Page 101 of Storm Echo

He carried her words with him into the ChaosNet. She was a tug inside him that was invisible, but that he knew led the way home. So it was that he stepped into the chaotic lightning-shot island with one goal in mind: to find some way to collapse it so that the minds within would reintegrate into the PsyNet.

Already, he could see the difference from the last time he’d visited: a number of minds had gone dull, and he knew that those were the people who were declining, not just comatose but in a critical state where their brains flickered between life and death.

It was, he found, difficult to ignore pain in front of him—he was pragmatic, had long ago learned to see death as an inevitability—but these people hadn’t chosen to play on this field, had been hauled onto it without permission. They’d been made pawns in someone else’s game, their choices ripped from them as Soleil’s had been ripped from her.

Regardless of his response, however, he couldn’t divert his attention to help them; such an action would deplete his psychic reserves, put him back right where he’d been after his first visit. He’d do far more good if he could complete his assigned mission and bring down the island.

He’d told Krychek before he went in, so the other man could put all the various hospitals on alert, as their patients might go into cardiac arrest or show other signs of catastrophic failure at the moment of disconnection. The medics needed to be warnednot to interferewith lifegiving measures unless the patient didn’t stabilize within five seconds.

A healthy Psy mind should only need half that long to reconnect to the massive sprawl of the PsyNet. Any interference in between could cause neural disruption that critically disturbed the process.

Krychek had confirmed that the hospitals were already on standby for such instructions, and that he’d blasted out a telepathic alert that it was happening today. Now all Ivan had to do was deliberately splinter the ChaosNet.

He’d have attempted to collapse the foundation by somehow taking out the anchors without killing them, but there was no way to identify an anchor on the PsyNet. Canto had confirmed that for him last night when he’d called and spoken to his cousin.

Ivan always had plans for an operation, but today, there could be no plan. This place was too chaotic, too much an unknown. He’d have to act in the heat of the moment the instant he found a fatal vulnerability in the system.

That in mind, he began to move quickly through the psychic space, gathering as much data as possible. He couldn’t avoid all the lightning strikes—not when the psychic space was full of them—but he didn’t take any major hits. Around him, the landscape was warped and sluggish, the data in the network so fragmented that it was of no use.

Which was why it took him a long time to pick up the echo that ran through every inch of the ChaosNet:Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen.

Over and over and over in an endless loop. Obsessive and compulsive and not rational. Even if they managed to pass themselves off as rational on the physical plane, their minds were lost in a fog of compulsion.

Compulsion toward their Queen.

Despite his earlier suspicions, Ivan had no proof that this was the Architect. To date, the Architect’s actions had all been very rational—they had played the long game. And they’d played it well enough that even his family hadn’t managed to unmask them.

A mind up ahead that had been shooting out lightning bolts suddenly burst outward in a supernova of light and energy that buffeted Ivan’s mind with brutal force. He was only able to survive because his shields were titanium. But when the dust cleared, nothing remained of the Scarab who had once existed.

That echo again:Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen.

That was who’d done this, broken the PsyNet by using the Scarabs. Because the world wasn’t an even playing field. Some people had more power, more charisma. If Grandmother, for example, had wished to turn Ivan evil, she could have: he’d been a badly damaged child when he came into the family, Ena his savior. She could’ve molded him into nothing but her obedient shadow with very little effort.

These Scarabs, too, would’ve been damaged when the Queen captured them in her web. But it couldn’t only be charisma and timing. Scarabs were too powerful when their brains broke the chain that Silence had imposed on them—they would’ve long ago subjugated anyone less powerful.

Ivan hissed out a breath on the physical plane: a Scarab powerful enough to control other Scarabs would be a nightmare. This individual might be even more powerful than Kaleb Krychek—and that could lead to hell on Earth.

He took a significant blow from a black lightning bolt right then, shuddered, but shrugged it off. His internal power meter, however, dipped once again. The longer he stayed here, the more hits he’d take, and the less power he’d have if he did work out how to collapse the island.

The only mercy was that the spider inside him sat silent, unmoving. He’d have hoped the mating bond had made it go quiescent, but he knew better. His power could coil and strike at any moment. As Soleil’s cat could pounce; that cat, too, sat unmoving, watchful.

Making a call on gut instinct, he began to arrow in toward the center. This island was a new construct, with nothing akin to the PsyNet’s psychic weight to it. Whatever stability it had, it had to come from the core, else it’d be folding in on itself, the weight on one end more than the other.

The PsyNet, in contrast, was so big that it had no true center. It was different depending on each individual’s location. The island was minuscule in comparison. It made sense that it would have a central point from where everything else flowed.

He expected to find a mind brighter than the others, the Queen to whom they paid homage, but when he reached the place that he was certain had to be the center, his internal compass telling him that he was now equidistant from most of the coast on any side, he saw nothing.

There was literallynothingthere.

Not a single mind, only endless darkness. Since Ivan took nothing at face value, he went closer, still closer. That was when he realized that no lightning bolts passed through this area, either, the region as eerily still as the eye of a hurricane.

A shield?

But he had zero issues moving through the dead zone … and that was when he felt it—a subtle draw that tried to suck him downward. In truth, there was no up or down in the psychic space, but that was how his brain made sense of it: that something was pulling at him, trying to siphon his energy.

It wasn’t a sinkhole. No, it was something much more subtle. He knew all at once that the dead psychic zone around it was formed of all the minds it had already sucked dry of energy.

A cold realization in the center of his brain, a creeping sense of the familiar. Had he been a cat like his mate, he’d have put it in scent terms: it was as if he’d scented something he knew, a psychic presence that was no stranger, was rather so akin to him that it … felt like family.

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