Terminal Point Read online

  For Kelly Weingart, because you’ve always been a brilliant friend. This one is for you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Just a few thank-yous to everyone who helped me through this process. First and always, I have to thank my mom and dad, who never doubted me. This wouldn’t be possible without my patient, awesome, wonderful agent, Jason Yarn. He’s a godsend and this book is so much better because of him. My editor, Brendan Deneen, for telling me not to freak out (confession: I still freaked out), and his spot-on guidance.

  To all my friends and family who’ve cheered me on this journey, especially Trudy North for her wonderful help and sharp eyes. A special, wholehearted thanks goes out to my best friend, Kelly Weingart. I promised her this story for years and I swore one day I would deliver. Kelly? I have delivered. And to all the readers who stuck with me. Thank you.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: Deprivation

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: Cognizance

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three: Vitiate

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Four: Clarity

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Five: Fluctuate

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Six: Salvation

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part Seven: Temporal

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part Eight: Ascension

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Part Nine: Tabula Rasa

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part Ten: Epitaph

  Also by K. M. Ruiz

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Deprivation

  SESSION DATE: 2128.05.07

  LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research

  CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett

  SUBJECT: 2581

  FILE NUMBER: 418

  She is young, only a child, bent over the table and coloring furiously. The wires attached to her hands, arms, back, and head shake with the motion. The crayon she is rubbing down to nothing is red, the black one tossed away. The paper she is using is covered with a shapeless picture. It’s the only color in the white room, save for the yellow dress she wears.

  The doctor sits across from her and touches a finger to the waxy residue on the large drawing paper. “Is this how you see the world?”

  “This is how the world is now,” Aisling says, pushing a trailing wire out of the way.

  “You could change that,” the doctor says. Her hand beneath the table is shaking. “You could tell us how to stop the wars.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “You are being a very selfish little girl, Aisling.”

  The girl looks up, her bleached-out violet eyes wide and unblinking as the EEG and supporting machines she is connected to whine shrilly behind her. “Am I in trouble?”

  “Not if you help us. Not if you save us.”

  When Aisling speaks, she sounds mournful. “I can’t do that.”

  ONE

  AUGUST 2379

  SVEAGRUVA, NORWAY

  They flew east into Bellsund, the arctic waters below mostly free of ice floes. The group of shuttles descended into the Van Mijenfjord beneath the government’s security grid, light from the midnight sun shining down on their wings. They stayed locked in tight formation, all nine following a route uploaded on another continent. The whine of the engines echoed eerily across the vast emptiness of the island they were approaching.

  The Van Mijenfjord began to narrow after the first forty or so kilometers, the lack of airspace noticeable, but not dangerous. Skimming above the still arctic waters between ragged shorelines, the shuttles sped toward their destination.

  Sveagruva was a mining settlement abandoned long ago, located some distance from the head of the Van Mijenfjord. A dilapidated airfield sat at its edge, where the nine shuttles finally came to ground, landing gear sliding dangerously on uneven terrain. Less than half a kilometer away were the remnants of Sveagruva, the dormitories and the supply center long since iced over and eaten away by the elements.

  The shuttles switched to standby mode, only their environmental systems running at full. Inside Alpha shuttle, the pilot leaned back in her seat and looked at her navigator.

  “Well?” Matron asked. “Now what?”

  Lucas Serca didn’t answer. He stared out the forward windshield, dark blue eyes red from burst capillaries. Bruises pressed beneath his eyes and dried blood clung to the skin of his face, his ears, his neck. As a Class I triad psion, Lucas possessed one of the most powerful minds born in this generation, and it was killing him.

  “Lucas.”

  “We need a day,” Lucas finally said, glancing at the leader of the scavengers. “Can the shuttles’ stealth systems handle that?”

  Matron pressed her lips together, brow furrowing. The exhaustion on her dark face was impossible to miss. “They got us here, so they should be good for it. Let me check with Novak, since he was the only one jacked into the system.”

  Lucas levered himself out of the seat, his lean frame rigid with pain. “You do that.”

  He stumbled back into the cargo bay. It was warmer in the main guts of the shuttle than on the flight deck. Lucas leaned his back against the cool metal of the hatch, letting it hold him up as he surveyed their passengers.

  Threnody Corwin, a Class III electrokinetic, was pale-faced and sitting up, a vast improvement from the beginning of this trip, when she couldn’t even breathe on her own. Wrapped in several thermal blankets, the former Stryker was carefully peeling off blackened skin from one hand, revealing healed pink flesh beneath the damage. She was still hooked up to an IV and trauma kit, her blue eyes glassy, but she no longer looked mostly dead.

  Sitting beside her, one hand gently pressed to the back of her neck, was Jason Garret. The only Class 0 microtelekinetic in existence wasn’t looking at either of them. Jason’s attention was focused on where his partner, Kerr MacDougal, sat slouched in a seat against the bulkhead beside Quinton Martinez. Both men were unconscious with exhaustion. The IVs hooked to their arms were almost empty and would need to be replaced soon.

  “Should you be moving?” Lucas asked.

  “Felt the landing,” Threnody rasped. “Jason took off my restraints.”

  “She’s doing better than she was even an hour ago,” Jason said. “Though she still has a long way to go.”

  Lucas studied Jason. The microtelekinetic looked better than the rest of them, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in pain. Jason’s power now let him work on the subatomic level, let him manipulate DNA in order to heal, to create. It’s what he was doing right now, still leaning on the nanites in Threnody’s body to help h
eal her since he didn’t trust his new strength alone yet.

  Jason’s upgraded Classification didn’t come without cost. His mind had been violated by Lucas’s youngest sister, Kristen Serca, a dysfunctional Class III empath, in order to give him access to his full power. The psychic bond Jason once shared with Kerr was severed after Kristen broke his nearly impenetrable natal shields. Lucas permanently reset the bond into Quinton, and the link between the pair was still raw. It had saved Jason’s life, yes, but at what felt like the cost of Quinton’s.

  “We make it?” Jason asked in a low voice. He moved his head a little, tipping it back until he exposed his throat. Lucas could see the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as the older man swallowed.

  “To Sveagruva, yes,” Lucas said. His English accent got thicker with every word he spoke, exhaustion heavy in his voice. Lucas shoved himself away from the hatch tiredly.

  Jason frowned, blinking slowly as he turned his head to look at Lucas. “Thought it was supposed to be Longyearbyen? Those were the coordinates you uploaded.”

  “We’ll get there soon enough. In a day or so.” Lucas crossed over to where his sisters sat slumped together on the other side of the cargo bay. “We need a day to recover.”

  “We need more time than that.”

  Lucas said nothing as he looked down at Samantha and Kristen. Of the three siblings, Kristen came away from the fighting in Buffalo with the least amount of damage, not surprising when one considered her default damaged state. Most psions tried to keep insanity at bay; Kristen reveled in it. His sixteen-year-old sister destroyed the minds of others in her search for a balance she would never find. Kristen’s dysfunction made her dangerous, yet also powerful. Even at full strength, Lucas was hard-pressed to keep her in check. Kristen was the only person who could have broken Jason’s formidable mental shields and survived. If they were lucky, maybe she had learned how to build sanity out of Jason’s neural pattern.

  Lucas wasn’t going to hold his breath.

  Reaching out with a steady hand, Lucas stroked his fingers over Samantha’s tangled blond hair, cradling her head. The eighteen-year-old Class II telepath didn’t stir at his touch, her mind a mess that Lucas didn’t bother to reach for. He could feel her wounds through his shields, those she sustained at his hands and also at her own. When Samantha severed the bond she once shared with her twin and Lucas’s brother, Gideon, it nearly broke her. Lucas didn’t attempt to heal her mind. She knew how to fix herself.

  “Why didn’t you take your brother?” Jason asked. “If you’re saving your family from your father, why not save them all?”

  “Aisling has no use for Gideon,” Lucas said as he pulled his hand away from Samantha. He returned to the center row of seats where Jason and Threnody sat.

  “What about you?”

  “Family ties mean little to Sercas and their Warhounds.”

  “I find that hard to believe after you dragged your sisters into this mess.”

  Lucas laughed, a dry, hacking sound. “They chose the lesser evil. That’s all. We don’t love each other. We don’t even like each other. They’re going to need to be reminded that this course of action is the right one, or the minute we turn our backs they’ll try to kill us.”

  “Your family is really fucked-up.”

  “Says the man who was leashed and collared like a dog not even a month ago.”

  “I still had people I could rely on,” Jason countered as he lifted his other hand to press it against Threnody’s sternum beneath the blanket. His careful, gentle touch was at odds with the raw anger in his voice. “I still had Kerr.”

  The loss was still too recent for the emotion to just be swept aside. Lucas didn’t need to be an empath to understand that the twist to Jason’s voice was fury, grief, and pain.

  “You know, Lucas, I could probably kill you right now,” Jason said, his eyes locked on Threnody’s face.

  “I may be suffering from psi shock, but trust me when I say I’d survive whatever you tried to throw at me. Then I’d have to mindwipe you, and there goes all my hard work,” Lucas said evenly. “How is Threnody?”

  “I’m not a psi surgeon.”

  “No. You’re something better.”

  Jason didn’t argue. It was the truth, whether he liked it or not. He sucked in air around his teeth, looking for a balance he wasn’t sure he would ever get back. It was different, reaching for his telekinesis now that nothing held it back. The depth of his power, the strength, was frightening. He could no longer trust his control or any of his childhood training in the Strykers Syndicate. Most of that training didn’t apply, not when he had the power to see the atomic makeup of cells. Channels he never knew existed were now accessible, areas of his mind geared to see the world on a completely different level all synced up now.

  Maybe telekinetics who attained Class V strength and could teleport had the potential to become what he was now. Jason didn’t know. All he knew was that he didn’t want to be the only person who could do this.

  Jason tapped into the wealth of power in his mind and let it pour out of him. He slipped through Threnody’s skin down to her bones. An echo of her damage crawled across his own nerves, countless pinpricks of heat and sudden scar tissue that was being absorbed back into her body at an accelerated rate. The new nerve endings created through cellular regeneration were going to take time to rewire, even with Jason able to control the nanites.

  “Ow,” Threnody said, grimacing. “That feels—weird.”

  “Does it hurt?” Jason asked, gaze blank.

  “Not exactly.” Threnody frowned, feeling the muscles in her face move stiffly. She peeled skin over the top of her finger and tossed it away. “It feels like my insides are being moved around.”

  “I had the nanites target your organs first. I think they’re still working on them.” Jason adjusted the placement of his hands. “The reason you lived long enough for me to help you was due to your electrokinesis. You’d be dead if you were any other kind of psion.”

  “That makes me feel so much better. Really.” She flexed her fingers carefully. “How did you fix me without a biotank?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  The lightning strike that seared through Threnody’s body and jump-started the power plant back in the sprawl of Buffalo had fried her entire body. When Quinton finally found her, he hadn’t been sure she was even alive, but her electrokinesis had preserved her brain and central nervous system from total destruction. It shut down her body, then shocked it back to life over and over again, a dangerous cycle that her system had struggled to overcome. Only when Lucas arrived to keep her heart beating to a steady rhythm with his telekinesis did Threnody start to stabilize.

  Jason did the rest. He was still doing the rest.

  The amount of power Jason carried now left him seeing the world—literally—through new eyes. His optic nerves shifted through spectrums of vision that should have been impossible for any human or psion to process without biomodifications. It made him nauseous, especially when magnification was thrown into the mix, allowing him to see the microscopic with the naked eye.

  The nanites were doing their job. Threnody was alive and healing. For now, that was enough.

  Jason carefully pulled his power out of her body, letting every last cell and nanite go, until he could no longer even visualize the layers of skin cells and capillaries that made up his eyelids. His head felt heavy. He watched as Lucas changed out Threnody’s IV bag. The soft, constant beeping of her cardiac rhythm was almost lulling.

  Jason shifted his focus to Lucas, sinking his power into the younger man’s body. It showed Jason the dark spots in Lucas where trauma had left ugly pools of damage beneath his skin.

  “I can feel you,” Lucas said as he finished securing the IV bag. “Get your power off me. Now.”

  “You’ve got bleeding in your brain.”

  “I’m handling it.”

  “Not well enough. That subdural hematoma isn’t going to fix itself. Let me
do something about it.”

  “You finally get full access to your power and suddenly you think you can do the impossible.”

  Jason arched an eyebrow as he pushed himself to his feet. “That is why you were after me, right?”

  “I’m not the only one,” Lucas said as he went to toss the used bag in the head’s disposal system. “Not anymore.”

  Jason grimaced. “Nathan.”

  Nathan Serca, the oldest psion alive at the age of fifty-one, was a Class I triad psion that Lucas rivaled in power, if not cruelty. Lucas’s father had no equal when it came to cruelty.

  Lucas came back out, nodding at Jason’s answer. “And every last Warhound at his disposal, so remember to read as human on the mental grid, at least until the launch, or you’ll get us all killed.”

  Unlike Warhounds, Strykers were never taught how to match their psi signature to a human’s, reading as human on the mental grid, that vast psychic plane of the world’s thoughts. But Jason wasn’t a Stryker anymore, and Lucas had taught him how to shield on the flight over, literally dumping the information straight into Jason’s mind and letting the microtelekinetic sort through the overload on his own. There hadn’t been time for subtlety, but Jason still got his shielding right.

  Jason looked over his shoulder at Samantha and Kristen. Three of Nathan’s children were turning their backs on their heritage, but Jason still didn’t trust them. One of the founding families of the society that survived the Border Wars, the Serca Syndicate they owned was well-known for its forays into politics and government-restricted sciences. Genetic manipulation and segregation were just the beginning. The Sercas were the ones to force the Fifth Generation Act on the world, beginning the long cleanup of tainted and mutated human genetics. The Act went hand in hand with another Serca creation, the Registry, a list of people whose genetic makeup was clean and utterly human. The Sercas had placed themselves on top of the list, though they were far from human.

  The Sercas had freedom and they wanted to remake humanity on Mars Colony, with themselves ruling atop society. The World Court and their chosen elite contemporaries were planning to inherit what the world’s ancestors had left them—Mars Colony. They dreamed of a utopia and a chance to start over. Caught in between were the Strykers, psion slaves bound to a paramilitary company, who only wanted to save what was left of the world and their own skins. The whole mess of false fronts and alliances was the reason why they were here, on Spitsbergen, following Lucas. Jason owed him for more than just removing the neurotracker that was once grafted to his brain, but that knowledge was a bitter pill to swallow.