Shield of winter a psy c.., p.35
Shield of Winter (A Psy/Changeling Novel), page 35
“Stefan.” The Gradient 9.7 Tk was on permanent duty in the deep sea station Alaris. “He’s been very careful.”
“He’s one of us.”
“Yes.” Stefan had been shifted out of Arrow training as a result of a psychological issue that made him no less valuable as a telekinetic and no less trustworthy. In the past five years, he’d assisted in the defection of a number of Arrows by helping to fake their deaths. “What’s Stefan’s solution to the problem?”
“You have to teach your brain to handle sexual stimuli,” Judd told him. “Under Silence, we were taught to maintain strict discipline even under severe duress, including torture. However, none of us were taught how to handle pleasure, especially the extreme pleasure of true intimate contact.”
“There was no need.” The dissonance would’ve crippled them before it ever got this far.
“Exactly. It means we have a blind spot—it also means we don’t have any bad habits or training to overcome.”
The latter, Vasic realized, was extremely important. “No need to split our attention in order to fight previous programming.”
A nod from Judd. “Right now, in the absence of any other instruction, your mind reverts to the most instinctive aspect of your ability. For most Tks, it’d be random destruction.” The other man shot him a quick, amused glance. “You’re unique, but the same principles apply.”
“I could train my brain to go only to certain locations.” Such as from one bed to another. “It’s not the best solution, but better than ending up on ice or on rocks.”
“There’s another option.” Judd pushed back strands of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “Your core ability is still Tk, so you should be able to teach yourself not to ’port at all in that situation. Neither Stefan nor I,” he continued, “are able to maintain control while sharing skin privileges with our mates. Perhaps if we’d been taught so since childhood—”
“I doubt that would alter the situation,” Vasic interrupted to say. “True intimacy demands we lower our barriers.”
“Yes.” The single word held a staggering depth of emotion. “So, because we can’t curb the surge of telekinetic power,” he said, “we’ve learned to redirect it in a specific way.”
“Into water?” Vasic guessed, seeing where Judd was going.
“Yes. Stefan’s surrounded by the sea and even his strength won’t do more than cause a ripple or two.” The other man paused to watch a pack of wolves lope across the clearing below. “I do the same by filling in the bath with water. It’s steam by the end.” A grin and a shrug. “Not to say I don’t still lose it now and then, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before. I figure the more practice I get”—laughter in his eyes now, at a training regime that was clearly no hardship—“the better I’ll become at handling the energy surge.”
Vasic considered the genius of the idea. “Stefan’s solution utilizes the same training protocols and pathways as Silence, but with positive reinforcement”—sexual pleasure—“instead of negative.” Using what had been forged in pain and torture for a far more beautiful end.
“It does take time, so you might be traveling for some time yet,” Judd added. “And your instinctive ’porting ability may make things more difficult, but I think you have the mental strength and the psychic discipline to be successful.”
Vasic thought it over. “To begin, I’ll set my brain on a loop of isolated locations.” Going bed to bed might be impossible this quickly, and even using one or two of his favorite remote locations would require meticulous care, but Stefan’s inspired plan had given him an idea as to how to do it—not to build something new, but to use what was already there.
“I’ll utilize one of the data memorization techniques we were taught,” he said, thinking it through, “hook it into the same system that allows my senses to continue to function even if I have to sleep in the field.” Both skills were basic building blocks of an Arrow’s training.
Judd nodded slowly. “Yes, that should work. Tell me if it does?”
“Of course.” It might be an option that could assist another Arrow down the line. “Is Stefan safe?” As the most isolated of them all, the other man had little access to help if he needed it quickly.
“Yes, but perhaps you should visit Alaris, speak to him. With the situation in the Net changing as fast as it is, he should know we have his back if something goes wrong.”
“I’ll go after this.” Due to an inexplicable quirk of teleportation, teleporters didn’t suffer any ill-effects from the huge changes in pressure involved in ’porting to the ocean floor and back up.
Shifting on his heel, Judd led them back into the trees. “You said you had more than one question.”
“How did you know what to do?” Vasic had gone on instinct to this point, and Ivy didn’t seem displeased, but he wanted to be certain he was doing everything he could to pleasure her . . . because touching her gave him pleasure so intense, he had no hope of ever describing it.
“I’ll send you my research file,” Judd said, “but you know what I’ve learned? If you listen to her, you’ll be fine.”
Vasic thought of the little noises Ivy made in bed, the way she dug her nails into his back when he touched her just right, and felt his body pulse. “I want this for the others, Judd.” Their brethren deserved the same happiness, the same steep learning curve anchored in pleasure rather than pain.
Judd’s eyes met his. “I never thought you’d make it to this point. I’m fucking glad you have. We’ll get the others here, too—we’re Arrows.”
“We never give up on a target,” Vasic completed, and for the first time since he’d been taught it, the assertion wasn’t one of darkness, but of hope.
• • •
IVY and Sascha spent a large chunk of the day visiting and interviewing the nonempathic survivors around the world, thanks to Vasic’s ’porting ability, while Jaya and Alice remained at the apartment and collated the data in a search for patterns.
“The survivors,” Jaya said over a take-out dinner late that night, “all have fractures in their Silence and they accept those fractures, even when the resulting emotions aren’t pretty.”
Ivy threw Abbot another nutrition bar where the blue-eyed Arrow sat with Vasic and Lucas. The three men had ceded the couches to the women, pulling up chairs for themselves. “The woman of darkness that we saw,” she said to Jaya afterward, “she was so sad and so angry.”
“The embodiment of rejection.” Sascha stared at her food without eating. “Silence teaches Psy to stifle all emotion, but at the heart of it, it’s always been about the aggressive, violent, angry emotions—and the PsyNet is impacted by the subconscious as well as the conscious.”
All the dark emotions, the ugliness, Ivy thought, had been shoved aside, buried, and in that festering soup had grown the infection. “That doesn’t give us a cure, though.” She pushed away her meal. “No one can simply embrace the whole gamut of emotion after a lifetime of being trained to do the opposite.”
Vasic’s eyes met hers for a piercing instant.
That wasn’t a complaint, Ivy said, blowing him a telepathic kiss.
I know. A caress in the ice of his voice. It’s an unavoidable fact.
Yes, it was. Her Arrow had opened his heart to her, but he continued to fight a pitched battle against his darker emotions. Anger, rage, loss, it was all trapped inside that great heart, and it made Ivy ache. But she couldn’t force those emotions out into the open. No one could. Only Vasic, when he was ready.
Jaya poked at her noodles. “A violent shift like that could also cause shock, a stroke, an aneurysm.”
“The other thing,” Alice said, leaning forward, “is that I can’t believe there are so few people in the Net who’ve embraced their emotions.”
At that instant, the charismatic intensity of the scientist’s gaze reminded Ivy of Samuel Rain—a spark of genius lived in them both, and both had been wounded in ways that sought to bury that genius.
“According to everything I’ve learned since waking,” Alice continued, “and what Jaya’s shared today, Silence has been fracturing for years.”
The three empaths looked at one another, nodded as a unit. The scientist was right—far more people should be immune to the infection if that was the only prerequisite.
Picking up a datapad, Jaya began to scroll through the information they had on the nonempathic uninfected. “We’re missing something, but I can’t—”
The other empath’s words cut off as a screaming roar of insanity and confusion smashed into the room.
It took Vasic less than seven seconds to teleport Ivy, Lucas, and Sascha to the site two blocks over, then return for Alice, the human scientist having insisted on being present. Abbot took Jaya directly to the end of the worst-affected street, where she’d join the medical units Vasic had called in. Leaving Alice tucked up inside a doorway not far from Jaya, Abbot there to protect the medics, the rest of them waded into the fray.
The street, lined with midrises zoned for mixed commercial/residential use, was also a busy entertainment area and thoroughfare utilized by countless people. Those people were all now fighting desperately for their lives against the infected—who seemed not even to notice their own injuries. Ivy saw a man whose left arm was hanging broken by his side run headlong at a big human male. The infected went down under a single punch but continued to try and get up.
Ivy recoiled as she was hit by a telepathic blow hard enough to make her skull ring. Shaking it off, she concentrated on calming one individual at a time. It worked as it had the last time, but a mere ten minutes in and she could already feel an agonizing pressure building behind her eyelids. It would—
A massive telepathic blow.
Hitting the ground hard enough to graze her cheek and hands as blood vessels burst in her eyes, she realized there had to be a Gradient 8 or higher telepath in the crowd. Hell. “I’m fine,” she managed to say to Sascha when the cardinal turned to check on her. “Telepathic strike.”
Sascha wiped a bloody nose on her sleeve, said, “I just felt one, too.” An instant later, she staggered. “That was a telekinetic hit.” Going to her knees in a controlled move, as if to make herself a smaller target, she stared into the carnage. “Lucas is all right,” she said at last. “His natural shields protect him.”
Ivy could see the blue scythe that was the laser built into Vasic’s gauntlet, so she knew he was holding up under the dual physical and psychic attacks. However, there were a significant number of humans and Psy—infected, noninfected, it was hard to tell—spasming on the ground, hands over their ears and screams tearing the air as the minds around them went haywire.
Nonpredatory changelings caught in the chaos tried to fight, but they weren’t aggressive by nature, couldn’t stand against the manic fury incited by the infection. And with the number of residents who lived in the midrises, there were simply too many infected against too few defenders. Even the arrival of the eagles didn’t turn the tide.
Ivy saw victim after victim go down under pummeling fists and clawing hands while still others bled and collapsed from increasingly violent mental strikes.
“Terminal field!” It was a rasping scream.
Turning, Ivy and Sascha stared at Alice as she ran toward them. The scientist staggered halfway, as if hit by a telepathic blow, but didn’t stop. “Terminal field,” she gasped to Sascha after falling to her hands and knees beside them, her body heaving. “You have to initiate a terminal field.”
Sascha, eyes pure black with the agony of the dying who littered the street, cupped Alice’s face in her hands. “Tell me what that is.”
Alice drew in a jagged breath while Ivy continued to do what she could, even as the pressure in her brain built and built to a nauseating pounding behind her eyes.
“Alice.” Sascha fought the urge to shake the other woman, knowing that wouldn’t hurry the retrieval of Alice’s buried memories. “What is a terminal field?”
Gaze blank, Alice stared at her, but just when Sascha was about to give up and turn back to the chaos, the other woman said, “You can block psychic abilities on a mass scale.”
Sascha’s heart slammed against her ribs. Forcing herself to hold firm against the horror and pain slapping at her senses, she focused on Alice. This was critical, could directly impact the number of fatalities. “How?”
Hands fisted on her thighs and eyes glittering wet, Alice shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t find that piece of memory.”
“Okay, okay.” Sascha touched her fingers to Alice’s cheek before shifting her attention to the fighting. “If I attempt to block everyone,” she said aloud, “it’ll negatively affect the defenders.”
So she’d have to narrow her focus, and do what? She wanted to scream at the unfairness of being told she had an ability that could save thousands of lives, then left to flounder without a road map as to how to activate it. Turning to Ivy to see if the younger empath had any ideas, she sucked in a breath, abdomen lurching.
Ivy’s face was a mask of blood.
Chapter 48
“IVY, STOP,” SASCHA said, using the same tone she used on recalcitrant juveniles in the pack. “Stop right now.” Panic beat in her—the other woman could easily stroke out, causing irrevocable damage to her brain. “Ivy.”
“There are too many, Sascha.” It came out thready. “I can’t stop, or they’ll swarm the defenders.”
Sascha grabbed Ivy’s shoulder, forced her physically around. “You stop right now, or I will telepath Vasic.”
“Not fair.” It came out mumbled, sluggish.
“Yes, well, you’re not exactly acting rationally.” She looked to Alice. “Can you get her to the medics?”
Nodding, the anthropologist rose to her feet with one of Ivy’s arms over her shoulders, her own around the empath’s waist, and staggered away. They were protected by Abbot and the Enforcement officers holding the line so the maddened couldn’t escape this pocket of insanity. Sascha watched long enough to make sure the two women were safe before returning to her task, automatically scanning for Lucas as she did so.
Her mate—claws out—was fighting beside a number of cops, taking out the more aggressive infected so the officers could get the uninfected and injured out. Vasic wasn’t visible, but since Ivy hadn’t raised the alarm, the teleporter must be safe.
“Terminal field,” she said to herself. “Terminal field. Figure it out.”
She tried every tactic in her arsenal, but all it got her was another bloody nose and a pounding in her ears that told her she’d soon be as bad as Ivy. “I am not giving up.” She refused to consign her daughter, any child, to a world overrun with vicious insanity.
That was when the Tk she’d chosen to focus on—on the theory his belligerence would make it easier to tell if what she was doing was working—looked straight at her . . . and teleported. Sascha hadn’t thought he was that strong, and maybe he wasn’t, but she was only twenty feet away and in plain sight. He was in front of her a second later, his hands shoving out as if to make her fly through the air to slam into the heavy- duty Enforcement combat vehicles. The impact would snap her spine.
Adrenaline took over. “Stop!” she yelled on the physical and psychic levels both. “You can’t do this!”
Blinking, he pushed out with his hands. Nothing. Staggered at her success, she almost fell victim to the meaty fist he swung at her face—except her mate was already there. Lucas took her would-be-assailant out with a clean punch to the jaw that left the Tk unconscious but alive.
“Kitten?”
“I’m fine.” Still on her knees, her heart a drum, she touched his calf. “Go, help the others.”
As Lucas returned to the fight, Sascha began to concentrate the terminal field on small, tight areas that didn’t weaken the defenders but eliminated the worst psychic threats. What she’d understood in that split second was that it wasn’t simply about telling an individual he couldn’t do something—it was about hitting his hidden emotional core to convince him he was incapable of the action.
Her nose didn’t bleed now, the pressure easing in her frontal lobe. This, this was what she was meant to be doing, the act as natural and as simple as breathing. And she understood why the post-Silence Council had wanted to eliminate empaths from the gene pool. Not simply because they were the personification of emotion, but because an E could strip power from Councilor and beggar alike.
• • •
IVY sat with nerves raw and teeth gritted in the back of an ambulance and listened to the fighting while an M-Psy told her that a blood vessel in her brain was critically close to rupture. “Whatever you were doing, stop it,” he said. “Or the next time, yours will be one of the corpses we body bag off the streets.”
Leaving her with those blunt words, as well as an order that she utilize pain-control mechanisms to ameliorate the agony in her skull, he went to deal with other injuries. Her psychic strain would heal on its own—all it would take was time. Time the world didn’t have, she thought, edging out of the ambulance . . . to see Vasic disable a man who’d been beating another to death with a broken chair leg.
Her throat filled with a raging scream she couldn’t allow herself to utter. He was so strong, so honorable, and he deserved happiness and peace, not this endless ugliness. Enough, she wanted to cry, he’s done enough! Let this gladiator rest. If only she could figure out the cure—
“You! This is your fault!”
Jerking around at the vituperative cry, she found herself facing a young woman on the other side of the secondary Enforcement barricade. She wore ordinary clothes but had a black band around her wrist. As did the man next to her . . . and the man beside him.
All three were staring at her.
