Shield of Winter

Chapter 52

SAHARA HAD A genius level IQ. That’s what she’d been told as a child forced to struggle with math when she’d rather have been out dancing. Math and Sahara had never made their peace, but in other ways, her brain was a finely honed machine.

It had been worrying on a problem for a considerable period of time.

“Eben Kilabuk,” she said, and placed an image of the empath on Kaleb’s desk, having commandeered the space since he was at a meeting. “Phillip Kilabuk.” She laid the photo of Eben’s dead, infected father below the boy’s.

“Christiane Hall. Marchelline Hall.” Empathic mother and infant. “Miki Ling.” The caretaker cousin. A low-level M-Psy murdered by one of the infected. Her autopsy had shown no signs of the disease in her own brain.

“Miguel Ferrera.” Twenty-five-year-old male, Gradient 4.1, commercial telepath.

She took several more photos, laid them out. All of survivors. Then she removed the Es and rearranged the remaining survivors into two groups. On one side, she placed those like Miki Ling, people connected to an empath and thus assumed to be, or have been, protected by the empath’s immunity in some way.

On the other side, she placed the random outliers, such as Miguel Ferrera, who had no empaths in his family tree and had, in fact, had no contact with his biological family for over two years.

Then there was Phillip Kilabuk. His brain had been riddled with infection though he was the father and custodial guardian of an E. Proximity to an E, familial and genetic connections to an E, Phillip Kilabuk had had them all and it hadn’t saved him.

There was no pattern. And yet . . .

Eyes narrowed, she logged into Kaleb’s system using the password he’d given her—her beautiful, dangerous man had access to every database under the sun—and began to run down every scrap of data she could find on each one of the people represented by the photographs. Banking information, medical histories, university transcripts . . . that was just the start.

The work was tedious, might take days or even weeks, but she could sense something in the information she already had, akin to a tiny stone in the bottom of a shoe, an irritation that simply would not go away. She had to find that stone, because in the irritation might lie a critical answer.