FORTY-SIX.

SEPTEMBER 2379.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Telepaths were dying beneath her hands, beneath her power, and Jael could only let them slide away as the merge ate through their minds. Nothing she could do would keep them alive long enough for her to stabilize their minds. She couldn't save most of them, so Jael settled for a few, two of them being Lucas's sisters. She kept a careful mental touch on Samantha and Kristen as she worked on the Strykers she could help. Jael judged the state of the fight by the state of those two Sercas and how damaged their minds were becoming.

Only when telekinetics started teleporting into the street in droves did Jael realize how many Strykers they were going to lose. She was inundated by the spiraling death throes of too many minds, and they threatened to take her down with them. Even her s.h.i.+elds weren't enough, the mental shrieks of the dying clawing at her mind. For the first time since she'd dipped into a person's mind for psi surgery, Jael closed herself off to their thoughts and pain, trying to find her balance again.

The telepaths who were purposefully held back from the merge to be available for the fallout couldn't have known what was coming. They couldn't have foreseen that Strykers would be dying in the streets, slumped over one another, bleeding in the gutter, minds tangled together in a knot that no one could undo.

Then the cause of the whole d.a.m.n mess teleported into the street, legs crumpling beneath him as he appeared. Someone screamed for Jael, but she was already running, stumbling over bodies to reach Lucas. The Stryker merge that had hung over the mental grid for so long finally broke down completely, the Serca siblings losing the viselike grip they had on everyone's minds. Lucas, for all his immense power, was so far gone, wrapped so tight and stretched so thin, that he never even felt it when his mind broke.

Samantha did, but she could do nothing, had nothing left to reach for him with that could help. Her telepathy was as shattered as the merge, and Kristen was no longer present to help pull Lucas out of the mental abyss that threatened his sanity. Kristen was already gone, mind broken beyond repair and shutting down, one dying spark in a wave of many. Try as she might, Samantha couldn't find Lucas in the mess that was the mental grid, and Jael felt the girl slip away somewhere deep inside herself.

Jael crashed to her knees beside Lucas's body, yanking at the lock of his skinsuit helmet and prying it off. She cus.h.i.+oned his head with one hand, letting her fingers catch the weight of it rather than the street. At the touch of her mind to his, Lucas's eyes snapped open, pupils tiny black pinp.r.i.c.ks in a sea of dark blue, blood leaking out of the corners like tears.

"Lucas," Jael said, heart pounding in her chest. Stay with me.

He focused on her, or seemed to. Recognition was there, but Jael knew, somehow, that it wasn't of her. She would never know what he saw in that moment.

He opened his mouth and choked on words. "I-"

Breath stuttered in his chest. Jael felt his mind fall through the mental grid.

She couldn't catch him.

Jael felt the ma.s.sive, gaping hole in Lucas's ravaged mind-all that was left of him after the merge-swallow everything in the wake of the trauma he'd inflicted on himself. Jael was effectively shut out, clawing at his mind and not even touching s.h.i.+elds, just empty s.p.a.ce.

"Lucas," she whispered, staring blankly down at his unconscious form and the slow rise and fall of his chest. Jael needed to transport him to the Strykers Syndicate immediately, but she wasn't sure if any telekinetics were left who had the strength to teleport.

A shadow drifted over her and Jael looked up, staring at Jason and Quinton. Jason had his arm slung over Quinton's shoulder, letting the other man take most of his weight. An ugly rip was torn through his uniform and skinsuit, blood having saturated the area, but his chest seemed whole. The grief they exhibited rubbed against the raw places in her own mind. Quinton was staring down the street with a dead look in his eyes, seemingly unaware of his surroundings.

"It's over," Jason said, eyes bloodshot, voice raw and wounded. "Threnody detonated the bomb. Kerr made sure Nathan and his Warhounds couldn't leave the explosion radius before everyone else teleported out of range."

Jael closed her eyes, her mind still searching for Lucas's. "And the people already in s.p.a.ce?"

Quinton spoke, but he didn't sound like the man Jael knew. "Let them die out there."

PART NINE.

Tabula Rasa.

SESSION DATE: 2128.09.28.

LOCATION: Inst.i.tute of Psionics Research.

CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett.

SUBJECT: 2581.

FILE NUMBER: 881.

The doctor kneels before the girl, one hand gripping the cascade of wires that hangs from bruised skin. Those bleached-out violet eyes seem sunken and they no longer look at the camera. They look elsewhere.

"Aisling," the doctor pleads. "We can't survive like this."

The girl is still and quiet, one hand clutching a white card. After a long moment, she unclenches her hand and lets the card fall to the floor. "Thank you," she whispers.

The doctor picks the card up, turns it around to see the shape on the underside. "We don't want your thanks."

"I know." The girl smiles and leans forward, the effort making her gasp. She presses a kiss to the woman's forehead, like a benediction when it isn't, not in her prison cell. "I wasn't thanking you."

The doctor drops the card to the floor and reaches out to help the child lean back in her seat. Behind them, the machines click and hum and whine, a nonstop sound that has been a constant companion to them both.

"What do we do?" the doctor whispers. "What do we do next?"

"Anything you want, Lucas." Aisling smiles, eyes wide and glazed and looking at things no one else can see. "Anything at all."

FORTY-SEVEN.

OCTOBER 2379.

TORONTO, CANADA.

It never changed.

Jael wondered about that, the first time she went down into the static of Lucas's mind to try to anchor a psi link. She gave up a.n.a.lyzing it on the tenth try. The vibrancy was gone, the brightness normally there on the mental grid missing. Nothing remained but an echo, a negative imprint that she couldn't hold on to.

Not a memory, exactly. Not really a dream. Just the seam of his mind and the s.p.a.ces in between that he'd fallen through. Just that last, drawn-out moment before the permanent end he hovered over, unable to let go, because psions were incapable of forgetting. Dying quick was always preferable to dying slow. Bleeding out in the mind happened like this, in increments. Searching for Lucas was like trying to find one clean drop of water in an ocean of toxic mistakes. Impossible without belief, without help.

Jael stared across the medical bed where Lucas lay, at a hollow-eyed Samantha, who swayed on weak legs, Marguerite standing worriedly behind her.

You won't find him, you know, Samantha said, the psi link between them quivering on her end as she struggled to hold on to something that only Jael was generating. Not how he was. I don't know why you brought me in here.

I'm not expecting to find sanity in his thoughts, Jael said as she curled a hand around Lucas's lax one. I'm only interested in what's left behind. We need your brother.

Samantha hunched her shoulders, the rigid line of her body bending into a brittle curve. Do you, Jael? You need something he no longer is.

Samantha could feel him, here in his mind, damaged as they both were, when all the times that Jael had tried before she only felt that vast, echoing emptiness; only seen a flatline on the EEG and supporting machines, despite the heart beating in his chest. Jael had been in and out of both their minds for weeks on end, struggling to find the pieces of two shattered personalities and coming up achingly, bitterly short.

Jael was a Cla.s.s III telepath. She would never be able to reach far enough to find Lucas, but Samantha could. She could find him, when no one else had the ability to, because Lucas always led her to him. It took nearly a month for Jael to realize why, of days spent holding Samantha's thoughts together while the telepath screamed her throat b.l.o.o.d.y and raw beneath makes.h.i.+ft mental s.h.i.+elds that wouldn't hold. Permanent s.h.i.+elds weren't an option, not yet, not until they found Lucas.

Samantha was as whole as Jael could make her, something far less than what the girl had been born to be. Jael could see the fragility in the blonde, in the tiny mental threads that held her together. All Jael's work and all for nothing, the Stryker thought tiredly.

Jael pressed her telepathy against the edge of Samantha's mind and the old scar of the mindwipe that had Lucas's touch all over it. All over his sister. Samantha's mind had never been her own. It had horrified Jael when she'd figured out what the scars pressed into Samantha's thoughts meant, yet it also relieved her. Here was the shape of Lucas, in Samantha's mind, the mold he needed to fill. Here was their salvation, as fractured as it was.

Jael stared at Samantha as their minds plunged deeper into the void that was seemingly all that remained of Lucas. Then she closed her eyes and Jael dug her telepathy into Samantha's battered thoughts with precise pressure.

I'm sorry, Jael said, for what they did to you. For what I need to do.

Samantha's screams echoed in the room, in their thoughts, bouncing off the jagged edges of a broken mind and against her s.h.i.+elds, as Jael stripped Samantha of the mindwipe. The last piece of who she was-torn from everything that had made her into what Nathan and Lucas forced her to be. Jael cut the psi link between them, and Samantha, no longer anch.o.r.ed, slipped away, collapsing unconscious in Marguerite's arms.

Jael wondered who Samantha would be, if she would be anything at all, when she woke up.

The pattern was in Jael's thoughts now, a delicate thing that only a higher-Cla.s.sed psion could possibly create. Borrowed, for now, as she spread the mindwipe through Lucas's mind, the mental grid humming around her.

We need you, she thought fiercely as that pattern of himself Lucas gave up so long ago seeped back into his thoughts. Some errant shard of a forgotten whole sparked and sputtered in her power, forming into a knotted, twisted psi signature she didn't recognize.

It always came back to that simple, selfish demand that drove humanity forward.

Need. Want. Some distant, half-formed idea of world integration beneath a clear blue sky.

Just some child's impossible dream.

Lucas, please.

... Jael.

What seemed like hours later, when she opened her eyes and came back to herself in a medical room at the top of a city tower, Jael was greeted by the soft, rhythmic noise from monitors tracking the synaptic pulse of Lucas's damaged mind, his hand weakly squeezing hers.

FORTY-EIGHT.

NOVEMBER 2379.

TORONTO, CANADA.

"Here's your weekly update," Jason said as he handed over a datapad to Jael before easing himself into a chair. "The major fallout from Paris stayed inside that country's borders. Winter winds will spread the radiation particles, but whatever damage it might do where it falls won't rate much. The radiation is mostly going to hit deadzones."

"I could wish that was the last time a nuclear bomb is detonated on this planet," Jael said as she scrolled through the report. "Somehow, I doubt it."

"If it happens again, we won't be around to see it."

But they were seeing the political fallout and it wasn't going to be easy to navigate a world where fear of psions might never fade.

"Oh, before I forget." Jason pulled a small fruit out of his jacket pocket and set it on Jael's desk. "That's for you. Courtesy of Matron. Carried it with me when I brought in the latest s.h.i.+pment of seedlings."

Jael looked up from the datapad in her hand and eyed the orange fruit as if it were something dangerous. "You sure she didn't poison it?"

"That woman barely lets people near her garden. You think she'd knowingly allow poison?" Jason shook his head. "Try it. She said it's called a k.u.mquat."

Jael stared at the tiny, bite-size fruit before her with the healthy hesitation that a lifetime of wariness had gifted her. Eventually, she picked up the fruit and popped it in her mouth. The skin was sweet; biting into it was a different story. The taste s.h.i.+fted from sweet to sour on her tongue, the flavor shocking her taste buds.

She made a face and swallowed the pulp as fast as she could, spitting out the seed. "I don't know about that one. You sure you didn't mess up the seed growth somehow?"

Jason scratched the back of his neck, shrugging. "Maybe? Thought I had this tree down. I guess Matron will have to wait on her pears."

"What in the world is a pear?"

"It's another fruit. I think."