To her surprise, she could feel him relaxing. And that relaxed her. Skin privileges, she thought with an inward smile. "Alright. Here, look." Bending over the table, very aware of him playing with her hair, she showed him the crucial pages.
"Family trees," he murmured. "Detailed."
She nodded. Her hair slipped out of his grasp but a second later, she felt a tug as he recaptured it. The caress was strangely soothing. "Looks like Shine went way beyond the most recent generations."
Clay was caught by the fierce light in Talin's eyes. Her intelligence blazed hot and damned sexy. "For all of them?"
"Yes." She grinned. "It's as if they were tracing the families, not the individual children."
"Shine doesn't take on whole families."
"I'm not so sure. Look." She tapped a particular record. "One kid in this three-sibling family has Shine support, but all three are being monitored. The only reason the other two were left alone is because they have other scholarships."
"That can't be the case with all of them."
"No. But if you look carefully at the charts, you'll see that a lot of the unfunded or untraced ones are actually stepsiblings. They're following bloodlines."
Clay stopped sliding Talin's hair through his fist, though he kept the smooth, silky stuff in his grip. "That explains a lot."
Lines formed on her forehead. "Why do I get the feeling you already know what I'm leading up to?"
He tugged at her hair, tipping up her head. Then he kissed her. A short, fleeting brush of lips on lips that tantalized the cat, teased and tempted in a way that would eventually become dangerous. But not yet. He still had enough control to pull back. "I have suspicions, no proof."
Her eyes were catlike in their smugness. "Look at the heads of the family trees."
He finally released her hair so he could spread out the charts. "I'm not seeing anything obvious."
"That's because it's not." She picked up one particular sheet. "This is Jon's record. I was staring at it this morning when it struck me that I'd heard - read - the name Duchslaya Yurev before. He's at the top of this tree. I did a search." She pointed to the computer built into the side of the desk. "Yurev was one of his generation's greatest minds. He's half the reason we know as much as we do about genetics."
"Kid's full name is Jonquil Alexi Duchslaya," Clay said, looking at the chart. "Okay, it's an ancestral name. Not unusual."
"No, but guess what." She traced a line on the chart. "Jonquil is Yurev's only remaining direct descendant."
Excitement gripped his gut. "Was Yurev human?"
"No." Her next words were a whisper. "He was a cardinal telepath."
"Damn."
"Yeah."
For a minute, they just stared at each other. "What about the other names?"
Her face fell. "Nothing. It's like they've been erased from the system - I only realized about Yurev because he was mentioned in an out-of-print textbook I read when I was fifteen. I was bored and it was the last physical book in the library I hadn't read."
"Geek."
She stuck out her tongue at him. "I guess Yurev was too famous to wipe out completely - though you know, he's not in any of the electronic textbooks, hasn't been for over half a century. Even the Internet databases have very little on him. If he was that hard to trace, I have no clue how Shine did the others."
"Maybe," he murmured, "they had a head start, a list to a certain point."
"Hold on." Tally liberated a small notebook from the confusion of paper on the table. "See on the family trees, they also have locations listed next to the names. Around two generations back, sometimes three, they start to scatter."
"A diaspora." Clay blew out a breath. "Yurev wasn't the only Psy."
"No," she said. "I can't prove it but it fits. The murdered kids were all gifted in a way that was almost Psy." Her mouth fell open at the echo of Dev's words. "Dev was telling us without telling us."
"Someone's trying to gag him, but I don't think he's happy about it."