Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
The woman who represented Designation A—the very foundation of the network—took several seconds to answer. Unclear, she said at last. Massive surges in the Substrate, tears all over the place. We’ll have to assess once things calm. What I can tell you is that we’ve lost multiple anchors to that island.
The cold and calculating part of Kaleb—a permanent aspect of his psyche that Sahara saw and somehow accepted—weighed up the potential of what had just happened. An island, complete with anchors.
It was the perfect test on whether such a separation could work.
They hadn’t done it when the idea was first broached because of a dearth of anchors—and this event would only magnify the shortage—but if it did work, then the long-term plan could be to hold on until they had enough new-generation anchors to action the plan in its entirety.
Update. Payal’s crisp psychic voice. Four anchors lost from the main network. Massive structural damage. Cascade collapse imminent.
Jaw clenched on the physical plane, Kaleb threw his vast psychic power into holding back the ripple effect. But he still saw a mind hanging in the dead space between the PsyNet and the island.
Pausing only for a split second, he checked his senses.
No mistake. There was a mind there, a mind cloaked in stealth that was blowing its cover in bursts of faint silver-shot light as it appeared to assist other minds. Its presence defied every psychic law in existence. Psy minds could only exist in a psychic space—and the moat was pure nothing. No psychic threads. No biofeedback. A perfect blackness akin to the emptiness of space.
But someone was hanging in the middle of the chasm; and since that someone appeared to be an ally, Kaleb shoved the oddity aside to deal with later.
Right now, he had to keep the PsyNet from falling.
Chapter 13
Ready for gentle physiotherapy. Prognosis is good but it will take time, especially her leg.
—Medical notes on Patient: Lei, 5:01 p.m., 9 October 2082
SOLEIL COLLAPSED AGAINST a sidewalk tree hours after the nightmare first began. Her hands trembled, the adrenaline crash hitting hard. She’d used up every ounce of energy in her body at least an hour ago. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t had to utilize her healing ability—that only worked with those who were pack, and Soleil was a changeling alone, her heart broken.
The pull on her resources had been unremitting regardless, patient after critical patient. It hadn’t let up even after help arrived in the form of more paramedics as well as changelings with medical knowledge.
Lucy, a blond SnowDancer wolf who’d introduced herself as a trained nurse, had happened to be close to Chinatown at the time of the incident, and she’d worked side by side with Soleil in the aftermath. Soleil had very much appreciated her calm competence.
Now the two of them sat against this tree that had pushed its roots up through the sidewalk. At any other time, the sight would’ve made her smile.
“You’re like this tree,” Farah said from her other side. “Stubborn, beautiful, cracking through all the walls people try to put up.” Laughter that hurt Soleil’s heart. “I was such a little grump as a cub, and still you became my heart’s friend.”
“Drink.” Lucy’s voice, the other woman indicating the bottle of electrolyte-laden water a shopkeeper had thrust into Soleil’s hand. “I’ve almost emptied mine.”
Soleil looked down at the bottle, her mind sluggish. And her mind was all she had in her quest for vengeance against a goliath. The realization, fuzzy though it was, was enough to have her lifting the bottle, opening the lid, and pouring the liquid down her throat. As a healer, it was her duty to ensure that she was ready to respond to an emergency. She’d failed once, failed to save any of them. Never again.
Unable to watch the dead now being put into body bags, she looked down at her lap instead, her cat too exhausted to argue with her retreat. Would autopsies be done on these dead when their cause of death was as clear as the cloudless blue of the late-afternoon sky?
The entire planet knew that when groups of Psy collapsed without warning, it had to do with a failure in their worldwide psychic network. Soleil often wondered why the PsyNet had ever been such a big secret to begin with—it wasn’t as if humans or changelings could enter that psychic space and do damage. Only Psy minds had the ability to access it.
“Leilei, what are you doing here?” Lucy asked with the ease of a friendship forged in fire. “You know you’re breaching our laws.”
Soleil picked at the label on her bottle, tiny pieces of confetti to match the ruins of her grief-induced plan of revenge. “Will DarkRiver execute me?”
Brow furrowed below the strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail to stick to her sweat-damp skin, and brownish-hazel eyes holding a wolfish edge, Lucy shot her a mystified look. “You’re a healer,” she said, as if that was an answer.