Nalini Singh: Blaze of Memory

“I know.” His own psychic senses had picked up an “echo” from the woman. Muted but there. “She’s not a threat at this stage. We’ll reassess the situation after she’s up and around.”

Something beeped inside the room, making Glen glance at his chart. “It’s nothing. Don’t you have a meeting with Talin this morning?”

Taking the hint, Dev drove home to shower and change. It was just ticking over six thirty when he walked back into the building that housed the headquarters of the Shine Foundation. Though the top four floors were sectioned into a number of guest apartments, the middle ten were taken up with various administration offices, while the floors below the basement housed the testing and medical facilities. And today—a Psy. A woman who might turn out to be the latest move in the Council’s attempts to destroy the Forgotten.

But, he reminded himself, right now she was asleep and he had work to do. “Activate. Voice code—Devraj Santos.” The clear screen of his computer slid up and out of his desk, showing a number of unread messages. His secretary, Maggie, was good at weeding out the “can-waits” from the “must-responds” and all ten on-screen fell into the latter category—and today hadn’t yet begun. Leaning back in his chair, he glanced at his watch.

Too early to return the calls—even in New York, most people weren’t at their desks by six forty-five. Then again, most people didn’t run the Shine Foundation, much less act as the head of a “family” of thousands scattered across the country, and in many cases, the world.

It was inevitable he’d think of Marty at that moment.

“This job,” his predecessor had said the night Dev accepted the directorship, “will eat up your life, suck the marrow from your bones for good measure, and spit you out on the other end, a dry husk.”

“You stuck to it.” Marty had run Shine for over forty years.

“I was lucky,” the older man had said in that blunt, no-nonsense way of his. “I was married when I took the job, and to my eternal gratitude, my wife stayed with me through all the shit. You go in alone, you’ll end up staying that way.”

Dev could still remember how he’d laughed. “What, you have a very low opinion of my charm?”

“Charm all you like,” Marty had said with a snort, “but women have a way of wanting time. The director of the Shine Foundation doesn’t have time. All he has is the weight of thousands of dreams and hopes and fears resting on his shoulders.” A glance filled with shadows. “It’ll change you, Dev, turn you cruel if you’re not careful.”

“We’re a stable unit now,” Dev had argued. “The past is past.”

“Dear boy, the past will never be past. We’re in a war, and as director, you’re the general.”

It had taken Dev three years into the job before he’d truly understood Marty’s warning. When his ancestors had defected from the PsyNet, they’d hoped to make a life outside the cold rigidity of Silence. They’d chosen chaos over control, the dangers of emotion over the certain sanity of a life lived without hope, without love, without joy. But with those choices had come consequences.

The Psy Council had never stopped hunting the Forgotten.

To fight back, to keep his people safe, Dev had had to make some brutal choices of his own.

His fingers curled around the pen in his grip, threatening to crush it. “Enough,” he muttered, glancing at his watch again. Still too early to call.

Pushing back his chair, he got up, intending to grab some coffee. Instead, he found himself taking the elevator down to the subbasement level. The corridors were quiet, but he knew the labs would already be humming with activity—the workload was simply too big to allow for much downtime.

Because while the Forgotten had once been as Psy as those who looked to the Council for leadership, time and intermarriage with the other races had changed things in their genetic structure. Strange new abilities had begun to appear . . . but so had strange new diseases.

But that wasn’t the threat he had to assess today.

If they were right, the unknown woman in the hospital bed in front of him was linked to the PsyNet itself. That made her beyond dangerous—a Trojan horse, her mind used as a conduit through which to siphon data or implement deadly strategies.

The last spy stupid enough to try to infiltrate Shine had discovered the lethal truth far too late—that Devraj Santos had never left his military background behind. Now, as he looked down into the woman’s bruised, scratched, and emaciated face, he considered whether he’d be able to snap her neck with cold-blooded precision should the time come.

He was afraid the answer might just be an icily practical yes.

Chilled, he was about to leave the room when he noticed her eyes moving rapidly beneath her lids. “Psy,” he murmured, “aren’t supposed to dream.”

“Tell me.”

She swallowed the blood on her tongue. “I’ve told you everything. You’ve taken everything.”

Eyes as black as night with a bare few flecks of white stared down at her as mental fingers spread in her mind, thrusting, clawing, destroying. She swallowed a scream, bit another line in her tongue.

“Yes,” her torturer said. “It does seem as if I’ve stripped you of all your secrets.”

She didn’t respond, didn’t relax. He’d done this before. So many times. But the next minute, the questions would begin again. She didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know what he searched for. All she knew was that she’d broken. There was nothing left in her now. She was cracked, shattered, gone.

“Now,” he said, in that same, always-patient voice. “Tell me about the experiments.”

She opened her mouth and repeated what she’d already confessed over and over again. “We doctored the results.” He’d known that from the start; that was no betrayal. “We never gave you the actual data.”

“Tell me the truth. Tell me what you found.”

Those fingers gouged mercilessly at her brain, shooting red fire that threatened to obliterate her very self. She couldn’t hold on, couldn’t protect them, couldn’t even protect herself—because through it all he sat, a large black spider within her mind, watching, learning, knowing. In the end, he took her secrets, her honor, her loyalty, and when he was done, the only thing she remembered was the rich copper scent of blood.

She came awake with a jagged scream stuck in her throat. “He knows.”

Brown eyes looking down into hers again. “Who knows?” The name formed on her tongue and then was lost in the miasma of her ravaged mind. “He knows,” she repeated, desperate that someone understand what she’d done. “He knows. ” Her fingers gripped his.

“What does he know?” Electricity arced like an inferno beneath his skin.

“About the children,” she whispered, as her head grew heavy again, as her eyes grew dark again. “About the boy.”

Gold turned to bronze and she wanted to watch, but it was too late.

Letter dated January 17, 1969

Dear Matthew,

At today’s meeting of government heads, the Council proposed a radical new approach to the problems we’ve been facing. I knew it was coming, but still, I can’t quite imagine how it will work.

The aim of this new program would be to condition all negative emotion out of the coming generation of Psy. If we could cure rage, what a boon that would be—so much of the violence could be stopped, so many lives saved. But the theorists have gone even further. They say that once we have a handle on rage, we may be able to control other damaging emotional events—things that cause the fractures that lead to mental illness.