Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
He’d have attempted to collapse the foundation by somehow taking out the anchors without killing them, but there was no way to identify an anchor on the PsyNet. Canto had confirmed that for him last night when he’d called and spoken to his cousin.
Ivan always had plans for an operation, but today, there could be no plan. This place was too chaotic, too much an unknown. He’d have to act in the heat of the moment the instant he found a fatal vulnerability in the system.
That in mind, he began to move quickly through the psychic space, gathering as much data as possible. He couldn’t avoid all the lightning strikes—not when the psychic space was full of them—but he didn’t take any major hits. Around him, the landscape was warped and sluggish, the data in the network so fragmented that it was of no use.
Which was why it took him a long time to pick up the echo that ran through every inch of the ChaosNet: Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen.
Over and over and over in an endless loop. Obsessive and compulsive and not rational. Even if they managed to pass themselves off as rational on the physical plane, their minds were lost in a fog of compulsion.
Compulsion toward their Queen.
Despite his earlier suspicions, Ivan had no proof that this was the Architect. To date, the Architect’s actions had all been very rational—they had played the long game. And they’d played it well enough that even his family hadn’t managed to unmask them.
A mind up ahead that had been shooting out lightning bolts suddenly burst outward in a supernova of light and energy that buffeted Ivan’s mind with brutal force. He was only able to survive because his shields were titanium. But when the dust cleared, nothing remained of the Scarab who had once existed.
That echo again: Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen.
That was who’d done this, broken the PsyNet by using the Scarabs. Because the world wasn’t an even playing field. Some people had more power, more charisma. If Grandmother, for example, had wished to turn Ivan evil, she could have: he’d been a badly damaged child when he came into the family, Ena his savior. She could’ve molded him into nothing but her obedient shadow with very little effort.
These Scarabs, too, would’ve been damaged when the Queen captured them in her web. But it couldn’t only be charisma and timing. Scarabs were too powerful when their brains broke the chain that Silence had imposed on them—they would’ve long ago subjugated anyone less powerful.
Ivan hissed out a breath on the physical plane: a Scarab powerful enough to control other Scarabs would be a nightmare. This individual might be even more powerful than Kaleb Krychek—and that could lead to hell on Earth.
He took a significant blow from a black lightning bolt right then, shuddered, but shrugged it off. His internal power meter, however, dipped once again. The longer he stayed here, the more hits he’d take, and the less power he’d have if he did work out how to collapse the island.
The only mercy was that the spider inside him sat silent, unmoving. He’d have hoped the mating bond had made it go quiescent, but he knew better. His power could coil and strike at any moment. As Soleil’s cat could pounce; that cat, too, sat unmoving, watchful.
Making a call on gut instinct, he began to arrow in toward the center. This island was a new construct, with nothing akin to the PsyNet’s psychic weight to it. Whatever stability it had, it had to come from the core, else it’d be folding in on itself, the weight on one end more than the other.
The PsyNet, in contrast, was so big that it had no true center. It was different depending on each individual’s location. The island was minuscule in comparison. It made sense that it would have a central point from where everything else flowed.
He expected to find a mind brighter than the others, the Queen to whom they paid homage, but when he reached the place that he was certain had to be the center, his internal compass telling him that he was now equidistant from most of the coast on any side, he saw nothing.
There was literally nothing there.
Not a single mind, only endless darkness. Since Ivan took nothing at face value, he went closer, still closer. That was when he realized that no lightning bolts passed through this area, either, the region as eerily still as the eye of a hurricane.
A shield?
But he had zero issues moving through the dead zone … and that was when he felt it—a subtle draw that tried to suck him downward. In truth, there was no up or down in the psychic space, but that was how his brain made sense of it: that something was pulling at him, trying to siphon his energy.