"I told you, Sahara, I will never hurt you."

Fingers trembling, she placed her free hand over his heart. "Thank you for keeping your promise, for coming for me."

His response was to tuck her hair behind her ear, the action as possessive as it was gentle, his face so darkly handsome as to steal her breath. No man should be as hard, as beautiful as her Kaleb.

"There's something else," she said, voice husky. "You can release me from your shields-mine are now operational."

Kaleb stilled, the primal creature that lived in the void rigid in its attempt to maintain control. "Your Silence is broken. You'll become a target for Pure Psy the instant you reappear in the Net." He would never permit her to be so vulnerable.

Sahara's hand spread on his heart. "Take a look at my shields."

He did so and beheld a mind so Silent, it had not even the finest of hairline fractures. Intrigued, he examined it from every angle and could find no errors that might give her away, nothing that would make anyone take a second look, the lie told with flawless skill.

"This isn't your work." Sahara was gifted in many things, but advanced shield mechanics of this complexity was a highly specialized field that required years of practice. "Sascha Duncan," he said, and saw from Sahara's wide-eyed surprise that he was right.

Councilor Nikita Duncan's daughter was not only a defector and mated to the alpha of DarkRiver, she was the best shield technician Kaleb had ever seen. He had acquired some of his most useful tricks by covertly monitoring her while she'd been part of the Net.

"She's enhanced her technique." Unexpected, given that Sascha Duncan was infamously no longer in the Net-or perhaps not. This region had seen a significant rise in the number of Psy with fractured or suspect conditioning. Those individuals would need a way to hide in plain sight.

Leaning to his right, Sahara put the gun on the window ledge, and he could tell she was uncomfortable with the weapon. As long as she used it when necessary, that didn't matter.

"It's not a shield but a sh.e.l.l," she told him, her hand sliding to his waist as she straightened, "its sole function to mask my broken Silence. My natural protective shields are hidden beneath, and they're tougher than most people's. They always were."

Yes, her natural shields were formidable, a side effect of her ability-but she'd been sixteen and already compromised by severe trauma when taken captive, while Tatiana had been an adult in full control of her scalpel-sharp telepathy. An inequitable contest from the start. "Total restoration?"

A nod that sent her hair sliding over the hand he'd curved around the side of the slender column of her neck, the strands cool and heavy. "Yes, faster than I predicted. It helped that no one was tearing away new growth before it could take root."

Kaleb decided he needed to increase the misery of Tatiana's punishment. Perhap he'd introduce insects into her environment. It was amazing how much terror such small creatures could cause.

"What are you thinking?" Sahara's eyes were suddenly acute, as if she'd glimpsed the darkness that lived in him.

He told her, felt her flinch. "I managed to kill all the insects," he said, thinking of the tiny, lightless closet in which he'd once spent three days for no reason but that Santano wanted to remind Kaleb who held the power, "and I was only ten."

"No." Sahara cupped his face, her own grim with an anger he knew wasn't directed at him. "You do not do this, you do not become that monster's legacy."

"You are my legacy."

"Tatiana is evil," she continued over the chill sound of memory, "and she'll do more evil if she's free, so I won't argue against her imprisonment, but no torture. Not of the physical kind and not of the mental. You're strong enough to tie up her mind without isolating it as you've done now."

Kaleb thought of the seven years he'd been alone in the dark, of the horror of a sixteen-year-old girl forced to imprison her own mind to survive, and said, "I'll consider it." In deference to Sahara's request, he wouldn't torture Tatiana as he'd been deliberating, but seven years would have to pa.s.s before he'd review the state of her mental imprisonment.

Sahara shook her head, her expression fierce. "Do you think I don't see you?"

"I know you do." It was the greatest, most inexplicable gift of his life that she saw him and didn't turn away. "This one thing," he said, "I won't give you. This vengeance is mine to exact."

Sahara pressed a lingering kiss to his jaw, a single tear escaping her closed eyelids. "What would we have become if we'd been free?"

Kaleb didn't know the answer to that whispered question, couldn't imagine an existence other than the one that had shaped him, but there was one request he could honor.

Chapter 31.

THE OBSIDIAN SHIELDS around Sahara's mind slid away to leave her exposed to the PsyNet. She hadn't been on the psychic plane for so long that the sheer vastness of the mental network made her pulse roar, her mouth dry.

Sahara. Starless eyes connecting with her own as her lids flew open. I can reinitiate my protection if you aren't ready.

No. She took a trembling breath, her hand spreading on the tensile muscle of his chest. It's overwhelming . . . but it's also freedom.

Freedom can be intoxicating. Be careful.

You won't abandon me?

This telepathic channel will never be closed. "Slow and easy," he said aloud, his fingers playing with the eagle charm on her bracelet. "You need to strengthen your wings before you can fly."

Holding on to him, she looked into the Net again, each mind a glittering point of light in the psychic network that connected millions of Psy around the world. In the s.p.a.ces in between flowed fine silver streams-data shared by those minds-until the landscape was a sea of sparkling silver, the waves ebbing and flowing in a beauty that closed her throat.

Another strand of memory worked loose of the vault.

"Why does everyone call it a starscape?" She frowned. "That doesn't make any sense."

"'Path me an image of what you see," Kaleb said, his face young, the line of his jaw not yet refined to masculine hardness.

Sahara did so, her feet hanging off the high branch of the tree at the back of the NightStar compound.

When Kaleb turned to her, his eyes held a wonder that was so rare it made her go motionless. "I don't see what you see. I don't think anyone does."

"Do you want to travel through it?" Kaleb asked, and the fine thread of her past wove into a present where that beautiful boy with a healing gash on his cheek had become a powerful man, his hand spread protectively on her lower back.

"Can I do so anonymously?" she asked, even as a section of her mind continued to disentangle the memories inside her, desperate to unravel the mystery of Kaleb before she asked the question no part of her wanted to ask. "Tatiana and Enrique both probably h.o.a.rded the truth about me, but just in case."

A set of telepathic instructions flowed into her mind, and two minutes later, she drew what was effectively a cloak around her roaming mind and stepped out into the PsyNet.

Would you like to see something interesting? Kaleb asked almost an hour later.

Drunk on the pleasure of being free on the psychic plane, Sahara had to be careful not to surf the data streams with too much abandon, lest she give herself away. Yes!

Can you see me?

Yes. His cloaked presence was a shadow she could barely make out through the psychic filter he'd instructed her to build into her own cloak. Now he took her deep, to a part of the Net devoid of stars, but no less alive for it, the silver thick and calm, as if she and Kaleb stood in a bay.

Delighted, she dipped a finger in the sea and came away with streamers of information wrapped around her psychic skin. The filaments waved as if in a breeze, each one a random piece of data. Astonished by the sight, she sent Kaleb a snapshot. I couldn't do this before!

Outside the aerie, his hand clenched on the back of her top, the fabric a fine green knit. It's been a long time since I saw the Net through your eyes.

She nuzzled at his throat, her arms around his body under his jacket. This place is wonderful. Dipping her fingers into the silver water on the psychic plane, she scooped up shimmering handfuls of data with a joyous laugh, throwing them up to create a sparkling rain. Thank you for showing me.

This isn't it. Taking her to the center of the bay, he held out a psychic hand. You have to connect so I can get you through.

She accepted the connection without hesitation, and they slipped through a fissure in the Net she couldn't see, to come out into a stunning blackness-the data in this part of the Net was so heavily compressed that it had become a faceted jewel.

"This is effectively the backup drive of the PsyNet," Kaleb said, switching from telepathy to psychic speech with a confidence that told her nothing would leak from this place. "If the Net ever fails, the data can be reintegrated to within twenty-four hours of the terminal event."

Fascinated, she attempted to concentrate on a single minuscule block of data, but it was of such complexity as to be impossible to comprehend. "How did you find this?"

"The NetMind showed me." He brought her to the center of the data archive and to a sphere that gleamed with a constantly shifting slick of color, an iridescent mirage that reminded her of the midnight colors she saw in his eyes when he let go of the leash. "This is the restart b.u.t.ton for the Net, meant to sanitize it from the core."

Horror cracked black fractures in her wonder. "Why does that even exist?"

"Because I created it."

KALEB disconnected from the Net on Sahara's heels, her face a strained white where she looked up at him. "That's how you planned to kill everyone."

"Originally," he said. "I later wrote in an algorithm to spare those under the age of sixteen." He'd never had a childhood; Sahara had come to womanhood in a cage. It seemed fitting to spare the children they had never had a chance to be.

Sahara shook her head in a mute refusal to accept what he would've done.

"It was intended as a last option." To be initiated only if they had stolen her from him forever. "Seizing control of the Net will be intensely more satisfying."

"You're the wrong person to be in charge of so many lives," Sahara said, her arms still locked around his body. "You have no allegiance to the Net."

Kaleb was in no way insulted by her judgment. He knew what he was, knew that his experience at Enrique's hand had permanently warped the fabric of his personality. But- "My allegiance is yours, and you need the Net to thrive."

Huge, dark eyes, one of her hands coming around to lie on his heart again. "What are you doing to me, Kaleb?"

"Someone," he said, closing his hand over her own, "has to make the ruthless decisions or the Net will die anyway." He showed her images of the rotting places where nothing could survive, reminded her of the infection that had taken hold in the psychic fabric that connected every Psy on the planet but for the renegades. "Our race is on the verge of extinction."

Sahara's fingers flexed, her expression somber. "Our people have voluntarily crippled themselves. Of course that damage will be reflected in the Net. The only thing that might reverse the-" Her eyes widened. "You're planning the fall of Silence."

"It can't fall for all, but for the majority it must." If it didn't and the rot continued to grow, the poisonous biofeedback would equal a slow death for millions upon millions.

"A sudden fall will cause ma.s.sive psychic shock," Sahara argued. "Thousands upon thousands could die."

"Acceptable collateral damage." Kaleb had no problem with losing a quarter or even half of the population. "Those who remain will be the strongest, most resilient."

Sahara shook her head. "You can't mean that."

"It's a practical solution. Slicing off the diseased and the weak will mean our race has a stronger foundation on which to grow."

"I fall into that category." A fierce response that spoke to the steel that ran through her body. "I'm weak yet, still broken in so many ways."

He knew what she was trying to do, but-"I don't have empathy, Sahara. I can't feel for those who are going to die. It would be akin to asking a falcon to take flight when his wings had long been hacked off."

He remembered the bone-shaking fear he'd felt as a three-year-old thrown into the h.e.l.l that was Santano Enrique's "training." He also remembered the day he'd embraced the full weight of the conditioning. Better to feel nothing, he had thought with a calm unnatural for the boy he'd been, than to scream in horror every minute of his existence.

"You," he said, "are the single exception to that rule." The oldest, deepest, most beautiful flaw in his Silence. "Without you, I would be a monster."

SAHARA lay in bed hours after Kaleb left her to meet with the Arrows, the calm way he'd told her of his lack of empathy colliding with her fears about his possible collusion with Pure Psy to leave her scared in a way that went so deep, it was in her very cells. Not of him. For him. For her Kaleb, who had never, ever let her down.

It didn't matter that she didn't have the memories to support that truth-she knew it the same way she knew the sky was blue and the rain wet, a fact so absolute it was beyond question.

"I will fight for you."

With that determined vow, she sat up and pushed the window open to look out into the night-cloaked forest, the heavy darkness as impenetrable as Kaleb's eyes when he wanted them to be. Was he right? Had his capacity for empathy been destroyed during the nightmare of his childhood? She wanted to disbelieve him, to a.s.sume it was simply buried deep, but then she thought of the damage done to her by Tatiana, and, heart hurting, considered the choices a vulnerable boy may have made to survive . . . and accepted he might be telling the absolute truth.

Even as she struggled with that realization, part of her mind continued to tug strands of memory free from the vault . . . and suddenly an entire chunk of her past came loose without warning.

She was cutting through the park again, her school satchel banging lightly against her hip. There were two younger students ahead of her, both on bicycles, but they disappeared around the corner a second later. Sahara twisted to fiddle with the strap of her satchel, her aim to confirm there was no one behind her, either.

The pathway was empty.

Picking up her pace, she waited until she was in the single surveillance blind spot along this route, then slipped off the path and into the bushes. It took her half a minute of rapid walking to reach the grove of trees to the right of the path. No one would call it a forest, but the small wood was thick enough to provide cover. More important, it was out of range of the security cameras.

Sahara didn't think anyone watched the cameras twenty-four/seven. Their main purpose was to act as a deterrent against antisocial behavior. If, however, someone ever became suspicious of her actions to the extent of tracking her movements, that individual would find exactly nothing. She'd arrive home via another route, making it appear as if she'd decided to walk off the approved route. A fact that would get her a stern lecture about safety but carry no other consequences.

"Where are you?" she whispered when she reached the tree that was theirs. Without him to take her home, she could only wait for eleven minutes. That was the safe window where no one would miss her. If he was late- But no, there he was.

Having teleported near another tree, he walked toward her, his eyes a brilliant cardinal starlight that she saw in her dreams, his body tall and of a young man, not the boy she'd known over half her life. He was harder than her, ruthless in a way she knew she'd never be, and the fact that he was almost twenty-two to her near-sixteen had nothing to do with it. He'd been the same way six years ago.

Here, however, they were equals, and beneath the disturbing coldness she glimpsed in him too often now, he was still her Kaleb. The one whose Silence appeared as pristine as her own while hiding a chaos of emotion so violent, she knew he could be beyond dangerous should his control ever slip. But never to her. Not ever to her.

Dropping her satchel, she ran into his arms. His own locked around her, squeezing so tight, she could barely breathe. "It's all right," she whispered, her hands in his hair. "It's all right." Over and over again, she said those words, attempting to comfort the man she loved when love was a crime that could get them both sentenced to living death.

Yet even as she spoke, she knew it wasn't all right, that the reason for his hurt was a trap he couldn't escape-and her beautiful Kaleb had never been meant for a cage. It terrified her that he'd go too far in the maddening fight to get out and she'd never again feel the steel of his arms around her. "I'm here. I'm here."

He just held her, in that way he had of doing during the worst times. She had no need to hear the details to know that he'd had to become even harder, more pitiless simply to survive. If it kept on in this way, she thought, her Kaleb would one day be lost behind a wall of black ice. Angry pain had her tightening her hold, her forbidden emotions hidden behind shields Kaleb had automatically augmented to protect her from exposure on the PsyNet. He'd been doing it for years, ever since he first realized her Silence simply wasn't sticking, the psychic taste of him as familiar to her as her own.

Never once had he failed to protect her. But she could do nothing to stop him from being hurt over and over again, the helplessness a fury inside her. "I'm here." She held on even tighter, refusing to surrender him to the ugliness that was Santano Enrique. If the black ice did form, she would shatter it with her bare hands. He was never going to shut her out, shut himself away in the darkness. Sahara wouldn't allow it.

Today he held her for almost the entirety of their stolen time together, and then he stepped back. "You shouldn't meet me anymore." No stars in the black, his voice dead in its tonelessness. "I'll hurt you."

It was a thought so incomprehensible, she didn't know why he'd said it, why he'd wound himself in that way. "You'd never hurt me."

"Don't be so certain."

Chapter 32.