Power slid through his mind, bolstering his Cla.s.s I strength, burning against the edges of his s.h.i.+elds. The faint hint of pain was caught by Kristen and locked down somewhere that Lucas couldn't reach. His sisters were like twin spots of brightness buried in his mind. Kristen's presence was chaotic and distracting, her empathy pulling at his mind in ways it didn't want to bend, but had no choice but to accept. Samantha was a mental bridge between Lucas and the Strykers in London, linked beyond that to other Strykers across the planet. A web of psionic power spanned the world, and she was slowly spinning it all together, feeding him the power. Her own Cla.s.s II strength was barely enough to guide the Strykers into the merge and help Lucas hold it together.

Lucas was the apex of that merge, the only one who could have carried the load and survived. Nathan made it a point to target him first.

The next telepathic strike caused Lucas to stumble in midstride. Jason caught him with one hand, keeping Lucas upright as they ran. Jason didn't look at him, all his attention focused on the street ahead. "Lucas?"

The crus.h.i.+ng pressure of merged minds weighed down on Lucas's s.h.i.+elds, echoed in the drag of his feet against the ground. He blinked black dots from his vision. "Let's start teleporting."

Telekinesis wrapped around everyone, dozens of Strykers picking up their fellow teammates and teleporting across the distance ahead in short-distance 'ports. They judged the distance as best they could using binoculars to get a visual, putting kilometers behind them in seconds rather than minutes or even hours. The Strykers came out of the last teleport into a hail of enemy gunfire, energy darts and bullets slamming into telekinetic s.h.i.+elds and Warhound telepaths struggling to break their minds as their feet hit the ground.

The Strykers in the scattered group spread farther out. Some telekinetic s.h.i.+elds fell beneath Warhound attacks, forcing Strykers to find physical cover behind broken cement foundations. Some weren't quick enough and took bullets in the back, collapsing to the ground. They didn't remain out in the open for long. Telekinetics pulled the wounded out of fire range, teleporting them back to London with the help of telepaths who provided up-to-date visuals.

Quinton dragged Lucas down behind a crumbling wall with Jason's help, watching Lucas's back while he watched over their minds. Lucas let his head fall back, helmet sc.r.a.ping against a cracked cement wall. His breath came rapidly, the oxygen coming out of his tanks clean, even if it tasted like copper on his tongue.

The sound of gunfire filled the air, screams echoing every once in a while over the shouted orders coming from both sides of the fight. Voices echoed down dozens of psi links, the mental chatter buzzing in the back of everyone's mind. Beyond the Warhounds and conscripted human soldiers, the launch platforms were visible with their s.p.a.ce shuttles, sunlight glinting off fuselages.

"They've got a s.p.a.ce shuttle on the launch ramp," Quinton said as he ducked down to reload.

"Lucas, who's on it?" Jason asked.

"Unregistered humans," Lucas said after a moment, the telepaths in his merge bringing him the information. "Some Warhounds."

"What about Nathan?"

"No. He's still on the ground." Lucas coughed, trying to catch his breath. "We can't let that s.p.a.ce shuttle launch."

"Then we won't."

Quinton looked over Lucas's head at Jason. "You pulling back your cover?"

"No other choice," Jason said grimly. He handed Quinton his gun. The Strykers ranged around them moved to compensate for his loss. Jason slid down beside Lucas and put his back against the wall, closing his eyes. "Can't let the Warhounds have a gene pool to breed from. Besides, this will buy Threnody and Kerr some more time."

Lucas nodded tightly. "They're almost in position."

"Good to know," Quinton said as he focused on the enemy. "We'll watch your backs."

Lucas pulled Jason into the merge, reaching through him for Keiko. She was on the other side of the city, having come in from the north, her group of Strykers closing in on the launch area. Lucas's mind pressed against Keiko's s.h.i.+elds and she dropped them.

The merge had mostly been filled by telepaths. Samantha anch.o.r.ed the 'path-oriented psions as Lucas rolled through Keiko's mind, pulling the telekinetic into a secondary merge that began to meld with the first. Keiko knew every last Stryker in the Syndicate, both those in Paris and the ones left scattered across the world. She gave up those psi signatures to Lucas, their locations sparking across the mental grid for Lucas to see.

He reached for them, searching out the psions that read to his touch as telekinetic, and pulled the ones he could spare from the fighting into the merge. It was difficult for the Strykers to give up control, to cede their power to someone else completely. In the face of a changing world, they succ.u.mbed to Lucas's mental order reluctantly, and he felt the merge strain beneath hundreds of psion minds. This merge held more power and more minds than any other Lucas had ever created, and its strength scorched through his own power, nearly shattering his concentration. Pain crept through his awareness, p.r.i.c.king at his thoughts.

That's not for you to feel, Kristen said, his sister suddenly there in the center of his mind.

She turned off the pain, the safety function that enabled a person to know when something was dangerously wrong going dormant. The body needed pain, needed to know what was wrong with itself, as did the mind. Lucas couldn't know, not for this. Kristen locked down all the pain synapses in his head and body, her empathic manipulation a mental block not even Lucas could break down.

Through the jumbled eyes of too many people, the Strykers in merge saw the s.p.a.ce shuttle launch, saw it streak down the long length of the curved ramp as it was propelled into the sky. Engines fired with a roar, the vapor trail streaming behind the s.p.a.ce shuttle, thick and impossible to miss in the late-summer sky as it fought gravity to leave the planet.

Jason, Lucas said, his thought echoed by hundreds of others. Take point.

The bottom seemed to drop out of the merge, every single one of Jason's s.h.i.+elds falling. His power exploded on the mental grid as a novalike burn, channeling into the merge. Through Lucas, Jason linked to every telekinetic in the Stryker ranks they could spare from defense on the field, drawing on their strength to bolster his own as he telekinetically reached for the s.p.a.ce shuttle with a crus.h.i.+ng mental grip.

Lucas nearly lost Jason in that rush of power, struggling to hold on to the other man's mind in the sheer ma.s.siveness of the merge. It took Quinton to find him, the bond between the two stretched taut, but it held. The backlash rolled through Quinton's mind, springing back down the bond in a never-ending loop that threatened the pyrokinetic's sanity. Lucas threw up a telepathic s.h.i.+eld around Quinton's mind, struggling to keep the other man from succ.u.mbing to madness. Quinton's thanks was wordless and desperate.

In the sky, the s.p.a.ce shuttle hit the upper atmosphere. In Lucas's mind, the merge was a glimmering monstrosity. Jason was somewhere in the thick of things, his Cla.s.s 0 strength straining everyone's connection. Despite the Warhound merge striking against their minds, driven by Nathan's angry desperation, the Stryker telekinetics still managed to grab the s.p.a.ce shuttle and wrench it off course. The broken angle of ascent was helped along by way of merged telekinesis. The s.p.a.ce shuttle shredded apart as it fell back to earth.

NO!.

Dozens of Warhounds minds screamed the word through the mental grid as the aborted launch-so close to its goal of escape-ended in hundreds of fiery fragments that streaked across the sky like meteorites. Silence stretched across the mental grid where the s.p.a.ce shuttle fell, the static of human minds diminis.h.i.+ng. They died in Earth's atmosphere, burning up as gravity pulled them home.

Nathan's merge ripped through the frayed mess on the mental grid, aiming for Lucas's merge. The mental grid tore beneath the clash of so many minds slamming together, so many minds breaking apart and dying, threatening to take neighboring minds with them. Then Samantha was there, cutting and tearing the Stryker merge apart from the inside out. She rea.s.sembled it into something that would hold, struggling to keep it stable.

Lucas's mind momentarily blanked out beneath the weight of the merge, thoughts and power twisting with something he couldn't identify, some emotion that Kristen refused to let him experience. In that moment where it seemed his mind would tear out of his body, Nathan slammed through his thoughts, fracturing everything.

Lucas's mind didn't break, though it took every bit of skill he had to force it to remain together. He borrowed strength from the merge itself, taking power pulled out of the willing minds of hundreds of Strykers. Aisling had seen this symbiosis years ago, lifetimes ago, in a white room bombed to ashes during the Border Wars. The disparate pieces of a world struggling to realign themselves into something new.

Somewhere, in the s.p.a.ce that existed between two heartbeats, in the possibilities that festered in the human mind, Lucas saw it all. In the bottom of his mind, in memories too numerous to count, Lucas thought he could hear her.

Tell me that they're worth it, Lucas remembered saying once as a child as he gripped his future in his hands, knowing even then that it was too late to back out. Too late to give up. Tell me that what's left of humanity is worth the future you're trying to give them.

Silence was his only answer then, same as it was now. He'd heard all her excuses before anyway.

He was the means. His daughter was the end.

In the here and now, none of that mattered, not when the only thing that everyone was striving for was survival.

The sound of a gunshot, too close for comfort and too loud to ignore, jerked Lucas's attention out of the merge, instinct pulling up a telekinetic s.h.i.+eld around himself. The split-second distraction lasted long enough for him to recognize the voice that started screaming, to feel Jason wrench himself free of the merge. Jason's abrupt exit ripped too many minds apart in the process, ruining the network Samantha had built through Lucas's mind.

Lucas opened his eyes, the world gone bright and liquid as his mind overloaded. He saw a familiar figure standing in front of them, gun leveled at someone else. Lucas watched Gideon smile.

"You couldn't hide Jason forever, Lucas," his younger brother said. "You didn't mindwipe me deep enough. I still had his psi signature in my memories."

The crack of displaced air from a teleport broke his tenuous concentration, and Lucas spiraled downward into a fraying merge that Nathan was taking apart one mind at a time with lethal, focused intent.

At the bottom of that tangled mess, Lucas found a way out.

FORTY-ONE.

SEPTEMBER 2379.

PARIS, FRANCE.

With the help of a telepath, Gideon used the eyes of a dying Stryker for his visual and teleported in behind the Strykers' defensive line. Quinton never saw him arrive, but he felt it when Jason got shot. The crack of the gun going off drowned out the sound of the teleport. The bullet slammed into Jason's chest at close range with telekinetic help. The sudden agony was shared between them. Quinton doubled over screaming as Jason's mind exploded through his own, the trauma nearly incapacitating him.

Jason, tied deeply in the merge, was forcibly yanked out of that connection, his mind ripped away from the collective whole. His eyes snapped open, the world spinning around him with a suddenness that made him sick. He choked back the bile that crawled up his throat, not wanting to vomit inside his helmet. He thought he heard Quinton yell a name, maybe his, as he struggled to breathe.

Blood bubbled past his lips. The hand that suddenly pressed down on his chest pulled a scream out of him that showed up in sound waves and light, in the blood that rushed through Quinton's face and veins and skin. Jason blinked, his power fluctuating in ways it wasn't supposed to-or maybe it was. Around him, he could see a glittering blanket of light, of energy, that flowed back in a connecting line to a body of cells and bones and breath. The connection hummed in his ears, against his skin.

Is this what our powers look like? Jason thought in some distant corner of his mind. Do we all burn like this?

His telekinetic s.h.i.+elds went down beneath his shattered concentration. Everything hurt, the pain worse than when Kristen ripped open his natal s.h.i.+elds. The world was s.h.i.+fting, Quinton pulling him back into the spectrum that they lived in, his mind impossible to ignore through the bond. Jason blinked, and blinked some more, until he was looking up into Quinton's pale face behind his helmet. Quinton's eyes were wide from shock and fear, blood leaking from his nose and ears. The pyrokinetic was leaning over Lucas in order to reach Jason.

"Jason," Quinton said, voice breaking on the name. "d.a.m.n it, Jason. You need to hold on."

"I am," Jason gasped out. He lifted a hand to Quinton's shoulder, fingers skittering over rough synthfabric. Jason left streaks of blood behind where he touched, the shape of hemoglobin in his sight swallowing him whole. "I am."

Jason felt the tug of foreign telekinesis pull at his body, like the shock of a defib machine on a heart. Gideon was trying to teleport him off the field. Jason closed his eyes and anch.o.r.ed his power in the only thing that mattered if he was going to survive-Quinton. Jason held on to the pyrokinetic through the teleport, forcing Gideon to bear the extra weight.

They landed hard on a cold metal floor, in a room filled with shouting voices and the steady hum of machines. Jason choked on blood, Quinton's hands yanking at the flak jacket strapped over his uniform to get to the wound beneath. Neither man cared about the guns trained on their bodies; Quinton only cared about Jason, because if Jason died, then so would he, along with the rest of the world. With shaking fingers, Quinton undid the helmet of Jason's skinsuit, pulling it off.

He fumbled at his own, communication lost with the comm link wired into the helmets. He tossed both aside, pressing his hands down harder over the sucking wound in Jason's chest, fingers digging against synthfabric and torn flesh, blood slicking his own skin.

"I wanted him alive, Gideon," Nathan said from somewhere behind them.

With Jason slipping away beneath his hands, Quinton ignored everyone. "Don't do this, Jays," Quinton said raggedly as he leaned his weight against the wound, eyes riveted on Jason's bloodless face. "Don't you f.u.c.king die on me. Threnody and Kerr would never forgive you."

Lashes flickered over Jason's eyes.

"That's it. Come on, do what you did for Threnody. Fix yourself."

"No nanites" came the near voiceless reply.

Quinton shook his head fiercely, one hand moving to slap Jason's face lightly to keep him awake. "You don't need it. You never needed it. They were just a G.o.dd.a.m.n crutch. Now f.u.c.king look at me and fix yourself."

Jason's protest was soundless, blood bubbling bright and red from his lips. The bubbles popped on a wet breath, and Jason jerked beneath Quinton's hands, still drowning.

"Please," Quinton begged, feeling the bond begin to fray in the back of his mind, starting to give way. He could feel cracks in his own mind at that anchor point, the painful stretch of his thoughts beginning to unravel. "Please. G.o.dd.a.m.n it, don't do this."

Jason forced his eyes open, black pupils having swallowed the hazel of his irises. He struggled to bring the face above him into focus, Quinton's expression frantic.

"Okay," Jason said, lips barely moving.

He closed his eyes, forced his power to sink into his own body. Down, down, until he saw his own cellular makeup against the back of his eyelids, all the possibility of life held in the double-helix coil of a DNA strand. No need for nanites and a biotank, just the code that defined his body. Just the power found in the genetic makeup of a Cla.s.s 0 psion.

Jason dragged his power through his veins, through muscle and tissue, the fragile sponginess of his lungs, looking for what needed to be fixed. Tear by tear he healed himself from the inside out, fixing the hole the bullet had torn through him. The blood loss was something he would have to fix later. He didn't have time to remake pints of the stuff by coaxing at his bone marrow, not when Warhounds wanted to peel him off the ground and take him into s.p.a.ce.

Jason hacked up sticky globules of blood, spitting until nothing was left in his lungs but air. A metallic taste saturated his mouth as he gripped Quinton's arms, needing an anchor. The bond between them shuddered in their minds. It couldn't block the headache pounding through Jason's head or the shaky weakness in his limbs. Pain burned through his nerves, impossible to ignore.

"Oh, man," he gasped. "I feel like s.h.i.+t."

Quinton was abruptly wrenched away, the pyrokinetic slammed down to the floor beside him. Jason felt that same telekinesis pin his own body to the floor. Weakly, he tried to fight it, but his mind hadn't stabilized yet, even if his body mostly had. He needed time to focus.

Nathan wasn't going to give him that.

Kerr did.

The telepath slid into Jason's mind with an ease that came from a lifetime of living in each other's head. Jason didn't fight him as Kerr focused through his eyes. Kerr soaked up the details of the room and used that visual to teleport in by way of merged Stryker telekinetics, mind cutting through Jason's bruised and battered thoughts without apology.

Jason-s.h.i.+eld!

FORTY-TWO.

SEPTEMBER 2379.

PARIS, FRANCE.

The pilot landed the shuttle hard, one of the last civilian shuttles allowed to come to ground. The Command Center had ordered everyone else to stay clear of Paris until the current problem was dealt with.

"Could he not get us killed prematurely?" Threnody said as she glanced at Kerr. "That's the worst landing I've gone through in months. Matron is a better pilot than he is."

Kerr undid his harness before grabbing his helmet and putting it on. "Let's just be happy we got here at all and get the h.e.l.l off this shuttle."

Threnody stood up. "Couldn't agree more."

The fifty-person shuttle was packed to the bulkheads, the pilot having ignored weight restrictions. They didn't have enough fuel to make it back to London, which was the only reason the Command Center allowed them to land. Kerr mindwiped every pa.s.senger and crew member on their way out, erasing their memories of himself and Threnody.

"Maintenance hatch is in the galley," Kerr said. "Let's get below."

They reached the galley and knelt on the floor. The latch was embedded in the decking; Kerr undid it and the hatch dropped down. First Threnody, then Kerr slid into the cargo bay of the shuttle. He locked the hatch behind them.

The s.p.a.ce was full of cargo trunks. Heavy-duty straps kept everything held down, with a small aisle between the two sides of the cargo bay. They found the carrying case still secured where they'd left it with their bags. They freed their bags first and stripped out of their clothes in favor of the nondescript workers' uniforms and tool belts Samantha had stolen for them. Then they freed the carrying case from the anchor straps.