they were disturbed. Or, the NetMind was disturbed and the DarkMind was ambivalent. Following them back into the Net, Kaleb found himself being taken to a section that was dark. Dead. No empathic sparks. No minds within the dead section. No Honeycomb strands. That wasn’t unusual. Parts of the Net had suffered catastrophic damage before the empaths woke and began to sew it back together.
At the current rate of improvement, it would take years, an entire generation, maybe two, for those sections to recover. No minds could anchor there until then. Nothing would survive—or if it did, it would be a creature of raving insanity.
?!!
Following the NetMind’s wordless urgings, he shifted his point of view . . . and saw the problem. The rot, the disease, was spreading. Not, however, in a way most people would be able to detect. No, the fine threads of the Net were literally coming apart strand by strand below the surface. Kaleb only saw it because the NetMind had imposed its vision over his. “Did you show the empaths?”
A sense of the negative, of an awareness the Es were already close to exhaustion.
Kaleb couldn’t disagree. Sahara worked closely with the Empathic Collective, and she’d been sharing her worry with him that Designation E was being asked to take on too much too soon. “No one designation can shoulder that much responsibility,” she’d said, eyes of darkest blue passionate. “It’s getting impossible to juggle the workload. I’m terrified that despite our best efforts not to repeat the mistakes of the past, they’ll begin to crumple under the pressure.”
The problem was that no one else could do what the Es could.
Now it appeared even their efforts hadn’t totally stopped the insidious disintegration of the psychic fabric of the PsyNet. They’d given the PsyNet a fighting chance, but it was struggling not to fray apart. Yet . . . despite his first thoughts, this didn’t feel like a resurgence of the disease. Rather, it seemed an indication of a deeper issue, a structural weakness that had permitted the disease to take hold in the first place.
“Is it because there aren’t enough Es at this location?” he asked the NetMind, because if that was the case, the Es could rearrange themselves to fix the damage before it became critical.
The NetMind sent him a sense of the negative.
The DarkMind, meanwhile, swam into the dead space, becoming at one with it. The two were created of the same primordial soup—all the rage, anger, jealousy, and other dark emotions the Psy race had refused to feel for so long. Only it hadn’t ever disappeared. It had simply collected in dark pockets of the psychic network until it split the NetMind into a stable innocence and a murderous darkness.
Today, neither half could tell him why the PsyNet was breaking apart, filament by filament, even as the Honeycomb fought to hold it together, even as the sparks of color that were the emanations of the Es spread through the black night of the spaces between minds.
The PsyNet should’ve been healing. Instead, it was simply dying more slowly.
Chapter 8
SASCHA HUNG UP after a troubling conversation with Ivy Jane. Her fellow E and president of the Empathic Collective had called to discuss the information she’d just received from Kaleb Krychek. Coming on top of the possible threat to Naya that Lucas had warned Sascha about earlier that day, it left her worried on multiple levels.
Naya was her first priority and always would be, but there were tens of thousands of children in the PsyNet, too. Even if the Honeycomb meant the PsyNet wouldn’t collapse on them as it had done in sections prior to the awakening of the Es, the disintegration and hidden weakness within had to be having an impact on all those developing young minds.
It frustrated her that she hadn’t been able to give Ivy any answers. Part of it was because she’d been out of the PsyNet since her defection and was receiving all data secondhand, but mostly it was because they were all stumbling in the dark. No one knew the exact extent of the damage done by a hundred years of forced conditioning, of erasing emotion.
“Coming,” she said when Naya made a questioning noise from the living room.
It would’ve sounded like “da mi” to most people. Sascha knew her daughter was asking after her milk. Setting aside the issues preying on her mind for now—Naya was far too good at picking up emotional nuances—Sascha breathed deep to calm herself. “On