Heart of Obsidian

of the Rika-Smythe corporation. “Did anyone else with ‘flawed’ conditioning get close to Sahara?” Sahara was small, her physical strength nowhere close to that of a full-grown male’s—and she’d been drugged, her abilities suppressed on top of that. Easy prey.
    “No.”
    Catching the skitter in Tatiana’s eyes, he snapped another finger. The reverberating echo of her scream had no impact on him. “Who hurt her?”
    Bent over, her body wracked by shudders as she threw up, Tatiana couldn’t immediately answer, but he was patient. “We had to gain her cooperation.” A voice raw with pain and fear. “Force was utilized.”
    He
would not
kill her, no matter the provocation. It would be far too merciful. “Tell me where you keep the records of Sahara’s captivity, and I’ll leave,” he said in a pleasant tone he knew disturbed people on the deepest level. “Otherwise, we’ll be spending several hours together.” He teleported in a scalpel—she didn’t know of his promise to Sahara, didn’t know that her victim’s conscience was the only reason he wasn’t torturing her right this instant. “I learned many things at Santano’s knee.”
    Fear a sheen of sweat on her face, she scrabbled backward into a corner. “A vault in the PsyNet. I’ll have to telepath the location and pass codes.”
    Kaleb smiled, knowing she wasn’t as broken as she was attempting to appear. “No, you won’t. Talk.”
    Tatiana talked and, when she was done, said, “You truly were Enrique’s protégé, weren’t you?” in the tone of someone making a discovery. “You helped him brutalize the changeling females he murdered.”
    Judging she was in no danger of dying from the slight fever and her minor injuries, he left without wasting another word on her. Locating the vault wasn’t a problem, but he took care in downloading the data. Tatiana didn’t disappoint him—the booby traps were clever and meant to be fatal.
    Once he had the data, he asked the NetMind to erase every other trace of it from existence, including the automatic copy in the PsyNet backup drive—which Kaleb had named the Obsidian Archive. No one else would ever know what had been done to Sahara during the years Tatiana had her in a cage. He would permit no one to look at her with pity in their eyes when she deserved only pride for her courage and strength.
    That done, he began to read the files, noting the name of every individual involved in the sessions meant to break Sahara’s will. Three of them he’d already executed after tracking them through other methods, and another one was going slowly and terribly mad, thanks to Kaleb’s secondary ability. The remaining two were minor players he told the DarkMind to suffocate in its blackness and consume.
    David Sezer was the only one left, and the birds were beginning to sing outside when Kaleb decided it was time to pay the other male a personal visit. It was three hours later, once he’d showered and dressed after taking care of that matter, that he went to meet the two people other than Sahara who had a claim on his loyalty.
    It was nothing akin to what he felt for her, but it was enough for him to teleport into the night shadow of San Francisco, the clouds hiding the sickle moon from view. Sliding into the last pew in the church where Father Xavier Perez welcomed all who came, he spoke to the back of the former Arrow who sat in front of him. Never did the other man look at his face, but he knew it was to Kaleb that he spoke.
    “You want to discuss Pure Psy,” Kaleb guessed. The three of them—Xavier, Judd, and Kaleb—had long been bound by a mutual desire to collapse the rotten power structure of the Net, but where Judd and Xavier wanted to save the innocents of all races caught up in the rot, Kaleb had fought only for Sahara.
    That he
had
saved a number of lives during their fight, helped some of those innocents, had been a consequence rather than an aim. Then again, perhaps Judd and Xavier had had a deeper impact on him than any one of them believed; after all, he had spared the children in his plan to wipe the Psy off the face of the planet if his search for Sahara ended with the knowledge of her death.
    He’d told her about Judd, about Xavier, and about the details of their strategic war, in the quiet minutes after he and Sahara had had sex under the starlit Moscow sky, his heart beating in time with hers as she lay warm and sated against him. The only person with whom he had ever