"Thought you had everything all set up."

"Novak is the only hacker who survived the job. He helped start the process, but his code is lacking. We need something less fragile, and you know how to write government code quicker and better than he does. Your shift starts now."

"And everyone else?"

Lucas let his dark blue eyes slide sideways, his gaze catching Kerr's. "Your partner and I have some reconstructive psi surgery to begin."

"Hell no," Jason said, stepping into Lucas's personal space. Lucas was taller than he was, but that didn't matter. "Whatever you're going to do to him, I want to know."

"You're a telekinetic, Jason. You can't do shit for him."

"I'm his partner."

"Yes, and I can't help but wonder if that permanent link has caused more damage than benefit. Hiding behind your shields, strong as they are, hasn't helped his mind deal with the problem of his shields collapsing. You're his crutch."

As Jason opened his mouth to argue, a heavy telekinetic hold picked him up and slammed him to the floor. Gasping for breath, Jason stared up at Lucas with anger and not a little bit of fear. Lucas knelt down and grabbed a fistful of Jason's hair, jerking him to a semi-sitting position.

"You're forgetting your place, psion," Lucas said, annoyance twisting lightly through the tone of his voice. "Aisling needs you alive, but there are many definitions of alive. We need the power locked up inside your head. That doesn't necessarily mean we need you."

Jason felt his heartbeat kick up, but he chose to ignore the adrenaline pumping into his veins. "We'd all be useless to you if you mindwiped us."

"Your idea of a mindwipe is so limited. I'm used to dealing with insanity. We need your power, not your personality."

Lucas let Jason go, and the telekinetic fell back to the floor with a hard thump. Lucas straightened up and looked over at the other Strykers and scavengers. "Anyone else want to argue?"

No one said a word.

Lucas curled his fingers at Kerr as he walked toward the doors they'd come through. "We're going."

Kerr helped Jason to his feet first, giving his partner's shoulder a brief squeeze. "Keep your mouth shut," Kerr said quietly. "I still need you."

"Yeah," Jason muttered as Kerr turned to follow Lucas out of the hangar.

"You really are stupid, aren't you, boy?" Matron said, looking and sounding unimpressed. "If me and mine can trust Lucas with certain things, you Strykers can as well."

"He's a Warhound," Threnody said. "Why do you trust him when it's his family that's helped segregate the world's population? And don't give me that crap about how he saved your lives. He saved ours as well, but it hasn't helped us any."

"See, now, that's where you're wrong." Matron dug into her back pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She stuck one in her mouth and lit it up. "What Lucas has planned? It's gonna save everyone."

"I find it hard to believe he's shared his plans with a mere human."

"And I find it hard to believe he brought you narrow-minded Strykers into the mix." Matron spat between them. "If we believe in what he's trying to do, then you people can."

"Why should we?"

Matron blew smoke out of her nose and smiled, showing her metal teeth. "Other than the fact that he's got his power so far deep in your brains that you can't piss without his say-so? Tell me, what do you know about the arctic Svalbard archipelago?"

"The what?"

"Exactly."

[SIXTEEN].

AUGUST 2379.

BUFFALO, USA.

"Can you be," Kerr asked, struggling for politeness, "a little more careful with him?"

Lucas didn't open his eyes from where he lay on the other bed. "You actually sound like you care."

"He's my partner."

"Shut up and lie down, or you're going to hit the floor with your face when I break open your mind."

Kerr stared at the other man for a few more seconds before carefully lying down on the bed that had been assigned to him. Stretching out, he put an arm over his eyes to block out the room, even if he couldn't block out the relentless presence of Lucas in his mind.

I'm touched you think so highly of me, Lucas said. Drop your shields.

Kerr went against everything inside him that was saying no and did as he was ordered. Lucas's power filtered down through the layers of Kerr's mind, his own shields wrapping around the both of them on the mental grid with such strength that they burned like beacons in Kerr's thoughts.

Just like you Strykers to make a mess of things.

I've survived.

I'm still not sure how.

That was the last thing Kerr remembered. The mental grid dipped under the sudden disappearance of Kerr's presence, Lucas holding the other man's mind in his power.

Sometimes I wonder about what you ask of me, Aisling, Lucas thought to himself as he decided where to begin.

The first thing Lucas needed to do was permanently destroy Kerr's shields. The Class II telepath had gone twenty-five years without acknowledging the empathy he carried in his mind. All of Kerr's deeply ingrained thought processes weren't going to be reversed in a single night, but they had to be factored in for this psi surgery.

There was no point in trying to keep up a shield geared solely toward telepathy when empathy kept undermining the process. There had to be acknowledgment of that secondary power, and Kerr had to weave both into the framework of his shielding. There was no getting around that, unless he wanted his shields to continue falling apart.

What had been clear-cut and obvious to Lucas upon a single dip into that mind had apparently been unintelligible to the Stryker psi surgeons. Even a lower-Classed psion had ways to diagnose problems in the minds of those ranked higher. This whole mess could possibly have been avoided, except this was what Aisling wanted. Collusion between previous Stryker OICs and Serca CEOs had only helped along the inevitable.

Digging his telepathy deep into the crevices and canyons of Kerr's mind, Lucas let himself be lost in the problem, allowing his power to bleed carefully into Kerr's. Lucas hadn't been lying, back in London. Scientists could reverse engineer pretty much any technological equipment on the planet with government permission. Lucas could reverse engineer the processes of the human mind only because he'd had his own torn to pieces over and over since his birth by Nathan.

Lucas didn't want anyone else to have that skill. Not that he wouldn't wish that pain on anyone-because there were many people that he would-but he wasn't willing to let anyone else have the knowledge that came with it. Marcheline, under orders from Aisling, had helped him gain control, but he'd been the one to build his mind into the weapon that Nathan had thought was his. Lucas hoped it had come as a shock to his father when he walked away from the Serca Syndicate two years ago.

This was the purpose Lucas had worked toward for all of his life: all the different people, all the different pieces, all the various powers that could come out of human DNA. It was hope for a different world that Aisling had instilled in him for the two decades she had seen him grow up. It was the belief in her promise that he was meant for so much more than the prison of his life, for however long he had left.

Ambition was what drove members of the Serca family to attempt the impossible, among other things.

Lucas let himself be lost in the processes of the human mind and felt, vaguely, at ease. When he opened his eyes hours later, he wasn't at all surprised to find Threnody sitting on the floor between the two beds.

"How is he?" Threnody asked, her face turned toward Kerr's unconscious body.

"He's not your partner," Lucas said.

"He's a Stryker."

"We've gone over this, Threnody."

"Getting the collar taken off me doesn't make me any less a Stryker. It never will." She turned her head to look at Lucas. "What have you done to us?"

He sat up slowly. His senses shifted with the migraine-strength headache he was suffering from after performing a long and complicated psi surgery on Kerr, not to mention everything else he'd been orchestrating to get to this point. The physical and mental toll on his body wasn't something he could escape. Growing old wasn't in his genes.

"I actually thought it would be Kerr who would ask that question," Lucas said as he rubbed at his face with both hands. "Him being the telepath and all."

"Before or after you screwed with his head some more?"

Lucas let out a harsh little laugh. "Oh. I like you, Threnody. You actually think."

"Can't say I feel the same about you."

"I figured as much." Lucas moved to put his feet on the floor, leaning forward as he studied Threnody. He wiggled his fingers at his head. "You're wondering why everyone's not as pissed off as they should be. Why everyone is just going along with what I want when all of you should be fighting me tooth and nail."

"Something like that."

"Mental suggestion. I implanted it when all of you were under during your brain surgery back in London. I needed you four to trust me."

"Trust isn't something you suggest. It's something you earn."

"Since when have rank-and-file Strykers ever trusted Warhounds outside of an ordered suicide mission?"

"What do you mean?"

"Ah." Lucas nodded to himself. "So you weren't scheduled for retrieval. Even better, because it means Nathan doesn't know about any of you."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Sometimes I think your OIC keeps more secrets than my family does." Lucas lifted a hand to rub at the back of his neck, fingers digging into the knotted muscles there. "We're the ones you rogue psions run to when the government wants you terminated and the Strykers still need you alive. Your OIC asks and we retrieve. I've always thought the Silence Law was more favorable to my side. We've been doing things with psion powers that none of you have even been allowed to think about, for fear that the government will lose control of its favorite dogs. It's a bargain, if you will. Your silence for my family's freedom."

Threnody recoiled sharply from him, disbelief thick in her voice. "You and your Warhounds aren't something I would ever willingly run to."

"Lucky for us, those Strykers we're sent to retrieve never get a choice in the matter, either during the transfer or after, when we mindwipe them for loyalty. Technically, I suppose that doesn't apply here. I'm not a Warhound the same way you're no longer a Stryker. Keep your title, if you want. If it makes you feel in control. Just know that you're not. That you never will be."

"Neither are you."

"I know what my sacrifices will gain me," Lucas said as a thin trickle of bright red blood slid down out of his nose. "I know exactly what I will get at the end, if we pull it all off this time. And I will do absolutely everything and anything to achieve what Aisling promised my family. What she promised me."

Threnody's gaze followed that slow-moving line of blood until it dripped off the edge of Lucas's jaw and fell to the floor. "Even if it kills you before you turn thirty?"

"Try twenty-three."

Threnody met Lucas's gaze without blinking, a slight tick twitching at her jaw. Nerves, but not the emotional sort. Synapses that still weren't healed, but better than they had been. Lucas leaned forward, using his telekinesis to keep her still while he curved his hand over her chin. He tilted her head from side to side, ignoring the fury that came into her blue eyes.

"You need to understand something," Lucas said, voice quiet, tired, the set of his shoulders tense. "We're what the future turns on, you and I. We're the ones who have to do what Aisling says if any of us are going to survive humanity's belabored attempt to reclaim Mars. Everything changes, Threnody. Without mercy, without exception, without pause. The best we can do is change the future into something better. If psions are ruling on Mars or ruling here, what does it matter? We'll all still be alive as a people."

"Don't touch me."

Lucas released her, lifting a hand to his own face to wipe at the blood there. Threnody watched as he studied the red smear on his fingertips, mouth pulled slightly off-center in a dissatisfied frown.

"What's in the Arctic?" Threnody said.

Lucas sighed. "Matron doesn't know when to keep her mouth shut."

"That free will you let some of these scavengers keep, kind of annoying, isn't it? Why didn't you just mindwipe them?"

"Because that's not always the answer."

Threnody shrugged dismissively. "The Arctic. What's so important about it?"

"There's a Norwegian island in that archipelago. Spitsbergen. Pretty much everyone except those on the World Court and my family have forgotten it exists." Lucas pushed himself to his feet and stretched until his bones cracked. "A lot of people died during the bombing years of the Border Wars. The majority of the world population died afterward, from disease and starvation and environmental change. Every country that exported food to the masses was targeted and destroyed. Agriculture as we knew it back then became impossible on radiation-tainted soils. That's where the deadzones came from."

"I know that. Everyone does."

"Then ask yourself how the SkyFarms came to be. Clean soil? A decent selection of foods and farm animals that could feed the remaining population that the World Court just happened to have at their fingertips? Please."

Threnody opened her mouth to argue, but paused, thinking hard. After a long moment, she said, "If the world was so polluted and damaged from nuclear war back then, where did uncontaminated food supplies come from? That's what you're asking, isn't it?"

"Glad to see that the government didn't fry all the synapses in your head every time they flipped that switch of theirs."

Threnody waved off his insult, brow furrowed in thought. "You said we left terraforming machines on Mars. Did we have any here before the Border Wars for our own use?"

"Terraforming machines were expensive. Governments couldn't agree on where to begin here on Earth, which is why they focused on Mars."

"You didn't answer my question." She looked up at him, understanding dawning on her face seconds later. "The SkyFarms. They were built with terraforming machines, weren't they?"

Lucas just smiled.