Lucas Serca made him die.

Bishop Santos didn't feel a thing when he fell to the steps leading up from the nave to the chancel. Nothing was left of his mind, no life was in those unseeing eyes. His heart still beat and blood still ran through his veins, feeding a body of cells that had nothing to live for anymore.

Lucas stared down at the man lying at his feet. He had never understood the religious, how they prayed for a way out of hell, but couldn't be bothered to find it themselves. The idea of mindless service to a higher power was anathema to his way of thinking-Sercas ruled, they did not serve. Tapping into his power, Lucas finished what he had started.

Telepathy had turned off the bishop's mind; telekinesis stopped his heart.

If there was a heaven, maybe the bishop was there.

[THREE].

JULY 2379.

SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA.

The shuttle came in over the Pacific, cutting across air traffic with priority clearance, dropping down out of vertical. The pilot adjusted the shuttle's vector as it approached the landing docks that stuck out like sharp spokes along the sides of every remaining city tower that made up Los Angeles. With a rush of air, the buzz of gyros and buffers, the shuttle settled firmly into the anchoring arms of a restricted docking cradle at the top of the tallest city tower. It locked in with a shudder and the anchor lights went from green to red.

No one disembarked.

On a midlevel work zone in the tower below, three people appeared in an all-white room, the faint crack of displaced air muffled by soundproofing.

"I hate cleanup duty," the man in the lead said irritably.

Jin Li Zhang was someone who couldn't be ignored. In his early thirties and close to the end of his short life as a Class II electrokinetic, Jin Li was tall, with black hair and brown eyes. He wore black BDUs similar to the style that Strykers used, designed that way to promote confusion between the government-controlled psions and the Warhounds, rogue psions secretly owned by the Serca Syndicate.

Jin Li chewed on the cigarette clamped between his teeth as he walked down the hallway, the cigarette nearly burned down to the filter, smoke blending into the air around him. The first office he found was empty; the second was not. Two people looked up as the door slid open. Recognition came hard and fast, and the one sitting behind the workstation stood up on shaky feet, all the blood leaving his face.

"Sir." The man swallowed. "I wasn't aware you were coming."

Jin Li drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out slowly, wisps of it twisting behind him as he approached the workstation. The man and his assistant, a woman in a neat business suit, scrambled to get out of Jin Li's way.

"You had your orders to keep us appraised of the situation," Jin Li said as he tapped command codes into the system that overrode every security feature present, shutting it down. "You didn't. We don't appreciate failure."

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the businessman's loud, ragged breathing. Finally he said, "It's difficult to track someone in the system who has the ability to hide from bioscanners."

Jin Li's mouth curled up around his cigarette. "I hate excuses. Come here."

It was painfully obvious that the man didn't want to obey. Sweat had broken out all across his face in a bright sheen, pupils dilated wide from fear. Repeatedly licking his bottom lip, the man took a few scuffling steps forward until he was within arm's reach of Jin Li.

Jin Li wrapped his hand around the man's bare wrist and forced him to his knees. Electrokinetic power burned through human nerves with frightening ease. The man screamed, the sound choking off only when Jin Li released him.

"You were supposed to get a lock on the target. You didn't. The Serca Syndicate requires obedience and results from its employees. You're going to have to work on that," Jin Li said, glancing over at the man's assistant.

The woman took a few steps back, face pale and eyes wide. She let out a little shriek when she ran up against someone she hadn't known was there.

"Humans," a disgusted soprano said. "You're really only good for breeding and menial tasks."

Jin Li spared a glance for the person who was leading this mission. The tall, slim teenager standing beside the woman in the middle of the room was dressed in the same streamlined BDUs as he was, her attention focused firmly on her father's best enforcer.

Samantha Serca was eighteen years old, beautiful, and extremely powerful; attributes courtesy of her genes. Her dark blond hair was pulled back away from her face, opaque glasses hiding the dark blue eyes that were the signature trait of the Serca family. No amount of gene splicing could legally re-create this deep, solid shade of blue outside her family. Anyone who followed the founding family of the Serca Syndicate would know who she was by her eyes alone. Which was why for this endeavor she wore the glasses and strips of synthskin lined with translucent bioware over the facial recognition points of her bone structure.

Standing a step behind her, with hands gripping the buckles of his flak jacket and wearing an identical pair of glasses, was another teen with the same distinctive eyes, the same dark blond hair. Twins; but Jin Li had always liked Gideon Serca more than his older sister. Gideon preferred killing over conversation most days of the week, and as a Class II telekinetic, he was very, very good at it.

"When they initiated a bioscan through security checkpoints in the Slums, they found jack shit and gave up," Jin Li reminded Samantha. "We got that report from HQ on the flight over."

She shrugged. "I'm not surprised. Lucas is almost as good as Nathan when it comes to reading as baseline human on the grid. You're not a telepath, you can't scan for him."

Samantha, however, was a telepath, a Class II with the genetics and training that made her capable of tracking their current target. Jin Li's lip curled up, but he stood his ground when she closed the distance between them, her attention focused on the man kneeling before the electrokinetic. The arrogance in the way Samantha held herself was impossible to ignore. So was the strength of her power when it slid into a static, human mind that didn't have the capability to handle such a strong telepathic intrusion.

The man's head snapped back, body twitching as Samantha sifted through his memories, looking for the faint scars that would signify psionic interference. She didn't find any in his mind and released him, sliding her power into his assistant's mind instead.

The woman stumbled from the pain, clutching her head and begging for Samantha to stop as the telepath dug deeper. Samantha found what she was looking for at the bottom of the woman's mind, just a faint dip in her thoughts that a lower-Classed psion wouldn't pick up. Samantha almost missed it. The only reason she didn't was because Lucas had meant for her to find it, some hint of what he was doing, but not why.

Piecing the memory back together proved aggravating, not because it wasn't difficult-it was-but because what she finally found only pissed her off.

The woman had been made to forget the memory Samantha pulled out of the recesses of her mind. The thing about memories was that they were fluid. The brain stored them over a person's life, and unlike humans, telepaths spent their entire lives tearing through other people's thoughts. Samantha knew how to find things most people forgot they even knew. She recognized the mocking tenor voice in that memory, recognized the face of the person she had grown up with. His idea of amusement was something she never appreciated.

It's been a while, Sam. Let's see if you have better luck in the Slums than you did back in London. You do remember London, don't you?

Her first failure as a full Warhound at the age of sixteen was something she'd never forget, nor the punishment she received after she failed to keep Lucas from leaving. Samantha flinched away from her own memories. She couldn't, however, escape the woman's memory of her older brother's knowing laughter, or of Lucas walking into this branch however long ago as if he owned it.

I left something behind for you. Find it, and you'll know where to find me. You know I never like to make things easy for you.

Two years on the run, Samantha thought as she wrenched her power out of the woman's mind, not caring about the permanent damage she'd caused. Two years when it was just her to face their father's sadistic wrath outside the glare of press cameras, because Kristen was unregistered and unknown, and Gideon had become the favorite Nathan used now. Gideon wasn't Lucas, despite her twin's sycophantic tendencies. Lucas had a spine, something Gideon still lacked, but Gideon was becoming adept at being cruel.

Samantha was beginning to hate her twin more than was considered healthy by the empaths in her father's Syndicate. She hated Lucas more for putting her in this situation.

"He's in the Slums," Samantha said, ignoring the seizing woman at her feet. "He stopped here first to make sure we would follow him through an implanted message. He left something behind in this branch. I want it found."

"Lucas isn't careless," Gideon said as he shared a look with Jin Li. "We all know that. He hasn't left anything behind in any of the rest of the cities he's run through, so why start now?"

"He's not careless, no. He just likes to play games. In that, he is very much like Nathan." With a crooked, little smile, Samantha toed the dying woman's body. "Have someone clean this mess up. She's bleeding all over my floor."

A puddle of blood was forming around the woman's head as her body still continued to seize. Her boss was only capable of watching her die from his own position on the floor, mouth forming protests he dared not speak, but Samantha heard him anyway.

"How predictable," she said as she turned on her heel and headed for the door. "He wishes he could kill us."

The man flinched when Jin Li dragged his fingers over the back of his neck. Samantha never saw Jin Li move; she felt it when the human died, a sharp white shock against her shields on the mental grid as Jin Li took care of rectifying the man's poor work ethic.

Nathan could get new humans to fill the vacancies in an instant, that wasn't a problem. Neither was covering their tracks. The problem was that she still wasn't sure what Lucas wanted or why he had left the Syndicate in the first place.

The psion in charge of this Syndicate branch was a Class VI psychometrist who went by the name of Jessica Frist. Samantha barely glanced at the screen detailing the woman's company rank-director of this pigsty-before she was palming open the door and walking inside. The spacious office was full of high-grade work terminals overseen by a slim woman. Jessica looked up from the vidscreens that surrounded her, inspecs glowing in her brown eyes, her face the only part of her not covered by a full-body skinsuit.

"Sir," she said, gloved fingers going still against the controls.

"We're cleaning house," Samantha informed her. "You'll get a new set of qualified humans by tomorrow. Their incompetence regarding the job assigned them doesn't excuse yours. The report HQ forwarded us is unacceptable. You had better have something more for me."

"We got a hit within the last thirty minutes in the grid," Jessica said, discomfort and fear making her stutter ever so slightly. "I thought it prudent to stay and monitor the system before I uploaded a second report."

"The humans said you hadn't been able to find Lucas's location."

"This isn't Lucas."

Samantha's mouth curled up viciously. "Strykers."

"Yes."

"This is our territory and they know it. Who's on the grid?" Jessica handed over a small datapad and Samantha took it, studying the information. Shaking her head, Samantha put it down on the desk. "They just don't know when to quit."

"It makes for an amusing way to pass the time," Gideon agreed as he came into the office. "The humans are dead. I teleported their bodies into the Pacific. Someone else needs to deal with the blood on the floor."

"Sir," Jessica said, inclining her head at the order.

Samantha focused on Jessica. "Take us to the servers. Lucas was here and I want to know why. You're scanning that room for any evidence that can give us that information and you're doing it now."

Jessica managed to physically hide her flinch, but Samantha could still feel the recoil in the other woman's thoughts. Jessica disengaged herself from the system, locked it down, and led her superiors to the server room at the back of the moderate-size office. The lights snapped on as the door slid open, revealing two terminals that hummed on standby power.

Samantha eyed Jessica after they stepped inside, not impressed with the other woman's hesitation. "Well? Get on with it."

Jessica moved around Gideon, peeling off her elbow-length gloves. She tucked them into her pockets and steeled herself for what was to come as she pressed both hands to the console, long practice helping her tamp down the fear of the unknown beneath her fingers.

Every psi power in existence affected the brain in ways modern science still couldn't quantify. Afflicted with an incurable disease born out of the ruins of a vicious nuclear war fought 250 years ago, psions were the people that the rest of society feared.

A psychometrist's power worked through tactile contact. Skin was the focal point of their power, and touch activated it. Psychometrists lived with the constant and brutal knowledge that anything and anyone they touched could and would suck them under into memories that weren't their own.

Jessica sank into the flashes of memories that had been imprinted over the years, sliding her hands through hundreds of moments as she ran her fingers over the edges of the workstation. The past sought to carve out space in the present through her Class VI power. It made her head spin as she followed that glittering line to the one bright moment purposefully embedded in the terminal.

One touch to that memory and the trigger Lucas had left behind in Jessica's mind broke her. Or seemed to. She sucked in a ragged breath, yanking her hands off the terminal as if she'd been burned as a hole she never knew was inside her mind filled up.

In her mind, Lucas smiled at her.

She remembered trying to pull away, but he didn't let her go. Hadn't let her go yet.

It won't be enough, you know, Lucas said to her as he turned her head this way and that, his power eating into her thoughts a week ago. I still expect my sister to try. So let's make this chase interesting, shall we?

The image of a broken-down, timeworn cathedral filled her mind. It wasn't complete. Pieces of the picture were purposefully missing, and their absence would make teleportation difficult, if not outright impossible.

Here is where I will be. They shouldn't have any trouble finding it. Enjoy your headache when you remember this.

Jessica opened her eyes, breathing raggedly. She tucked her hands close against her body, refusing to touch anything else around her in an instinctive reaction to keep her sanity safe.

"What did you see?" Jin Li demanded from the doorway.

She lifted her head to look at her superiors, hating the words that came out of her mouth. "It's me. He-Lucas left it all in me."

A sick feeling was already in her stomach, pain in her head. Samantha made it all worse as the telepath cut through Jessica's shields, the psychometrist unable to drop them fast enough. Samantha's telepathy, so different from Lucas's cool interference, filled her mind and drove her to her knees. Where a human was incapable of surviving psionic interference if the psion in question wasn't careful, psions themselves were genetically built for it. That didn't mean it was easy to handle, just that they could. The repercussions were still painful.

"I am getting sick to the back of my teeth with the bloody games he plays. He's almost worse than Nathan," Samantha said, biting off the words as she shared the acquired memory with Gideon. "Can you piece that together enough to 'port us there?"

"Maybe. If you get me a clearer picture from someone else's memory," Gideon said after a short pause. "Unless you want to risk being a smear of atoms in the smog?"

"We don't have the time to wait. I'll get you a better memory, you work on getting a stable avenue of teleportation." Samantha tapped the fingers of one hand against the edge of a terminal even as she skimmed her power over the minds of everyone around them until she found what Gideon needed and shared it with him. "You have any ideas on why Lucas would want cartel contacts? It's the only possible reason why he would be here in the Slums, since drugs are really all we handle out of Los Angeles."

Gideon closed his eyes. "He can't possibly hope to cut into the support Nathan's built up over the years. The drug cartels won't switch their loyalty that easily, not until Nathan formally hands over power to Lucas. Which he won't. Now let me work."

"Lucas needs to be killed," Jin Li said, watching as Samantha walked around the two work terminals, running a finger over the console edge on each one.

"That's your opinion. It's not our orders," Samantha said.

Jin Li scowled. "It's going to come down to Nathan. He's the only one with the strength to pull Lucas back into the fold."

"Nathan hasn't lived this long by being stupid, Jin Li." Samantha gave him a sharp look over the top of a vidscreen. "He won't risk himself to hunt Lucas down. He'll risk us. You'll accept our father's orders, or have you suddenly found a way to save yourself from Nathan's attempt at living longer than a human's average lifetime?"

"Fuck you."

"I thought not. Stop hoping for something that won't happen. You're in the same predicament as we are. If we die trying to bring Lucas in, then we die. At least we'll have worn him down."

"Your mother would be so proud of your human sensibilities."

Jin Li was picked up and slammed into the nearest wall, held there by Gideon's telekinesis. The younger twin glared at him. "Don't insult us."

Jin Li just smiled. Gideon let him go after a moment of warning pressure. Once Jin Li had his feet back on the floor, the electrokinetic straightened his uniform. "Lucas is your brother, Samantha. Out of all of us belonging to the Warhounds, you would know best why he decided to leave."

Samantha grimaced. "I've never been deep into Lucas's head. That's Nathan's prerogative, not mine."

"Some prerogative."

It wasn't, not really, not for those who had to live through it. Nathan's and Lucas's arguments had always happened privately and always ended bloodily, but Nathan inevitably won. The only time Lucas came out the winner was two years ago. Lucas had been eighteen when he'd walked away from the Serca Syndicate, from the Warhounds, leaving Nathan to deal with the fallout of his absence right when their father could least afford it. Samantha still didn't know how he had done it.

Samantha turned her attention to where Jessica was still huddled on the floor. "Put your gloves back on and clean this place up."

Jessica nodded, already yanking on her gloves, and stumbled out of the room. Gideon rocked back on his heels, eyes still closed and fingers tapping against his thighs as he concentrated on visualizing the teleport. "I need five more minutes."