Tangle of Need

Chapter 21

MING EXAMINED THE satellite images captured when Sienna Lauren had allowed her cold fire to feed. Though taken in the night-darkness of the battle, there was no absence of light, the red and yellow of the deadly fire an inferno.

Setting those images aside, he looked at the ones taken directly after the battle. The carnage was absolute, the forest a wasteland. No sign remained of the Pure Psy army.

An incredible weapon.

One Ming had been certain he wanted destroyed if she had survived, because she could not be controlled. Except … His eye went to the small steel box on his desk. It held within it a single chip, the last remaining prototype from Ashaya Aleine’s aborted project to instigate Silence on a biological level.

That chip could also be utilized as a leash.

The problem with using it in such a fashion had always been twofold. One, the chip was unstable. Two, Ming would need to have a controller chip implanted to interface with Sienna’s, and even had he considered the risk acceptable, this was the single surviving chip of which he had personal knowledge. He’d had it excised from one of the victims the Scotts had implanted, after the male’s suicide. Neither Henry nor Shoshanna had ever realized he knew of their unauthorized experimentation. Ming’s scientists hadn’t been able to reverse engineer the chip, however, one had just informed him that there was a very slight chance it could be altered to allow control via a remote device.

“Do it,” he said into the intercom.

If the device worked, he would own an X. If it failed, Sienna Lauren would die in an implosion of brain cells.

A perfect solution.