"My life..." A pause at last. "Have you seen the new network we're linked into?"
Ashaya gave a shaky nod. The Web of Stars, Dorian had called it. A minuscule network in comparison to the PsyNet, but instead of isolated white stars on black, this network, this web, was filled with connections. Golden threads that tied each star to another, sometimes to more than one. And in between streamed ribbons of color, streamers of joy and light, hope and forgiveness.
"Those pieces of color, they keep getting inside me and now I have these thoughts." Shoving both hands into her hair, Amara held her head. "I see with a clarity that wasn't a part of me before. I see that some lives should never come into being. The cost-benefit ratio is too unbalanced."
"You're brilliant."Ashaya dropped the weapon to her side. "Why can't you use that power to help our people?"
"Because my neural pathways have been permanently compromised. Perhaps I was born that way." Amara lowered her hands. "Or perhaps I became that way as a result of Silence. The point is moot. I have marked sociopathic tendencies. Those can't be remedied."
"What about Keenan? Is he going to remain safe from you?"
Shadows in blue. "These new thoughts... I find myself hesitant to kill a child born of my body." She shook her head. "But don't trust me. That decision may one day change."
"I have the same DNA," Ashaya persisted, realizing that Amara had set herself up to be killed. "We had the same upbringing."
"I can't become good, big sister. This is the only gesture I might ever be capable of making." Amara didn't say any more. She didn't need to. Facts were facts. If Amara lived, she would do evil. But to kill her? Ashaya turned to Dorian, lost. "What do I do?"
Dorian had once thought nothing could penetrate the scientific shell around Ashaya. Now he knew different in so many ways - but this link with Amara, it had the potential to destroy her. "Can you control her?"
Ashaya shook her head. "No."
"Incorrect, Ashaya." Amara raised an eyebrow. "If I allow you to embed a control link inside me, you can."
"Is she right, Shaya?"
Ashaya's fingers brushed his as she shifted to stand beside him. "Yes. Not mind control but - "
" - a leash," Amara completed. "Long enough to let me pretend I'm free but short enough to keep me from indulging in things my twin would deem unconscionable."
"Will it hurt you?" he asked Ashaya, ignoring Amara.
"No." Her fingers closed around his. "Our twin bond exists whether we like it or not. If Amara lets me in that deep, then I'd become the one in control. She'd lose the ability to enter my mind, but I'd be able to monitor her at will."
"You'd be her keeper your entire lifetime."
Ashaya looked at him. "I have help now. I have you."
The leopard inside him growled in a rush of possessive pleasure. "Glad you're finally beginning to understand that."
"Amara's in our web," Lucas said to Sascha as they stood outside the hospital. "What does that mean?"
Sascha leaned against the wall that faced the manicured front lawn. "It means there's darkness in the Web now."
"How do we fight it?"
"We don't." She thought back to when Faith had joined them, to the revelation about the DarkMind. "Amara is fundamentally flawed, but she exists. She's part of the world. We watch her, we manage her, but we don't imprison her on the psychic level. The instant we do, we sow the seeds of a split inside our own web."
"I don't like it." Lucas's tone was alpha-hard. "With her link to Ashaya, she could come through, influence you, Faith - hell, any of us."
"No," Sascha said, having spent hours looking at the situation from every angle. She and Faith both agreed on this. "Her link doesn't allow that."
"If she's in the Web, how can it not?"
"Think of it like a math problem." Grabbing her organizer from the pocket of her light summer coat, she slid out the attached laser pen. "First we have the large value - our web." She drew a circle and filled it with the members: Lucas in the center, herself enclosed within him, the spikes leading out to the sentinels, and then the connections to their mates.
"The mating bond links Ashaya into the Web." She connected the M-Psy to Dorian. "But our web is different from the PsyNet. It's a network you can only join via two methods that we know of - mating or a blood bond."
"Keenan," Lucas said, frowning. "Dorian said he had an open cut on his hand, and the skin on the kid's wrists was broken. The boy's need probably short-circuited the process I'd normally go through to blood-bond someone into the Web. The problem is, it takes control out of my hands."