Shield Of Winter Part 35

"The other races call it making love." Ivy had heard that on comm shows. "It felt like that, didn't it?" She curled her fingers against the firm breadth of his chest.

Vasic tasted the words, nodded. "Yes."

Her smile was luminous. "I loved making love with you. Can we do it again?"

"Ivy." Brushing his thumbs over her cheeks, he held her gaze. "Don't try to distract me. You were happy for a while, but there's sadness inside you." Tiny flickers in her eyes, her smile fading when she thought he wasn't watching, he'd noticed it all. "Tell me why."

"Could you get Rabbit first?" she asked, her expression holding a raw vulnerability that kicked him in the heart. "I don't want him to wake and find himself in an unfamiliar place."

Vasic left at once, to return less than half a minute later. Rabbit was still curled up in his basket, fast asleep. Going down into a cross-legged position on the floor, Ivy petted the dog with a gentle touch. "My brave Rabbit," she murmured, as Vasic came down to sit with his back against the wall, one arm braced on a raised knee.

Ivy took time to speak, and when she did, it was with helpless pain in her voice. "I can't stop thinking about the gauntlet. I try so hard not to, but it's always there at the back of my mind." She dashed her hand across her eyes. "I'm sorry."

Vasic didn't know how to comfort her. All he could do was draw her close, wrap her in his arms. "Surely," he said, "you don't doubt Samuel Rain's genius. Are you a monkey?"

When she spluttered wetly and slapped at his chest, he felt a staggering sense of achievement. He'd given his mate what she needed, brought her through the sadness. Nuzzling his chin into her hair, he continued to hold her as they sat on the floor beside Rabbit.

"That wasn't funny," she said at last.

"You laughed."

He saw her lips tug up at the corners, only to curve downward not long afterward. "There'll be another outbreak soon, won't there?"

Vasic didn't want to talk about that, wanted to indulge in Ivy, but the world continued to turn beyond the walls of this apartment. "Chances are high."

"I don't know what to do, Vasic." It was a trembling confession. "I was so foolish at the start, so sure instinct would guide me, but . . ." She moved her head in a negative motion against his chest.

"You weren't foolish." He couldn't stand to see his tough, determined Ivy so beaten. "You were ready to try, to take a chance. Without you pushing for placements in infected zones, Jaya and Brigitte wouldn't know who and what they are, and Sascha wouldn't have made her breakthrough."

Ivy's hand curved over his upper arm. "That doesn't change the fact that I can't do anything to help!" Angry frustration. "The medic told me I'd cause an aneurysm if I continued on my current path."

Vasic thought of the secret he'd kept from her about Isaiah, knew she'd be angry with him for it, but told her anyway. Her eyes darkened as she sat up to face him, one hand lifting to her mouth. "Will he . . ."

"The doctors are hopeful, but there is no definite prognosis as yet."

"Concetta must be devastated." Hand dropping to her side and voice raspy with withheld emotion, she said, "Why did you hide it from me?"

He curved his hand around the side of her neck. "I knew it would hurt you."

Gaze meeting his, she shook her head. "I don't want that kind of a life. Padded against danger and insulated from reality."

"I know." He leaned forward, pressed his forehead against hers. "Just . . . give me a little time. I've never had someone who was mine before."

She softened, hand spreading on his thigh. Enclosing her in his arms once more, he held her close, the scent of her in his nose, his heart beating in time with hers. And he knew he'd fight a thousand outbreaks, vanquish untold nightmares, to have another moment such as this. "Have you attempted to attack the infection on the PsyNet itself?" he asked, the idea a sudden, acute one. "The infected are only a symptom. The cause is the poison in the PsyNet."

Ivy sat up and shifted sideways so that her back was braced against his raised knee. "We tried that back at the compound on the day of the farewell dinner. We thought we should attempt it while we were all together." Her skin crawled at the memory. "It threatened to suck us into itself, as if we were insects and it was a huge spider."

"You were inexperienced then, unsure."

Ivy tapped a finger on her knee, gave his statement serious thought. "Yes." Not only had the group been uncertain and untested, they'd been feeling the staggering responsibility of coming up with a solution before more people lost their lives. Not ideal conditions. "I think there's something I can try during the next outbreak as a test."

Vasic took her chin in a gentle but firm hold. "I won't get in your way, but promise me you'll stop the instant you feel any pressure on your brain."

Ivy felt her heart break at what she saw in his expression, what he let her see, her lethal Arrow trained to hide all vulnerability. "I promise."

If she'd thought she'd have more time to consider the idea, that proved to be a false hope. An hour later, all h.e.l.l broke loose in Midtown Manhattan, the outbreak the largest across the world to this point. Arriving with Vasic, Ivy fought her instincts and didn't wade into the fray when he began to work to contain the situation. Instead, she took a protected position behind a wall and opened her eyes on the PsyNet.

The area where she was anch.o.r.ed remained quiet, but she could see minds sparking an erratic red not far in the distance, violent against the velvet black of the psychic plane. Shooting to the turbulent section, she took a deep breath and whispered, Shh, be calm, be at peace, to herself and released the empathic energy within her.

It was a translucent ripple, akin to the colors formed inside a soap bubble, so subtle it was near invisible against the black. The ripple traveled over the tormented minds, settling on them in undemanding gentleness . . . yet the violent red sparks continued unabated. Disappointment heavy in her gut, Ivy was about to stop and volunteer to fetch and carry for the medics, when Vasic's mind touched hers.

Ivy, if you're doing something and it's not hurting you, keep doing it. This entire block has gone eerily placid-the infected are standing around looking confused, while the noninfected are so calm they're falling asleep on the street.

Bracing her hands on her knees as her legs threatened to go out from under her, Ivy nodded though he couldn't see her. Okay, okay.

She didn't know how long she stood there, but by the time Vasic appeared in front of her, her back was stiff and her calf muscles knotted. "Well?" she rasped, dots in front of her eyes.

"Drink this first." He thrust an energy drink in her hand and hunkered down to ma.s.sage her calf muscles with firm, knowledgeable hands that made her moan in relief.

"Only limited casualties," he said when he rose to his feet and saw she'd finished off the drink.

Already she felt better, her power outlay nowhere close to burnout.

"It could've been a ma.s.sacre." Vasic's expression turned grim. "There was a gun shop within the zone of infection, and several of the infected worked inside, had the weapons."

Ivy shuddered at the thought. "The infected I calmed?" she asked in cautious hope. "How are they?"

"The majority fell asleep over the past ten minutes." Wrapping his arms around her, he teleported to the apartment before adding, "Jaya and the medics say signs are they'll slip into comas like the others."

Heart falling, Ivy stumbled to sit on the arm of a sofa Vasic had righted. "It might be that the cure for this infection isn't psychic at all," she said, uncertain what else an E could do. "Maybe it's a medical problem." Even as she spoke, she knew it couldn't be that simple, not with the Net itself beginning to erode.

"Krychek has a top medical team looking into that possibility." Disappearing without a word, he returned in seconds, Rabbit in his arms. Once again, it was the off-shift Arrows at Central Command who'd kept an eye on their pet.

Rabbit was asleep but woke soon afterward. Ivy hated seeing him so lethargic, so unlike himself. Stroking and petting him as she murmured loving rea.s.surances, she reminded herself how hurt he'd been when he'd first dragged himself to the orchard. If he could survive that, he'd certainly come back from this.

"He likes the sun," Vasic said, and taking him carefully from Ivy's lap, placed their pet on the wide windowsill that was his favorite lookout. He didn't sit up and stare out the window as per usual, but he did stretch out in the late afternoon sunshine.

"Now you," Vasic said, and pulled a box of nutrition bars from the kitchen cupboard. "That drink was just a stopgap measure."

Ivy made a face but sat with him on the sofa and ate. "You know, now that some of us want taste," she said as he finished a bar with quick efficiency, "there's a business opportunity in making flavored bars."

"I'll tell the Arrow Consortium."

She hesitated with the bar halfway to her mouth. "Is that a real thing or are you teasing me?"

"It's a real thing, though it's not called that officially," he said to her surprise. "We knew we'd need money if we ever defected or went independent. Not all of us want to continue in this line of work."

But they would, Ivy thought, heart twisting. As long as the Net needed them, the Arrows would surrender their lives to it. For that sacrifice, the men and women of the squad would be pushed to the margins of society and looked upon with fear. Hand tightening on the bar, she took another bite and made a vow that any member of the squad would always be welcome in her home, would be family.

However, all that had to wait. The first thing she had to do was share her empathic breakthrough with the others. It was as well that she'd discovered the key to soothing the infected when she did-the outbreaks continued unabated across the world in the next week.

Empaths-all Gradients, with a focus on those on the brink of natural emergence-were awakened on a wholesale level during the same period. Not all could accept the truth of their nature so quickly, but those able to open their minds to their new abilities after any existing blocks were removed, were given basic training, and sent out to join the fight. Yet despite the appearance of countless minds sparking with color, color that had slowly begun to infiltrate the formerly cold black fabric of the Net, the infection couldn't be slowed, much less eradicated.

The infection might have hesitated to approach the concentration of Es at the compound back at the start, but it had grown more aggressive. While empaths remained immune, having even multiple Es in a limited area was no guarantee of safety for those around them. And the simple fact was, no matter if every E in the world was brought to active status, it would never equal the one-to-one ratio from the compound.

An entire section of the Net in Paris had to be evacuated when the infection surrounded it in a liquid black cage. Twenty-four hours later, that section collapsed, rotted through; the resulting shock wave left a thousand dead, many more injured. New York, too, hadn't escaped injury-Ivy and Vasic had been responding to at least two outbreaks a day, even with the humans and changelings throwing their weight behind the containment effort and with all the active Es in the city working on a rotation.

The infection was winning, millions staring down the barrel of death.

Chapter 52.

Interpersonal violence between Psy has dropped to rates so low, it eclipses that during Silence. And as we all now know, given the recent investigative reports, the Silence stats were manipulated by Council after Council and cannot be trusted.

The fact that it has taken the threat of near-certain annihilation to bring us to peace is a bittersweet irony.

Editorial, PsyNet Beacon SAHARA HAD A genius level IQ. That's what she'd been told as a child forced to struggle with math when she'd rather have been out dancing. Math and Sahara had never made their peace, but in other ways, her brain was a finely honed machine.

It had been worrying on a problem for a considerable period of time.

"Eben Kilabuk," she said, and placed an image of the empath on Kaleb's desk, having commandeered the s.p.a.ce since he was at a meeting. "Phillip Kilabuk." She laid the photo of Eben's dead, infected father below the boy's.

"Christiane Hall. March.e.l.line Hall." Empathic mother and infant. "Miki Ling." The caretaker cousin. A low-level M-Psy murdered by one of the infected. Her autopsy had shown no signs of the disease in her own brain.

"Miguel Ferrera." Twenty-five-year-old male, Gradient 4.1, commercial telepath.

She took several more photos, laid them out. All of survivors. Then she removed the Es and rearranged the remaining survivors into two groups. On one side, she placed those like Miki Ling, people connected to an empath and thus a.s.sumed to be, or have been, protected by the empath's immunity in some way.

On the other side, she placed the random outliers, such as Miguel Ferrera, who had no empaths in his family tree and had, in fact, had no contact with his biological family for over two years.

Then there was Phillip Kilabuk. His brain had been riddled with infection though he was the father and custodial guardian of an E. Proximity to an E, familial and genetic connections to an E, Phillip Kilabuk had had them all and it hadn't saved him.

There was no pattern. And yet . . .

Eyes narrowed, she logged into Kaleb's system using the pa.s.sword he'd given her-her beautiful, dangerous man had access to every database under the sun-and began to run down every sc.r.a.p of data she could find on each one of the people represented by the photographs. Banking information, medical histories, university transcripts . . . that was just the start.

The work was tedious, might take days or even weeks, but she could sense something in the information she already had, akin to a tiny stone in the bottom of a shoe, an irritation that simply would not go away. She had to find that stone, because in the irritation might lie a critical answer.

Chapter 53.

Heroes are often the quietest people in a room, the ones least willing to lay claim to the t.i.tle. These men and women simply go about doing what needs to be done without any expectation of grat.i.tude or fame. It is in their nature to protect and to shield and to fight against darkness, whatever form it may take.

New York Signal EXHAUSTED DOWN TO the bone, Ivy nonetheless put Rabbit on a leash during a mercifully peaceful afternoon, and she and Vasic took him out, their intended destination a Central Park clothed in sparkling white snow. It wasn't fair to their pet to be cooped up now that he was back to his usual energetic self.

"It's so quiet." Ivy had quickly become used to the frantic energy and wild vitality of New York, but that vitality was nowhere in evidence today; people's faces were strained and their eyes downcast. "How many have left the city, do you know?" she asked Vasic.

"A tiny percentage in comparison to the city's population."

"People have jobs, lives they can't just leave," she murmured, thinking aloud. "And word's out that pretty much nowhere is safe." Her parents' region of the Net was holding strong at the moment, but Ivy continued to worry. "I wish I could cover my parents in my empathic shield and your great-grandfather, too." She hadn't yet met Zie Zen, but Vasic had told her a lot about the extraordinary man.

Vasic, dressed in his "civilian" clothes of jeans and leather-synth jacket-though the T-shirt wasn't black today, but dark blue-put his arm around her waist, his fingers at her hip. "Neither of the three would thank us for abandoning hundreds of thousands to shield them, regardless of how much we might want to ensure their safety."

Ivy sighed, having had that exact conversation with her parents. "Yes." It took her a few seconds to realize her Arrow was stabilizing her using Tk as she walked on the icy sidewalk. Those sidewalks should've been cleared of snow early that morning, but systems were breaking down all over the world.

As were the systems in Vasic's gauntlet. While he hadn't been using its weapons capability since the command failure during the attack by Ming's men, the program had come on spontaneously during an outbreak. He'd suffered a small overload in the fight to shut it down.

The burns had been minor and treated on-site. It didn't matter-Ivy had felt her heart crack in two when she saw the wounds, though she'd fought not to let her panic and fear show. He'd known. He always knew. Holding her tucked against him, he'd told her that Aden had found a surgeon willing to attempt the risky operation to remove the critical malfunctioning components.

Only if we don't hear back from Samuel Rain before time runs out, he'd told her. The surgeon is exceptional. She's known to be a maverick with a reputation for accepting risky cases and coming through with flying colors, but she's not Rain.

Ivy's nerves were stretched to the breaking point at the sustained silence from Rain, but she agreed with Vasic's choice. Her stomach a lump of ice, she knew there was a high risk the surgeon might kill him. Samuel Rain might as well . . . but if the engineer wasn't brain damaged, the risk was lower.

That didn't mean it wasn't still unacceptably high.

Shoving that brutal truth to the back of her mind on this sunny afternoon when she was out for a walk with her man, she tugged his hand off her hip to lace their fingers together. "You should wear color," she said when Rabbit, nimble and curious, paused to scrutinize the window display of a menswear shop. "With those gorgeous eyes, any vibrant shade would look good on you."

He examined the display. "Would it please you if I wore color?"

Ivy's heart flipped. "You please me by being you. I was just . . . flirting." It was silly and awkward, and she wanted to try it with him. She wanted to try everything with him, couldn't bear the thought of living in a world where Vasic wasn't there to be her partner in exploration.

He didn't speak again until they were deep in Central Park. "Why would you flirt with me?" he said as they walked along an otherwise deserted pathway enclosed on all sides by snow-dusted trees, the white carpet of it unbroken but for Rabbit's paw prints in front of them. "I'm already yours."

She stopped, unable to look at him because there was so much inside her for him that it terrified.

Breaking their handclasp, he closed his fingers over her nape, his thumb brushing her skin in a quiet caress. "I don't know how to play games of courtship. I can learn if that's what you need."

Rabbit's leash dropping from her hand, she swiveled to face him. "No, I want you to be you." An Arrow who said what he meant and who didn't speak except when he had something to say. "I want you to be you," she repeated in a whisper, her hands clenched tight in his T-shirt. "I want to make mistakes with you, learn how to be in a relationship with you."

Vasic stroked his thumb over her skin again, his hair gleaming blue-black in the ray of sunshine that pierced the canopy, his skin golden. "I'm used to working with plans, with blueprints," he said, "but observation of the other races tells me life doesn't come with a blueprint." The Psy had attempted to change that, create rules, but all that had done was buy them a little time before the inevitable crash. "We have to make the plan ourselves."

Ivy, his empath who'd wrenched him out of the gray numbness in which he'd existed and into a world of vibrant color, reached up to play her fingers through his hair. "Samuel Rain," she said, determined fury in every word, "is going to come through. I will believe nothing else."

Vasic had never been afraid of death, but now he fought the idea of it with every breath in his body. "I could kidnap him," he said, his hands on her hips. "Force him to work on the gauntlet under threat of being left in a jungle full of his favorite primates."