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When she is small, small enough that she does not yet mark time with the metronomic precision that will come as she advances through the Protocol, she meets her grandmother.
It is an entirely unremarkable meeting, a business affair conducted over a bland meal as her mother negotiates the transfer of family assets. Reina has begun to take over for Ai in the last year or so, and even in Nikita’s watercolor-soft memories, she is eager to wield her increased influence.
Nikita sits quietly. She is only at the meeting because she had not yet been formally introduced to her grandmother, and it is very dull. The adults speak in cool tones about names and numbers that mean nothing to her, and though she has learned by now that it is frowned upon to let her thoughts wander, to leave the mind undisciplined, drift she does.
Most of the other minds she can feel are human. Different from the blazing brightness of the Psy, these minds are small, dull sparks milling in the nearby buildings and streets. Their shields are paper thin, and it is easy enough to pluck individual thoughts from the vast current flowing around her and examine them. Rude, perhaps, but they are none the wiser.
One young woman is furious with her girlfriend, with the world, stewing in bitterness as she orders a coffee to match her mood. An old man, much older than any Psy she has ever met, sits placidly on a bus, thinking of nothing in particular. A boy closer to her age clings to his mother’s hand, grateful for something familiar in the loud and dizzying bustle of the city.
It is different from reading a Psy mind; everything there is cool and compartmentalized, like staring into a mirror and seeing nothing you do not recognize. Human thoughts are different, chaotic, with a whirl of emotion that colors everything. It feels familiar and alien at the same time.
Something inside her, something she is already being taught to ignore, shivers.
Startled, she pulls out of the current of human minds, fast, as though she has been caught doing something worse than letting her attention drift from the meeting.
She glances at her mother and the other adults. None of them have noticed; her face is calm and bland, and her mother’s telepathic senses are all focused on business. Reina Duncan has aspirations toward the Council, and little time for her too-young daughter.
The thought pricks at her. Perhaps she is unsettled from her contact with the human minds. She pulls her mind further into herself, drawing away from even the low-level hum of the meeting taking place before her.
I will be good, she thinks to herself. I will not drift like that again.
“No,” says another voice, icy and foreign in the back of her mind. “You will not.”
That she does not audibly gasp is a triumph.
When she thinks she can ‘path without giving herself away, she focuses on the feel of that bright, cold mind against hers.
“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” she says.
Ai is not looking at her, but her mental voice is clear.
“You must be careful, child,” she says. “You must be perfect.”
Nikita fights the urge to frown. “I have not yet graduated from the Protocol. I am progressing at an admirable rate, but perfection is not expected of me yet.”
“Nevertheless,” her grandmother’s glacial voice whispers. “Perfect is what you must be.”
“Why?”
Ai pauses, going silent for a long moment. When she speaks again, there is something heavy in her words, heavy and old. For a fleeting instant, her grandmother’s mind flares like a human’s against her own, not cold at all.
“Because you are Psy,” she intones. Later, when Nikita is much older, she will recognize the heaviness in her grandmother’s voice as grief. “You are Psy, and this is what we have made you.”
The words weigh her down as if they were lead, and for a bare moment, her throat is tight and her eyes sting. Then Ai’s mind pulls away from hers, and she can breathe again. Her mother is standing to bid the Duncan matriarch farewell.
That is not the only time she sees her grandmother, but it is the only time that matters.
Nikita carries Ai’s words with her as she walks through the Protocol, until she has no more need of them. Her mind does not drift; her thoughts do not wander.
When she graduates at sixteen, she is fully Silent. She does not think of the long ago brush with humanity that unsettled her so thoroughly. Her mother still schemes toward the Council, and it is not safe to be anything less than perfect.
Perfect is what she must be, and so perfect she is.
There are many moments in her life that Nikita recalls with perfect clarity. The first time she wrapped her mind around the twisting, lethal shape of a mental virus. The day she realized her mother would never be Council. The moment she realized she could be.
The day Sascha is born.
She comes out from under the careful telepathic block administered during labor, and her mind immediately searches for her daughter. The link she makes is tenuous at best - it is difficult to link with newborns, small, chaotic minds that know only how to feel - but it is there.
Sascha’s mind is a jumble of sensation, bright and wild and somehow, beneath the newness, eerily familiar.
Nikita does not think in metaphors. That is for humans and changelings, who liken shock to bolts of lightning. It is nothing so sudden.
Nikita is a perfect Psy, just as Ai cautioned her to be. She is as cold and hard and empty of feeling as Silence demands.
In the end, it does not matter.
Slow as the melting of glaciers, the knowledge trickles into her that her daughter is not perfect. That her daughter will never be perfect.
Sascha’s mind, still new and fragile, feels just as her great-grandmother’s did. Only this time, the nascent spark of power is not pressing an old, aching sadness into her skin, but a warm, frothy joy. Sascha’s infant mind - her brilliant empath mind - loves her mother. Nikita can feel it, clear as day.
She should sever the link.
The M-Psy hands her daughter to her, lips moving as he passes the small bundle into Nikita’s arms. She is holding her daughter before she can cut the link. She is small, and warm, and so incandescently happy it is a wonder the whole hospital cannot feel her delight.
“Ms. Duncan?”
Her link with Sascha holds steady.
“Ms. Duncan?”
Nikita does not think in metaphors. She makes her choice clear-eyed.
She meets his eyes.
“Congratulations. Your daughter is healthy. Seven pounds, seven ounces. A cardinal.”
Sascha’s eyes are closed, but Nikita knows that when she opens them, they will be nothing like her own.
Ai Kumamoto may have lived hidden in the PsyNet, her power buried away beneath her Silence, but Sascha is a cardinal. No cardinal can hide what they are. Their power is as deep and vast as the oceans, for all that it is the skies of the PsyNet reflected in their eyes.
It does not matter. Nikita has made her choice.
Sascha rests trustingly in her arms, her tiny mind alight and sparkling with love. This world will crush her, if it has the chance. If Nikita lets it.
She does not sever the link.
You must be perfect, she hears in her mind, the memory of her grandmother whispering to her like a ghost.
I must be more than that, she thinks in reply.
Nikita has always been what she needs to be. This time will be no different.
She makes her choice clear-eyed, but that does not mean it is easy. There are moments, locked away behind her strongest shields, that she refuses to think of. Like a fistful of thorns, they draw blood in their own defense.
Every moment is a memory of Sascha.
Perhaps this would surprise her daughter, if she knew, but Nikita will never find out.
Sascha needed to live her life free of the killing freeze of Silence, and so Nikita kept her daughter alive to find that freedom. The cost was Sascha herself.
She does not regret it. She does not explain.
What is there to say?
Her daughter sits across the table from her, next to a panther in human skin. Her mind is on her own small daughter, and her thoughts are threaded with the pang of sorrow that goes through her whenever she sees Nikita.
Sascha’s shields are beyond compare, but Nikita has always known her daughter’s mind.
Mother, Nikita knows she is thinking. Mother, I wish you could know Naya. I wish you could love her.
Nikita does not respond. Sascha is not ‘pathing her, not even attempting to, and Nikita knows she will not. She holds the image of her granddaughter - Nadiya, a Russian name - deep in her mind, and lets her daughter keep her silence.
As soon as the meeting is over, Sascha and Lucas leave the city, bound for DarkRiver land.
Nikita lingers, looking out at the skyline of the city that has changed the world. Humans and changelings and Psy all move through the streets below, their minds a distant buzz against the furthest edges of her shields.
As it has ever since she had Sascha, the memory of the day she met Ai rises to the surface of her mind. She has not opened herself up to the thoughts of a crowd since that long ago day. She made herself a Councilor, for all that the position has changed in recent days, and she cannot afford to be defenseless.
She does not startle when Anthony moves to stand beside her. She cannot afford to be defenseless, but he has become familiar.
They stand in silence until the room has emptied. Neither of them will speak until they know their secrets are not at risk.
She feels the gentle flare of power that precedes telepathic communication, but then it dies away, and he remains quiet.
When he does speak, it is in his physical voice, smooth and deep. It is as familiar as the rest of him is, in a way she does not care to contemplate.
“Nikita,” he says. “When are you going to talk to Sascha?”
“I spoke with her just moments ago.” It is not a lie, but it is not the answer to the question he is asking.
He does not point that out. Instead, turning from the city and the sunset, he stands with his back to the window.
It is a gesture of trust. The office is quite safe, but he leaves his guard to Nikita. They are silent again for a long while.
“My daughter forgave me,” he says finally. “A lifetime in Silence, and she has opened her heart and her home to me.”
She says nothing.
“Is it so hard to think that Sascha could do the same?”
Nikita is perfect in her Silence. She has never needed forgiveness.
“My daughter is safe,” she says. Her tone is cool and distant. “That’s all that matters.”
“Of course.”
The touch of his hand on hers is gentle. The Psy do not indulge in physical contact, but Nikita does not shrug away.
Her fingers are slim and delicate, and they fit easily against the broad warmth of his palm. Her mind does not seek his. It does not need to.
They have both fought so long and so hard for their daughters. Anthony is perhaps the only one who could understand, if she ever tried to explain. Every choice weighed and measured, every ounce of safety bought with sorrow.
But the world is changing. The Council is gone.
Nikita has a granddaughter.
She thinks of the blazing brilliance of Sascha’s love. The grief in her grandmother’s voice. The warm solidity of the man beside her.
The world is changing.
Nikita has been Silent for nearly all her life. Nikita has always been what she needs to be.
She grips Anthony’s hand.
“Soon,” she tells him. “Soon.”