Blaze of Memory

CHAPTER 40

The papers floated to the ground in serene silence as she unclenched her fingers. “I can see it now.” There was a fine spray on the back wall, almost hidden by the way dents had been pounded into the plasboard. And the sofa. . . some of those wicked-looking metal springs were rusted. Except that wasn’t rust.

Dev took her hand. “We need to see the rest.”

“Wait.” Bending, she picked up one of the sheets she’d dropped. “It’s part of the command log. They must’ve printed out a hard-copy backup because of the risk of power failure.”

“Why not keep it on the PsyNet?”

“It takes a lot of psychic power to maintain a PsyNet vault. Some companies prefer—” Chills snaked up her spine as she realized what she held. “Dev . . .”

Dev took the paper. “‘Major incident,’” he read out. “ ‘Request emergency assistance immediately. Repeat, request emergency assistance as soon as—’ It just ends.”

“A vocal-to-print transcript,” she said, tapping a line of code at the top of the page. “Probably set to print out automatically.” The thought of the printers working with quiet efficiency while blood erupted around them created the most macabre of images. “It’s dated September twenty-fifth.” While she’d been with Ming, a creature he thought he’d broken. “The speaker died midtransmission.”

“He died trying to save lives—that deserves to be remembered.” Folding the piece of paper, Dev put it in his pocket alongside the prospectus. “Let’s go.”

She’d never wanted to do anything less. But these people, she thought, needed her to keep going. Because they’d been locked in the dark, too, the final moments of their lives erased from existence. “Yes.”

The next building housed what appeared to be a mess hall. It was fairly neat, with only a little evidence of trouble—in the food preparation area. “Whatever happened,” Dev said, “it happened either very early in the morning or late at night.”

“When there would’ve been only kitchen workers in here.”

“Why a kitchen at all? I thought Psy lived on nutrition bars.”

“That’s the norm, but our psychologists sometimes recommend a more varied diet within an otherwise isolated population—they did for the lab.” The scientists working on the Implant Protocol, a protocol designed to turn the Net into a true hive mind, had been buried under hundreds of tons of earth, in a construction Ming had rigged to blow. “Every brain needs a certain amount of stimulation.” Her eyes went to a solid steel door at the back of the room. “The cooler.” Cold silvered into her very bones.

“I’ll do this.”

“No.” Ripping off a glove, she tangled her fingers with his. “Together.”

A pause where she could literally see him fighting his instincts, his face all brutal angles. “These are my nightmares,” she said. “I need to see if they’re real.”

Finally, he nodded and they walked to the cooler, the door growing monstrously larger with each step. “There’s nothing on the surface,” she said in relief. No blood, no scratches, no dents.

Reaching forward with his free hand, Dev twisted and pulled.

Icy mist whispered out, making Katya take a startled step back. Telling herself to stop being a coward, she returned to Dev’s side. “Shouldn’t the light come on automatically?”

Even as she spoke, something flickered and sparked and an instant later, a cool blue glow filled the space, illuminating the horror within. “Oh, God.” She couldn’t get her eyes off the bloody palm print in the very back, a palm print that streaked down over the wall and across the floor until it ended in a pile of blood. “She was trying to get away”—because the print was too small to be that of a man, and her mind simply couldn’t accept a child in this madness—“and he dragged her back, killed her.”

“More than one.” Dev’s tone was a blade. “Someone threw bodies in here.” He pointed to the other concentrations of frozen blood. “No one else struggled. They had to have been dead by then.”

“The entire kitchen staff.” She turned, able to see it now. “Whoever it was came in and managed to kill them off one by one. The woman alone figured it out, tried to escape.”

“Yeah.” Stepping back, he closed the door.

“Where are the bodies?” Her mind jerked from one wall to the next, trying to make sense of an evil that defied understanding. “You don’t think they’re outside, beneath the snow?”

Dev shook his head. “I’m guessing EarthTwo sent in a cleanup crew.”

Neither of them said anything more until they’d walked through the remaining buildings they could access. One was a gym, and it was pristine. The next five buildings had clearly been dormitory facilities. Shattered objects, broken windows, blood and chaos reigned here, most of it concentrated around the beds.

“Night,” she whispered. “They were asleep. That’s the only way anyone could’ve gotten so many of them—there had to be telepaths in the group. They’d have warned the others if they’d been awake.”

“Unless . . .”

She looked up from her contemplation of a bunk bed that seemed to have been snapped in half. “Unless?”

“Unless we’re talking about more than one killer.”

A wave of darkness, a crackle of memory, and the flood-gates opened.

“There’s been a major incident, sir.”

“Details?” That voice, Ming’s voice.

A pause. “The female?”

“She hasn’t got enough mind left to understand. Tell me the details.”

“EarthTwo received a telepathic and electronic Mayday from its operation in Sunshine, Alaska, approximately two hours ago. The management asked for Council help, as such assistance is a negotiated part of their contract with us. We were able to mobilize a small Tk unit and teleport to the location.”

“How many dead?”

“One hundred and twenty.” The speaker could’ve been talking about stocks and bonds, so calm was his tone of voice. “The population numbered one hundred and fifty. Three were seriously injured, while six managed to find hiding places.”

“That leaves twenty-one.”

“Yes, sir. It appears various members of the team broke Silence at approximately the same time, though not in a central location. They attacked each other and the nonfragmented members of the expedition. Of the twenty-one who survived the initial incident, ten died attempting to attack the Tk team, while eleven were neutralized and put into involuntary comas.”

“Sunshine?”

“An isolated outpost. We can send in a team to clean up the immediate mess, but we’d have to take a significant number of Tks off higher-priority tasks in order to fully erase the settlement.”

“Viability of the work without telekinetics?”

“There’s always a risk of detection with flying in—the op may attract unwanted attention.”

A long silence. “Were all the staff members at Sunshine Psy?”

“Yes.”

“Have EarthTwo log that the encampment was abandoned after the outbreak of a lethal airborne virus. That should keep anyone else from wanting to go in for the time being.”

“Katya!” Dev shook the woman in his arms, having carried her outside to the cold when she refused to respond to him in the dormitory.

Her eyes fluttered. “Dev?”

“It’s me, baby. Come on, come back.”

“I remembered,” she whispered, her voice husky.

“Tell me in the car.” Only when he’d settled her in the backseat and crawled in to take her into his arms did he breathe again. “Your eyes . . .” It was like she’d ceased to exist, or gone so deep that he couldn’t see her anymore. He’d thought no terror could come close to what he’d experienced as a child. He’d been wrong.

She hugged him, pressing kisses to his jaw. “I’m sorry—I think I must’ve slipped into some type of a trance state.”

He let her soothe him, needing the caresses, needing to know that she was alright. “Tell me.” Stroking his hand up her spine, he closed his hand over her nape.

Horror spread its fingers through his chest as she began to speak, the invasion hard and pitiless. “Over twenty people went insane at once?”

“More than that—some would’ve been killed when they first turned on each other.”

“How is that even possible?” He pulled her into his lap, needing to feel the living warmth of her weight. “I’ve heard that Psy are breaking in higher numbers, but we’re talking about a case of mass insanity.”

“I didn’t believe the rumors,” she said. “Not until I heard that.”

He waited.

“A number of our—mine and Ashaya’s—contacts reported that there were stories of certain parts of the Net going ‘dark,’ like something was collecting there, something that ate up or buried the fabric of the Net.”

“The influence of the DarkMind?”

“Yes, that’s a possibility. I just don’t know.” She shook her head. “No one could ever actually point to an example, so we didn’t pay it that much attention. We couldn’t—we had to focus on what we could actually see and change.”

“Go on.”

“You know what it means to be in a neural network—it’s like swimming in the sea. There’s no way to avoid coming into contact with any pollutants.”

Dev pulled off his knit cap with an impatient hand. “You think this ‘rot,’ ” he said, for want of a better word, “seeped into all those minds?”

“The Net isn’t locked to any one location,” she said, “but your location in the Net is determined partly by where you are in the world. This group would’ve been in Sunshine, and that means they would’ve occupied an isolated section of the Net. If they all arrived together, the rot would’ve started to work on them at the same time.”

“Some of the ones who were killed,” Dev said, barely able to wrap his mind around the sheer magnitude of the slaughter, “chances are they would’ve broken, too—if they’d lived a little longer.”

“Yes.” Katya wrapped her arms around his neck. “If this has happened once, Dev . . .”

“We need to record this. We need proof.”

“The Council will deny it. No one is ready to believe.” A tight kind of anger filled every syllable. “I know—we tried so hard to tell people the truth, but it’s like they can only take so much at a time. They’ll say you’re simply trying to create political—”

“I know.” He broke off the flow of frustrated words with a kiss. “I need the records for my people.”

Understanding lit those pretty eyes from within. “Oh. I see. Did you bring a recording device?”

“My cell phone has a high-enough resolution and plenty of memory.”

Neither of them said anything for several minutes—though they both knew they had to get out of the car to document what they’d found. Katya listened to the steady beat of Dev’s heart and in that, somehow found courage. “We can do this.”

He dropped a kiss to the top of her head. “Do you know what I see when I look at the blood?”

“Tell me.”

“The possible future of the Forgotten.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “Why couldn’t we have left the madness behind when we left the Net? Why do our abilities always have to come bundled with darkness?”

Katya had spent many hours considering the same. “If they didn’t, the Psy truly would rule the world—that flaw, that built-in Achilles’ heel, is the only thing that makes us breakable, the only thing that stems our arrogance.”

His fingers threaded through her hair, pushing off her cap. “With power comes temptation.”

“Yes.” She thought of the people who’d worked in the labs with her, so many of them gifted, so many of them unable to see that what they were doing was monstrous. “That much power, without any controls, changes a person from the inside out.” And what emerged wasn’t always anything human in the wider sense.

“Emotion is a control.” Dropping his hand from her hair, he picked up her cap. “But it’s not the complete answer.”

“If it was,” she murmured, letting him put the cap back on her head, drawing his tenderness around her like a shield, “Silence would have never come into force.”

“Circles.” He reached out to open the door. “Ready?”

“Yes.” But it was a lie. She’d never be ready to face the death that stained Sunshine a dark, nearly black red. It didn’t matter. This had to be done. Somebody had to bear witness to the loss of so many minds, so many dreams and hopes. “Yes. Let’s go.”

Letter dated January 5, 1979

Dear Matthew,

I almost can’t believe that we made it. The ShadowNet, as everyone’s calling this new network, is a vibrant, chaotic place. Given our numbers, it’s not as dense as the PsyNet, but it’s alive. And that’s all that matters.

The ostrasizing has already begun. We called your uncle Greg to tell him we were safe. I could see the relief in his eyes, but all he said out loud was not to call him again. He’s afraid that if he shows any feelings toward us, the Council will take your cousins away.

I cried afterward. You saw me, wiped my tears. And I knew with every beat of my heart that I’d made the right choice.

I love you so.

Mom