We refuse to lose any more of those we love. Which is why we've been working to condition emotion out of our sons since the moment of their birth. Perhaps some of you will call us monsters, but today, our children stand alive beside us, in full control of their gifts. We've given them life.
I understand Arif's grief - I was only twenty when he and Catherine lost Margaret, but I'll never forget his keening agony the night he found their poor, sweet baby. It ravaged him, ravaged them both. The man I saw today bears the emotional scars still. They're so deep and true that he can't see the paradox in his own words. To save those he loves, he's willing to destroy the capacity to love itself?
How is that in any way an answer?
Mom
Chapter 15
Katya accepted Dev's offer of a walk without hesitation the next morning. Something had shifted between them the previous night - she could feel it deep within: a subtle tug, a bond barely formed.
But that wasn't the change that distressed her.
Dev walked beside her, but gone was the man who'd kissed her with a passion that had seared her to the soul. Only the director, hard, focused, unreachable, remained. As she watched his teeth sink into the crunchy flesh of a bright red apple, she couldn't help but remember those same teeth grazing her neck, nipping at her ear. Yet it seemed impossible that this cool stranger was the darkly sensual man who'd taken her mouth until she felt branded to the very core of her being.
"Perhaps he did me a favor," she said when the silence became too crushing.
"He?"
"The shadow-man." The spiderweb in her mind pulsed, a constant reminder that she was, in the end, nothing but a puppet. Her hand clenched into a fist. "By breaking my Silence."
"There are ways to do that without destroying the individual." He threw his apple core into the undergrowth, his jacket dusted with snow that fell from an overhanging branch. "Let's go down here."
She followed him through the snow-covered firs, but her mind had turned inward. For the first time since she'd woken, she looked deep within, examining the strands of control - of compulsion - that swirled around her psyche. Each was barbed. Ripping them out would destroy parts of her, maybe cause brain damage. It would've been easy to give up - but she chose to let the brutality fan the simmering flames of her anger.
And when she saw the pathway, she didn't hesitate to take it. The vines of control ripped at her from every side, drawing blood that felt real, the acrid scent of it thick in her nostrils, but she pushed through, determined to find answers, determined to find herself.
Two steps later, terror silvered into her mind, into her very heart. "Dev." A husky plea to a man who seemed to have frozen his own heart with the dawn.
He took her hand, the heat of him soaking into her skin, through her blood, into her very cells. The terror remained, but she understood it now. It was an implanted fear, designed to stop her from reaching the end of this road. Her mind felt as if it was awash in blood by the time she completed the task, but she didn't stop.
And there it was, buried so deep that it was as much a part of her as her heartbeat - her link to the PsyNet, to the biofeedback that kept her Psy brain from dying. She looked at the solid column of light, brilliant and beautiful, and understood that it offered no means of escape. The link jacked her directly into the fabric of the Net itself, but it was no tunnel. No, this was the most solid of conduits, its only purpose to keep her alive. To get out, to actually surf the Net, she'd have to find a doorway.
She'd tried to do that once before, but then she'd been physically weak, her mind in chaos. It was possible she'd missed something. Today, she took every step with slow deliberation. . . and she found it. The psychic doorway was hidden behind several layers of barbed wire. Swallowing, she thrust her hands through the viciousness of the coils and cracked it open the barest millimeter.
Black.
Not the black of the Net, but the black of a shield. She knew the shield had been created by her torturer, that it linked back to him on some level. But . . . "It's not mind control," she said out loud. "It's not an open link. That would take too much energy." So he'd immured her in her mind, given her instructions, and set her free. "He doesn't know what I know, doesn't see what I see." The fist around her heart fell open.
"You're probably programmed to contact him if you discover something important." Dev's tone was flat as he came to a stop in a small clearing pierced by a ray of sunlight. "Could be as simple as a phone call."
Closing the psychic door, she backed down the path and returned completely to the world. It was an effort to keep her feet on the glittering white of the snow, to tell herself she wasn't truly bleeding. "I don't think I was ever meant to come out of this alive."
The tendons of Dev's jaw pulled white over bone. "What did you see?"
"The roots of his control, they're buried deep. I can't see a way to pull them out - even if I could figure out how - without killing myself in the process."
"He must have the psychic key to unlock it safely."
"Not like he's going to give it to me." She slid her hands into the pockets of her coat, chilled to her very soul. "So since I'm dead either way, do you know what I want to do?"
Dev simply watched her with those amazing, amber-flecked eyes.
"I want to follow the only thing I have left - my gut."
"What's it telling you to do?"
She met his gaze, hoping for understanding, for freedom. "To go north."