Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
She was aware of Remi falling into step behind them.
When the nurse glanced back and hesitated, Auden said, “He’s mine,” and the words felt right in the purest sense, with no connection to power or control. He was hers…as she was his. And Liberty was theirs. A symbiosis of love. “You can speak freely.”
“Yes, sir,” the nurse said with compliant obedience, and led her into a long and scrupulously clean tunnel before beginning a rundown using complex medical terminology that went right over Auden’s head.
But one thing was clear: the nurse was talking about a person.
A person whose brain patterns had begun to falter.
A person who needed a new brain.
A person who everyone in this household was doing everything they could to assist in what was, quite frankly, an insane endeavor. Because even the most powerful Psy in the world couldn’t just move their consciousness into another brain.
She felt no surprise at all when they emerged into a large chamber with white walls, two hospital beds, and masses of complex medical machinery to see the emaciated form of her dead mother.
Chapter 42
Auden will never be my first choice for transference, but her brain injury provided me with perfect access to test my idea of telepathic mesh. She was a malleable doll as far as her mind was concerned—and though attempts at psychic control failed as they always do because of the energy requirements, I was able to overlay a mesh over her mind that permits me to hook into it. Into her.
It’s nowhere near as smooth a transition as with my Scarabs, but those transitions are temporary and any such transition wouldn’t give me access to my web. It would also leave me stuck in the mind of a being without power, without wealth, just another weak pawn on the chessboard.
It’s possible Auden has a dormant ability to web that I can uncover. But I’m not relying on that. Neither do I have any intention of being stuck in a damaged brain. I will create the brain I need for the next phase of my evolution, and this time, I’ll begin to build the mesh from the moment of my host’s birth.
—Private journal of Shoshanna Scott (personal archive, address unknown)
“THE BODY HAS degraded even further than I recalled,” Auden said with clinical detachment, and this time, it wasn’t the other part of her. It was anger so profound that it was a sheet of glass over her emotions. Because if she let it go, if she cracked the glass, she would be a thing out of control, a mother who loved, a mother who would beat in the brains of the thing on the hospital bed.
What had once been Shoshanna Scott was a much-too-small lump of a torso with a head. No arms. No legs. Not even a full torso. “Alive” only because she was hooked up to so many machines that she had become some science fiction writer’s macabre creation—a human brain at the heart of a network.
“Yes, I’m afraid even with the amputations, the Councilor took too much energy from her body and organs in her valiant effort to keep her brain alive.” A glance at Auden, back at the bed. “I don’t know what to call you and her, sir.”
“Stick with the usual,” Auden said. “It’ll make it easier for both of us, and it’ll ensure you don’t slip up in the future.”
“Yes, of course,” the nurse said, and Auden wondered if she had any idea of her likely fate if Shoshanna had come back in Auden’s body.
The nurse would have had to die.
As would the doctor.
The chance of a leak would otherwise be too great. Charisma alone would have survived—because Charisma had already kept countless other secrets for Shoshanna.
“Wait at the monitoring station,” she ordered the nurse.
“Yes, sir.” Lomax moved to the far left of the room, from which she’d never get past Remi to escape and send up an alarm, should she be so inclined. It was possible that she’d already voiced a telepathic alarm, though she appeared to believe the story Auden had told her…but that made no difference now.
Auden knew what she had to do.
“Auden.” Remi’s rumble of a voice, quiet enough that the nurse would never hear it.
She looked up, the anger inside her a storm of violence born of years of abuse dressed up as medical experiments. “It’s time to finish this.”
He came with her as she walked closer to the body that was an abomination of what a living being should be—what remained of her mother’s body had all but mummified, her mutilated torso shrunken in. Her once glossy black hair was brittle straw, her face parchment over bone, but her eyes moved rapidly under her eyelids.
“She’s alive.” If this could be called life. “I haven’t felt her in the PsyNet since her supposed death, but that’s not a surprise. We didn’t have much of a bond.” Shoshanna could’ve been hiding in plain sight, and Auden would’ve never spotted her.