Nothing, his skin cold.
“Come, milochka,” he murmured to the bride, “tell me you made it.” He pressed his fingers against her skin. Cool, but not cold. A fluttering heartbeat.
“She’s alive!” Sliding out his phone, he snapped a photograph of her amidst the rubble. He sent it directly to the number he’d been forwarded for Vasic Zen.
The bride disappeared a second after he’d sent the photo. An instant later so did her father, though Valentin had tagged the man as deceased. The father had only been in the image because Valentin had wanted to be sure the Arrow had enough visuals to do the remote teleport. The teleporter was only supposed to be asked to retrieve survivors, not the dead.
“You’re a good man, Vasic Zen,” Valentin murmured before gripping the rope and hauling himself up and out.
“We got a survivor?” one of the construction workers asked with a hopeful smile.
“We got a survivor!” He yelled it loud enough to carry to the engineer and others below. “The bride!”
A huge cheer went up. The construction worker who hadn’t spoken wiped away a burst of tears. “Fuck, man,” he said in American-accented English before switching to Russian. “There’s just been too many dead.”
Valentin clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s keep going. We don’t know who else is trapped below.” Even as he started to do exactly that, he had to battle the urge to check in on Silver.
His Starlight should’ve been in bed, resting. Instead, she was here, fighting to clean up a mess of violence, fighting to save lives. Because she was Silver Fucking Mercant, and she was as tough as any bear in StoneWater.
Including its alpha.
The Unknown Architect
THE ARCHITECT OF the Consortium looked at the raw footage feeding out of Moscow. It was being reported as a terrorist strike undertaken by a lone individual, for which no group had taken credit.
The Consortium didn’t take credit for its actions, but they also didn’t cause violence without significant thought as to the advantages of any such action. They weren’t fanatics or ideologues. Their entire reason for being was built on cold, hard thinking that led to political or financial gain.
They weren’t anti-Trinity, as often reported. That implied an ideological stance. No, it was the peace fostered by Trinity that was an impediment to their goals. From a purely financial perspective for certain members of the Consortium, there was far more profit in instability and war. For others, like the Architect, peace offered no path to power. War and panic did.
It was all about the cost-benefit ratio.
Whoever had hit the wedding reception in Moscow had undertaken no such rational calculation. If their aim had been to destabilize the city, they’d failed in a spectacular fashion. The media had highlighted Kaleb Krychek in the footage, as well as the problematic-to-the-Consortium Silver Mercant.
A changeling alpha, Valentin Nikolaev of the StoneWater bears, had also been identified by the media, along with wolves from the BlackEdge pack and nonpredatory changelings, including mountain ponies. Human medical staff, engineers, and Enforcement officers were working side by side with their Psy and changeling compatriots.
The rapid, coordinated response was a poster child for Trinity.
As it would be in the city called home by the director of EmNet and by the most powerful telekinetic in the world. Not only that, but the violently powerful StoneWater and BlackEdge changelings also had an open line of communication, offering no room for sowing discord. Moscow was simply not a good target for anyone who wanted to cause maximum damage.
Switching off the feed, the Architect turned their mind to their own business interests. The Consortium had nothing to do with the badly planned Moscow attack and, as such, the bombing needed none of the Architect’s attention.
As for Silver Mercant . . . perhaps it was time to get an update on that operation. A shame to eliminate someone of her abilities, but she’d chosen her fate when she accepted the directorship of EmNet.
If the Architect had believed she could be turned, an approach would’ve been made. However, while the Architect had rethought the invitation to Ena Mercant after deciding the woman was too intelligent and might prove a threat to the Architect’s role as the puppet master of this operation, the reason for not approaching her granddaughter was far different: Silver Mercant appeared to be taking the “equal treatment of all parties” aspect of her job seriously.
Unfortunate.
Chapter 18
Trust to a Mercant is a complicated thing. It usually requires years of acquaintance, several background checks, and a probationary period.
DAWN WAS A bare two hours distant when Silver made the call no one in her position ever wanted to make: The rescue effort was now a recovery operation. No survivors had been discovered over the past two hours, and the rescuers all agreed on a lack of signs of life: Psy with their telepathic scans, changelings with their peerless sense of smell and acute hearing, and humans with a high-tech imaging scanner that had been brought to the site by a local geology professor.
“No heat signatures,” the black-haired woman with dark brown skin and softly uptilted eyes had said to Silver, lines of exhaustion bracketing her mouth as she stood with her back to the wreckage of the bar.
Valentin, his body and hair covered with dust and his mouth set in a grimmer line than she’d ever seen it, had just shaken his head. He’d found the final survivor, a young man he’d carried out of the rubble in his own arms after the teleporters had been called away to take three severely wounded survivors directly to the trauma ward. The doctors had asked them to stay and lift the wounded using telekinesis so that the victims’ crushed bodies could be examined without causing those bodies any further harm.
No one had found anything since then.
Bathed in the hard white glow of the powerful lights Silver had organized early into the rescue effort, the ruins of the bar appeared a spotlit tomb.
While Valentin and the others began to do what they could to help retrieve the bodies, Silver sat and collated the numbers. She already knew them, of course. “Seventy-five-percent fatality rate,” she said to the head of the on-site medical team, the man who’d triaged the victims. “Another ten percent are so badly injured that their chances of survival are low to negligible.”
The doctor, his face stark, sat on the tailgate of an ambulance and stared out at the destruction. “I guess we got lucky there wasn’t a secondary explosive.”
“Yes.” The changelings had reported no signs of any suspicious scents, and the Arrows had done a sweep for covert devices and unearthed nothing. “You should stand down your team.”
The doctor glanced toward the exhausted group. They sat in silence in the cordoned-off part of the dusty street, their heads hanging. “It’s hard, being a healer and not being able to do anything.” With those quiet words, the human male left to pick up the pieces of his devastated team.
Silver, her own legs shaky from fatigue, nonetheless made time to personally speak to all the other team leaders, bar one. Valentin, she saved for last. As the most senior changeling, he’d taken charge of the other changeling responders—no one had disagreed with his leadership, partisan lines laid aside in this time of emergency.
She found him with Kaleb.
He greeted her with a scowl. “You planning to face-plant?” he asked in a low rumbling tone, his eyes suddenly ringed with amber.