Dhaelon tasted copper.
He pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth and let the blood pool in his mouth — warm, metallic, his — and for the first time in years, he felt something that wasn't boredom.
Pain.
Real pain. The kind that started behind the eyes and spread outward like cracks in glass. A hundred threads severed in a single breath. A hundred minds ripped from his hold by a girl in a tower who had no business being inside his network, no training, no understanding of what she was touching.
And she'd done it anyway.
He spat blood onto the scorched earth. Red on black. Pretty, in a way.
Arin.
He said her name inside his own skull the way you'd say the name of a song you'd just heard for the first time and already couldn't stop humming. She was in there — in the web, in the threads, in the space between his consciousness and four thousand stolen minds — and she was pulling.
Clumsy. Desperate. Furious.
Beautiful.
