Nalini Singh: Heart of Obsidian

“Vasic is practicing the weapons capability of his gauntlet?” Krychek asked, his eyes on the churned-up sand around Aden’s partner, Vasic having chosen a position midway down the dune that was Aden’s watchtower.

“Yes,” he said, and refused Vasic’s telepathic offer of assistance at the same time. If Krychek had come with hostile intent, he’d have struck already. “It’s meant to integrate with his base telekinetic strength, but there are glitches.”

Vasic teleported in and shot a small, personal laser missile at a target they’d set up on another dune a hundred meters away. It not only went haywire, it doubled back toward the teleporter. Not showing any indication of being concerned, Vasic pressed something on the gauntlet and the missile exploded in midair.

“I’d say the glitches are significant,” was Kaleb’s cool appraisal. “He shouldn’t have been implanted with the device if it’s at this level of development. Its usefulness doesn’t balance the risk.”

Aden found himself in the unusual position of being caught unprepared. Because Kaleb had just repeated Aden’s own argument when he’d tried to talk Vasic out of volunteering for the risky procedure. “There was no way,” he said after a slight pause, “for the scientists to progress further without implanting it onto a live subject.”

“Can it be removed?”

“No, it’s fused too deeply to his body.” Aden watched as Vasic launched another missile. “You didn’t track us down to watch Vasic target practice,” he said as this missile did exactly what it was meant to do, sand exploding in a silver geyser.

“Why are you here?” Kaleb asked instead of answering the implied question. “There’s nothing you can do to stop an accident.”

Aden had no intention of answering with the truth. “I’m here to monitor the tests, provide a backup account of the results.”

Kaleb was quiet for a long time, the two of them watching the arcing blue flare of weapons fire as Vasic tested another setting on the gauntlet. When he spoke, Kaleb again said the unexpected. “You’re here so that if something goes wrong, Vasic doesn’t die alone. He’s so close to the edge, you aren’t certain he won’t engineer a fatal accident.”

There were very few people in the world who knew Vasic that well. Kaleb Krychek was not one of them, and yet he’d come to the right conclusion. Turning toward the man who was dressed in black combat pants and a black T-shirt, a large thin-skin bandage on the inside of his left forearm and scuffed boots on his feet, Aden said, “What do you want?”

Kaleb shifted to face him. “To know if I’m going to have to leave you dead on the desert sands.”

“What makes you so certain you could?”

The white stars in the cardinal Tk’s eyes gleamed as hard as diamonds. “You could incapacitate or kill me if you had the element of surprise, but in brute strength, I have no equal.”

“Vasic has a lock on your position.” His partner had taken that action the instant Kaleb first appeared. “He can have a gun to your head in the space between one breath and the next. And I am no medic.” The only reason he told Kaleb that was because he was certain the other man already knew the true nature of his abilities.

Unlike Ming, Kaleb took nothing at face value, especially not a field medic who held the loyalty of the entire squad. “To be complacent in the presence of a cardinal Tk of opaque objectives and fluid allegiance,” Aden added, “would be stupid in the extreme.”

“That’s why I’d rather not kill you,” was Kaleb’s response. “It’s easy enough to find a trained assassin—an intelligent fighter capable of foresight, and flexible enough to alter his plans given the circumstances, is a far more rare thing.” Shifting on his heel, the cardinal began to walk down the dune. “There’s something your partner needs to see.”

Aden followed in silence, unable to predict what Kaleb would do next. When the cardinal asked both Aden and Vasic to meet him on the PsyNet, they did so without argument. Once there, the other man said, “I need you to step inside the first layer of my shields.”

Again, neither one of them hesitated; Krychek’s shields were byzantine, but Aden and Vasic were more than capable of breaking out of this layer without problems. Aden had actually broken into it when the squad had first begun to consider shifting their loyalty to Kaleb—in a strictly limited sense that made it clear the Arrows were no one’s lapdogs.

Then, he’d seen nothing, the outermost layer of Kaleb’s shielding nothing but a redundancy that acted as an alarm bell in case of incursion. Today, he saw a psychic bond that went from Kaleb’s mind to another one he didn’t recognize, the colors of the bond faceted obsidian and a radiant light gold.

Force, coercion, manipulation, indications of psychic fraud, he searched for any hint of that in the connection that broke every rule of Silence, and found nothing. It was an organic construct, growing from two minds that had reached out for one another across the void, the light embracing the dark, the dark protective around the light.

Almost before Aden understood what it was he was seeing, he and Vasic were shoved out by a wave of naked power, shields of impenetrable obsidian slamming down over Kaleb’s mind and that of the unidentified other.

“You’re emotionally linked to someone,” Aden said back in the desert, thrown enough by what he’d seen that the words spilled out past his normally airtight guards.

Was it real? Vasic asked at the same time, as if distrustful of his own perception.

Yes.

“My true allegiance,” Kaleb said on the heels of Aden’s telepathic answer, “has never been fluid.”

It was Vasic who next spoke, the desert wind so quiet around them that it disturbed not a single grain of sand. “That bond cannot exist in a Silent world.”

“No.”

At last, Aden understood why Kaleb had come tonight, why the cardinal needed to know if he would have to drench the sands with their blood. “The Arrows,” Aden began, “were created at the dawn of Silence, our mandate to protect the Protocol at all costs.”

Kaleb said nothing, his face so remote, it was impossible to believe he had the capacity to bond with anyone.

“The first Arrow,” Aden continued, “was told that Silence was the Psy race’s only hope, that without it, we would fall into madness and insanity until our people were nothing but a terrible memory. Zaid believed. We all believed.”

“It wasn’t a total lie.” Kaleb’s gaze met Vasic’s. “Not all of us would have survived to adulthood, or maintained a kind of sanity at least, without some level of conditioning.”

“No,” Vasic said, “it wasn’t— isn’t —a total lie, but the core is rotten.”

“That’s why it must be excised.” A ruthless proclamation from a man who had always seemed the embodiment of the Protocol: cold, powerful, without ties of any kind. “Silence must fall. Will the Arrows fall with it?”

“The Arrow Squad,” Aden said, “must always exist.” For those like Vasic and Judd—and Kaleb. The ones who were too dangerous to live in the ordinary world; the ones the rest of their people would fear if the outliers were not first trained to hide their lethal nature; the ones who would always be needed to protect their people. “It cannot fall.”

Kaleb’s answer was blunt. “Then it must adapt.”

It would be the most difficult journey any Arrow had ever taken, and Aden knew some would splinter before this was all over. But, his men and women were ready. The squad had known it might one day have to break from Silence, from the Net itself—though that Net was their lifeblood, a psychic home they had fought to protect for over a hundred years . . . even as it killed them.