He didn’t flinch at the stark words. “You beat your parents’ heads in for a very good reason.”
“What if I decide to beat in the heads of everyone I see as competition for you?” Midnight receded from her eyes with the arctic question, as she gritted her teeth and hauled herself forcefully into that unyielding, Arrow-black box. “Think about that, Aden.”
• • •
TEN minutes later and Aden was in the infirmary. He’d finally left the aerie after Zaira flat-out told him to go, her tension so vicious that he was worried she’d rupture a blood vessel if he didn’t give her space.
What if I decide to beat in the heads of everyone I see as competition for you?
He didn’t believe she’d do that, but he had no way to prove it to her.
“Can I borrow a microscope again?” he asked Finn, needing to distract himself.
“Sure.” The healer nodded to the right. “That one’s high powered. You going to examine the implant?”
“Yes. I may see something I missed the first time.”
“You might want to fix up that lip before you get to work.” The medic threw him a small medical laser, a very feline expression on his face. “Of course, you could leave it and strut around like the cat who got the cream.”
“How do you know she didn’t punch me in the face?”
Finn laughed without reserve, his eyes going leopard. “Hell, dominants have been known to take that as foreplay.”
Aden sealed the wound after a moment’s thought. What to him was an indication of want that filled the emptiness inside him, Zaira would see as a reminder of a dangerous break in discipline.
That done, he set up the scope and put his eye to the lens.
He wasn’t a neural tech by training, but as a medic, he had some familiarity with the Human Alliance implant. The squad had made sure to get their hands on one, in order to ensure it posed no threat to the Psy race. Aden had no argument with humans shielding their minds against unscrupulous Psy. Should, however, the implant have shown any signs of having been engineered to be embedded into Psy minds as well, in an effort to manipulate them, the squad would’ve stepped in. No such features had been found.
Under the microscope, he saw the same thing he had the first time: segments of construction that reminded him of the Alliance implant—but those segments weren’t identical to the original. As if the design had been cannibalized to another purpose.
That didn’t rule out the Alliance.
Of all those who had cause to hate the Psy, and the Arrow Squad in particular, humans undoubtedly had the biggest grievance. Prior generations of Arrows had targeted high-level human scientists and businesspeople on the orders of the Council. It’d be no surprise to find the Human Alliance had decided to take steps to eliminate any further such ugliness. Bowen Knight, the Human Alliance security chief, was more than ruthless enough to initiate that type of an operation in an effort to protect his people.
However, the Alliance wasn’t the only possible perpetrator, especially given the existence of segments that pointed to the closely guarded and Council-funded “hive mind” implant. A number of Psy groups and individuals found the Arrows a threatening inconvenience, including those who saw the Es as a weakness rather than a strength. On the flip side, both the Liu family group and the Chastain family group had attempted to manipulate more-naive Es into indentured slavery. Aden had personally taken care of the extraction.
Both families had more than enough money to contract out a hit.
There was also Ming LeBon—the ex-Councilor had lost control of the squad and might believe that eliminating or besting Aden was the way to get it back. He couldn’t forget Nikita Duncan, either. She might be on the Ruling Coalition and more interested in finance than military tactics, but she’d survived this long for a reason: she was smart and cutthroat. She could well have decided the Arrows had too much power and put out a hit or made a mutually self-serving alliance with Ming.
It was a surprise when someone around Nikita didn’t end up with a metaphorical knife in his or her back.
He couldn’t totally discard Kaleb Krychek as the mastermind, either. The other man had agreed to an alliance with the squad and didn’t appear to want personal control of it, but Aden never made the mistake of thinking he could predict Kaleb. He also hadn’t forgotten that during the Alaska incident—when part of the PsyNet suffered a catastrophic collapse as a result of a psychic infection—the cardinal telekinetic had caught a glimpse of Aden’s true psychic strength.
Kaleb could’ve decided Aden was too big a threat to leave alive.
Another former Councilor on the list was Shoshanna Scott. She’d lost her standing in the PsyNet with the recent changes, might want it back, but Shoshanna had little access to military muscle. As with Nikita, she could’ve hired mercenaries and Aden would look into that, but from all appearances, it seemed as if Shoshanna was focusing on further growing her financial power base at present, likely so she could mount a political offensive in the future.
There were also two new players who had begun to flex their muscles. One was Pax Marshall, grandson of assassinated Councilor Marshall Hyde and a Gradient 9 telepath. Some of the most ruthless people in the Net were noncardinals but high Gradient. The second was Payal Rao, eldest daughter of the Rao family group out of India. The Rao Group had a stranglehold on a large sector of the energy industry in Southeast Asia, but ever since Payal had taken the reins, it had become more active as a regional power.