out. Taking a deep breath, she stared out straight in front, the world a blur.
Her next comment was rote, words to buy her time. “An interesting location. How did you discover it?”
“I’m a Mercant.” It seemed an answer as flat as her question had been. Then his shoulders locked and he shifted his chair to face her. “Payal, we are not doing this.”
“You asked me to come here.”
“No, we’re not going to pretend to be two strangers having a conversation about the fucking desert or the weather.”
Chapter 6
“Our histories tell us that anger can be either a weapon or a weakness, Canto. Decide what it will be for you.”
“No, Grandmother. Sometimes, I just want to be angry. I don’t want to pretend to be civilized—because I’m not, and never will be. And I’ll never wear masks.”
—Conversation between Canto Mercant and Ena Mercant (2063)
PAYAL COULD FEEL the heat blazing off Canto—but that had to be her imagination, for they stood in a sunlit desert. Yet the urge to go closer to his flame was a tug. It had always been there, since she was that feral little girl. The boy who’d given her food and who’d stealthily passed over a folded-up piece of paper bearing answers to a test she was meant to fail, he’d meant something to her.
Some part of her insisted on seeing that same boy in this man. But he wasn’t. He was a Mercant. A man whose job it was to gather information—so it could be used against his targets. “We’re strangers now,” she said as coldly as she could, and took a step to the left, putting more distance between them. “The girl I was, she’s dead. She had to die so I could survive.” A simple, inexorable fact.
Canto’s eyes shifted to pure black, the galaxies eclipsed by emotion. “What did they do to you?” Rage thrummed in every syllable.
“It’s all in the past.” She glanced at her timepiece, steeling herself so her arm didn’t tremble. “Why don’t we talk about why we’re here today? I don’t have endless time.”
“You mean the extinction of Designation A?” It was a near-growl. “Yeah, why don’t we?”
“Using the word ‘extinction’ is a touch hyperbolic.” She had to keep this rigidly practical. “The PsyNet has its issues, but much of it has to do with the damage done by Silence, and by the rise of the Scarabs.” Deadly, unstable Psy who were unleashing their abilities on the Net in a fury of violence.
When he didn’t respond, she couldn’t help herself from glancing at him.
It was as big a shock as the first time she’d laid eyes on him, her stomach muscles clenching reflexively. She couldn’t understand it, why he had this impact on her when they’d both grown and changed so much in the years between what had been and what was now. His cheekbones were striking, his cardinal eyes extraordinary—it was as if he held the universe in his eyes.
Even had she forgotten everything else about him, never would she mistake those eyes for those of any other cardinal. The eyes and the cheekbones weren’t the whole of it, however. His skin held a glow that said he often spent time out under the sun, and his eyes were subtly tilted, his jaw square. His short hair was silky black, but the unshaven bristles on his face held a dusting of gray.
Binh Fernandez had been of mainly Filipino and Turkish descent, with a smattering of other genetic factors. The Mercants, meanwhile, had multiple lines of descent through their family tree, but the primary one through Ena was Caucasian—however, that split again in the Mercant matriarch’s offspring.
It was the rare Psy who was full-blooded in any genetic sense. Not when their race was about psychic power above all else. Matches were on the basis of increasing the chances of powerful offspring.
Payal didn’t know much about the Mercant—Magdalene—who’d carried Canto in her womb. She needed more data on Magdalene. More data on him. Data made sense of the world. Data would help her understand why she felt the impact of him like a kick to the stomach.
Data would stop the feral girl inside her from screaming for freedom.
It had to be a remnant of their childhood interaction, especially those final minutes when she’d locked her hand around his and held on, just held on. She’d known that pain lay on the horizon for both of them, but for those murderously stolen minutes, they’d been free of punishment, free of being watched.
Just