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)
Throwing a glance over her shoulder as Farah’s words tormented her, she saw that the blue-eyed man remained on the other side of the street—but he was pacing her.
Her cat stretched in readiness to shove out of her skin, forcing the shift in a way it had never before done. It wanted to go to him with a feral desperation. “No,” she said under her breath, her hands fisted to bone whiteness. “Not until—”
That was when the world went to hell, screams splitting the air as people fell to their knees or straight down onto their faces. Bones snapped, blood spilled, and chaos reigned.
IVAN crashed to one knee on the hard asphalt right as he went to cross the street, follow a ghost. The only thing that saved him from a cracked kneecap was instinct born of years of training; he’d slammed his hand against the faux-adobe wall of the café he’d been passing and THROWN his body weight that way, absorbing most of the impact with his shoulder, arm, and upper body.
He’d be bruised, but nothing was broken.
All of that had happened in the space of split seconds, his vision going hazy at the same moment. Then his mind began to slide away into a black nothingness that chilled his blood.
He knew what this was: a major PsyNet rupture.
And his mind was caught on the cliff edge. If he didn’t anchor himself, he’d slip and fall, his connection to the PsyNet severed with brutal efficiency. At which point, he’d die.
Psy did not survive without a connection to a psychic network.
And reconnection was only possible should the psychic pathways in the brain remain undamaged. Such a violent separation would twist them to unusable knots, brain cells dying in a massive shock wave.
Teeth gritted, he shot out telepathic grappling hooks into the fabric of the PsyNet. Canto had taught him that. His older cousin was an anchor—one of the foundational elements of the PsyNet—and he’d made it a point to teach all his cousins “emergency first aid.” Once it became clear it worked, the anchors had disseminated that same information freely out into the PsyNet.
The first rule was to do anything you could to hold on.
Ivan wasn’t as psychically powerful as his cardinal cousin, but he hit 8.9 on the Gradient on his particular—and eerie—psychic ability. His secondary telepathic ability was a respectable 6.1. When he used the latter to look at the psychic plane, all he saw was horror. The PsyNet was fraying around him, minds blinking out at the speed of light.
Life after life. Gone. Erased.
This wasn’t a rupture.
It was too deep, too black, too endless.
No chance of survival or reconnection.
Grabbing another falling mind with a psychic hand in an effort to save it, he channeled even more energy into the grappling hooks … and then he felt it. Something—someone—had grasped his hooks and pulled them into such a deep part of the PsyNet that Ivan couldn’t even see it.
Anchor.
Not Canto. Not Payal. Not anyone he knew. Just an anchor who’d recognized what he was trying to do and helped him.
Ivan used his newfound stability to literally throw the untethered mind deeper into the PsyNet, where—since he’d caught it before a total break—it would reconnect instinctively. Psy were built to be connected to a network. Disconnection was the error.
In front of him in the physical world, a brunette woman who’d fallen to the ground gasped and sat up in a jagged movement. Ignoring her because she was safe now, he grabbed another mind, then another, then another.
At some point, he became aware that all those minds were now linked to him by fine silvery threads. Not unexpected with the continuing erosion of his shields. He’d deal with it later, would cut them free the same way he’d learned to cut his cousins free when he’d inadvertently captured them in his web as a child.
Behind him, the breach in the Net grew and grew, such a massive divide that he knew it couldn’t be fixed. That was when he saw it. A mind on the other side of the divide about to slide off into the abyss. Into death.
He didn’t even think about it, just threw a grappling hook over the fracture and toward that person. It slammed into the mind and was grabbed with scrabbling desperation, while Ivan threw another grappling hook into the piece of the PsyNet closest to the other mind.
The person clinging to him clearly saw what he was doing and was rational enough to switch telepathic lines and “climb” back to safe ground on the other side of the nothingness that was this unsalvageable fracture.
A fine silvery thread floated over the canyon, linking the two of them.
Spider, spider, my beautiful spider.
Ignoring the haunting singsong voice of memory, Ivan grabbed more people on both sides of the growing divide. Part of him knew that he shouldn’t have been able to reach that far, not across dead space devoid of psychic energy.