Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

“Was I the only target or were there others?” Aden asked.

Counting the dead and the badly injured one Zaira had just located, the count was at seven snipers overall so far. Too many even for an Arrow.

“I was paid for you,” said the tattooed sniper, “but they paid extra if I’d agree to do as much collateral damage as possible.”

The other two said the same, admitted they’d been told to aim specifically for families and children. It confirmed Aden’s suspicions on the motive behind the public attacks: to create panic and fear when the world had just barely begun to recover from the horrors of the infection, as well as the civil war in the Net.

“You are threats.” The chill in Kaleb’s eyes communicated itself to the snipers, who all went deathly still. “You also have no viable data. We have no reason to keep you alive.”

The three men were silent for a moment, no doubt calculating odds and percentages, as snipers were trained to do.

One or more of these men could be part of the larger organization, Aden said to both Vasic and Kaleb. The only way to know for certain will be to tear through their minds.

Two are Psy, Krychek responded. I’ve tested their shields and they’re solid—I can break them, of course, but there’s a high chance I’ll kill them in the process. The one so eager to speak is a changeling, with their impressive natural shielding.

Which meant that breaking his shields would most probably cause brain damage or death. Aden had no compunction meting out harsh treatment to men who made their living killing others, especially ones who’d admitted they would’ve murdered children, but smashing shields often produced only limited data. Better to see if they could break them down first.

“You can have the numbers of my bank accounts,” one of the snipers said into the silence. “Trace the money back to where it came from.”

Which would very likely be an anonymous account, Aden thought. However, it provided another avenue of investigation. He took the information the men rattled off, passed it on to Tamar.

Further questioning revealed nothing, and, as expected, the Psy snipers balked at being asked to voluntarily lower their shields.

At which point, Kaleb teleported out, as did Aden and Vasic, leaving the three men in a featureless underground bunker none could escape. The two Psy weren’t telekinetics—while Kaleb and Aden questioned the snipers, Vasic had traced their identities using DNA scans, found one was a low-level telepath, the other a midlevel psychometric.

So far below the earth, their basic telepathy wouldn’t work, but Aden had deliberately left their minds unfettered on the PsyNet in an apparent oversight, though in truth, he’d already assigned two Arrows to monitor any PsyNet activity. It was also why he and Kaleb hadn’t revisited the idea of smashing their shields. He wanted to see who the men would attempt to reach and whether they had direct access to those behind the conspiracy.

His gut told him the chance of that was low; these men would now be discarded as Hashri Smith had been. Pawns, all of them. “Whoever is running this conspiracy is cold-blooded but it appears they have nothing against using fanatics,” he said to Krychek as he, the cardinal, and Vasic stood on the cliff overlooking the valley.

The sniper who had suicided had traced back to Pure Psy. Not such a huge surprise. Because while the squad and Krychek’s forces had picked up or eliminated all the major players, there were a scattering of minor ones floating around.

Kaleb looked down at the valley. “The dregs of Pure Psy are just fodder. They’re rootless, looking for someone to tell them what to do. Easy pickings.”

Vasic stepped right to the cliff edge. “I think it’s now undeniable that we’re not looking for an individual but a group. There’s too much coordination, too many worldwide events, and their data spans all three races.”

Which meant that to cut this off at the root, they’d first have to find all the branches.

•   •   •

KALEB had known for some time that Aden was no medic. Or not just a medic—because the Arrow was fully trained and capable as a field medic. But what he’d seen today was incomprehensible. “According to the data I hacked, all his tests come back to a 4.3 telepath and 3.2 M,” he said to Sahara when he returned to Moscow.

“I can’t work out how he created that reflective shield.” Kaleb could deflect bullets and missiles, but not return them to their locations with the precision Aden had displayed unless he was focusing specifically on a particular shot.

“It really looked like a mirror in the recordings.” Sahara smoothed his iron gray tie, Kaleb having been in a meeting with Jen Liu when Zaira Neve contacted him. He’d teleported out without explanation, conscious Zaira would never telepath him unless it was a major emergency. Factoring in the possibility the Arrows might be under attack and he could end up being unable to avoid a bullet if he teleported in too close, he hadn’t locked in on their faces but made the call to come in near the park around which he knew the two were running a security check.

As it was, he hadn’t needed to speak to them to figure out what was going on. “How did he do it?” he said. Moving back from Sahara, he tossed her several small items from his desk, including a piece of lapis lazuli she must’ve been playing with absently as she worked on a report requested by the Es. “Throw them at me at the same time.”

She rolled her eyes but did as asked. Kaleb had no problem freezing the objects in the air, but he couldn’t reverse their trajectories all at once on their original flight paths—the objects all arrowed toward a central point. “He must be a telekinetic of some kind.” Except Tks could never keep their abilities under wraps—telekinesis had a way of making itself felt, especially telekinesis that vicious.