"What does it want to know?"
"Everything. It's thirsty for life, for hope, for sunshine." She spread her fingers over his skin. "Like me. Make me purr, Vaughn."
"Inside or outside?"
Her eyes went wide and she looked up at the night sky, a blanket of beauty and darkness, light and shadow, black and white, as it should be. "Here."
"What about your curious friend?" He slid his hands under her shirt.
Sensation skittered along her nerve endings. "It's gone." The NetMind came and went throughout the day, touching her mind as a child would touch its mother's, looking for reassurance that she was still there. It would be back. And it would teach her more about itself, learn more about her and their world.
"Good. I don't like an audience." His hands came up to close over her unfettered br**sts. "You're mine to see, to touch, to pleasure." His fingers squeezed her ni**les.
She knew she should protest his possessiveness, but the thing was, she liked her jaguar like this in bed. She liked being his. Liked belonging to a male who'd never let her go, never give her up, Council be damned.
Those fingers were driving her mad and when his mouth followed, she fell into insanity. But what sweet insanity it was.
In the Web of Stars, a hundred rainbow sparks crept into Faith's mind without her conscious knowledge. These were the sparks born of an empath, the single functioning empath in the world, the only one who'd escaped the torture of Silence. It was the lack of working empaths in the PsyNet that had sentenced the F-Psy to certain madness. Yes, to be born a foreseer was to be born with a higher chance of madness, but before Silence, it had been a tiny percentage of the minority who succumbed, not the majority.
The Council didn't understand that in its attempt to purge the E designation from the Net, it had also destroyed the F designation and so many others. Because everything was connected. Everything had a purpose.
The PsyNet was no longer fully functional.
But the Web of Stars was. It was different from the PsyNet and always would be. Because this Web had rainbows and sunshine, emotion and heart, predatory hunger and utter loyalty. Now those sparks healed the broken pieces of Faith and she never even knew that she'd been fractured.