Heart of Obsidian

sight.
    Shivering from the onset of shock, she rasped out, “Santano Enrique gave her to me.”
    Her answer was no surprise, but Kaleb had needed to hear it from her mouth. “Why?”
    “We were . . . partners of a kind. He respected my ambition, and I respected the fact he’d cut my throat if I ever turned that ambition in his direction. We trusted each other.”
    It was the ugliest definition of trust he’d ever heard. “Did you know she was mine when you took her?”
    Tatiana shook her head. “No. I didn’t think he allowed you to pick victims.”
    No, it wasn’t then that Santano had needed him. “What are you doing, Tatiana?” He shifted the majority of his attention to his own mind as several alarms activated at once and found a secondary, near-invisible telepathic worm seconds away from penetrating his final shield.
    His rebuff this time made blood vessels burst in her eyes, but she hissed out a breath, holding his gaze with the crimson of her own. “You aren’t unbeatable. I almost had you.”
    “Almost is never good enough with someone like me, you know that.” Shutting her up by constricting her diaphragm to the point that she had to shunt all her concentration toward the task of drawing in enough air to survive, he leaned back in the chair and said, “You never should have taken what was mine.”
    Despite her diminished oxygen supply, Tatiana began to struggle in earnest, striking at him with aggressive telepathic blows as vehicles running dark screamed to a halt outside. “Calling in reinforcements? Tut-tut.” With that, he walked unhurriedly around the desk and teleported them both out.
    The blackness inside the old cement bunker was broken up only by a single long-life bulb hanging from a rusty chain in the ceiling. The dull light didn’t penetrate the shadows that gathered in deep pockets around the circular room, but it was enough to illuminate the yellowed and stained concrete beneath the steel table on which he dumped Tatiana’s body, the shoe still on her foot clanking against the metal.
    Stepping back, he watched her struggle up into a sitting position and look carefully around. No feigned emotion, nothing but the frosty will of a woman who had always been able to negotiate or manipulate her way out of trouble. It was an admirable trait, one Kaleb appreciated for the way it would extend and intensify her torture.
    Tatiana would spend countless hours plotting escape, only to realize her hell was permanent.
    “What is this place?” she asked.
    “You don’t know?” He waited for her to discover what he’d done.
    It only took her a second. “Why can’t I access the PsyNet?” she asked in a tone an octave higher than her normal voice, the first true hint of panic she’d betrayed. “You have a shield over me.”
    “I have other uses for my abilities. The DarkMind, however, finds it fun to play with a mind whose Silence promises to crack slowly and with great pain.” It had sucked Tatiana into itself, blocking out everything, including her telepathic channels, in endless nothingness. If it then began to feed off her ensuing terror, first she’d go slowly, insidiously insane, then she’d fall into a coma where terror would continue to be her sole companion, and from there, death wouldn’t be far behind.
    That little habit of “eating” people was one tendency of the DarkMind Kaleb had never been able to stem—so he’d directed it at those who deserved a slow, maddening death. Kaleb did his own killing when it came to power and politics, but he had no compunction in setting the DarkMind loose on the other vermin. The last one had been a would-be pedophile with a collection of photographs that should have never existed, a man who had just gained a job as a nursery-school teacher.
    However, the DarkMind knew not to feed off Tatiana. She was Kaleb’s, and the dark neosentience was delighted to help him hold her. Kaleb, after all, understood the cruelty and rage and malevolence that had created it . . . because he’d been created of the same ugly components. “The DarkMind,” he told Tatiana, “will keep you isolated in that black cocoon as long as I please.”
    “If I disappear from the Net,” Tatiana said, not understanding that there was nothing she could say that would alter her fate, “it’ll have the same effect as my death. The resulting shock wave—”
    “Tatiana, Tatiana.” He shook his head. “You disappeared from the Net when you created such