Chapter 5

My mind is who I am. Do not prolong my life by artificial methods should my brain suffer an insult that leaves me a flesh and blood ghost of myself.

—Living will written and signed by Bowen Knight. Witnesses: Lily Knight and Cassius Drake

HORROR CLAWED AT Bowen.

He’d christened himself in blood to protect his mind against a savage telepathic violation, had spent his adult life attempting to find a way for humanity to do the same. He’d fought so no human would ever again be turned into a mindless doll . . . but he’d forgotten that the Psy weren’t the only threat to that integral component of his self.

“I can stop the experiment right now.” Dr. Kahananui’s voice, softer and less bluntly scientific than it had been to this point.

Bo wrenched his gaze from Kaia’s, her inky pupils having flared against the brown of her irises—as if she’d seen his nightmare and understood it. “What would that mean?”

“All I have are the computer models—and I’ll be able to refine them with more data now that you’ve woken,” the doctor answered, “but to summarize, you’d have approximately a month to six weeks at full function before your chip goes into catastrophic failure.”

She checked something on a monitor. “According to models the Aleines have run during your coma, you’ll know when it begins—the migraines will be excruciating. Then will come the nosebleeds and the ocular degeneration. At which point, you can shut yourself up to die in peace, no chance of anyone disobeying your clearly stated decision to not be put on life support should you suffer brain impairment.”

Four to six weeks of life versus an entire lifetime.

But that wasn’t the real choice and never had been. “If I don’t accept the risk”—if he didn’t put his mind on the line for a meager five percent chance of success—“someone else will end up here, end up deciding to continue to stage three.” Lily or Cassius or Heenali or Ajax, maybe even scared-of-his-own-shadow-but-brave-despite-it Zeb.

When Dr. Kahananui hesitated, he looked to Kaia. He already knew she’d give him the unvarnished truth. Unraveling her folded arms, she gripped the edge of the panel at the end of his bed. “Yes. The compound is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Models can only tell Attie so much. She needs data from a living subject.”

“Did you manufacture this compound? How much can you access?”

Dr. Atalina was the one who answered. “It’s natural, created by a deep-sea creature as part of its life cycle. We have approximately a hundred grams—”

“No, Attie.” Kaia put a hand on the doctor’s arm. “What he wants to know is how many people it could save if it works.”

“Oh.” Dr. Kahananui glanced down at the organizer she’d picked up, but he had the feeling it was more a reflex action than anything—she had the information in her head. “If it works, we have enough to stabilize every individual who already has an implant.”

Bowen’s heart shuddered. Lily, Cassius, Heenali, Zeb, Domenica, Ajax, the others, they’d all be safe. “Will you be able to get more?” The world had so many vulnerable human minds.

“No, to harvest it again anytime within the next century would be to harm the being who created it. But,” the doctor continued, “with the data from a successful experiment, I can take the first step toward attempting to replicate and manufacture the compound—it’s so complex and rare that the task is apt to take decades, maybe my entire lifetime.”

She could give him no quick answer for humanity’s desperate need, but she could save the lives of people he loved. All he had to do was risk everything that made him Bowen Knight. “Five percent is better than no chance,” he said, his voice like gravel. “Right now, we’re all on the fast highway to death.”

“What will you do if it fails?” A soft question from Kaia.

“I won’t be able to do anything,” he said flatly. “I’ll be too brain damaged.”

Her fingers clenched even tighter on the edge of the panel. Because while Dr. Kahananui might take his words at face value, Kaia was a darker creature. She understood that he’d make his choices, put contingencies in place. Cassius and he, they were bound by blood and horror. His best friend wouldn’t struggle with fulfilling Bo’s choice, wouldn’t hesitate to run a blade across his throat.

That was when Dr. Kahananui spoke. “Even if it fails,” she said, “you’ll have the compound in your brain. I’ll be able to study its interaction with your neural tissue over the years and gain critical data that could one day lead to a long-term solution.”

Bowen stared at her. She was trying to comfort him, but she’d just slammed the prison door on his personal hell, then locked it and thrown away the key. He couldn’t ask his best friend to put him out of his misery, not without stealing the chance of psychic safety from future generations.

His sister and friends would all be dead. But countless humans would still be walking around in a world where human minds were considered easy prey. And a slim chance was better than no chance.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Do it,” he said. “All three stages.” For some reason, he’d looked at Kaia as he spoke . . . and he caught her slight flinch. For him? Because of him? Not that it mattered. In making this choice, he’d put himself in a purgatory where his life couldn’t go forward or backward for—“How long will it take to get to stage three?”

“Not counting today, exactly two weeks,” Dr. Kahananui answered.

His heart thudded at the ruthlessly short time frame. A man could do many things in two weeks, but he couldn’t live an entire lifetime. He couldn’t make promises, couldn’t dance with a woman under a moonlit sky and know that tomorrow and every tomorrow to come for decades, he’d wake up by her side.

And the security chief of the Human Alliance couldn’t set up a framework that would protect his people for untold years to come. But he could damn well try. His brain was working right now, and his heart was strong—

Wait.

Raising his hand, Bo spread his fingers over his chest, felt the powerful beat of that heart, sensed the life-giving rush of blood pumping through his arteries. “My heart was punctured by shrapnel. I didn’t imagine that.”

“No, you didn’t,” Dr. Kahananui said. “You went into total heart failure soon after the shooting.”

“There was nothing left,” Kaia added. “No way for the surgeons to patch you back together.”

Dr. Kahananui gasped at that instant, gripping at her belly. Bo jerked instinctively toward her, but his body wasn’t ready yet; it reacted sluggishly. Kaia, however, had her arm around the other woman. “You in labor?” It was a sharp question.

“No.” The doctor came fully upright again. “Just a muscle spasm.” She patted Kaia’s cheek when the cook with a scientist’s background made a distinctively suspicious face. “I have plans to take this baby to full term and to birth in the ocean and not even the resurrection of Bowen Knight will stop me.”

Bo looked at the heavily pregnant woman. “In the ocean? Won’t the baby drown? I know changelings don’t shift until about a year of age.” It had taken time and an excruciating amount of patience to learn that fact—changelings were remarkably insular for a people who had a reputation for being wildly affectionate.

“Maybe not all changelings are the same,” was the enigmatic response from Kaia.

Dr. Kahananui, meanwhile, was back beside him, running a scanner over his chest. “As for your heart, it’s functioning at perfect efficiency. Your primary physicians attempted to clone one, but for whatever reason, the cloning process failed multiple times.”

Bo had to concentrate to keep his attention from drifting to Kaia—it was as if he were connected to her by an invisible cord. She moved and his gaze wanted to follow. “Then what is it I have inside my chest?”

“A mechanical heart. A cutting-edge piece of tech.”

Bowen spread his fingers over his chest again . . . and realized this heart would keep on beating if the experiment failed. It’d keep his mindless body moving, keep him from dying. “I haven’t heard of this technique before,” he said in an effort to exist in the here and now rather than the unknown future.

“It’s a rare procedure because of the complexity of creating hearts and because only a single biomech company has done it successfully.” Dr. Kahananui continued to take readings as she spoke. “You’re the first living recipient of this latest and most stable version. It’s a prototype not intended for transplantation into a living subject for another two years at least, but Silver Mercant was able to cut through the red tape for you.”

Across the room, Kaia’s gaze held only ice, only distance. “You have powerful friends, Bowen Knight.”

“No,” he said after thinking through the unexpected piece of information, “it’s Lily who knows Silver.” She worked most often with the telepath in charge of EmNet—the worldwide Emergency Response Network. “This tech is Psy?”

Kaia raised an eyebrow. “Is that a problem?”

“Just a fucking irony.” After all that the Psy had done to humans, stolen from humans, after all that Bo had done to make sure a telepath could never again get into his head, he now had a piece of expensive Psy technology inside his chest. “The experiment with the compound”—he touched the side of his head—“did the Psy have a hand in suggesting that?”

Before the shooting, he’d had a meeting with Kaleb Krychek, in which the staggeringly powerful telekinetic had told Bo that the PsyNet—the psychic network the Psy needed to live—was on the verge of collapse. In another magnificent irony, it was the sustained lack of human energy in the network that had led the psychic race to the brink of disaster.

The Psy desperately needed humans. Cooperative humans.

Coercion wouldn’t work.

Mind control wouldn’t work.

Krychek needed Bo to tell humanity to trust the Psy.

Bo wasn’t heartless, but the Psy had caused too much horror for him to let his heart overrule his head. He’d asked Krychek for a specific gesture of good faith, an act done with no assumption of a return—but simply because it was the right thing to do.

“Put humans and Psy on equal footing when it comes to psychic privacy,” he’d said. “Then, maybe, we can talk.”

This might be Krychek’s response.

But Dr. Kahananui shook her head. “No, this is a purely BlackSea operation.”

Which meant the Psy might still be working on their attempt at a solution. But, even if they were, it was impossible that they’d magically come up with an answer in two short weeks. This was the throw he had to play. “Did you tell my sister about stage three?”

Again, he looked to Kaia for the answer. She understood him, would know exactly what he was asking beneath the straightforward question.

“No,” she answered. “There was no point if stage one didn’t bring you to consciousness. If it did, the choice had to be yours.”

“Don’t tell her,” Bo said, the words an order. “Lily, my parents, Cassius, none of my people can know. But especially not Lily. And if the experiment fails, you tell them I died and that you had me cremated because the compound made my body toxic. Never let them see what I become.”