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"Why do you think I told you?" A tone that left no room for doubt And then he said the words she’d waited what felt like a lifetime to hear "You won’t betray us, Katya, no matter what the cost"
"Dev"
"You beat hi has no claim on you anymore"
PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES
Letter dated July 17, 1982
Dearest Matthew,
You’re growing so big and strong, hter I e didn’t have to uproot you at such a critical time, but I’d rather be safe than sorry Several of the defectors have recently disappeared without a trace They were all at the powerful end of the spectru us
Your fatherhe had a vision yesterday He’s so rarely truly with us these days that I wanted only to talk to him, but he used the oing to come after you, Matthew You’re too powerful a telepath So we have to run And we have to keep running until they can no longer find even a trace of the Petrokovs
Your father won’t come with us He calls himself a liability And he won’t listen to me when I say different Before Silence, I used to tease hinations It says that F-Psy are considered so our race because of what their ability demands But today, he proved the definition true to the last word, o tomorrow I don’t know if I can I don’t know if I can leave the only man I’ve ever loved
Mom
Chapter 43
You won’t betray us, Katya, no ht than he knew, Katya thought two hours later, pain beating at her teers over Dev’s cheekbones, conscious he’d wake to anything but the most butterfly of touches Even then, he shifted
"It’s just me," she whispered, as the exquisite ache in her heart threatened to tear her wide open This, she thought, was love She’d never felt it before but she knew This feeling, it went soul deep, and it ravaged even as it healed Devraj Santos had becoo after Ming - she had every faith in his abilities, but she refused to lose him to a fool’s errand
There was no way to save her
She’d realized that the instant after Dev had said she could live out her whole life without anyone being the wiser True Except that her whole life ht only equal anotherin a prison was that after a while, your skin got pasty, your body got weak, and your ainst the walls in a vain effort to escape
She was Psy
She couldn’t survive being permanently cut off froh She had to be some part of the fabric of a neural network Psychic isolationIt would drive her ers lifted to her nose Dev hadn’t seen it She’d hidden it But there, in Sunshine, her nose had bled again Just a little Butoff the incident as being a consequence of the bitter cold - yet even then, part of her had begun to wonder And now, tonight, as her skull threatened to i headache, she accepted the truth - her brain was already starting to lose the battle Her ainst the walls of its prison
Even if she so had assured her end She’d told Dev she was re more and more She hadn’t told hi into her et them out "It hurts," she said tonelessly It wasn’t a complaint He’d ordered her to tell him her reactions She didn’t understand hen he could si to rebel without reason That brought pain so excruciating, one ile threads of her very self
"Good" A "snick" that she heard with her psychic ear "It’s done"
She waited
"Open your psychic eye"
It took her almost a minute, she’d been forced to keep herself contained for so long All she saas blackness Then, as her eye adjusted, she began to make out the spiderweb linked to every part of her mind Those thin threads fed back to thicker, darker, obscenely jagged roots
Chilled, she moved around those talonsand slaripped her throat but she didn’t make a sound Instead, she padded around the walls until she was back at her starting point "I’htmare Even the rehabilitated, those Psy who’d had their minds destroyed by a psychic brainwipe, had access to the Net Ming ht as well have buried her alive
"We wouldn’t want your aberrantthe Net" A small pause as he took a seat "Your personal shields are under your control - you’d be useless otherwise Telepathy appears to be your only offensive capability"
So, she thought, ignoring his deliberately belittling words, she could still do that much at least But it wasn’t the saically excised from the herd
"Why does it hurt?"
"An incentive to coer it takes, the less chance you have of actually obtaining any useful inforotten realize what you are"
"Incentive?"