Heart of Obsidian

he could use to speed up his own death, Kaleb ’ported to Sahara, after sending her a warning message, tugged the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head to shadow her face, and ’ported back with her.
    Sounds had begun to echo through the garage by the time they arrived, the rest of the team doing a level-by-level sweep to make sure there was no one else hiding in the structure.
    “No questions?” the critically injured male rasped on their return, blood bubbling out of the corners of his mouth.
    Kaleb’s leg was bleeding badly now, the viscous liquid having soaked into the tough fabric of his pants and trickled into his boot, but he would finish this. “You’re unlikely to answer them.”
    The man’s lashes came down, settled, then lifted to show he was still alive and conscious. “So you’ll stand there and watch me die, not even attempt a retraction?” Contempt in those words.
    It is Andrea Vasquez,
Sahara said along their familiar telepathic pathway.
But this was not his final strike. That is what he calls the Phoenix Code: he’s split Pure Psy into multiple cells, each with the goal of collapsing as much of the PsyNet as possible, until only the “pure” remain—his belief system, as well as those of his followers, has altered until they now truly think that those who are “pure” are stronger. Anyone who dies was therefore not pure.
    The tautology of that belief did more to disprove Pure Psy’s “rational” rhetoric than any reasoned argument.
    Geneva,
Sahara continued,
Luxembourg, Paris, San Francisco, they were all intended to give his people time to scatter and hide deep, only to arise anew once the dust has settled. While their goal to rid the Net of the impure is paramount, their secondary aim is to instigate a worldwide war that will eliminate the weak and the “inferior.”
    His legacy, as he thinks of it, is an organization with so many heads that it will be impossible to decapitate: a true hydra.

Chapter 43

    VASQUEZ’S PLAN WAS all the more terrible for its simplicity. It was too bad for the leader of Pure Psy that, at last count, the Arrows had taken down seventy-five percent of his lieutenants and were now moving on to the next layer. Even a multiheaded hydra needed some type of a command structure, and Kaleb had no intention of permitting the remaining lieutenants to set up any kind of a power base.
    As for the weaker members—they might be troublesome, but only to the extent an insect is to a dragon. Eventually, they’d all be crushed.
    “You would sentence your race to annihilation,” he said to Vasquez, and it wasn’t a judgment. How could it be when he had once considered destroying the PsyNet? No, it was a question, one Vasquez understood.
    “We will rise as the phoenix from the ashes. Better, stronger, purer.” His eyes met Kaleb’s, the sclera red with burst blood cells. “You understand.”
    “Yes.” And because he did, because he saw in Vasquez who he might’ve been but for Sahara, he crouched down to grip the other man’s hand so he did not have to go into death as alone as he’d been in life. Neither did he tell Vasquez that the plan he’d sacrificed himself to put in place would never come to fruition.
    It was the only peace he could offer.
    The leader of Pure Psy coughed up bloody froth, his voice a raw whisper as his blood-slick fingers tightened on Kaleb’s. “The Psy have always been meant to rule. When it is over, we will be the only power that remains.” A final rattling gasp, his eyes fading to stare out into the nothingness of death.
    Andrea Vasquez was dead and with him, his dream of a world enslaved by the Psy.
    Closing the man’s eyelids, Kaleb rose to pull Sahara close. “We may have won this battle, but now comes a far harder one—to rebuild a society that is so fundamentally broken it has begun to cannibalize itself.”
    “Which you need to be alive to do,” came the furious response. “The bulletproof fabric
did its job
?” She was staring at his thigh as she repeated his earlier assurance.
    Only to Sahara would he explain himself. “That was a later shot.”
    Ignoring him, she twisted around as the first of the wider team cleared the level. “Judd can—”
    “No.” He teleported them directly to a private medical facility staffed by those who would not dare betray Kaleb, not only because he paid them very well, but because the agonizing punishment involved should they speak his secrets would in no way be worth