Some might say the belief was a delusional one her mind had created to survive a nightmare—and perhaps it was—but it had helped her navigate the piercing loneliness of the past seven years. It would help her weather this, too.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, proud her voice didn’t tremble.
Cardinal eyes devoid of stars met her own gaze, Kaleb’s hair uncharacteristically tousled. “Give you your own organizer.” A paper-thin tablet computer landed on the desk an instant later. “I need this screen for a comm conference in twenty minutes.”
With that, he reached out and entered a URL into the browser—an obscure one to her eyes, created as it was of a string of numbers. “That’ll tell you what you need to know about Santano.” Pushing off the desk, he walked to the door. “Remember, I need that screen in nineteen minutes.”
She stared after him in openmouthed disbelief until she could no longer hear his footsteps. Her mind tried to find some kind of reason in his response, was stymied by the inexplicability of it. Kaleb had to know full well that information was power, and yet he’d handed her the key to it.
Rubbing her fingertips over her temples in a vain effort to clear the confusion, she turned her attention to the page he’d brought up—and found herself on a site run by a self-termed conspiracy theorist. The otherwise anonymous owner identified himself as Psy, and given the amount of information on the site, he was one clever enough to hide his tracks from the Council’s enforcers—because the topics he covered were more than taboo.
Skimming past the recent entries, which stated the Council was no longer in existence, regardless of the lack of an official announcement, she found the search box and once more typed in Enrique’s name . . . to be directed to a single continuous page that held update after update. The most recent one was dated just over two years ago and stated simply: Kaleb Krychek now on Council. Acknowledged protégé of Santano Enrique—no evidence for or against theory that he assisted S.E. in the torture murders.
A stabbing pain in her chest, a cry trapped behind her hand. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, she began to read up from the oldest entry.
According to the author, Santano Enrique had been that rarest of anchors, one who’d not only embraced politics instead of isolation, but thrived in the cutthroat world of the Council. He’d also been a serial killer responsible for the torture murders of a number of young changeling women. He hadn’t died of natural causes, as reported in the mainstream media. He’d been executed by the DarkRiver leopards and the SnowDancer wolves in a gruesome fashion, a message to the remainder of the Council left stapled to his tongue.
“You have five more minutes.”
Snapping up her head, she saw Kaleb in the doorway. His hair was damp but neatly combed, his shirt a deep blue, his pants charcoal, the belt black—the same shade as his shoes. He held a glass of the nutrient drink in his hand.
Whatever he’d learned at his mentor’s knee, it could be nothing good. And yet the compulsion to go to him thundered in her blood, making her distrust her own mind—regardless of the fact she knew she was immune to mind control on that level. As no one could compromise her mind, neither could anyone control her, not without her being aware of the interference.
Still, her stomach twisted, her nails digging into the softness of her palms.
“How could anyone outside the Council know all these details?” she said, surprised the words came out sounding calm and rational when her body and mind continued to fight a battle she couldn’t explain. “Either he’s delusional or he has a source.”
Kaleb sipped at his drink, never taking his eyes off her. “What do you think?”
“His accusations are so outlandish, they might well be the truth. A source.”
“Likely.” Finishing the drink, he teleported the glass away. “He is correct in all particulars.”
Her fingers trembled as she picked up the organizer, noting absently that it was far thinner and lighter than had been the norm seven years before. “Santano Enrique was insane?” Even as she asked the question, she was thinking about the statement she’d just read that said Kaleb had effectively been in Enrique’s “care” since he was five years of age. It would be the greatest fallacy to assume the experience hadn’t warped his development, turning him into a mirror of the man who had been the paternal figure in his life.
Kaleb slid his hands into the pockets of his suit pants, nothing in him speaking of the boy he’d been—a boy who had grown up with a monster. “That,” he said, “is a matter of opinion. Some would say he was a perfect creation of Silence. Totally without emotion, without empathy. To him, the murders were interesting experiments.”
KALEB saw the slick sheen of fear in Sahara’s eyes as she rose from his chair, her hair clipped back to expose a face that had no deceit in it. He wondered if she was even capable of the games he played on a daily basis, using truths and lies interchangeably to achieve his aims.
Though she left the room without taking her eyes off him, he knew she hadn’t regained the totality of her memories—she wasn’t afraid enough, the wariness in her generalized and not specific to him.
He let her go, not pointing out that if he wanted to hurt her right this instant, there was nothing in the world she could do to stop him. Her bones would snap like matchsticks should he unleash the merest fraction of his telekinetic strength, her blood pouring out of her in a pulse of darkest scarlet. As it had once before, to soak into the sheets on the bed in that cheap hotel room that had burned to black cinders but hadn’t escaped Enforcement’s eye, thanks to the games Santano liked to play.
Waiting several minutes to give her guard a chance to go down, he walked to the open doors to see that she’d taken a cross-legged position on the sun lounger. The umbrella, unnecessary at this time of day, remained closed, the glossy black of her hair glowing with hints of red-gold in the dawn light.
Those strands were unusual but not totally unpredictable, given the genetic mix of maternal and paternal DNA. Her mother’s hair color was a soft black, while her father’s was that of wet clay, the otherwise recessive trait for red hair strong in the Kyriakus family tree. It was Sahara’s psychic profile that had come out of the blue, rare as that of a dual cardinal.
To Kaleb’s knowledge, Sahara was the only individual in the Net with her specific ability—one so coveted her captors hadn’t executed her despite the labyrinth.
Sahara Kyriakus held within her the potential to make a man into an emperor.
Pure Psy
IF THERE WAS one individual in the Net who had Vasquez’s respect, it was Kaleb Krychek. The cardinal Tk had proven his Silence with his cool, calculated ascension to the Council, eliminating anyone who stood in his way, and doing so with a stealth and an intelligence that meant none of the executions had ever been connected to him.
Henry, too, had spoken well of the younger man, but he’d been unsure about trusting Kaleb with the inner workings of Pure Psy. “Krychek’s priorities are not our own,” the now-dead leader of Pure Psy had said. “He wants to take total, unquestioned control of the Net, of that I’m certain.”
That goal had clashed with Pure Psy’s—for where Krychek wanted to utilize such control to increase his power, Pure Psy wanted to use it for the betterment of the Psy race. However, the situation had changed since Henry’s original decision not to invite Krychek into their inner circle, the most critical being Henry’s assassination.
The organization would need a strong man at the helm when it rose to power and Krychek fit the bill to perfection. His involvement would also serve to calm the populace, maintaining continuity with the previous Council.