Part 10 (1/2)
The tapping paused, the tendons in Tatiana's hand standing out against her skin. ”No.”
”No?”
Eyes connecting with his, chips of agate, she nodded at the chair. ”Perhaps we can do business after all.”
”I'm glad to hear it.” He sat down, waited.
Tatiana took her time in replying. ”I acquired the item intending to use it as a hostage should NightStar ever attempt to blacklist me, but it was never needed.”
A lie, but that didn't matter. What mattered was the confirmation.
Tatiana gasped as she was shoved backward, her chair cras.h.i.+ng to the floor as invisible manacles pinned her to the wall, her feet at least a half meter off the ground. One sleek black pump landed on the carpet with a dull thud, while the other drummed against the wall as she struggled to break free.
He hadn't expected such useless panic from Tatiana.
Put immediately on alert by her uncharacteristic lack of control, he looked into his mind-and saw the insidious tendril that had already penetrated the first three layers of his s.h.i.+elds. Slamming outward with violent force, he sealed up the surgical holes she'd created as a drop of blood, dark and viscous, dripped out of her nose.
”Very smart.” He'd made a near-fatal error in the grip of the black rage that lived below the sh.e.l.l of his Silence. Another half a minute and she'd have been inside his mind.
”What do you want?” she said when her ruse failed to distract him, her body now motionless and her voice frigid.
”I want to know why you took her,” he repeated, relaxing into the chair without ever taking one eye off his s.h.i.+elds.
”She's malfunctioning, of no use to you.”
Kaleb sighed. ”That's not the question I asked.”
”You can't kill me,” Tatiana said in that same icily composed tone. ”Regardless of the rumors of the Council's demise, the psychic shock wave caused by the death of another Councilor will cause the Net to destabilize to a dangerous extent, especially given the current violence.”
”Yes, that's true.” And Kaleb hadn't yet decided if he wanted the Net to fracture on that level. ”But there are worse things than death.” With that, he used his telekinesis to dislocate her left knee the same way Sahara's had once been dislocated, according to the information caught by the scanner when he'd inspected her for tracking devices.
”I apologize,” he said after Tatiana stopped screaming. ”Where were we? I believe you were about to answer my question.”
”She was given to me,” Tatiana gasped, her left knee beginning to swell up.
”And who was your generous benefactor?”
”You know.”
He didn't bother to warn her this time, simply dislocated her left shoulder exactly as Sahara's had been three years ago. That piece of information he'd gained when he pulverized the mind of the pathetic excuse for a male he'd executed in the kitchen. His lack of restraint had cost him a large amount of useful data; the guard's mind had broken split seconds after Kaleb smashed through his s.h.i.+elds, leaving Kaleb a very short window in which to sweep up information, but he found he felt no remorse.
As he didn't now, watching Tatiana's head loll forward. She'd blacked out. ”Weak,” he said, having stayed conscious through far worse as a seven-year-old. He gave her a minute, and when she didn't awaken, picked up the gla.s.s of water on her desk without moving from his position in the chair and threw the contents into her face.
She came to with a whimpering jerk, wet strands of hair sticking to her skin and a glint of fear in her eye. Her Silence might have been pristine until this moment, her will ruthless, but for all her deadly cunning and strength, Tatiana Rika-Smythe hadn't been trained as Kaleb had been. She didn't know how to hold on to the conditioning-or a convincing reproduction of it-in the face of excruciating pain, with no end in sight.
s.h.i.+vering from the onset of shock, she rasped out, ”Santano Enrique gave her to me.”
Her answer was no surprise, but Kaleb had needed to hear it from her mouth. ”Why?”
”We were . . . partners of a kind. He respected my ambition, and I respected the fact he'd cut my throat if I ever turned that ambition in his direction. We trusted each other.”
It was the ugliest definition of trust he'd ever heard. ”Did you know she was mine when you took her?”
Tatiana shook her head. ”No. I didn't think he allowed you to pick victims.”
No, it wasn't then that Santano had needed him. ”What are you doing, Tatiana?” He s.h.i.+fted the majority of his attention to his own mind as several alarms activated at once and found a secondary, near-invisible telepathic worm seconds away from penetrating his final s.h.i.+eld.
His rebuff this time made blood vessels burst in her eyes, but she hissed out a breath, holding his gaze with the crimson of her own. ”You aren't unbeatable. I almost had you.”
”Almost is never good enough with someone like me, you know that.” Shutting her up by constricting her diaphragm to the point that she had to shunt all her concentration toward the task of drawing in enough air to survive, he leaned back in the chair and said, ”You never should have taken what was mine.”
Despite her diminished oxygen supply, Tatiana began to struggle in earnest, striking at him with aggressive telepathic blows as vehicles running dark screamed to a halt outside. ”Calling in reinforcements? Tut-tut.” With that, he walked unhurriedly around the desk and teleported them both out.
The blackness inside the old cement bunker was broken up only by a single long-life bulb hanging from a rusty chain in the ceiling. The dull light didn't penetrate the shadows that gathered in deep pockets around the circular room, but it was enough to illuminate the yellowed and stained concrete beneath the steel table on which he dumped Tatiana's body, the shoe still on her foot clanking against the metal.
Stepping back, he watched her struggle up into a sitting position and look carefully around. No feigned emotion, nothing but the frosty will of a woman who had always been able to negotiate or manipulate her way out of trouble. It was an admirable trait, one Kaleb appreciated for the way it would extend and intensify her torture.
Tatiana would spend countless hours plotting escape, only to realize her h.e.l.l was permanent.
”What is this place?” she asked.
”You don't know?” He waited for her to discover what he'd done.
It only took her a second. ”Why can't I access the PsyNet?” she asked in a tone an octave higher than her normal voice, the first true hint of panic she'd betrayed. ”You have a s.h.i.+eld over me.”
”I have other uses for my abilities. The DarkMind, however, finds it fun to play with a mind whose Silence promises to crack slowly and with great pain.” It had sucked Tatiana into itself, blocking out everything, including her telepathic channels, in endless nothingness. If it then began to feed off her ensuing terror, first she'd go slowly, insidiously insane, then she'd fall into a coma where terror would continue to be her sole companion, and from there, death wouldn't be far behind.
That little habit of ”eating” people was one tendency of the DarkMind Kaleb had never been able to stem-so he'd directed it at those who deserved a slow, maddening death. Kaleb did his own killing when it came to power and politics, but he had no compunction in setting the DarkMind loose on the other vermin. The last one had been a would-be pedophile with a collection of photographs that should have never existed, a man who had just gained a job as a nursery-school teacher.
However, the DarkMind knew not to feed off Tatiana. She was Kaleb's, and the dark neosentience was delighted to help him hold her. Kaleb, after all, understood the cruelty and rage and malevolence that had created it . . . because he'd been created of the same ugly components. ”The DarkMind,” he told Tatiana, ”will keep you isolated in that black coc.o.o.n as long as I please.”
”If I disappear from the Net,” Tatiana said, not understanding that there was nothing she could say that would alter her fate, ”it'll have the same effect as my death. The resulting shock wave-”
”Tatiana, Tatiana.” He shook his head. ”You disappeared from the Net when you created such beautiful s.h.i.+elds to conceal your location.” She had made it so easy for him. ”Soon after I leave, your security team will receive a sharply worded note ordering them to do a full security audit, since they failed their recent 'test.'”
Again, she had paved the way for her own imprisonment-she was so paranoid about her enemies that she rarely used telepathy these days, preferring to communicate via secure e-mail. ”As for your companies, as long as they continue to receive instructions from 'you,' no one will be any the wiser.”
Tatiana's hand gripped the edge of the metal table hard enough to make her bones push against her skin. ”Kaleb, I didn't know she was yours.”
”That's irrelevant.” Rage rolled through his bloodstream in a pitiless wave, cold and unforgiving. ”You still damaged her to the point where she may never fully come back.” Sahara had screamed in that b.l.o.o.d.y bed during their last meeting, but she had never begged, somehow managed to stay whole. Then had come Tatiana, and a captivity that had forced Sahara to entomb herself to survive.
”What does it matter to you, if you intend to kill her anyway?” Tatiana asked, a desperation in her tone that was too ragged to be feigned.
Psychic isolation had a way of doing that to Psy. Sahara had lived the same nightmare for seven years. ”My intent makes no difference to your culpability.”
Strolling around the circular room, he glanced at the food stores to make sure she had enough to survive on. The medical supplies were basic, but she'd be able to do some first aid. He'd been very careful about the injuries he'd done her-none of it was life threatening, and she could fix the dislocations herself.