Resonance Surge

Book 7: Psy-Changeling Trinity

by Nalini Singh

Genres: Paranormal Romance; Science Fiction Romance; Urban Fantasy; Shifters; Paranormal

Synopsis

StoneWater bears Pavel and Yakov Stepyrev have been a unit since birth, but now Pavel's life is veering in a new direction, his heart held in the hands of Arwen Mercant, a Psy empath—and the only man who has ever brought Pavel to his knees.



This is it. A point of irrevocable change. For Pavel . . . for Arwen . . . for Yakov . . . and for another pair of twins whose bond has a far darker history.



A low-Gradient Psy, Theodora Marshall is considered worthless by everyone but her violently powerful twin, Pax. She is the sole person he trusts in their venomous family to investigate a hidden and terrible part of their family history—an unregistered rehabilitation Center established by their grandfather.



The Centers are an ugly vestige of the Psy race's Silent past. But this Center was worse. Far, far worse. And now Theo must uncover the awful truth—in the company of a scowling bear named Yakov, who isn't about to take a Marshall at face value . . . especially a Marshall who has turned his dreams into chilling nightmares.



Because Yakov is the great-grandson of a foreseer . . . and he has seen Theo die in an unstoppable surge of blood. Night after night after night . . .



Contains mature themes.

Release date: July 18, 2023

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 432

Sample

Ruins

SILENCE HAS FALLEN.

For the Psy race, emotion is no longer a crime.

They are free for the first time in over a hundred years.

So free that perhaps they have forgotten those who cannot walk into freedom, who cannot even see or understand that freedom. The ones who were irreparably destroyed by Silence.

Where are the “rehabilitated,” those Psy who were sentenced to a psychic brainwipe, those Psy who were left nothing more than shuffling blanks?

Where are the people who are a living indictment of the cruelty of the Silence Protocol?

Who watches over the most broken of them all?

Chapter 1

Theodora, I’m being told by your handler that you’re refusing to follow orders. Do you or do you not realize that the act you’re being asked to perform is the only way in which you can ever be useful to the family?

If you continue to refuse, you become nothing but a drain on our resources, a failure of genetic potential that will need to be addressed—and do not make the mistake of believing that the fact you’re the twin of a Gradient 9 gives you a protective halo.

You are now seventeen years old, far beyond the point where the loss of one twin will in any way impact the other. Pax has long forgotten you and is thriving free from the burden that was his bond to you. You are on your own.

—Private message from Marshall Hyde to Theodora Marshall (12 December 2072)

BLOOD, THERE WAS so much blood on her. It spurted through the hands she’d clasped desperately to her throat, dripped down the bone white of her fingers to stain them a rich scarlet. Her eyes were stark when they met his. And he knew.

She was dying.

Yakov Stepyrev jolted awake, his heart thunder and perspiration hot and damp on the mid-brown of his skin. He whipped his head around, searching for her . . . but of course his room was empty.

Heart yet a bass drum, he dropped his face into his pillow and mumbled, “Govno, Yakov, you’re losing it.”

It was an effort to flip over onto his back, but once there, he couldn’t stay put. He was a bear—usually he liked to linger in the warmth of the bed while hitting the snooze button on his old-school alarm clock. Usually however, he didn’t wake with his adrenaline pumping from a violent dream about a woman who didn’t exist and had never existed.

He flexed his fingers on the sheets . . . and only then realized his bear’s claws, thick and glossy and deadly, had pushed through his skin. Fur brushed against the inside of his body, the animal that was his other half as unsettled and agitated as the human half of Yakov.

Shoving off the sheet, he gritted his teeth and managed to retract his claws, then decided to work off his frenetic fight-ready energy by doing push-ups on the thickly carpeted floor. He did pull on a pair of boxer briefs first, though. He was no blushing violet—he just didn’t want his cock kissing the carpet with every rep.

But even the strenuous physical activity did little to redirect his mind from the track on which it was fixated. Her. The woman he’d been dreaming about since he was sixteen.

Never like this, however.

Never with blood, with fear that was chill sweat on his skin.

It had been fun in the beginning, when he was a teen. He’d bragged to his fellow juveniles that he knew exactly what his mate looked like, that he was a step ahead of them when it came to the mating dance. His great-grandfather had been a foreseer, hadn’t he?

After the odd experiences both he and his twin had had over the years—when they’d just known things even when those things hadn’t yet come to pass—Yakov had been certain his dreams were a glimmer of foresight. It had made sense to him that the dreams were so powerful because they related to the woman who was to be the one for him.

His mate. His heart.

But he wasn’t a teen any longer, and he was beginning to question his sanity. The dreams had stopped for years . . . only to return with a bloody and brutal vengeance this past week. Every freaking night. Always the same dream, too—of Yakov in his bear form, walking through the mist of early morning until he realized that he wasn’t alone, was walking beside a woman with hair of softest gold and eyes of haunted blue.

She knelt beside him at some point, her hand fisted in his fur as she cried into his neck. Her tears were so hot they burned, and all he wanted to do was change form, take her into his arms. But he couldn’t disturb her in her pain, so he just folded his legs to come down to the ground, and he let her cry until all her tears were done, and she could look him in the eyes again.

“I’m sorry,” she always said, her voice husky. “It’s too late, don’t you see?”

Then, without warning came the blood, the terror . . . the dying.

Yakov’s muscles quivered as he held a plank, but he couldn’t hold back the memory of his rage in the dream, the echo of his bear’s growl of repudiation ringing in his ears.

One thing he knew—the dreams hadn’t been like this back when he’d been a kid. His mystery woman had been younger then and he’d been in his human form, and though they’d met in the same misty clearing, she’d smiled at him in delighted surprise before they’d run through the flowers like small cubs playing a game.

It had been a thing of sunshine and joy.

Not a horror of scarlet blood and a man made helpless to save his mate.

Giving up on the push-ups when they did nothing to halt his thoughts of her, he sat back on the carpet he’d installed himself despite the ribbing from his clanmates about getting soft. Hah! Hadn’t the big, furry mudaks all been jealous afterward and sidled up to him one after the other asking about where to get the same plush carpet?

“Why are you haunting me?” he demanded of the girl become woman he’d never met, never seen. He was starting to wonder if she was someone his great-grandfather had known. Déwei Nguyen had been a powerful F-Psy, the real deal. Yakov and Pavel, in contrast, had only inherited a drop of his talent. With them, it was more a sense of intense intuition, rather than a manageable ability.

To Yakov, it felt like an itch under the skin when he knew he had to do something. He’d learned young not to fight the drive, because it never led him astray. That whisper of foresight had saved his and his twin’s

skin many a time—whether by warning them that their parents were approaching and they’d better hide all evidence of their illicit activities, or by making them halt in their tracks right before they walked onto a cliff destabilized by a storm.

But Pavel didn’t dream about a woman with haunted eyes. Not like Yakov.

“That’s because I like boys,” Pavel had joked as an older teen, then waggled dark eyebrows identical to Yakov’s; his eyes were a distinctive aqua green behind his spectacles, Pavel’s vision the only physical difference between the two of them. “Maybe your future mate is Psy and is seducing you with telepathy.”

Back then, with the Psy keeping a firm distance from changelings as well as humans, the idea had made Yakov roll his eyes. “It’s probably just some kind of weird psychic memory inherited from Denu.” The word he and Pavel used to refer to their great-grandfather didn’t officially come from any of the languages spoken inside their family unit.

Not Pavel and Yakov’s native Russian. Not their great-grandfather’s first languages of Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese that their beloved babushka Quyen had taught them pieces of, not the English spoken by their wickedly funny babushka Graciele, nor the Portuguese spoken by their paternal grandfather, Wacian.

According to their mother, as toddlers, they’d heard family members talking about their great-grandfather and tried to replicate his name, but in their baby mouths, Déwei Nguyen had come out sounding like “denu” and that was that. Their grandmother Quyen, one of Déwei’s two children with his bear mate, had refused to allow anyone to correct them, and so he was forever Denu to Yakov and Pavel.

The two of them had been born after their denu passed, but their grandmother had told them stories about him that made him come alive. “He was so handsome and he had such a laugh, boys,” their babushka would say. “His eyes would crinkle up at the corners, and it would just spill out of him.” Her own lips curving, her eyes awash with happy memories.

Later, when they were older, she’d told them the other side of her father’s life. “He was a man of heart and honor, my papa, but he had such sorrow inside him.” Déwei, she’d told them, had already been mated when the Psy race embraced Silence, his home the StoneWater den.

“He never once considered leaving my mama—he adored her to his dying breath.” A smile potent with memory. “But he did miss his own parents and siblings terribly. I was born after the Psy embraced Silence, so I never met them. As an adult, I asked him about them, and he

said they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to maintain an emotional distance if they continued to stay in touch.”

She’d shown them a picture of her parents in the twilight of their life, Déwei Nguyen’s hair a shock of silky white and his face creased with laugh lines as he stood with his arm around his laughing mate, her hair a tumble of silver that yet retained a hint of the vivid red from images of her youth.

“You two love as fiercely as he did.” Their grandmother’s eyes had shone wet, her throat moving as she swallowed. “Always hold on tight to you and yours—and don’t allow politics to come in between. That’s what my papa taught me. Love is a far greater gift.”

“I could use your help today, Denu,” Yakov said now. “Who is she? A girl you had a crush on as a youth? Good thing your Mimi never knew.” According to their grandmother, that had been his affectionate pet name for his mate, Marian Marchenko.

“Hot-tempered, my mama was,” Babulya Quyen had said with a laugh when they’d asked about their great-grandmother. “She apparently chased him down with a skillet once during their courtship, after she mistakenly thought he was making eyes at another bear. Shows you my father’s charm that he not only got her to put down that skillet—but convinced her to make him pancakes on it!”

It was one of Yakov’s favorite stories of his great-grandparents’ enduring love affair. Smiling at the memory of the story, he rose off the floor, and seeing that the hand-knitted blanket on his bed was trailing over the side, he threw it back up. The blanket was terrible. Full of dropped stitches and wild lines. But their mother knit to “relax, damn it” and it always made Yakov grin when he woke and saw her efforts.

Mila Hien Kuznets was the least relaxed person Yakov knew, and he’d have her no other way.

But today, even the sight of his mother’s knitting had no impact on the tension knotting his veins. He flexed his hands, unable to forget the blood. No matter what he might want to believe, this wasn’t about a childhood crush of his great-grandfather’s. It was too grim, held too much portentous weight to it.

Jaw clenched, he walked into the bathroom, stripped off his briefs, then stepped into the shower. A wet room carved out of the stone of the den, it featured a lush fern that thrived in the natural light system that ran throughout the den except where it had been overridden on purpose.

Yakov was happy to shower in the soft glow of cool dawn light that echoed the world outside. Who was she? The question would no doubt—

A scream pierced his eardrums, so harsh and pained that it took him a split second to realize it was coming from inside his own fucking mind. Hand slamming against the stone of the wall, he tried to gasp in a breath, but it was too late. The waking dream accelerated, and suddenly, he was standing in front of a weathered gate of wrought iron through which coiled thick green vines, a sense of urgency pumping inside him.

He twisted toward her, but she was already turning away to double over, her arm pressed against her stomach as if wounded. Yakov’s bear threatened to take over, make him run to her, help her.

But he couldn’t.

Yakov struggled against the invisible ropes that held him in place, but no matter how much strength he put into it, he couldn’t move . . . because he had no right to touch her.

“Fuck!” He snapped out of the nightmare or whatever the hell it had been to find himself still standing under the water.

Claw marks scored the stone.

MOSKVA GAZETA

 

30 August 2083

BREAKING NEWS

Second Victim Fits Profile

Authorities in Enforcement continue to refuse to confirm speculation of a serial killer after yesterday’s discovery in the Izmaylovo District of a second victim who fits the same victim profile as the first: Varisha Morozov, age 29.

The name of the second victim has not yet been released; however, Enforcement did verify that this victim, too, was a Psy woman in her twenties with blue eyes and blond hair.

When asked if young Psy women, especially those with blond hair and blue eyes, should be concerned, Enforcement Commissioner Yaroslav Skryabin stated that there is no reason to panic. “We are in the very early stages of the investigation. To throw around wild theories at this juncture would be both precipitous and inappropriate.”

The commissioner also stated that at this point, there is no evidence of the killer being a fellow member of the Psy race. “Given the method of murder, they could as easily be human or changeling” was his only further comment on the subject.

That method of murder has not been released by the authorities. While the Gazeta does have sources close to the investigation, the Gazeta’s internal ethics board has agreed to Enforcement’s request not to publish that information so as not to prejudice any future judicial case.

To be updated as further information becomes available.

Chapter 2

The restricted rider to Coda 27 of the Silence Protocol applies here. Pax and Theo can be—and must be—separated the instant they hit seven years of age. I’d recommend doing it sooner but the risk of psychic collapse is high. To chance that with a Gradient 9 would be reckless in the extreme.

—Report by PsyMed specialist Dr. Kye Li to Councilor Marshall Hyde (1 January 2061)

THEODORA MARSHALL BUTTONED up the crisp white of her shirt, erasing the view of the strip of smooth and pale skin in between the two panels. That skin was so inoffensive, so normal. Look at that and you’d never know what crawled over her back—and twisted inside her mind.

She could live with the physical marks of what had been done to her, but the only way to live with the mental marks was to enforce a rigid aloneness.

Except that was impossible.

Pax needed her. Her twin, the golden child, the one who was supposed to survive, to make it, had ended up kicked by their genes. Scarab Syndrome they called it. A disease that was the greatest irony of their race. Psy who were born so powerful that their minds effectively ate them up; prior to the advent of Silence, such Psy had imploded and died as children.

Then had come a protocol that put chains around all that chaotic power. Silence might have crushed and murdered millions, but it had worked for those like Pax who would’ve otherwise burned up in the conflagration of their abilities. Then Silence had fallen . . . and there was no putting the genie back in the bottle, no way to reinitiate Silence once Scarab Syndrome took hold.

Doctor Maia Ndiaye, one of the lead medics on the Scarab team, had framed it thus: “Once a susceptible Psy enters the Scarab state, it is a permanent shift. Literal alterations to pathways in the brain that mean the subject is no longer capable of initiating Silence on any level.”

In short, her brother’s vast power had become a voracious monster lurking in the back of his brain.

Theo’s stomach lurched at the idea of Pax vanishing from her mind. Because that was what no one in their family had ever understood: their grandfather might have separated Pax and Theo on the physical level, but even Councilor Marshall Hyde had never quite managed a clean break on the psychic.

Pax had saved her life time after time.

Theo would do anything to save his. With that in mind, she picked up the bracelet she’d manufactured using knowledge gained in her prior job as a medical-device technician who moved tiny components using her very limited telekinetic abilities.

Made of two pieces of dull metal polished to an unexceptional smoothness except for the intricate pattern she’d hand-carved in the center, the bracelet was designed to clip over her wrist. She’d been careful to ensure that it mimicked a popular low-price comm device, complete with a tiny screen.

Snapping it shut on her wrist, she checked that it was fully charged.

One hundred percent.

Good. The shock it was designed to send into her system would hurt.

Satisfied, she finished dressing in preparation for meeting Pax. Her brother needed her to handle something for him. No matter how much she’d prefer to vanish into the murkiest of shadows, she couldn’t.

She had debts to pay.

Blood debts.

It still took all her willpower to drive through the imposing metal gates of the Marshall estate just outside Toronto. The blades of grass on the lawns on either side of the driveway were clipped to a precise length, the asphalt itself clean of anything as mundane as moss or dirt.

The two-hundred-year-old marble fountain in front of the house lay silent, but it, too, was pristine. As were the box hedges by the wide front steps. As if the gardener in charge walked around with a ruler in his back pocket.

There were no flowers.

Parking her small vehicle in the circular area at the top of the drive, she ignored the imposing bulk of the estate house of traditional red brick and walked around one of the wings to the green area beyond. If she’d ever experienced true freedom in this place, it had been in the small wilderness beyond the back lawns.

For a moment, as she stood in the silence behind the house, staring out at the green, she could almost hear the sound of her and Pax’s mingled laughter as they chased each other into the trees.

“Theo.”

Unsurprised that her brother had found her so fast, she touched the deep and glossy green leaf of the decorative plant that bordered the path that now cut the lawn in two. “It’s changed a lot.” She hadn’t been back to the family residence for . . . a long time.

“Yes, I suppose so.” A glance over the manicured green with eyes as blue and as cold as her own—neither one of them understood warmth. “I try not to spend much time here.”

She didn’t need to ask why; she knew. The grand old place full of antiques and an endless warren of rooms at their backs wasn’t a home. It held too much poison and dripped too much treachery. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Because you own half of it.”

Theo snorted; she didn’t pretend to be Silent around Pax. He had an excellent idea of exactly how “good” she was at the protocol that had conditioned emotion out of Psy for over a century. “Pax, I know full well that Grandfather left everything to you.” After Theo’s place on the Gradient of Psy power was confirmed, Marshall Hyde had never even publicly acknowledged that he had a granddaughter.

Privately . . . in the darkest shadows, it had been another matter.

He’d had quite the use for Theo there.

“And,” she added before Pax could speak, “I hope to hell you’re not about to saddle

 me with any of it. You know the entire vicious lot of our ‘beloved’ family would be out for me with knives sharpened.” They had no idea what Theo could do, no reason to believe that she was the more deadly twin—but that didn’t mean she wanted to spend her life looking over her shoulder.

She already had too many ghosts chasing her.

“I wouldn’t do that to you.” Pax slipped his hands into the pockets of his black cargo pants. His black boots were scuffed and his simple sweater of dark green wool hugged a well-muscled body devoid of any ounce of fat.

Some would call the latter a result of discipline. Theo knew Pax had plenty of that. She also knew that Pax had never been permitted to fail, not even by the minutest fraction. He’d never been given any room to grow out of the brutally defined box into which their grandfather had put him.

Her twin didn’t know how to be anything but unflinchingly perfect.

As it was, the world rarely even saw her brother dressed as casually as he was today; Pax was known for his bespoke suits and razor-sharp elegance, his “utter precision of form”—words she’d actually seen in a magazine article.

Why had she been reading an article about her brother?

Because he was the only person in the entire world who mattered to Theo, and—even though he’d never expect it—it was her turn to protect him. Even from outwardly harmless journalists who seemed to be paying a little too much attention to a Psy who kept his focus on the business world. It could be a hapless individual caught by his magnetic charisma—or it could be a stalker.

“What I’ve done,” he said now, “is set aside a hidden trust. The details on how to access it are in our PsyNet vault.”

“Our” meant the vault that Theo and Pax alone could access. Created of building blocks of pure psychic energy and embedded in the vast psychic network that connected all Psy on the planet but for the rare rebels, the vault was locked to their mental signatures. To the psychic echo that ran through both their brains. Because those brains had developed together in the womb and never fully lost their entwined nature.

Their invisible bond was the only thing that had saved her all those years when her grandfather would’ve rather disposed of this “defective” member of the extolled Marshall family. Too bad for him that to erase Theo would’ve been to fatally damage Pax.

Some Psy twins were like that.

“You’ve already given me enough money to last me multiple lifetimes. And I earn an

income from my work.” Theo didn’t need much, didn’t deserve much after what she’d done. “I have no use for more. Especially after you gave me a position at your side, with the commensurate pay.”

Theo would’ve preferred to remain occluded, hidden by the shield of their grandfather’s machinations and her and Pax’s apparent personal estrangement. It had been far easier to help Pax as a lowly tech no one was watching, but her twin needed someone he could trust without question at his right hand—so here she was, a monster walking out in the open.

Poor Pax. Tied to a twin with no power, and death her only gift.

“We need to prepare you to go under if I die.” Flat, hard words, a reminder that her outwardly healthy brother’s life hung in precarious balance.

Theo looked away, her stomach clenching so hard it hurt.

“Theo.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Not yet. Not when they’d had but a heartbeat of time together after the cold and lonely desert of their childhoods. “I don’t like this place. Let’s get out.”

“Wait, I did have another reason to bring you here. I wanted to talk where we had no chance of being overheard—and no one ever comes out into the grounds.” Halting on the far end of the path, where the land merged into a small stand of trees and other foliage that blunted the impact of the high walls beyond, he pulled a slimline organizer about the size of a phone out of his pocket.

“I’ve been researching Grandfather’s interest in the Centers.” His eyes were ice chips now. “We own significantly more of them than I realized.”

A chill deep inside Theo’s chest, a shiver of awareness over her spine. “I’m not surprised. That’s exactly the type of business Grandfather would’ve considered a good investment.” The truly sickening thing was that until recently, Marshall Hyde would’ve been correct.

Psy families had paid good money to have their “malfunctioning” members “rehabilitated.” Such a clean word for the destruction of all a person was and all that they might’ve become, nothing but shuffling blanks left in the aftermath.

“The records are complex and I’m still digging my way through them,” Pax said, “but I found a fragmented file with your name on it.”

“What?” Theo blinked, frowned. “Why would my name be on anything to do with the Centers?”

“I don’t know.” Pax brought up a document on the organizer. “This is all I could pull

 up—looks like the file was deleted but the system glitched and so it was only partially erased.”

Taking the thin datapad, Theo stared at the jumble of black letters on white. Most of it was so fragmented as to be gibberish, but she could clearly see what Pax already had: Theodora M—

There were no other Theodoras in the current line, but—“Wasn’t I named after a great-great-grand someone?” Theo had zero interest in her family’s history; aside from Pax, they were nothing to her. “Maybe she was the one who made the original investment in the Centers.” A second later, she corrected herself. “No, it can’t be that. Her death would’ve predated the Centers.”

“Yes, but look here.” He pointed out a fragment she’d missed in her initial scan.

A date: November 2, 2055.

Her and Pax’s shared birthdate. Theo was exactly two minutes his elder.

She checked the entire document again, this time with intense care, but found nothing else legible. “You’ve already run a program to see if you can work out the rest of the scrambled words.” Not a question because that was exactly what she would’ve done, and in things like this, they thought the same way.

A short nod. “From what I can tell, multiple files were deleted at the same time and hit the same glitch, so what we’re seeing is a scramble.”

Just when she’d begun to breathe again, sure that her name had nothing to do with any Center, he said, “The only thing that I am certain of is that all the documents in that particular file dump had to do with the family’s interest in a specific Center.”

Theo’s hand clenched on the organizer, her bones pushing up against her skin. Rage simmered just beneath the surface of the person she’d patched together from the ruins left by her grandfather.

It took conscious effort to force herself to breathe and relax her hand, return the organizer to Pax. “There’s no reason I should be in those files. Grandfather never took me to any of his business enterprises.”

She looked away from her brother’s incisive gaze, not wanting him to see, not wanting him to know. Pax had always believed she was angry with him for being the favored son, the family’s shining scion.

His guilt was enormous.

How much worse would it be if she told him what Marshall had forced her to become?

Better that he believe her to be holding a grudge than realize that the reason she refused to permit him any closer was that she couldn’t bear for him to

see the ugliness of her. Because Pax had a heart far less warped than her own; he’d protected her even when he was so small he shouldn’t have been able to protect her.

She’d die for her brother. More importantly, she’d kill for him.

“What do we know about this particular Center?” she asked when she could speak again.

Pax hadn’t interrupted. He knew about this part of her, this splintered chaos that boiled deep within and exploded as rage.

Uncontrollable. Deadly to anyone in the vicinity not as powerful as Theo.

Not a problem since she was a 2.7.

Unfortunately, she had an instinctive and inseverable connection to a Gradient 9. And in her rage, she could access some of Pax’s power.

They’d both tried to shut off the valve. It didn’t work.

When under the influence of a rage attack, she became a violent and murderous 9. And there were very, very few people stronger than a 9 on the Gradient.

“That’s just it,” Pax said, making no comment on her tense frame or rigid features. He had no idea of the root of her rage, but he knew the price she paid to keep it contained, keep up the meek and mild avatar she’d perfected so she could hide in plain sight. “We know nothing. The Center isn’t even a ghost in the main system. It’s nonexistent.

“What I did unearth,” he added, “I found in one of his private archives that he must’ve been in the process of decommissioning when he was assassinated—the job was half-done, a door left partially open.”

Nausea, inexplicable and bitter. “Grandfather hid it even from you?”

“Maybe he was planning to tell me. But then he got killed.” Pax said the latter in the same way he might mention a business acquisition.

Where others would see a ruthless predator with no emotions and no heart, Theo saw only the twin who’d had to survive a different kind of abuse. Being Marshall Hyde’s favorite grandchild and heir had been no gift. At least Theo had been able to spend the vast majority of her time out of her grandfather’s sight.

Now, her twin, the boy who’d refused to let go of her no matter what, held her gaze. “What’s your status? Are you able to take on the task of checking out this Center? I can’t be away from HQ with our dear cousin attempting a leadership coup, so it has to be you. Grandfather hid this because it’s important.”

“I’m in control.” The last rage storm had hit three months ago, and she usually had six

between strikes. “I need to know why I’m in those files.” There was no reason, no reason at all for Theo’s name to be anywhere near that of a Center.

She had full mental capacity.

She hadn’t ever had a brainwipe.

Hadn’t ever been rehabilitated.

Cold in her veins. Ice that crackled as it spread.

Are you sure, Theo? asked the cruel phantom of her dead grandfather.

Chapter 3

Gradient 1: Baseline—no one below a full level 1 has ever been able to link to the PsyNet.

Gradient 2: Minor useful ability but 2s do not work in fields that require psychic ability, unless the power requirement is negligible.

Gradient 3: Beginning of beneficial levels of power, though 3 remains in the low range.

—From the introduction to Overview of Gradient Levels (24th Edition) by Professor J. Paul Emory and K. V. Dutta, assigned textbook for PsyMed Foundation Courses 1 & 2

Twenty Years Ago

THEO STOOD OUTSIDE the door to her grandfather’s study in the large family home that they were all supposed to live in before they turned eighteen and moved to their own places in either a high-rise owned by the family or, ...