Heart of Obsidian

Pure Psy

VASQUEZ WATCHED THE news feeds with a growing sense of unease. The situation was even worse than he’d believed: Psy journalists were not only praising the skills of and the assistance provided by the lesser races in the aftermath of the university strike, they were calling it a bright new dawn in interracial cooperation.

If this continued, his people would soon begin to see the animal emotions of the changelings and humans in a positive light, and the traitors in the Net would have another weapon in their fight to topple Silence. That could not be permitted to happen—and Pure Psy’s next strike would make certain of it, splintering all hope of cooperation in a miasma of distrust.

The university hit had been nothing, a decoy to distract those who hunted Vasquez and his faithful soldiers. Pure Psy’s true message was yet to be heard, would be written in the skies in deadly flame, the omega site going down in the history of the world.

An Arrow was rumored to be sniffing around that site, and it was a concern, but not enough to make Vasquez authorize a premature “go.” The fact that a large number of Tks had been tired out by the university operation played a weightier role in his deliberations, but in the end, he decided on patience.

If he detonated now, with the final preparations not quite in place, he risked doing a grave injustice to hundreds of hours of painstaking work. His people deserved to witness the glory of what they could achieve—and in the end, it did not matter if every single Tk in the world responded to the next strike: it could not be stopped, could not be minimized.

“We will,” he said to the memory of his lost leader, “arise anew from the ashes of the world.”