of being an elected head if a man like Krychek could do as he pleased, with no one able to stop him?
Psy were more akin to changelings in that sense.
He listened as Payal laid out the problem with Sentinel, her words succinct and her tone cool. No longer was she the soft, curvy woman who’d sat in his lap. This was the CEO, the anchor, the general.
“I didn’t realize the situation with Designation A was so dire.” Nikita Duncan’s face was a seamless canvas that gave away nothing. “Santano was the one in charge of that portfolio, and after his death, we all but forgot about it.” Not an excuse, just a statement of fact.
“The problem didn’t begin with your generation,” Payal said. “It began much earlier, but regardless, we’re stuck with the consequences.”
“Is it still happening?” Ivy Jane’s unusual eyes—clear copper ringed by gold, her pupils jet black—were stark against the cream hue of her skin. “Young anchors not making it to adulthood because they’re considered flawed?”
“Unknown. We don’t have the data and no one is collecting it. That’s something that needs to be put in place, but right this instant, our first problem is the issue in my region.”
“The repair is fluctuating.” Aden Kai, all square angles, olive skin, and short black hair, was as expressionless as Ivy Jane was distressed. “Payal’s right to assume it won’t last much beyond two weeks. A month might be possible, but it’d probably burn out all the anchors involved.”
“Confirmed,” Payal said when Aden shot her a questioning look.
Kaleb spoke for the first time, a living green wall at his back that offered no clues as to his physical location. “Suggestions?”
The result of the discussion was confirmation that there weren’t any free anchors who could take over the area. Canto had already come to the same conclusion, but it was important for the Coalition to reach that conclusion on their own, be confronted by the brutal reality of the problem.
“We may have another option,” Anthony Kyriakus said, his dark hair silvered at the temples and his body clad in a tailored black jacket with a rounded collar that was buttoned up on both sides of his chest with polished black buttons. The head of PsyClan NightStar was a man of dignified appearance and bearing.
At this moment, he had everyone’s attention. “One of my foreseers has twice this week reported visions of what she termed ‘a great migration of stars.’ She could make no sense of it at the time, but if we look at it in the context of shifting minds out of a dangerous PsyNet zone, it fits.”
NightStar foreseers were the best in the world. And if Anthony was mentioning it, the vision had to have been seen by one of their senior F-Psy, possibly even Faith NightStar, the jewel in the NightStar crown.
“Is a move viable from an anchor perspective?” Nikita, pragmatic and ruthless. “The same number of As handling a significantly larger number of minds?”
“Yes.” Payal held her own with one of the deadliest women in the Net. “Our zones are limited by geography, not by the number of minds.”
Because anchors, Canto thought, worked for the PsyNet. That was the critical difference between them and empaths. The Honeycomb helped protect the PsyNet, but the basis of the empaths’ work was to protect and provide succor to the people within it.
An anchor’s first priority, by contrast, was to the Net.
That was why the loss of the NetMind and DarkMind had hurt Designation A so much. Every anchor in the world had been connected to the twin neosentiences in some way, even psychopathic Santano Enrique. The twins had sickened as they sickened. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
That As and the Net were entwined was beyond question.
“We still have the problem of logistics,” Nikita pointed out. “Such a large psychic migration has never before been attempted. Most Psy won’t even know how to sever their PsyNet link, then reconnect.”
Canto acknowledged the point. The biofeedback link was necessary for life. Unless the Psy in question had another psychic network in which to link, to cut it was to die, so what was the point of learning?
Still, there was something …
“Panic will kill the majority.” Ivy Jane rubbed her face, the purplish shadows under her eyes a silent statement of the strain on Designation E.
Canto’s brain worked, his mind finally unearthing the piece of random information he’d stored away at some point in his teens. It’s been done before, he telepathed