Heart of Obsidian

“Are you determined to erase this?”
    “I won’t risk you.” He telepathed her the reasons why as the rain turned slowly to a misty haze, the connection between their minds so clear it was beyond even his telepathic strength. “And whatever you see in it, I’ll never see the same.” For him, it would always be a reminder of the day he’d lost her.
    “All right.” Shimmering droplets on her eyelashes, stars caught in transition. “But will you replace it with something for me?”
    “Anything.” His body was hers.
    Brushing her fingers over his lips, she said, “You gave me an eagle. I want to give you one, too.” A tender kiss pressed to the scar. “I want us to fly together.”
    “You saw me, all of me,” he said, dragging her up to his mouth. “You know I’m never going to be good.” After seizing control of the Net, he’d do whatever it took to maintain it. No one and nothing was ever again going to imprison either one of them.
    “A good man,” she said, her lips against his, “wouldn’t have survived what you did, wouldn’t have been able to find me. To fight evil, you have to understand the dark. We both do.”
    “You’ll have to be my conscience.” He knew his flaws, and he knew the parts of him that were irrevocably broken. “Mine isn’t going to grow back.”
    Pushing off wet strands of hair from his forehead, Sahara held his gaze. “Have I ever let anything slide? That won’t change.” A slow smile. “I intend to have a thousand fights with you.”
    He thought of a lifetime of having Sahara’s stubborn will in his life and knew that she was his reward for surviving.
    “Kaleb?” When he met her gaze, she touched one of the fine silvery scars on her own body, and his anger ignited anew, rage swirling in his veins. “No,” she whispered with a shake of her head. “You don’t think of him when you see these. You think of
me
. A fighter, a survivor, your lover.” It was an order . . . and one he realized he would have no hesitation in following, the marks her badges of honor.
    Leaning up, he kissed one on her shoulder as she’d kissed the scar on his arm. “Only you,” he said, the vow a final one. “My fierce, intelligent, lovely Sahara who spit in a monster’s eye.”
    “Kaleb.”
    They were lost in one another in the minutes that followed, touching and caressing and simply being together.
    “Our bond,” he said afterward, “it’ll be visible in the Net if I drop the shield I placed over it.” It had been an instinctive act from his mind, the feral response to protect something indescribably precious. “Twenty-four hours—that’s how long I plan to keep the shield in place.”
    Worry shadowed Sahara’s smile and he knew she understood what he intended to do. “Are the people ready?”
    “Some will never be ready, but it’s time.” The disease rotting the fabric of the Net was growing stronger, more virulent with every passing hour. “The only other option is a slow death.”
    Sahara thought of the dark places Kaleb had shown her, the dead places, and knew he was right. “You need the time to speak to the Arrows, don’t you?”
    “Yes. I have to find out if they’ll fight me or support me when I announce the fall of Silence. I don’t want to execute men and women who are more like me than any others in the Net, but I will if necessary.”
    If the squad fought him, Sahara thought, the resulting conflict would be far more devastating than anything Pure Psy had done. “The Arrows are intelligent; they must see Silence is rotten at the core.”
    “It’s difficult to fight over a century of unyielding tradition.”
    Kaleb’s words had Sahara thinking of the teleporter with the cold gray eyes. Could a man like Vasic exist in a world without Silence? It might be an impossible demand. Her heart hurt for him, for the choices he had never had, and she wished there was an easy answer, some way to give him a path out of the darkness.
    Then the midnight star pulsed inside her, and it was a silent reminder that life wasn’t easy. Sometimes, it demanded heart’s blood and gave back only unbearable pain. Sometimes, it broke you. “When you’re broken,” she whispered to the man who would save the world for her, “you can’t see hope.
We
must be their hope.”
    Kaleb held her close as she tucked her head under his chin. “You want me to drop the shielding around our bond when I talk to them.”
    “It’ll be a risk, I know. They could immediately