Psy & Changelings 02 - Visions of Heat

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    VISIONS OF HEAT
     
    A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author
     
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Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / March 2007
     
Copyright © 2007 by Nalini Singh.
     
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    eISBN : 978-1-440-67456-3
     
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This one’s for my Mum, Usha,
the most extraordinary woman I know.
With love.

MADNESS
    Clinical insanity.
    The number one cause of death for F-Psy before Silence.
    Death by insanity? For the F-Psy, it was very much a harsh reality. They became lost in the visions of the future their minds created—so lost that they forgot to eat, forgot to drink, and, in extreme cases, forgot to make their hearts beat. The Psy are their minds, and once those minds are lost, their bodies can no longer function.
    But the dead were the fortunate ones. Those who broke under the pressure of the visions and yet survived were no longer sentient, no longer anything close to sentient, their minds locked in a world where the past, present, and future clashed and splintered over and over. As time fractured, so did they.
    Surprisingly, the F-Psy were divided about the implementation of the Silence Protocol. Some thought it would be a precious gift to feel no emotion, for then they’d be safe from the threat of insanity, safe from the hideous illusions of their minds . . . safe . But there were others who saw Silence as an act of betrayal against their very gifts. The F-Psy had stopped countless massacres, saved countless lives, done endless good, but they had done it all with emotion. Without emotion, their abilities would be controllable, but crippled.
    It took ten years, but the proponents of Silence won the mental battle raged across the millions of minds in the PsyNet. As a result, the F-Psy stopped foreseeing the human darkness of the future and withdrew into the sheltered walls of the business world. Instead of the saviors of innocents, they became the most powerful tools of many a Psy enterprise. The Psy Council declared their services too valuable to share with the other races and gradually, the F-Psy disappeared from public view.
    It is said they prefer to remain out of the limelight.
    What very few know, what the Council has hidden for over a century, is that though they are wealthy and cosseted, the once-resilient F-Psy have become the most fragile of