Page 70 of Storm Echo

He’d emerged into the Net across from the psychic island that had broken off during the major PsyNet incident. Though he could “see” it, the dark mass was utterly blank to his psychic vision, as it was to everyone else. He’d caught the news reports yesterday, learned of a number of people whose minds had vanished from the PsyNet, but who were alive.

It should’ve been a simple matter for those people to tell others of what was going on in that fragment of the PsyNet, but every single individual found to date was either unable to communicate in a lucid fashion, in a coma, or catatonic on both the psychic and physical levels. Whatever was happening on the island had crashed all their brains.

Communication had proved impossible, though hospital empaths had reported erratic bursts of fear and confusion from their patients. That last piece of data wasn’t public knowledge, but of course Grandmother knew of it without having put any of her children, her grandchildren, or their partners in a compromising situation.

The latter had never before been an issue, with their entire family below the radar. But now Silver was the director of the biggest emergency response organization in the world, Canto was bonded to a member of the Psy Ruling Coalition, and Arwen was an official member of the Empathic Collective and had taken the Collective’s oath to protect the privacy of those he treated.

“Really, Ivan,” Ena had murmured on a recent call, “soon, we shall be far too visible to run an information network.”

“Maybe, Grandmother,” Ivan had replied, “it’s time to return to our roots. Back when Mercants were the knights to a king, walking right in the open rather than being the shadows behind the crown.”

Onscreen, Ena had raised both eyebrows, the sky a turbulent gray behind her and her upper body clad in a shift of delicate bronze silk. “Once again, you surprise me. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we come to a moment of change—after all, the world is in flux.”

Her words had played in Ivan’s mind as he wandered closer to the island. As he did so, he became aware that, in the aftermath of the incident, he’d forgotten to sever the fine threads that connected him to the people he’d saved. Links that had formed at the moment he grabbed hold of them and threw them to safety. Those threads had become stronger in the interim, turned silver with the barest touch of flame.

His abdomen went rigid in the physical world, but he was unable to sense any power flowing his way. He hadn’t turned them into a spider’s prey. For now, at least. Because the fact the threads had gained in strength was a warning that the spider wasn’t only stirring, it was wide awake and looking to feed.

A moment of sheer panic before he remembered that his bond with Soleil was a changeling thing. Nothing he could even see. No way for the spider to devour her. Not that he could trust it would remain that way as the spider gained in strength, the psychic mutation of Ivan stretching out its limbs in endless greed.

He went to sever his connections to the survivors from yesterday, hesitated … because some of those threads led to the island. He’d thrown people to the closest safe area. For many, that had meant the island. Which also meant they were probably now in a coma or locked inside their minds.

In trying to save them, he might have doomed them.

Jaw set, he used the threads to try to tug himself onto the island. Per the family-wide alert he’d received before he left the apartment yesterday evening, no one had been able to access the island to date. Psy minds literally could not cross empty psychic space.

It was akin to asking someone to walk over to the next neighborhood by crossing an expanse of outer space. It was neurologically and physically impossible. Psy minds couldn’t survive in that dead space.

Except … Ivan was now standing on the island, his hands glinting with the flame-kissed silver of the threads he’d used to travel here. As if they’d acted like a spacesuit, keeping him alive for the journey. Which meant hewastaking energy that wasn’t his to take; he might not feel bloated with it, but that he was alive was an answer in itself.

Ivan had become the monster he’d spent a lifetime fighting.

He turned to look back the way he’d come, his gorge rising … and saw nothing but a wall of obsidian. His mind was anchored on the other side, this part of him a roaming echo—but he could no longer see his mind, far less the silvery bonds he’d used to reach this strange place. Neither could he make telepathic contact with any of his family.

A definite problem.

A roaming mind couldn’t survive separated from the main part of the mind, and vice versa. At a certain point in time, the two parts would both begin to fragment, with the roaming part absorbed into the PsyNet. Giving him, in effect, a psychic lobotomy. At which point, his physical body would die.

Great.

However, since he’d learned young that to rail against that which couldn’t be altered was a waste of time, he didn’t try to throw himself against that infinite wall of black. Rather, he focused on the psychic structure of the barrier. The ones behind this island had been clever. Instead of trying to control each individual mind on the island, they’d simply isolated the entire island.

That had to be burning massive amounts of power.

Power such as that generated by Scarabs before they imploded.

Because Scarabs were inherently unstable. That was the problem, had alwaysbeenthe problem. Silence had been designed as a solution partially to deal with this exact scenario: to assist Psy who burned so hot, so out of control that they went insane or died in childhood, their brains unable to cope with the psychic overload.

That amount of power required very specific neural machinery. Machinery such as that in a dual cardinal’s brain. And dual cardinals were the rarest of the rare, genetic anomalies so unusual that there was no statistical model for their occurrence in the PsyNet.

Had the Scarabs not been unstable—both psychically and mentally—no one would’ve worried about them. Rather, they’d have been studied for the potential for untrammeled psychic power. Because while not every Psy wanted to be a brutal power, it was a safe bet that most at the lower end of the Gradient wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to safely supercharge their psychic abilities.

But, as with Ivan’s own ability, it turned out that becoming a Scarab wasn’t a choice—and it wasn’t safe. Thanks to Grandmother’s standing in the PsyNet, a standing that meant she’d been briefed fully on the entire situation, Ivan knew that Scarabshadbeen studied once—a generation into Silence.

Project Scarab had initially been lauded a great success. Removing the psychic rules mandated by Silence had removed the “dimmer switch” on the abilities of affected Psy.

It had also destroyed them.

“They all died,” Grandmother had told him, her tone solemn as she stared out at the roiling waves of the ocean. “Either by their own hand, or at the hands of Council executioners. They were too unstable, fractured at the very core—and that instability, that psychic chaos, threatened to destabilize the Net.”

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