Chapter 47

Alja still couldn't fully believe it when she looked around the room. She was in Kaleb's home, in his bedroom. Her body close to his, wrapped in that wonderful scent of electrified air and darkness, touching a man she'd never expected to be touched by anyone. It all seemed so surreal, she almost missed what else she was touching, more specifically what she was lying on: a silky dream of midnight-blue satin that caressed her skin like the dress she'd worn at the ball. The sheets were made of the exact same fabric.

"When and more importantly where did you get these?" she asked pulling the material up over her bare legs and hips. Not because she was cold but because she liked the extra intimacy it added to her current position. She was lying half beside and half atop Kaleb, who was on his back, one arm behind his head the other wrapped possessively around her waist.

"Four days ago. I had them made by a Spanish firm called tejido de los ensueños," he answered truthfully.

A typical Psy answer, but she was sure he was teasing her. She propped her head up on her arms on his chest and looked at him directly. "Ok. Mr. Super-Psy and how did you know where to get the cloth? Stalker much?"

"The name of the fabric and its retailer was in one of the media reports I scanned."

"Why would someone report what my dress was made of?" she asked truly surprised.

Kaleb liked how her face scrunched up in disbelief. It was cute. Unused to such emotional terminology he let the word ring through his mind again, decided it was a good one to describe Alja but probably not one her soldier side would appreciate. "They analyze everything. This information came from a changeling fashion blog that was suggested in my internet research." When Alja shook her head laughing he added: "Seriously, how do they get anything done with a network as inefficient and full of superfluous data?"

"Obviously it wasn't so superfluous in your case…" she teased.

"Maybe…" then his voice turned suddenly intense. "I needed something that felt like you. I thought the sheets would be enough, so I could keep away from you."

She met his gaze with the same intensity and felt something pass between them that was beyond words. But they both understood. Then she leaned forward and kissed him with crushing gentleness before she smiled his favorite wicked smile and stated: "So that didn't work out then."

"Obviously not." He pulled her a little closer against his body, as if to emphasize it. "And as for the stalking part: I consider myself a predator and I never made a secret of it." He said it as if that rectified any line crossing behavior.

Alja rolled her eyes at the obvious arrogance in that statement, but she didn't question its truth either.

"Although," he went on, "in your case I couldn't yet decide whether you are prey or a predator yourself."

"Well I guess I'll let you figure that out by yourself," she replied and shifted so she could prop herself up on an elbow beside him and had her other hand free to draw patterns on his naked chest.

Kaleb in return started stroking along the lower edge of her ribs with his fingertips. It had the intended effect of making her chuckle and wriggle away slightly. He didn't let her. Instead he pulled her on top of him and repeated the tickling caress on her other side. She didn't react. He tried again, noticing a small uneven spot on her skin, but she still showed no sign she'd felt the touch. "What's that?"

"Just a scar from training." She sounded casual, but since she'd stopped wiping her emotions off her face, he saw that there was more to it.

"You have no sensibility in the skin below it." Neural damage that shouldn't have lasted. "The Arrows have excellent medics and even Tk-Cells as far as I know. Why was this not treated properly?"

She sat up beside him, pulling the sheet around her chest, suddenly looking a little vulnerable.

"If I tell you about the scar, will you tell me about yours?" When he didn't react at once, she reached out to pull out his arm from under his head, stroked over the strangely shaped burn scar on his forearm.

Kaleb considered it for a moment. Alja looked excited, curious, but never scared of what ugliness he might reveal. It was a hard secret to begin with but not as hard as it could have been. It wasn't one of the truths he hid so deep in his mind that even he only remembered, when he dared to peek into the cage of the monster, into that room that held memories of murder even before the moral decision of a seventeen year old.

Alja felt tendrils of an aching anticipation spread through her stomach as Kaleb hesitated for agonizing seconds. His face turned blank, making her fear he would retract behind those walls of Silence at last. And then, all of a sudden it seemed he couldn't talk fast enough.

"I will, actually I can even start." He had sworn to himself he wouldn't hide anything from her. And even though she had proven over and over that she wouldn't shy away from who he was, there was so much more darkness he had to reveal. So much more risk of losing her to the horror he was at last. He just wanted it over. "You already know about my past with Enrique Santano. Don't you?"

"I know you were his protégé and probably present more than once when he tortured and murdered these changeling women." To be the Council's boogey men the Arrows had to know a lot of dirty secrets and what they weren't told they had ways to find out. And for Alja there was the NetMind of course. "And I suppose killing that swan-changeling, Susannah, wasn't your idea either." Alja deliberately used light words trying to lessen their impact. It was going to be hard enough, if they were trying to talk about that part of their connected pasts.

Kaleb froze nonetheless as she mentioned the name.

"Hey it's ok." Alja cupped his face and pressed her lips on his hard. Anchoring him back to reality. "That's a memory for another time. Just tell me about the scar!"

He pushed himself up to a sitting position too and went on, glad he didn't have to explain everything from the start. "He was very absorbed in his experiments. So most of the time I just had to watch, describe what I saw and clean up. – before that last one at least." Alja didn't like that his voice turned so toneless. But she recognized the technique of distancing himself emotionally. She had done it often enough. "It was when I was twelve or maybe fourteen. I don't remember when exactly." He stated it just as flatly as the other facts but it was a shock nonetheless. Because Kaleb had one of the sharpest minds she'd ever seen. And it said a lot about his time with Enrique that he didn't even remember how old he'd been, when he got a scar that must have hurt like hell. "But back then he didn't use the signature he used later – the 79 cuts. He used a burning iron in the shape of the Greek letter psi to mark the victims with a symbol of Psy superiority." Only later when the changeling and human fractions gained more and more power it had become too risky. The Psy could no longer violate the other races in plain view without fearing the consequences so the murderer had switched to the more subtle marking, which involved even more pain for the victim than the burning. "One day he decided it was time for me to partake in his work. He wanted me to do the brand mark on a bear changeling. He held her down with Tk but of course he let her go the moment I was in her reach with the burning iron. It was just another test. It took me only a second to get her back down with my own Tk, but it was enough to have her swing one partially changed paw at the iron. It swung towards my face and I blocked it with my forearm. Then I broke her arm with Tk."

Alja heard the guilt in the last sentence. Instinct made her shift close to him lean he body against his. His arm came around her at once. "It was not your fault. It was a reflex."

"No it wasn't. I did it so I wouldn't seem weak in front of him." Only the truth. He wouldn't hide.

Still not your fault. Alja wanted to answer, but she held the words back. This would only lead to an argument she had no chance to win. It would take a long time for Kaleb to let go of the guilt he had amassed over so many years at the hands of a serial killer. And she knew that sometimes it was easier to blame yourself, easier to accept the guilt than to admit you had been helpless and that a part of you would always be that helpless, frightened creature that would have done anything, no matter how terrible it was, to make the pain and fear go away. Kaleb however surprised her by reading her mind without his telepathy working on her.

"I know what's going on in your head right now. I know what you want to say, what you want me to believe. But where do you draw the line Alja? How much shall I blame one the ones who formed me when I was young and where does my own responsibility for my actions start?"

She had no easy answer to that. "Maybe it's not about guilt or responsibility. Maybe it's about which things you can't change once they're done and for which things you can at least make amends. It's how I hold myself up: By believing one day I will make up for everything I've done."

"I would like to believe that too." But he didn't sound convinced. "So what about those?" He leaned around her and brushed his knuckles across the scar on her right lower ribs that he'd discovered earlier and then on the one on the other side, that almost mirrored its brother. Only it hadn't caused the same insensitivity of the skin around it.

Alja relished the gentle touch and was equally impressed. Both scars were very faded and it spoke for Kaleb's perceptiveness, that he'd found them both so fast. "They're stab-wounds I got during training."

"I heard that young Arrows are hurt by their trainers to harden them. I just never expected that extent." Stab wounds to the chest were a serious matter even with modern medicine.

"We weren't only hurt by our trainers. They also made us hurt each other when we were in senior training. I believe they feared our bonds of loyalty to each other within the training group threatened to get stronger than our commitment to the Squad in general. That one time they locked us up in a large training hall and made us fight. We'd only get food and water if we hurt one of our comrades. If we scored a serious wound on the head or chest we'd be set free. It sounds easy, but with the level of training and psychic skills we possessed it could last for days." That kind of exercise was one of the main reasons for the strange sense of connection between the Arrows. It had formed in them an unflinching loyalty towards anyone who had come through the same hell of training. But at the same time it prevented any personal attachment, which was exactly what their trainers had wanted to achieve. Only it hadn't worked with everyone.

"They actually let you kill each other?" Kaleb asked not hiding his shocked surprise. It meant something that even with his own background, he was impressed by the severity of what Alja had been through.

"Just almost. At that point in our training we were already too valuable. They had a team of medics stand by to patch up the casualties. They'd have to go back in another round later."

"But then the scars should have been treated in a way that they wouldn't be visible today." He saw Alja bite her lip so hard he wanted to kiss her to make her stop hurting herself but this was important, so he let her go on.

"There was a boy I knew from compensatory training. We were the weak ones. We had no chance to score our points while the others were fighting with their psychic combat skills. But we were clever enough to keep out of the line of fire and last for a long time. And I had my shields after all." Now it was Kaleb's turn to be surprised how self-evidently Alja related what must have been one of the worst times of her life. "And then there were just three of us left. The third one was a bit of a surprise. He was a strong Tk and I had expected him to be one of the first to get out. Too late I realized the only reason he was still there was, because he was protecting his friend." Needless to say that something like friendship was absolutely outrageous in their situation. "But they had maneuvered themselves in a trap. Even if one of them would have gotten to me, one of them would still have to hurt the other. And they couldn't. I hadn't shut off the empathic senses so tight back then, so I knew. And it was the first time I felt that someone was like me. They weren't empaths of course, but they weren't like the others either."

Kaleb had an idea who those two might have been. But asking would have put Alja in a conflict of loyalty so he held his tongue about it and just stated the obvious. Not something a Psy would do, but he wanted her to know he understood her. "You felt for them."

There was no reproof in his tone. And it meant a lot to Alja that he wouldn't judge her. "I wanted to help. So I shielded our telepathic conversation and we worked out a solution that would get us all out and leave no one to be sent in again. We would all attack each other simultaneously. I would let them score a chest wound each, while I would hurt them back badly enough to count me as a win as well."

"And that worked?"

"No, they counted us all as failure and made us go in again. But the next time we found victims fast enough to come out separately. We learned from our mistakes."

"And they let you keep the scars as a reminder?"

"Oh no. It wasn't that." She'd almost forgotten about his initial question. And she wasn't too eager to tell him that detail of the story. But maybe it would help him to learn, that he wasn't the only one who had made some grave choices to survive. "The way I hurt the other boys – it was bad. The medics were busy keeping them alive, so my punctured lungs were patched up properly but the skin wounds were just roughly sewn together."

"Punctured lungs?!" He wasn't certain he could ever look Aden or Vasic in the eye again and not kill them for hurting her. Maybe if he could convince himself it hadn't been them after all… "What could you do that was worse?"

He saw the stars in her eyes start to tremble, wished he could take back the question.

"Did you ever wonder what Arrows learn in compensatory training?" Of course he hadn't. Alja had said it just to anchor herself, make sure her voice was still working, because it felt as if it was about to give out. And she was right. She heard her own voice break and knew she couldn't tell him. She had to show him. So she tilted her head to the side and brushed her hair away from the soft strip of skin behind her right ear.

Kaleb was baffled for a second, wondering if she asked for a caress. He already considered pressing a kiss to the delicate skin she had laid open but then he registered a tiny movement under that very skin. Slowly a little spike emerged through a hole in her skin that was so small it didn't even bleed. He didn't fully process what was going on until the glass needle was floating right in front of his eyes

"Now imagine that thing inside your brain." Her voice – forced to work with brutal control – was so cold and cutting no one who'd have heard it would have believed her anything but absolutely submerged in Silence.

Kaleb just stared at her as he began to understand what she was telling him.

"My Tk is too weak to do much damage on its own. But I don't need much strength to get that thing here through an eyeball. And you couldn't stop me even with Tk because of my shields. It is a very unique technique even in the Squad. You might think punctured lungs bad, but the others knew exactly where and how deep to push in the blades to make it count, but still relatively easy to heal. It was me who didn't have a clue how to avoid the vital structures, when I drilled the needles into their brains. They took a much higher risk than me." There she'd admitted it. She hadn't helped her comrades. In the end they had helped her. Although they had to go in again, word of her skills had spread. No one in the Squad ever challenged her or disrespected her for her relatively weak mental combat skills.

Kaleb picked the needle out of the air where it still floated and threw it away. Alja looked after it just to see it crushed to dust and then vanish entirely. He had thrown it just outside her shield range so he could get rid of it with his own abilities. "How many of them are still inside you?" It made him sick to think she had to turn her body into a weapon in such a literal way. It must hurt her more than anything else she'd had to do as an Arrow.

"Enough to go around for a lifetime." Not that she ever intended to use them again. "I was lucky." She stated bitterly. "So far there were only six cases where this special skill was needed." And the one where she had killed using her empathy.

Kaleb pulled her onto his lap, wrapping the sheets of soothing silk tightly around both of them, crushing her to him as close as humanly possible. He needed to hold her safe to still the irrational fear for her he felt at hearing of the horrors of her past. "It really is a wonder you came out of this alive!" he whispered against her hair. "If someone else told me told me this story I would not believe them. How did you not break?"

"What makes you think I didn't?" Cuddled close to the warmth and thunderstorm scent of him it was finally a little easier to admit. Her voice trembled nonetheless. "You saw me break down more than once. When I first met you I was so close to falling apart I wasn't sure I'd survive another year." She'd done what all Psy did: tried to push the bad things away, lock them in a part of her mind. But just like for the rest of her race it had only slowed the process if insanity. The darkness kept eating its way back to the surface.

He remembered her fractured psyche and the way she'd reacted when she learned that her friend had died. I'm broken. And I can't be fixed. And he understood that even with all her open emotionality there were yet more layers of her personality to reveal. Outside there was this rough Arrow persona – no, that was wrong. It wasn't a persona, a mask. Part of Alja actually was a lethal Arrow, her mind always strategizing, always in defense mode ready to go to offense. But there were other parts she usually hid: There was the woman with the mischievous smile, who liked to joke about everything and provoke him out of his hard shell. And then she had that incredibly gentle creature of pure light and warmth inside her, her empath side, a being full of love and care for the world around her. Until now he had believed, that this was the part Alja covered the most. But it wasn't: Underneath it all was another layer, a dark part that was far more than the emotions and memories she had tried to compartmentalize as she'd once said. There weren't just some suppressed impulses and feelings. It was something worse: A part of Alja had lost hope somewhere along the way. Deep down she didn't fully believe that everything would be alright, didn't believe she really could save the Net. Deep down she didn't believe she was good enough to survive.

He saw that darkness shimmer through right now. And he knew he had seen its potential before, the night she'd made him confess about the death of her friend. And not only then, that hopelessness vibrated under the surface all the time and it peeked through whenever the Net or Alja's empathy was concerned. He would give anything to make it go away. "But you're here. You made it that far." Incredible, strong woman that she was.

"Only because you gave me something to hold onto. – I know you don't want to hear that, but it's you who keeps me stable." The softest brush of her lips against his jaw.

"You have no idea how much I want to hear it, how badly I want to believe it! But all those years. How did you not lose hope way before?" Her strength was just incredible.

Alja had to think for a moment. She'd been desperate when she was younger, but before the killing had taken its toll on her, giving up had never really been an option. She just always knew she had to find a way, she had to complete her task… "I think I always believed that somehow I was protected by something bigger." She murmured thoughtfully uncurling her hand on his chest right over his heartbeat in a gesture of reassurance that said I'm alright now, and I'm here for you too.

"That sounds almost religious." Emotion was one thing but faith was a big stretch for a Psy.

"No." She let her laughter vibrate softly against his chest. "I was thinking of something more concrete."

"The NetMind." The answer wasn't hard to find. It was one of the most important open questions Kaleb had about her.

"Yes, it gave me this purpose, the task of healing the Net. So it always made sense, that the NetMind wouldn't let me die, before I fulfilled it. – But you're right maybe it did serve the same purpose as a religion: Believing in a higher power, a greater sense of all those terrible things that happen. And a possibility of redemption for my sins."

He understood that. He had known father Perez long enough to have learned some things about belief and faith and why people turned to it in their need. He thought about his own uncanny relationship with the DarkMind. What did that make him? Had he sold his soul to the devil? He felt the sudden urge to shake his head to get the thought out of it. No, faith wasn't for him. It let him down a path that didn't look sane at all. "I don't believe that comparison works. The NetMind lacks the omniscience and the omnipotence of a divine being. It can be controlled by strong Tk or F-Psy. The Council had it almost completely under control for decades."

Alja was surprised to find Kaleb so engaged in the discussion. He must have his very own views of the guardian of the Net. "Maybe the structure of your Tk mind makes it easier for you to communicate with it, but I don't think anyone ever 'controlled' the NetMind. I think it functions in ways we cannot even begin to understand. And there's nothing religious about it. It's just how it is. It is too complex."

"It retrieves every bit of data I ask for, except, for when the information is not in the Net." Kaleb tried to hold against Alja's strange reverence for the neosentience.

"Just because it doesn't tell you, doesn't mean it doesn't know. It protects the empaths in the Net – the ones like Sascha Duncan and me. And it sure as hell didn't tell that to Enrique Santano or none of us would still be alive." Alja had learned early, that the NetMind had unique ways of deciding what information to reveal. And it had never betrayed her to anyone. Thinking about it, it really was curious. But it had never occurred to her to question the NetMind's decisions. Maybe it was a kind of faith after all.

"But Santano also used it to cover his crimes," Kaleb argued.

He sounded even a little frustrated now. This was very personal for Kaleb, Alja realized. "Santano's crimes were outside the Net. As I have learned over the years, the NetMind has very little concept of the 'real world'. Maybe it didn't understand, because it is only omniscient inside the Net."

"If it were, I wouldn't be combing the Net for seven years for someone it told me to save," he blurted out without thinking further. The thought of Her, the sun-mind, had broken through with the now familiar pang of guilt.

"So it gave you a task too?" Alja asked very quiet, shifting her body so she could look him in the eyes better.

"One that kept me believing in hope for us – even for myself – for a long time. But also an impossible one. The person I am to help is not to be found in the Net."

"Maybe you need to look outside then."

Kaleb thought about it for a moment: The NetMind hadn't given him a clue how to find Her, although it must have more information about her. But why? Maybe Alja was right… She went on before he could follow that train of thought further.

"If the NetMind wants you to help that person you must try. Even if you cannot understand it now. The NetMind isn't just a librarian or a collection of data that accidentally got a consciousness. It is far more than that and whatever it does is to help the Net survive."

"You really are a believer aren't you?" He couldn't help but smile at that. Not because he wanted to mock her but because Alja didn't seem to know herself how far from Silence she had lived all her life. She just looked at him intensely, her face strained with something he couldn't understand at first. She seemed agitated. At first he thought she felt offended by his comment, and then he knew it was something different: He'd just told her something that frustrated him and she was already trying to fix it. It was in her nature. "I didn't tell you about this to add to your burden. It is my task and I will solve it one way or another. There are so many details about it you don't know…"

She let out a frustrated sigh. "You're right I know nothing about it. I know nothing about you at all."

He raised his brows. "You know more about me than any individual on the planet."

"But we both have a lifetime of building walls between us." Walls every Psy had to build to survive in the merciless world they had created over a century. "We won't tear them down in a few days."

"Yes, it's too much. We'll take it one step at a time."

"I want to, but I can't shake the feeling I'm running out of time – we're running out of time," she whispered desperately.

There it was again: the darkness seeping through. And he could do nothing for her because he knew she might be right. "I know. I feel the same. But we still have a chance. And we're not as alone as you might think."

Alja took a deep breath, relaxed once more into those strong arms that could make her feel safe anywhere. "Yeah about that: Please tell me you have a special connection to the Ghost and did not just frame him for our strike on Pure Psy out of arrogance."

"I have a special connection to the Ghost and did not just frame him for our strike on Pure Psy out of arrogance," Kaleb stated simply, mimicking even her tone. Teasing her gave him time enough to realize, that after everything he'd learned about Alja it was really not that hard to reveal this particular secret. On the contrary, he wanted to tease her even more just to see that mock-annoyed look on her face.

"You're working with the rebellion?! With the Ghost himself?!" she exclaimed, sincerely surprised but already working to integrate that information into her picture of him.

Kaleb just gave her a wide grin in response, loved to see that sharp mind of hers working so intense it made her forehead wrinkle. "Well, not exactly with the latter."

That last piece clicked into place. "You're the Ghost?!" And just like that all the gloom and darkness vanished from her features, being shoved aside by curious excitement. "You've got to be kidding me!" She straightened in his lap, eyeing him almost reproachfully.

"That's how I feel about you all the time." His smile was thoughtful this time.

"Hm… I guess a lot of things make sense now." Like no one having been able to ever find single clue of who the Ghost was, like the fact that he could accomplish impossible things within the Net. Or that no one could even guess at his hidden agenda.

Yes, it was a shocking revelation, she thought. But somehow she wasn't as surprised as she thought she'd be. It just didn't change that much for her. She'd fallen hard for Kaleb when he was still Silent and she had considered a few times, what a person he'd be when he felt. She of all people should've known he wouldn't be so different after all. He was demanding, pushing at her boundaries all the time but didn't seem to mind her pushing back. Only now she thought he even liked it. And being a notorious, volatile rebel? If anything that made her fall even harder for him. Because it fit.

She'd seen how he handled his staff in a way that was highly unorthodox for Psy. She'd noticed how he did a lot of things by himself that wouldn't have been necessary in his position. And then there was his behavior towards her from the start. It had been different from how any Psy – even one breaking Silence – would have acted: He'd sparred with her a few days into her employment. He'd had her demonstrate her projection on him instead of taking her to a lab and scientifically analyzing her skills in a controlled environment. She'd thought him a thrill-seeker then and she'd obviously been more right than she knew at the time.

Underneath all the Silence and power hunger Kaleb had probably always liked a little risk, a little danger – well maybe more than a little.

But still, for a single person to achieve what the Ghost had…"You must've been working on this for – I don't even know for how long."

"I was seven when the Protocol was rooted deep enough so I could start rational planning."

"That's insane!" The words were out before she could stop them, she was so taken aback. "I mean that fact, not you of course," she added hastily.

"No it's true. You don't survive the things Santano did to me as a child without going insane. Not even with Silence. The only reason I am coping is that I set my goal to destroy the Council so early. It's the thing that kept me going. Like you with your faith in the NetMind." His tone was cool now, factual. But not the kind of emotionless it had been under Silence. He was simply stating a fact none of them could escape.

He had kept his head above water by resorting to phantasies of omnipotence. It was what abused children did sometimes. Growing up in the Arrow Squad Alja should know. Only in Kaleb's case they weren't just phantasies. And that was why it had worked for so long. "And what if that goal gets out of reach?"

"I won't let it." No stubbornness. Simply another fact. "You've changed a lot for me Alja, but I will not lie to you: I still think the Council must be eradicated. And I still want control over the Net. That hasn't changed with breaking Silence. On the contrary, now I have you to protect. And at least half of what's left of the Council is the biggest threat to your life."

"But the Net is dying."

"You'll fix it." Unwavering trust lay in that simple statement. Trust that hurt Alja, because she didn't know if she could honor it.

"That's what I meant. I know what it feels like when the hope you're clinging to all your life slips away. And you've seen what it does to me."

"You won't let it get out of reach either." When she only answered with a worried expression on her face he added more lightly. "And since a dead Net is not much worth taking over, you have all my resources and support to fulfill your agenda first. Deal?"

That got him at least a little smile and a hesitant nod before the silence between them was broken by a loud growl from her stomach.

"Do you need food? I have some nutrition bars." He paused there for a second and then added almost apologetically: "Unfortunately I can offer nothing more appealing to the senses." He could teleport anything he knew the precise location of. But he had never bothered get that information about tasty foods. He would have to take care of that omission soon.

Alja noticed with a burst of warmth blooming inside her that Kaleb tried to care for her – again. It made her smile even more. "We have more important matters to discuss. Nutrition bars will do."