Blaze of Memory

When I turned, there was Zaid, holding the elevator open. He’d remembered me from when the Adelajas lived on the same street as your father and me—back when we were first married. Well, I went to them and all three boys stepped back out into the lobby, and we were able to talk for a few minutes before their meeting.

Zaid . . . I always liked Zaid. He was such a solemn child—I knew in my heart that he carried the burden of terrible power. Now he reminds me of a soldier, strong, determined, proud. Beside him, his twin younger brothers were slender and so cold I could almost feel the ice on their breath. Tendaji spoke for them both—they were polite, precisely so, and their intelligence can’t be doubted. And yet I kept feeling as if I was talking to two shadows—it was as if something critical was missing.

No, I’m not saying it right. Not missing, dead. Killed. As if part of them had ceased to exist. I said nothing of the sort, of course, spent most of that short time speaking with Zaid. I’d hoped he’d one day find peace. And I can’t argue that today, there was a sense of purpose in him that spoke of peace.

If that’s true, then perhaps this Silence has a chance? But Zaid, with his courage, his strength, and his will, isn’t the future. The twins are. And they’re so removed from humanity that I fear what such a course will do to the wild beauty of our race. Will the PsyNet one day turn dark, our minds cold, isolated stars?

I don’t know. And it terrifies me.

With all my love,

Mom

CHAPTER 16

Katya jumped when Dev walked into the sunroom, where she was viewing archived news footage in the hope of triggering new memories. His eyes went to the trail mix in her hand.

Heat burned across her cheekbones. She’d all but thrown it back at him when he’d handed it to her after that flat-out “no” about going north. Now frustration, anger, need, it all tangled inside her, stealing her voice. The only thing she could do was watch the contained strength of him as he walked around to sit on the sofa beside her. “NewsNet,” he said, taking the remote. “That’s the Council’s propaganda machine.”

Her paralysis snapped in the face of his arrogance. “It is not.” She tried to get the remote back, but he held it out of reach. “What’re you doing?”

“Here.” His body a line of heat against her side, he switched to an unfamiliar channel. “CTX is what you want to be watching—they’re the ones who broke Ashaya’s story, and they’re currently running a series on the recent surge of public violence by Psy.”

Unwilling, unable, to pull away from him in spite of her simmering anger, she watched. “It’s very energetic.” No NewsNet reporter would ever gesticulate as wildly, much less use such emotive language.

“Hmm.” Reaching over, Dev stole some of her trail mix, popping it into his mouth in a smooth gesture that hijacked her interest from a report on what appeared to be some kind of political turmoil in Sri Lanka.

Drawing in a deep breath, she tried to focus. But the scent of Dev—rich and wild, with an edge that tasted of steel—settled over her senses, holding her in thrall. He glanced over at that very moment and for the space of a single frozen second, everything stopped. Dev broke the electric contact by putting his arm around her.

She resisted. Because in that fleeting instant, she’d glimpsed a thousand shadows in his eyes. “What’s going to happen when we get back to New York?”

“Later, Katya.”

Shaking her head, she turned to push at his chest. “The pretense ended last night.” With the painful honesty of that kiss.

He closed his hand over hers, holding her palm against those pectorals she ached to have the right to stroke. “A few more hours,” he said, his expression stark with things unsaid. “Do you want this to end so soon?”

No, she thought, no. Even if their relationship was a fragile construct formed of hopes that would never survive in the harsh light of day, she wanted to cling to it with all the strength in her. Giving in, she settled herself back by his side, curling her fingers lightly into his chest, her knees scraping against his thigh as she sat with her legs bent, feet pointing away from him.

His chin brushed her hair as he said, “Watch this.”

It took her emotion-torn mind several seconds to realize the import of what the reporter was saying about trouble in Sri Lanka’s legislative capital. “She’s talking about Psy.” Her mouth fell open. “The reporter’s saying Psy attacked a government building!”

Dev’s free hand came to rest on her knee. “Only four people,” he murmured, “but that’s four more than should exist under Silence.”

“That’s Shoshanna Scott!” Blasted by memory, by reams of connected knowledge, she would’ve jerked upright had Dev not been holding her.

On-screen, the slim brunette waited until the reporters had quieted to make her statement, her pale blue eyes striking against the darkness of her hair, the creamy white of her skin. Shoshanna Scott was the Council’s public face for a reason—she had an appearance of such delicate beauty that people forgot the Psy ruled with their minds, not their bodies.

“This was,” she began in a clear voice, “an incident provoked by Jax.”

Katya couldn’t believe it—her memories, shaky as they were, told her the Council liked to consign the Psy drug problem to the darkest of corners.

“The psychological weakness,” Councilor Scott continued, “inherent in those who succumb to Jax is unfortunately not a genetic abnormality we can screen against.”

“Councilor!” A short man with stiff black hair stood up, his eyes that of a rottweiler. “There are rumors this incident was caused by Psy who’ve given in to their emotions. What’s your answer to that?”

“It’s a ridiculous assertion. Normal Psy do not feel.”

“Clever,” Dev muttered, stroking his hand down her calf in a caress that shattered her concentration. “She’s sidelining those four, effectively making them non-Psy.”

Another reporter stood up even as Katya realized he was tugging her feet out from under her, placing them on his lap. “Dev—”

“Shh.” His eyes were on the screen, but his fingers continued to stroke lightly over her calf. “Listen.”

She forced her attention back to the screen, hearing only the last part of the newest question.

“—Jax is a problem for Psy?”

“For the weak among us, yes,” Shoshanna said. “Some individuals are intrinsically flawed.”

The report cut off at that moment, with the anchor doing a short analysis. “She took the less damaging blow,” Katya said, skin stretching tighter with Dev’s every languid stroke, “acknowledging the Jax problem rather than admitting Psy are beginning to break Silence.”

“Yeah, that’s my take, too.” His hand closed over her ankle in a grip that screamed possession. “It’s not really admitting anything, is it? Everyone knows some Psy do Jax. The junkies are hard to miss.” The lazy stroke of his thumb over her anklebone.

Her thighs pressed together in an instinctive response she barely understood. Dragging in a breath, she tried to find her train of thought. “But it’s the deeper issue that’s really interesting—the public nature of the breakdowns.”

“These four aren’t the first,” he said, his breath mingling with hers as their faces came ever closer. “There was a rash of similar incidents not that many months back. They’ll be in the CTX archives.”

It should’ve been a startling piece of information, but—“I worked with Ashaya for years. I always knew there was something imperfect about her Silence.” And if there was one, why not more?

“Stop that.”

Only then did she realize she’d been petting him through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. “I—”

His hand curled into her hair, tugging back her head and cutting off her words. She found herself looking up into a face that could have as easily belonged to some dark age of war and conquest. Devraj Santos, she thought,