"What about the Web of Stars?" Sascha asked from within Dorian's embrace.
Faith wriggled to a more upright position. "It's a single entity. Same with the LaurenNet."
Vaughn wrapped his arms around her neck and pulled her back against his chest. The wall of fire was a sweet benediction. "So what makes the Psy NetMind different?"
"Emotion." Sascha's eyes had gone pure black.
Lucas reached out to tug at her plait and Dorian released her to her mate. "Talk to me, Sascha darling." He ran his finger down her cheek.
"The Psy have cut off emotion, tried to suppress it into nonexistence. So if the NetMinds are created when a net is created, then the basic material is provided by the net in question."
Faith saw where Sascha was going. "Our Web is fed by everything - love, hate, fear, joy."
"So is the Laurens', probably because of the children." Sascha tangled her fingers with Lucas's. "The PsyNet, however, is fed mostly by emotionless Silence."
"But the NetMind is good. It feels joy." She was convinced of that.
"Yes, but the aim of Silence was to wipe out violence. The core of the conditioning says that any kind of darkness is bad. It must be contained, caged, kept separate from everything else."
"And that's become amplified in the twin NetMinds." Faith suddenly understood what the empath had seen at once. "A DarkMind for everything negative while the NetMind is pure goodness. It's so vulnerable."
"I'm not so sure about that," Sascha said. "If it's aware of the DarkMind, then perhaps it's aware of everything its other half knows. You did say it's fooled the Council."
"Yes." Some of Faith's concern faded. "But even if the twins function as a team, their separation has to have a consequence."
Sascha's eyes met hers and there was such grief in them. "Until the DarkMind and the NetMind are merged again, the Psy will continue to produce the most vicious serial killers on the planet."
"Killers without an ounce of mercy." Faith thought about what she'd seen. "The DarkMind is using them to give itself a voice. Maybe it can't speak like the NetMind can, because it's been Silenced, but it can communicate with its acts of violence."
"A child screaming its existence." Sascha's words gave emotional force to the cold facts.
The image chilled Faith. So much death, so much rage, all because of a child's need for acceptance. "Until Silence ends, the only thing we can do is try to stop the manifestations of darkness."
"Killers." Vaughn's beast prowled in the energy of his skin.
"Yes."
"Why does it speak to you?" Sascha asked, after a small silence.
"Maybe because I speak to it and I'm a Psy who has emotion. I think it needs that contact, needs to know that such Psy are possible."
Sascha's sadness softened into hope. "Can I speak to it, do you think?"
"It adores what you are." Faith felt her own lips tilt upward in the faintest of smiles. "I think I might even be jealous."
"Why?"
"How do you think you escaped detection in the Net as a child, before you were old enough to hide your rainbow mind?"
"The difference didn't appear until I was a teenager."
"No, Sascha. It was always there. Think about it - our basic abilities are something we're born with." Faith shook her head. "It showed me a thousand hidden minds exactly like yours, protected by something other than their own shields."
The look on Sascha's face was priceless. "The NetMind knows about us?"
Us. The E-Psy. The designation Faith had barely begun to understand because they'd been slated for deletion from the Net. But they'd survived. Because, Faith now comprehended, they had to exist. If they didn't, the Psy would cease to be human, cease to be sentient. All sentient races had a conscience. Take that away and what you were left with was something horrifying.
"Yes. It's been protecting you for decades, ever since it started to understand what Silence was doing to you. Maybe that's when it started to think on its own. I don't know. All I know is that we're dealing with a life form that has a heart and that heart is made up of a thousand E-Psy. The NetMind will never be evil so long as those minds exist. In contrast, its twin will be absolute evil."