“Kaleb”—the other woman turned her face up to the cardinal—“was able to confirm his immunity for me. The reason why he’s immune may explain all the outliers.”
“The ones who have no connection to an E?”
“No obvious connection,” Sahara replied, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with impatient fingers. “Miguel Ferrera has an empathic neighbor who was away at the time of the outbreak.”
Aden, having taken a seat next to Ivy, shook his head. “Many of the infected lived in close proximity to an empath—even closer than Ferrera.”
“That’s just it,” Sahara responded as Rabbit jumped down from his favorite window ledge and came to sit at Ivy’s feet. “Miguel doesn’t just live down the corridor from an E. He’s listed as her emergency contact.”
A hush fell over the room.
“Three months ago,” Sahara continued into the quiet, “Miguel was the one who called an ambulance when the E had a fall. Three weeks after that, she named him as her emergency contact.
“Soon after that, their purchasing patterns changed. The E started ordering certain food items that previously never appeared on her online grocery order but that regularly appear on Miguel’s, and vice versa. In the same period, he also twice purchased two tickets to a lecture series at a nearby gallery.”
The evidence was circumstantial, Ivy thought, but compelling. “They have an emotional bond.”
Sahara nodded. “That’s my conclusion.”
Ivy rubbed her hands over her face; something was niggling at her. “But, if an emotional bond with an E is the deciding factor, why was Eben’s father infected? With such a young empath, I’d expect a connection—even if it was one-sided.”
Sahara’s hand tightened on Kaleb’s thigh. “That case frustrated me, too,” she said. “I tore the data apart looking for an answer, and I finally found it.”
Chapter 56
ENERGY PULSED OFF the other woman. “It appears Eben Kilabuk is the child of a contractual dispute—the conception and fertilization agreement was drawn up by an incompetent lawyer, and while the mother believed she had the right to full custody, the father challenged it for unknown reasons when Eben was ten. He won.”
Ivy thought of how Eben had asked to call his mother during the time the teenager had stayed at the compound. “He never bonded with his father.”
“Yes.” Sahara held her gaze, dark blue eyes intense. “And his mother, a low-level Tk, just survived an outbreak that took out everyone else in her building.”
Aden stirred. “Does the theory hold for the other outliers?”
“Yes.” Sahara thrust a hand through her hair, messing it up. “All the anomalous survivors I was able to track eventually connect back to an E.”
That also, Ivy thought, explained the other commonality among the survivors—a fractured Silence that was accepted by the individual. Bonds couldn’t be formed within the cage of the Protocol.
“I know the data is thin yet,” Sahara said, “and there’s no way to manipulate the emotional bonds to protect everyone, but I thought it was important to share it.”
Ivy barely heard the qualification. She could feel something pushing at the back of her mind, a huge knowledge, but she couldn’t reach it. Frustrated, she met Sahara’s gaze again. “The bonds, why aren’t they showing up on the Net?” Ivy had grown up knowing she was loved and wanted, and yet the connection with her parents was nowhere in existence on the psychic plane.
Sahara looked to Kaleb, who said, “They’re there but concealed.” The cardinal’s voice was obsidian in its controlled power . . . and his love for Sahara so absolute, it burned against Ivy’s senses.
Sahara’s emotions were as potent, as deep, and oddly—as old. As if the two had known each other far longer than they were said to have been together.
Kaleb continued to speak as Ivy considered the mystery of the couple’s relationship.
“I had to make specific requests to see each one Sahara suspected.” Slipping off the tie on the other woman’s hair, he ran his palm over the dark strands. “The NetMind has been protecting the vulnerable for a long time.”
Ivy watched the cardinal interact with Sahara, understood intellectually that the two were “mated,” to use the changeling term, but though she felt their connection, she had difficulty comprehending how someone so hard, so cold, could’ve bonded with anyone. Much less powerfully enough to rip through the fabric of Silence itself.
A polite telepathic knock on her mind. When Ivy accepted, Sahara said, You do realize your Arrow is just as lethal as my Kaleb?
Your Kaleb only acts “human” with you.
Um, have you noticed Vasic touching anyone else?
Okay, Ivy conceded, you may have a point. Vasic didn’t even touch Aden that she’d seen, and the two might as well be twin brothers, they were so close. I’ll try not to sidle away next time Kaleb appears.
Sahara hid her smile behind a raised hand. It’s all right. The first time Vasic teleported me anywhere, I was half-afraid he’d decide to lose me mid-’port.
Ivy reached up to touch her Arrow’s hand. His fingers curled around her own, though he was listening to the conversation between Aden and Kaleb. The two of us, she said to Sahara, need to have lunch together after this is all over.
Yes—Sahara’s ocean deep gaze held hers, solemn and haunted—after this is all over.
Both of them knew that might be a long time coming.
UNABLE to sleep despite the fact she’d attended a bad outbreak with Vasic two hours earlier that had come close to wiping her out, Ivy sat up in bed that night and gnawed on the knowledge she could feel just beyond her reach.
“Ivy, you need to rest.”
She looked down at Vasic, the light from the streetlamps coming through the thinly opened blinds marking him in tiger stripes. “Shh”—she bent to press a kiss to his shoulder—“I’m thinking.”
Rising from bed after a minute, he left the bedroom and came back with a hot nutrient drink. “You’re losing too much weight.”
Ivy frowned. “What ab—”
“I already had mine.” He tapped her on the nose, the affectionate act making her toes curl. “Now stop stalling and drink. I drowned it in your caramel syrup.”
She stuck out her tongue at him but accepted the glass. Taking a sip to find he’d made it a drinkable temperature, she narrowed her eyes as he sat down beside her and pulled up something on a reader. “That better not be another manual.”
“I thought you were thinking?” He looked pointedly at her glass as Rabbit raised his head in his basket, ears pricked.
Gulping the drink, Ivy put the empty glass on the bedside table and sat up on her knees facing him. His eyes went to her breasts, her nipples pushing shamelessly against the camisole she’d worn to bed with her flannel pants. “Focus,” she said through the pulsing ache he aroused in her with a single look. “I need to see the bonds Sahara told us about.”
“I can contact Krychek.” He patted the bed, and an ecstatic Rabbit scampered over to curl up in his favorite spot at the bottom end.
“No.” She ran her fingers along the ridges of Vasic’s abdomen, scrunching up her forehead in thought. “I have this nagging sense that he isn’t naturally built to see the bonds. It seems more like the purview of an E.”
Vasic nodded slowly. “It might be why the NetMind can only show him pieces.”
Yes, Ivy thought. Because psychic minds were wired differently, depending on their designation. “Sascha told me the NetMind likes empaths.” She nibbled on her lower lip, made a decision. “It can’t hurt to ask.”
Snuggling to his side, she opened her eyes on the psychic plane and wasn’t surprised to see her Arrow right beside her. The black velvet night of the PsyNet, each mind a glittering star, was now “contaminated” with sparks of color, but those sparks couldn’t seem to reach the stars . . . as if blocked by the invisible tendrils of a terrible, voracious corruption.