"Hell." Connor spoke for the first time. "William's adamant it was him?"
Jack nodded. "His eyes that day - I've never seen such terror. Before . . . before we thought he might be a telekinetic. He's so accident-prone and the notes the rebels left behind say that young telekinetics are notoriously clumsy because they move things without realizing it."
Telekinetics, Dev thought, were also obsolete from the Forgotten population. The ability to move things with the mind had been one of the first gifts to go, which wasn't surprising as telekinetics had formed the smallest group among the rebel contingent. Dev's great-great-grandmother on his father's side, Zarina, had left a journal that Dev had read as a child. He'd never forgotten her words about the Tks.
I'm an M-Psy. My chances of insanity are low, but if I do go mad, I might possibly kill someone. However, if a strong Tk goes mad, he will almost certainly kill. And because Tks are disproportionately male, as E-Psy are disproportionately female, he will kill his sister, his wife, his daughter.
That's a burden that crushes the Tks, makes them turn inward. I don't blame all the telekinetics who chose Silence. How can I? When I prayed every night that my child would not be born a Tk. Only the X designation is more cursed, and thankfully, that gene is so recessive it rarely makes an appearance.
"Did you have a genetic chart done on William?" Dev asked his cousin. Things were in flux - there was a chance the Tk gene had risen to the fore once again.
"We were about to when that happened, with Spot. I didn't want to scare him by asking him to come in for tests."
"Do you have a genetic sample? Glen can run the DNA tests with that," Dev said, looking to Connor for confirmation. He continued at the doctor's nod. "We'll have a starting point at least."
"Here." Jack put a sealed plastic bag on the table. "I planned to ask for a DNA chart anyway. Got some of his hair in there, his toothbrush, even a swab of blood from when he cut himself running into a wall." His body jerked, those solid shoulders of his shaking. "It's killing Melissa to watch him literally will himself to death. Yesterday, I had to threaten her with a sedative so she'd get some sleep - we're so afraid to leave him alone for even a second."
Dev walked to stand beside his cousin, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Don't give up, Jack. I promise you, we'll find an answer."
"Silence is an answer," his cousin whispered, but there was a weariness to him. "I wish it wasn't, but it is."
Meeting that familiar gaze, Dev knew what he had to say, what he had to decide. "And if it is the only answer, then we'll find a way to teach William to be Silent."
No one disagreed with him.
Chapter 48
Dev considered everything Jack had told him - both during and after the meeting - as he headed down to Katya. She'd volunteered to be confined to an isolation ward in the clinic while he wasn't able to be with her. It tore at his every protective instinct that she'd effectively imprisoned herself, but there was no knowing what grenades Ming had put in her head.
Soon, he promised himself. Soon, she'd be free. Today, however, he needed her help. But first - "How's your leg?" he asked, after kissing her gently on the forehead.
"Healing normally according to Dr. Herriford." A soft smile. "You want to ask me something."
It didn't surprise him that she knew. He knew her unspoken secrets, too. "What are the abilities that can cause death?"
"Pretty much all the strong offensive gifts," she told him, eyes troubled. "Telepaths and telekinetics are near definites. M-Psy, less so - it depends on whether we have an offensive gift we can couple with our M potential. Ps-Psy occasionally - "
"How?" As far as he knew, psychometrics used touch to divine an object's past. Many worked for museums or private collectors, appraising which items were genuine, which fake.
"If an object has a violent past," Katya explained, "it occasionally 'short-circuits' one of the Ps-Psy, causing some kind of a temporary psychic injury. But I've heard rumors that some Ps-Psy can also absorb that violent power purposefully." She turned up her palms. "I never really had much reason to research them so my knowledge isn't that good. I'm sorry."
"You're doing fine. Any other designations?"
"Some of the old texts mention an ability more destructive than telekinesis, but to be honest, I can't think what that would be. Tks can collapse buildings on top of people - the truly powerful might even be able to cause small quakes."
None of which explained William's killing of his dog. There was, Dev knew, a very good chance the boy had been born with a violent New Generation ability. And if so, Silence might not be the cure Jack was hoping for.
"The person you really need to talk to," Katya murmured, "is an Arrow."
"The Council's bogeymen?"
"You know about them?"
"They're mentioned in our records." Dev's own ancestors had been hunted by the Arrows, families torn apart, loved ones forever lost.
"Well, they deal in death. They'd know all about the destructive abilities." She put her hand on his arm. "Unfortunately, I don't know any in the resistance. Ask Ashaya - she has more contacts."
Loath to leave Katya in a sterile environment that had to awaken terror-filled memories, he pressed a kiss to her lips. "One day, you'll be free of him. Then you can walk through any room you want, any place you want."
"One day."
But as he headed back upstairs, he knew their time was running out at an inexorable pace. According to the text Glen had sent to his phone half an hour ago, Katya had suffered a severe nosebleed that morning. And as he'd looked into her eyes before he'd left, he'd glimpsed a pinprick hemorrhage.
Rage tore through him, leaving devastation in its wake. Forcing himself to the comm panel in his office, he put through a call to Ashaya. Her eyes widened at his request. But all she said was "I need more information."
Dev sent through Jack's notes on his son - and on what William had done. "Ashaya, whoever you share this with, make sure you trust him absolutely."
"Understood. I'll get back to you as soon as I can."
Switching off the screen, he walked to the window. It was a cloudy winter's day, with snow an ominous threat in the sky, but New York moved with clockwork precision below him - there were so many Psy in the financial center of the country that efficiency was less striven for than expected. But even from this far up, he could spot the humans, the Forgotten, the changelings. They wore color. Splashes of bright red, azure blue, even shimmering gold.
The Psy shunned color, and if there was no other hope for William, the boy Dev had held as a newborn would learn to shun it, too. Why color? Perhaps, Dev thought, it was because the vibrancy of it spoke to something within the Psy soul, the same as music. No Psy ever sang, ever attended a symphony. He'd heard it said that their voices were uniformly flat, but he didn't believe it. No, what was more likely was that their voices had been flattened by Silence, by the cold control it took to maintain a stranglehold on emotions so powerful, they should never be contained.
The door opened behind him. "What is it, Maggie?"
"Is that any kind of greeting for your nani, Devraj?"
Spinning on his heel, he crossed the office with long strides to pull his grandmother's rangy form into his arms. "What are you doing here?" The scents of spice and paint filled the air, overlaid with an edge he'd always thought of as glass. As if Kiran Santos's love for her work had infiltrated her very being. "Where's Nana?"
"I left him at home." His grandmother winked as he drew back from the embrace. "I wanted to spend time with my other favorite man." Strong hands, scarred by a thousand nicks and cuts, closed on his upper arms. "You look tired, beta."
"You shouldn't be here," he said. "You know that."
"Don't you think the Psy spies know about me?" A squeeze of his arms. "Of course they do. They see me as a weakness, but I'm a strength."
He'd never yet won an argument with his grandmother. Giving in, he took the hand she held out to him. "Why are you here?" She'd always left him to run Shine as he saw fit, no matter that she hadn't agreed with all his decisions - such as the one that had precipitated a heart attack in a member of the old board earlier in the year. Dev hadn't apologized for that. He couldn't. Because the old board had been hiding from the truth, burying their heads in the sand.
Meanwhile their children had been dying, systematically culled by the Council.
"You needed me," his grandmother said, switching from English to Hindi without pause. "Why didn't you call or come to me on the ShadowNet?"
"Because there are no answers here."
"The woman," she said. "You care for her a great deal."
"Yes." A stark answer. "Yes."
"Tell me."
And he did. Because she was one of the very few people he trusted implicitly.
"I want to kill Ming - tear him apart with my bare hands - but what I really need from him is the key that'll release Katya from her psychic prison, wipe out the compulsions. For that, I need him to talk."
"Devraj, you must realize. . . holding a gun to Ming's head will achieve nothing. Not unless you can somehow cut off all his avenues of escape."
That's why he liked his grandmother. She was practical. "It has to be a short, hard hit." A brutal hit. "Even if he gets out a telepathic cry for help, I have to convince him he'll die before that help reaches him."
"That assumes he has no teleporters at his command, and I wouldn't assume that."
"There's only been one report of a true teleporter, and our intel says he's currently somewhere in South America - not attached to Ming," Dev argued. "The others are Tks. Able to teleport, yes, but not as fast."