Visions of Heat

room, if not sooner.

Survival was going to become a dicey thing if she wasn't careful. 'What I won't agree to is being used by the Council as a pawn to test Kaleb's strength. Find another target to pin the bull's-eye on.'

Her stomach was a knot and her muscles ached, but she'd walked out alive. Faith knew she had very little time. Either Kaleb would get impatient and decide to push his own agenda or the Council would figure out what Faith was doing behind their backs. And what she was doing was hunting a murderer.

She refused to leave Marine's killer free to take another life. Whoever he was, he was too strong, too mentally powerful. She had to pinpoint him before he figured out a way to circumvent her new protections, protections that held faint, dangerous tendrils of emotion. He might not have tortured her again with his fantasies of death, but it wasn't for lack of trying—his darkness had been scratching at her mind for two days, wanting to show her what he would do.

Tonight, she was going to let him in.

But first she wanted to gather as much useful data as possible. Not for herself, but for the changelings, the only people who'd ever treated her as anything other than a highly profitable machine. 'Vaughn.' Her jaguar's name was a talisman. Fur brushed over her hands, lips pressed against her neck, the sensations so real that she wrapped them around her like a protective cloak as she closed her eyes and stepped out into the starry field of the PsyNet.

Minds bright and weak flickered around her, a thousand points of beauty and grace. Once again, she made no effort to hide herself, to pretend to be anything but what she was—a born cardinal, her star bright enough to burn. While no one seemed to trail her, she wasn't stupid enough to think that the PsyClan wasn't attempting to track her in some fashion.

She'd made a plan to deal with that, prewarned by the same sense that had told her to be on the Net tonight. It had to be tonight. She didn't know why, but hoped it was because the murderer was going to make a mistake. For now, she was out here to do the simplest of things—to listen to the pulse of the Net, to hear the voices the Council couldn't hear because they were too hushed, too secret.

But something didn't make sense to her. It was often said that the NetMind had been trained to flag any conversations that might be of interest to the Council. So why wasn't the Council cognizant of the brewing dissent, the embers of rebellion? And it was clear that they weren't aware of it. Because if they had been, those voices would've been mercilessly Silenced, rehabilitated until they had barely enough neurons for simple tasks like eating and washing.

Spurred by thoughts of the Rehabilitation Center, she put her plan to attain privacy into action, streaking through time and space to a far-off sector of the Net. At the same time, she raised the firewalls that ensured her anonymity. To any watchers, it would appear as if she'd popped out of existence. A very simple way to evade trackers, but she'd never been to this public link, having recorded its imprint unobtrusively during her last foray, so maybe they didn't have a way to trace her.

Arriving at the link, she circled around it to merge into the local data flows. There was nothing particularly interesting in the information, composed as it was of regional news and other bulletins, so she spun out of the flow and breezed through to a public chat room. The participants were discussing propulsion theory. She stayed anyway. That way, if she hadn't been successful in shaking off her shadows, and did find what she was seeking, it wouldn't look odd if she hung around, given the other things she'd listened to.

After all, she was an F-Psy. They were meant to be a little weird.

Propulsion theory was followed by a chat area devoted to the newest yoga master in the Net. Effective as it was in teaching Psy to focus their minds to laser sharpness, yoga was considered a highly useful exercise. Faith, however, had begun to form a different opinion as to why Psy gravitated toward what had once been an ancient spiritual discipline and it had nothing to do with focus. Maybe they were simply trying to find something to fill the void inside of them.

From yoga, she found herself in a newsroom full of talk about how the groundbreaking DarkRiver/SnowDancer-Duncan deal was already paying huge dividends. Faith didn't know the full details of the deal but was aware it had to do with a housing development geared toward changelings. Though it was a Duncan family project, they'd contracted out the design and construction to DarkRiver on the theory that only changelings understood the needs and wants of their own race. The SnowDancer wolves had apparently supplied the land— through DarkRiver—making the project a partnership, the first of its kind.

Now she heard that the entire development had sold out before the first house went on the market. And orders were piling up. Several minds suggested that such partnerships should be tried out in Europe with some of the more civilized changeling groups. On the heels of that came the logical rebuttal that the leopards and wolves were hardly civilized, which seemed to be the reason for their success.

She filed away the data—DarkRiver would appreciate knowing that Sascha's defection hadn't cut off the possibility of future trade. On the contrary, it seemed as if the changelings' negotiating power had actually risen. Psy might not be allowed to talk to the Duncan renegade, but doing business with her pack was a different matter entirely. Something the Council had been smart enough not to attempt to stop.

When the talk progressed to other matters, she listened for a few more minutes before leaving. Two hours later, she was starting to think that the knowing had been a mirage bought on by her own need to assuage her guilt. But in the next split second, she caught the edge of a conversation in a small room half-hidden behind another. Given its location, it was clear that those inside had come seeking the room.

'—lost two members in the past three months. That's not statistically explicable.'

'I thought both were ruled accidental.'

'The bodies were never recovered. We have only Enforcement's word that they were accidents.'

'We all know who holds Enforcement's strings.'

More than interested, Faith remained on the farthest edge, trying not to draw attention to herself.

'I heard the Sharma-Loeb family group lost a female two years ago in similarly unexplained circumstances.'

'Since we last discussed this, I've been tracking other disappearances. There's too many to be rationalized away, no matter how you look at it.'

'Any suggestions as to what it could be?'

'There are rumors that certain components of the training aren't functioning.'

Clever, Faith thought. The Psy had deliberately not used the words Silence or Protocol, both of which would likely have alerted the NetMind to the potentially rebellious talk. However, the very fact that this conversation was taking place in the public space of the Net was a sign in itself. Either the Council had become lax in its policing or the populace was getting more confident.

Several of the leading minds in the conversation suddenly winked out, probably heading to a safer location. But whether they'd ever be safe from the NetMind was another question altogether—a sentience that was the Net, trying to hide from it was like trying to hide from air.

But then, her mind asked again, why did the Council not seem up to date with the level of dissent? It certainly wasn't huge but neither was it safe to ignore. Or... ! A revolutionary idea exploded into her mind. Deciding she had nothing to lose, she shot back out into the Net and continued her seemingly aimless stroll, coming across another whisper of rebellion in the process.

But those stirrings of disaffection were no longer enough to hold her attention. Even the futile search for information on Marine's killer had taken a backseat to a new compulsion born out of a knowing that veered on the edge of being a vision.

She wanted to talk to the NetMind.

However, she had no idea how to achieve contact. It wasn't sentience as they knew it. It was something other, something unique, the only one of its kind. It might not speak, might not think, might not do anything as she did. She didn't even know how to find it. It was everywhere and it was nowhere.

Since it had already brushed past her several times since she'd entered me Net, she decided to head out to a quiet area, near the least interesting data flows, and wait for its next pass. In doing so, she was ignoring the voices of logic and reason— a certain jaguar had taught her that logic wasn't always right. Sometimes, you had to go with instinct, even long-buried and rusty instinct.

The brush when it came was so subtle and familiar that she almost missed it. Catching the trailing edge of