. March.e.l.line Hall.” Empathic mother and infant. ”Miki Ling.” The caretaker cousin. A low-level M-Psy murdered by one of the infected. Her autopsy had shown no signs of the disease in her own brain.
”Miguel Ferrera.” Twenty-five-year-old male, Gradient 4.1, commercial telepath.
She took several more photos, laid them out. All of survivors. Then she removed the Es and rearranged the remaining survivors into two groups. On one side, she placed those like Miki Ling, people connected to an empath and thus a.s.sumed to be, or have been, protected by the empath's immunity in some way.
On the other side, she placed the random outliers, such as Miguel Ferrera, who had no empaths in his family tree and had, in fact, had no contact with his biological family for over two years.
Then there was Phillip Kilabuk. His brain had been riddled with infection though he was the father and custodial guardian of an E. Proximity to an E, familial and genetic connections to an E, Phillip Kilabuk had had them all and it hadn't saved him.
There was no pattern. And yet . . .
Eyes narrowed, she logged into Kaleb's system using the pa.s.sword he'd given her-her beautiful, dangerous man had access to every database under the sun-and began to run down every sc.r.a.p of data she could find on each one of the people represented by the photographs. Banking information, medical histories, university transcripts . . . that was just the start.
The work was tedious, might take days or even weeks, but she could sense something in the information she already had, akin to a tiny stone in the bottom of a shoe, an irritation that simply would not go away. She had to find that stone, because in the irritation might lie a critical answer.
Chapter 53.
Heroes are often the quietest people in a room, the ones least willing to lay claim to the t.i.tle. These men and women simply go about doing what needs to be done without any expectation of grat.i.tude or fame. It is in their nature to protect and to s.h.i.+eld and to fight against darkness, whatever form it may take.
New York Signal EXHAUSTED DOWN TO the bone, Ivy nonetheless put Rabbit on a leash during a mercifully peaceful afternoon, and she and Vasic took him out, their intended destination a Central Park clothed in sparkling white snow. It wasn't fair to their pet to be cooped up now that he was back to his usual energetic self.
”It's so quiet.” Ivy had quickly become used to the frantic energy and wild vitality of New York, but that vitality was nowhere in evidence today; people's faces were strained and their eyes downcast. ”How many have left the city, do you know?” she asked Vasic.
”A tiny percentage in comparison to the city's population.”
”People have jobs, lives they can't just leave,” she murmured, thinking aloud. ”And word's out that pretty much nowhere is safe.” Her parents' region of the Net was holding strong at the moment, but Ivy continued to worry. ”I wish I could cover my parents in my empathic s.h.i.+eld and your great-grandfather, too.” She hadn't yet met Zie Zen, but Vasic had told her a lot about the extraordinary man.
Vasic, dressed in his ”civilian” clothes of jeans and leather-synth jacket-though the T-s.h.i.+rt wasn't black today, but dark blue-put his arm around her waist, his fingers at her hip. ”Neither of the three would thank us for abandoning hundreds of thousands to s.h.i.+eld them, regardless of how much we might want to ensure their safety.”
Ivy sighed, having had that exact conversation with her parents. ”Yes.” It took her a few seconds to realize her Arrow was stabilizing her using Tk as she walked on the icy sidewalk. Those sidewalks should've been cleared of snow early that morning, but systems were breaking down all over the world.
As were the systems in Vasic's gauntlet. While he hadn't been using its weapons capability since the command failure during the attack by Ming's men, the program had come on spontaneously during an outbreak. He'd suffered a small overload in the fight to shut it down.
The burns had been minor and treated on-site. It didn't matter-Ivy had felt her heart crack in two when she saw the wounds, though she'd fought not to let her panic and fear show. He'd known. He always knew. Holding her tucked against him, he'd told her that Aden had found a surgeon willing to attempt the risky operation to remove the critical malfunctioning components.
Only if we don't hear back from Samuel Rain before time runs out, he'd told her. The surgeon is exceptional. She's known to be a maverick with a reputation for accepting risky cases and coming through with flying colors, but she's not Rain.
Ivy's nerves were stretched to the breaking point at the sustained silence from Rain, but she agreed with Vasic's choice. Her stomach a lump of ice, she knew there was a high risk the surgeon might kill him. Samuel Rain might as well . . . but if the engineer wasn't brain damaged, the risk was lower.
That didn't mean it wasn't still unacceptably high.
Shoving that brutal truth to the back of her mind on this sunny afternoon when she was out for a walk with her man, she tugged his hand off her hip to lace their fingers together. ”You should wear color,” she said when Rabbit, nimble and curious, paused to scrutinize the window display of a menswear shop. ”With those gorgeous eyes, any vibrant shade would look good on you.”
He examined the display. ”Would it please you if I wore color?”
Ivy's heart flipped. ”You please me by being you. I was just . . . flirting.” It was silly and awkward, and she wanted to try it with him. She wanted to try everything with him, couldn't bear the thought of living in a world where Vasic wasn't there to be her partner in exploration.
He didn't speak again until they were deep in Central Park. ”Why would you flirt with me?” he said as they walked along an otherwise deserted pathway enclosed on all sides by snow-dusted trees, the white carpet of it unbroken but for Rabbit's paw prints in front of them. ”I'm already yours.”
She stopped, unable to look at him because there was so much inside her for him that it terrified.
Breaking their handclasp, he closed his fingers over her nape, his thumb brus.h.i.+ng her skin in a quiet caress. ”I don't know how to play games of courts.h.i.+p. I can learn if that's what you need.”
Rabbit's leash dropping from her hand, she swiveled to face him. ”No, I want you to be you.” An Arrow who said what he meant and who didn't speak except when he had something to say. ”I want you to be you,” she repeated in a whisper, her hands clenched tight in his T-s.h.i.+rt. ”I want to make mistakes with you, learn how to be in a relations.h.i.+p with you.”
Vasic stroked his thumb over her skin again, his hair gleaming blue-black in the ray of suns.h.i.+ne that pierced the canopy, his skin golden. ”I'm used to working with plans, with blueprints,” he said, ”but observation of the other races tells me life doesn't come with a blueprint.” The Psy had attempted to change that, create rules, but all that had done was buy them a little time before the inevitable crash. ”We have to make the plan ourselves.”
Ivy, his empath who'd wrenched him out of the gray numbness in which he'd existed and into a world of vibrant color, reached up to play her fingers through his hair. ”Samuel Rain,” she said, determined fury in every word, ”is going to come through. I will believe nothing else.”
Vasic had never been afraid of death, but now he fought the idea of it with every breath in his body. ”I could kidnap him,” he said, his hands on her hips. ”Force him to work on the gauntlet under threat of being left in a jungle full of his favorite primates.”
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