Page 122 of Primal Mirror

Remi growled. “What the fuck is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Auden admitted even as Liberty shook her fists with no indication of psychic stress or hurt. “It’s Libby. She’s doing something through me. I think…I think it needs an adult mind to work, but it’s her power. I’m just the conduit.” She brushed her fingers over her baby’s soft cheek. “It’s a web of glorious beauty, Remi. Like it’s coated with crushed gemstones.”

“It’s a good thing?”

Despite her wonder, Auden frowned and considered it from every angle. “Yes,” she said at last. “It’s not doing harm. I think…I think it might be helping in a way I don’t understand.”

She looked at their daughter again. “What are you doing, my baby?”

But Liberty just yawned before rooting for her breast…and Auden’s milk flowed so fast that it stained her T-shirt. Laughing, crying, she pulled down the loose neckline and fed her child while her mate—and Liberty’s father—cradled them close and purred deep in his chest.

A nudge at the back of her mind, that desperate entity sighing in relief. The sensation was weak, the flowers it showered on her mind a cascade of luminous steel.

Chapter 48

I don’t have empathy, Sahara. I can’t feel for those who are going to die. It would be akin to asking a falcon to take flight when his wings had long been hacked off.

—Kaleb Krychek to Sahara Kyriakus (circa late 2081)

KALEB SAW THE line of spidersilk before it reached him. That blue…

The same blue as Shoshanna Scott’s eyes.

Monster. Murderer. Spider.

The same blue as Auden Scott’s eyes.

Protected by the NetMind itself, to the point that the neosentience had almost burned itself out sharing its own energy with her so she could heal.

It had nearly done the same a second time around, when it had screamed for Kaleb to help her.

The NetMind was ready to die for Auden Scott.

He allowed the spidersilk to touch his mind, anchor into it…and felt it at once, a subtle draw on his power. Far less, however, than he was expending in his brute force effort to hold the PsyNet from crumbling.

Because it turned out that he wasn’t a black-hearted bastard after all. Not when it came to children. He’d set himself up above the area where Sahara—in concert with local empaths—had corralled all the children in their region, his aim to protect their innocent minds as the PsyNet shattered.

Sahara stood next to him, hand in hand with him, her power his to use.

“Do you see the spidersilk?” he asked.

“It looks like a dream. Should I allow it in?”

“Yes,” he said, remembering what the NetMind had shown him. “It’s…a mirror of what Shoshanna did. She took and took and became bloated with it. I think this web is doing what Ivan’s web does.” Creating a closed system of energy using every mind in the PsyNet, strong and weak, old and young, broken and whole.

“Oh,” Sahara whispered. “It’s so…happy?” Tilting her head against his arm, she smiled. “It’s gone now, but I could’ve sworn I felt the sweetest brush against my mind. This web is young.”

Kaleb hadn’t sensed any of that, but his emotions were twisted and calcified. He relied on Sahara when it came to knowing good from evil, dark from light. So, lifting her hand to his mouth, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles, then sent a telepathic blast through the PsyNet.

Accept the web. The NetMind designed it to hold the PsyNet together. It will not take by force. But the more minds in the web, the more energy it has to weave us back together.

The web spread at a phenomenal rate in a matter of seconds, and when he went to the mind he knew to be the center, it wasn’t there. A glittering blue orb sat in its place, roiling with the energy of millions of minds linked in a biofeedback loop of inconceivable proportions.

Kaleb understood. The mind couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be known. It was too fragile. “It’s a child,” he said with confidence. “The being at the center of the web. Auden Scott’s child.”

Sahara met his gaze, her dark hair lifting in the breeze on their terrace. “Will you tell the others?”

“I think the Arrows must know. There was an Arrow shield around Auden Scott’s mind the last time I saw it.”

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