Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,40

the PsyNet, and Sahara went back into the house—after a kiss to his back that made his battered soul curl up in pleasure. “What do you see?” he asked Ivy.

“The fraying is new, but the disease itself isn’t as bad as it was pre-Honeycomb,” she murmured. “Back then, the PsyNet was literally rotting away piece by piece, as if with gangrene.”

Kaleb waited.

“The Honeycomb isn’t visible here,” Ivy continued after a small pause, “but it is present to my empathic senses. That fine net of emotional strands is all that’s keeping this section from collapsing.” She indicated the lifeless blackness in front of them.

“But?” Kaleb might not be an E, but he’d spent a lifetime learning to read people. First so he could predict the moves of the psychopath who’d ruled his childhood, later because he’d realized that to know people was to know their secrets. And secrets meant power.

“The disintegration below the surface?” Ivy said. “It’s eroding the foundation on which the Honeycomb sits, and with each frayed thread, the weight of the dead section gets heavier. Thin as they are here, the Honeycomb bonds could simply snap, and if they do . . .”

Kaleb scanned the area. The rotten section was unpopulated, but there were minds anchored within touching distance of the black. Should it collapse, it would take hundreds, perhaps thousands of those minds with it, much like a whirlpool sucking in everything around it. “Do you want me to move those minds?” Kaleb couldn’t do it himself, but the NetMind could make certain adjustments.

“No.” Ivy’s voice held an awareness of the risk of her decision, of the lives that hung in the balance. “If they go, they take their part of the Honeycomb with them. There’d effectively no longer be anything holding this section of the Net in place—it might create a tear so massive it could cause a catastrophic chain reaction.”

Snuffing out the very minds they wanted to save.

“I’ll set part of my consciousness to monitoring this area.” It was a task Kaleb would’ve normally given the NetMind, but he was starting to have the disturbing suspicion that as the Net frayed, so did the neosentience in charge of it.

The signs had been there for a long time, if he thought about it. Lapses in concentration, lost or missing pieces of data, a distinct lack of growth since Kaleb was a child. Yes, the neosentience grew at a glacial pace in comparison to a Psy mind, but it had shown no development in over two decades.

In point of fact, it appeared to have gone backward, to an even more childlike state.

The only reason Kaleb hadn’t noticed earlier was because he’d been distracted by the violent potential of the DarkMind. Though he’d never differentiated between his acceptance of the twin neosentience, handling the DarkMind had always required more attention.

Inadvertently hiding the subtle degeneration of its twin.

Kaleb considered sharing that suspicion with Ivy, made the decision that the Es were already at overload. One more worry could be the proverbial straw that caused a fatal breakdown. “It’ll alert you if the risk of total Net failure at this location hits seventy-five percent.” At which point, the risk in not moving the minds would outweigh the danger of a possible collapse and chain reaction.

Ivy’s attention lingered on him. “Can you maintain such long-term monitoring without risk to yourself?”

Empaths. Dangerous to themselves most of all, with their concern for others.

“Yes,” he said at the same instant that thought passed through his head.

As a dual cardinal, the only one in the Net, Kaleb had off-the-scale psychic abilities his mind had learned to utilize without melting down in the process. A single monitoring program wouldn’t even register as usage on his internal psychic meter. Not when he could cause a cataclysmic earthquake without coming close to burning out.

Kaleb looked at the dead section again. “That’s all you see?”

“Broken threads,” she murmured. “Frayed edges. Like a piece of natural fabric coming apart, thread by thread.”

“If it was the absence of active empaths that caused the damage, the disintegration makes no sense.” Not with so many Es awake now. Kaleb could see sparks of color heading into the rot, to be absorbed by it.

“It’s like . . . like something is acting against us and it’s stronger.” Ivy made a sound of frustration before her mental presence froze in place. “The NetMind, I felt it.”

So had Kaleb, and this time, the neosentience had passed on an image that was impossible to misinterpret. “A honeycomb