She would have pushed Kristen away, except the younger girl was holding on to her so tightly that it was impossible to shake her off completely.

Traitor, Samantha thought, shoving the word straight into Kristen's mind, ignoring how it made her own bleed psionic pain.

The empath smiled at her, her psi signature overlaid with Lucas's presence. Tell me, Sam, Lucas said through Kristen's mind. How am I the traitor when I was the one who pieced your mind back together over and over again? You've got those memories back now. Aren't you grateful?

Not to you.

Still so sullen. We're going to have to work on that. Lucas stretched his power through Kristen's mind, the empath's insanity a barrier between him and the scans that the Warhound telepaths were doing. You know what Nathan wants. I want something different.

I'm not on your side.

Remember when I said I would save you? I never said it would be easy. Trust me, Sam. I'm all you've got left. Do you think you can go back to Nathan with your mind the way it is now?

She couldn't. She knew that it would be impossible to return to London, present herself to their father, and leave his presence alive. Nathan would take her changed state of mind as betrayal, and only one punishment fit that crime in the Warhound ranks.

He'll kill you messy and he'll kill you slow, Lucas told her as he drifted away through the cracks in Kristen's mind. I need you alive. What's it going to be, Sam?

Kristen sagged against her, done being her oldest brother's conduit. Her head rolled against Samantha's shoulder, the smile on her face unchanging.

"Strykers," one of the telepaths announced, breaking Samantha's precarious concentration. "That's not Lucas in power plant two. It's Strykers."

"Any of them the ones he took with him out of the Slums?" Jin Li said.

"No. Several teams' worth, though."

Jin Li shook his head as he made his way back to where Samantha and Kristen were standing. More like leaning, Samantha thought, curiously removed from everything as she felt the wall at her back. Jin Li stood before her, eyes narrowed into slits.

"I don't give a fuck what you previously decided with Gideon," he said in a low voice. "But he's a Class II telekinetic and we need his ass in the field. Contact him, give him a visual, and tell him to get here. Now."

Samantha glared at Jin Li. "He stayed behind for a reason. One of us needs to be available to Nathan."

"Bullshit." Jin Li tangled his hand into her hair and yanked her closer to him, his fingers brushing over her bare scalp, over her nerves. "The little one-upmanship game you two are playing isn't helping us here and-"

He broke off with a strangled curse, shoving himself away from Samantha as Kristen slammed her empathy through his mind. Much as Jin Li's power could disrupt a person's nervous system, Kristen's disrupted downright everything. He got his mental shields up before she went too deep, but the first layer was already gone, peeled off by Kristen's insatiable hunger.

She bared her teeth at him, smile fixed and threatening as she put herself between Jin Li and her sister. "Naughty boy," Kristen rasped. "We own you, remember?"

Jin Li raised his fist, pride demanding that he retaliate. Except these two were Nathan's children, his blood, Sercas to their very DNA. Even if Kristen would never be acknowledged, even if Samantha would never take control of the Serca Syndicate after Nathan, they still ranked higher than Jin Li did in the grand scheme of things. Much as Jin Li wanted to tear Kristen apart, he didn't dare touch her. He'd crossed a line with Samantha just now. He couldn't afford to do it again.

"Keep your mind to yourself," he snarled. "And you, Samantha, get Gideon down here. We need a functioning Serca."

Jin Li retreated because he had no other choice. He wasn't 'path-oriented, and no way in hell was he going to fight Kristen unless ordered to by Nathan.

"Do it," Kristen said, laughing through the words. "Oh, bring our brother down here, Sammy-girl."

Samantha would have given anything not to, but if they were going to face a contingent of Strykers in the middle of a powerful acid storm, then they would need whatever strength they could get. With Samantha's telepathy pretty much broken, her mind bleeding through psi shock, she didn't have a choice in the matter. Jin Li was right. They needed a functioning Serca.

She closed her eyes against the chaos of the bunker, against the pain in her head. Stripped as she was of everything even remotely resembling control, the only way she could reach her twin was through the psi link that was still intact between them. She shielded as best she could, but Gideon would still know something was wrong.

Gideon, she sent at him, mental voice strained, the psi link between them shaky. Gideon, we need you on the field.

What happened? He didn't sound concerned, just curious, and Samantha swallowed her bitterness until she couldn't taste it anymore.

What do you think? She managed a tight, angry little laugh. I've hit burnout, pushing into psi shock. We need you to lead.

You wanted me to stay behind.

Now I want your arse here. Samantha opened her eyes, sharing the space she was in with him, the dimness and crowdedness of the bunker. The way it smelled of old metal and human perspiration, the stench of too many years lived beneath the ground. Do you have it?

She felt him like a vise inside her skull, in what little area of her power she could spare, the world gone blurry as another pair of eyes looked through hers. Yes.

Suddenly, her twin was standing before her, a little smile on his face that was for her alone. It wasn't supposed to be reassuring.

"I told you it should have been me," Gideon said.

Samantha pushed herself off the wall, let Kristen continue to hang off her because her sister's mind was a better barrier than anything she herself could come up with at the moment. "You really think Lucas will let you find him?"

"One wonders why he let you."

They stared each other down, but Samantha couldn't afford to be the one who looked away first. Kristen solved the problem for them, shoving at Gideon with one hand, or at least trying to. Gideon held her in place with his telekinesis, her hand splayed against an invisible shield millimeters above his chest.

"Don't," Gideon warned. "Or I'll break your arm."

Kristen licked her dry, cracked lips and winked at him. She was shoved back against Samantha, Gideon leaving the pair of them behind whole and intact because they needed everyone they could get to take Lucas down. Samantha sucked in a breath and started walking after her twin, Kristen keeping pace with her. The Warhounds with them were grouping together-she counted sixteen of them, herself and siblings included-everyone except Gideon wearing a field uniform. He didn't need one, nor the armor it came with, not with his power wrapped like a second skin around his body.

"Report," Gideon said, now the center of attention, taking control of the mission away from Samantha.

Clenching her hand into a fist, Samantha looked down at her white knuckles, the blood drying on her fingers, and listened as the Warhounds who had obeyed her for the majority of this mission switched their focus and loyalty to her twin.

Kristen wrapped her arms around Samantha's waist, pressed her forehead against Samantha's spine. "What's it going to be, Sam?"

Kristen's voice, Lucas's words.

Samantha didn't answer. Not here in the bunker, not when they arrived in the middle of the acid storm ninety seconds later, teleported within meters of the power plant in question, where Strykers were hunting some of their own. The wind nearly threw them both to the ground. Kristen dug in her heels and kept them upright through sheer will as thunder and lightning crashed above them, the clouds so low, it gave the illusion that if they lifted their arms to the sky, they could touch the storm.

What's it going to be?

A memory. A promise. Lucas seeding rebellion throughout the ranks, throughout her mind.

Trust me.

[THIRTY].

AUGUST 2379.

BUFFALO, USA.

Threnody couldn't hear anything over the sound of the storm, not even her own ragged breathing as she crouched behind the thick security wall of the power plant, next to the guard building. Quinton and Kerr were directly across from her, on the other side of the front blast doors.

To get past the quads who guarded the area, Kerr had altered their minds and convinced a human to walk with the three of them, in the illusion of a quad, through the power-plant gates to get inside. Once there, Kerr had knocked out every single human. Humans were always easy to control. Dealing with the Strykers who had arrived soon after was something else entirely.

Quinton's power was useless now that the storm had picked up. So were their guns because shooting bullets through wind that was blowing at 320 kilometers an hour was just asking to die. They had Kerr's telepathy and Threnody's electrokinesis, two powers against ten times that on the other side of the doors. Quinton had managed to close them again, but the doors were steadily being peeled apart despite Kerr's psionic interference that blocked 'path-oriented strikes and teleportation. Not good odds.

The one thing they had in their favor was that the Strykers couldn't find them on the mental grid. Lucas's trick of hiding a psi signature until the person in question seemed only human, or not present at all, was keeping them alive. She didn't know how much longer their luck would last. They needed to get inside the power plant. Running right now would leave them easy targets without a telekinetic to watch their backs, and the only way inside that power plant was through the front doors. A lot of open space was between them and those doors.

We should have brought Jason, Threnody said in a tense voice through the psi link Kerr had strung between their minds.

Kerr didn't answer her. Someone else did.

He was needed elsewhere. You'll have your chance to make a break for it in thirty seconds, Lucas said as he appeared beside her, stumbling out of his teleport and needing the wall to support his weight for a few seconds. He'd startled her; blue lines of electricity sparked over her hands out of instinct. She pulled her power back in only after she realized who it was.

Threnody glared up at Lucas through the rain, rapidly blinking the stinging wet out of her eyes. What did you do?

Twenty seconds. Be ready.

When the Warhounds teleported in, arriving between where they were cornered and where the Strykers were waiting, Threnody felt her stomach clench. Lucas waved a hand at her, the features of his face sharply lit by the brightness of the security lights that burned hotly through the storm on the walls around the power plant.

Now, Lucas told her, head turned toward the doors that had been torn to the ground under telekinetic pressure. Both of you, run.

Threnody was already running toward the entrance of the power plant, slipping through the sheet of mud that overlay the cement pathway, bent nearly double against the wind and the rain. Quinton was running in her direction, both of them highlighted by the lights and the storm, presenting perfect targets to everyone behind them.

Except they would have to get through Lucas first.

Kerr, Lucas said, drawing him into a merge. I'll need your support.

Kerr didn't understand what was happening, having never had his mind merged into another's before. He didn't try to fight it, as he hadn't fought Lucas when the other man had fixed his mind, knowing that this was the only way they were going to survive. Lucas needed his strength, he could feel that now, because for all that Lucas was a Class I triad psion, the younger man had been pushing himself hard since well before the Slums. Alone, Lucas didn't have the reach he needed to fight nearly fifty-odd Strykers and Warhounds.

The limits of Kerr's mind expanded, his power pushing through someone else's strength and laying down anchor points across their area of the mental grid. A merged Class I and Class II mental wall was built up along the edge of a chasm that cut so deep and so wide it would take everything all the psions outside the power plant had and more to break through their shields. A breach was still a possibility.

It was similar to how Kerr had worked most of his life with Jason, except this partnership went deeper. Kerr could feel the channels of Lucas's telekinesis more clearly than he'd ever felt Jason's. Kerr let Lucas take whatever he needed, their minds weaving together seamlessly, thoughts paralleling as Lucas became the apex of a two-mind merge.

On the mental grid, pockets deepened with individual powers from the Strykers and the clumping knots of power that signified Warhound merges. None of them even remotely approached the strength that Lucas and Kerr wielded.

Telekinesis wrapped around their bodies; a shield also bubbling over Threnody and Quinton as they made it to the rusted blast doors of the power plant. Lucas and Kerr planted themselves on one side of those torn-down doors, clothes soaking wet and skin chilled beneath the sudden barrier against the storm. Two men who were neither Stryker nor Warhound, just human enough to believe in doing the right thing.

Traitor, Gideon said on a narrow psi link between himself and Lucas, riding a Warhound's telepathic power to make the connection.

Lucas didn't sense Samantha in any of the Warhound merges at all, nor did he feel the devastating pull of Kristen's deadly need. A slow smile cut across his face, Kerr the only witness to it.

You seem to think that because I want to survive, I'm a traitor, Lucas said as he readied his and Kerr's shared power behind their shields. You can have what Nathan's offering. I found something better.

Lucas's and Kerr's telepathic strike ripped through everyone's mind like an explosion, burning through the shields of anyone who was a Class V and lower, shattering concentrations. People fell to the ground, Warhounds and Strykers alike, minds whiting out in pain. The backlash of that much power caused Lucas's control of the merge to waver, just a little.

Don't kill them, Kerr said, guilt and a lifetime of commitment to the Strykers asking for a reprieve.

Beg elsewhere, Lucas said as he raised their shields and felt the dip on the mental grid that signified an attack from the Strykers, because they had never learned what the Sercas had imparted to the Warhounds about merging.

Telekinetic strength exploded around them as if a bomb had gone off, cracking the ground and the walls, sending debris spinning off into the storm for the wind to catch. Lucas was ready for it, mind braced to deflect the attack. He grunted, rocking back on his heels from the mental strain, muscles drawn tight over bone as he stubbornly held his ground.

Kerr fed him more strength and Lucas absorbed it greedily, fortifying his telekinesis right before they were hit. Lucas's training and knowledge of how Gideon worked on the field was the only thing that let him anticipate his younger brother's attack. The Class II telekinetic had merged seven other telekinetics with his power. Lucas could feel the difference between his brother and the Strykers like a sharp divide. Gideon had been trained by Nathan. His attack was quick, powerful-expected in this instance in the wake of the kill order. The Warhounds had dropped off the mental grid, covered by telepaths in merge, and this time the telekinetic attack happened both outside and inside Lucas's shields.

The power Gideon wielded would have crushed Lucas and Kerr if Lucas's defenses had been even a sliver less than what they were. His shields weren't a single barrier; he layered them at intervals around their bodies and mind. What Gideon's merge broke down was only half of Lucas's defenses, but the damage was more extensive than that. Power broke apart in Lucas's mind, synapses overloading somewhere in his brain at the backlash. Lucas's mind dealt with the damage instinctually, compensating for a bridge that was lost, the merge shifting just enough to steady both minds.

I'll take the telepaths, Kerr said. You deal with the telekinetics.

It was the logical choice, and Kerr was used to being a backboard for telekinetic strength. Lucas didn't hesitate to switch his concentration to the telekinetics, holding up his shields while Kerr used his own Class II telepathic strength in an attack that left holes in all lesser-Classed psion minds. Not as deep as Lucas could go, but deep enough to cause damage.

Not even a month ago, Kerr wouldn't have been able to stand his ground in a battle like this. His shields wouldn't have withstood the follow-up attacks. Here, now, his power had a new depth, strength once used fighting his empathy now relegated to controlling it, twisting his secondary power into an attack that affected everyone's emotions.

He had no formal training for his empathy. What Kerr knew now had been imparted through Lucas from the psi surgery, and what Lucas didn't know about the human and not-so-human mind wasn't worth the knowing. Kerr had control of his minute amount of empathy, just enough to push fear against the minds that he slammed through until they choked on it.

A Class IX power wasn't really much of anything to be worried about. Kerr didn't think it would make a huge difference, but it left damage in its wake. People forgot, sometimes, why the higher Classes were rare and why most psions never broke past a Class V. The human mind didn't need a lot of power to do a lot of damage. It just needed enough to leave a scar. A reminder.

Kristen understood that better than anyone else because she lived with it day in and day out. Her mind was just scar tissue built on top of scar tissue, layers of damage that would never be fixed because she'd been broken too young and too many times, and no one had bothered to put her back together again. When she dropped her shields, called by the taste of fear Kerr had projected, her presence shook through everyone's mind.

Lucas cut her off at the pass, sliding between Kerr and his sister with a skill that spoke of long practice. Kristen was only a distraction, though, just a threat that they couldn't ignore and had to face down first even as Gideon dropped out of the merge he led, his place filled by a different telekinetic. Lucas couldn't react fast enough and stop them, not and risk letting Kristen find a crack in his own two-person merge and exploit it.

Lucas, Kristen called to him, laughter in her thoughts. Come play with me!

In the midst of all that fighting, only one person stood apart from it all, mind bleeding into her bones as she felt Gideon teleport beyond Lucas's defenses with Jin Li by his side. Samantha spat out a mouthful of blood and saliva as the wind howled in her ears. Kristen was a heaviness between herself and Lucas on the mental grid, a barrier that was steadily eating through the thoughts that swirled all around them.

Samantha's shields were paper-thin and full of holes. Her defenses were no better than a human's, which was all the difference that mattered.

For the first time in her entire life, Samantha could think.

She used it-that decadent, giddy sense of freedom-to fight.

[THIRTY-ONE].