Claimed: Future Found Read online

  “The next time you come, I’m going to blow every circuit you have. Take that as ‘fair warning’.”

  “Duly noted,” he whispered faintly, rocking his hips into her grip.

  His eyes lost their focus when she tightened her fingers.

  “I know it’s probably part of your plan…” She fisted his head. “But I want you to know I appreciate it.” She rubbed his tip with her thumb.

  “Appreciate what?”

  “The flooring. The altar. The beautiful specimens here.” She dragged the thick cloth down to his base, watching as he licked his lips of her cream. “The fact you didn’t push me like you could have.”

  He was handsome and hot. He could have laid her out on the floor and fucked her in front of the tree. She would have let him, and possibly even needed it. But she would have hated him. She was still angry about being trapped here. But hate was looking like an impossibility. He was nice, when he wasn’t being annoyingly controlling.

  Those green eyes focused like a laser. She froze at the passion in them.

  “Shay, there is a plan. But it was all designed for you.”

  She swallowed, blinking up at him. She was proud to be a singer. She loved her gift, lived for it. But all her life she’d just drifted through, waiting. Wondering. Her temple project felt impossible, but it gave her something to focus on between trees. This was what she’d been waiting for. This man, and his improbable secret tree, and his talk of faith. She felt like she was waking up, on the cusp of some greater purpose.

  She licked her own lips, putting both hands on his hard chest. “Sand, I know you’re all worked up…but do you think you could take a break and talk to me about the tree now?”

  There was no mistaking the relief that washed over his face. He nodded, his lashes sweeping down as he levered himself off her. Just like that, he controlled his need, and she admired him for it.

  He led her down the hall, across the foyer, through the glass walkway and back to the tree’s room. His ass looked so manly in the clinging cotton, his wide, pale shoulders rippling with strength that he no doubt carefully planned with a strategic workout routine.

  It was weird to be walking without her veil in this strange home. The air moved so freely around her body, making her feel exposed, even though she was always nude. After opening the first two safety layers, but leaving the aircap in place, he pulled her down to sit between his legs in the doorway.

  She sprawled back against his strength. He was warm, solid. They spent a few minutes just gazing at the tree. If she lived at this compound, she would set up her bedroom here, in the entry to the biodome. It was just too beautiful. Too rare, too amazing. This tree had defied so many odds, had been loved by so many.

  “I grew up relatively privileged, but not in the top tier.”

  His voice rumbled against her back. She relaxed into his heat that surrounded her. She was only distantly surprised how at ease she was with him already.

  “I went to training school when I was twelve.”

  She nodded. The elite sent their children to be trained in skills that matched their specialties, and to be trained to withstand pain, so they’d survive their implantations. Also, puberty was monitored closely, as the cusp of maturity was the time they were augmented.

  “I immediately made two friends. We were inseparable. One of them was Cullen. He’s from a Council family, and a radiation elite.” Sand’s hands held her tighter. “I don’t see him much anymore, since it all happened.”

  Shay swallowed. Radiation elite were the people who developed the filters to protect what was left of the atmosphere. They also designed the sunshine bulbs everyone needed to live by, that mimicked the sun of old. Radiation elites also worked in offense, designing weapons that burned or disintegrated. She didn’t know which was scarier, Cullen’s skills or his family status. The Council controlled all the compounds, and thus all life. Beyond the compounds was a desolation of poisoned wasteland.

  “Cullen was summoned to the house of a priestess when he was sixteen. It was on this spot, and at the heart of it was this oak. She was the keeper of it, the biggest secret possibly in all of the compounds. He came back a day later, shell-shocked. He didn’t talk for days. When he did, he sealed us in a privacy booth and asked us about our faith.”

  Illegal, to talk about what you believed outside of your family.

  “We all had altars, so we already knew that we believed in the Spirit enough to worship, even as boys away from our families. It was one of the things that bound us, I think, at first. Others took down their altars after a few weeks at school. But we used ours.

  “We talked about it, and all of us had family trees that played a big role in our belief and childhood. Mine wasn’t an ancestral one, but it will be someday.”

  If a family built up enough power and wealth, they could design a nursery that would support a sapling. Petition the government for enough years, pay the enormous fee, and they’d be granted a baby tree. If the family wealth stayed strong enough, they kept the tree alive until it was ancient and needed a singer. Then it was an ancestral tree and logged as such, a national treasure the government would help support.

  “What is your family’s tree?” she asked.

  “A hickory.”

  She smiled. A hardwood. A slow-growing tree, it spoke of a family that valued inner strength over looks. And to think she had thought him a flowering fruit. Now she knew better.

  “Cullen told Tavish and me about the priestess and her secret oak. She was fifty-five, and had no children. She wanted to leave him her estate, if he’d prove himself.” Sand shifted behind her. “He had to bed her.”

  Shay blinked. The old perv. Poor boy. “Did he?”

  “She wanted him to do it when he was legal. Of his own free will. It wasn’t for pleasure. She wanted to give him her chi. But more than that, she wanted to give him this oak.”

  Shay jerked in Sand’s arms. Twisting, she looked at him incredulously. Only such a shocking statement could have ripped her gaze from the oak. “She offered him transference? But why did she choose him?”

  It was the most sacred ceremony a person could perform. Transference was both suicide and a way to cheat death, sharing all your acquired power with another in one burst. It was also illegal, because it usually killed both participants, rebounding onto the recipient as well.

  “He asked the same thing. She said it was because of us, his friends. She said the time was right. To bring Spirit back to the people.”

  Shay didn’t know what that meant, but it sent a resonance through her as if his words had plucked her heart like an instrument. Turning back, she focused on the tree. A tree that had to have been sung to for generations. Off the record. “She wasn’t the first, was she. She was part of a line. They’d been passing their chi for a long time. Building it.”

  “Yes. How’d you guess?”

  “It’s the only way to explain the oak’s survival without singers. When an ancestral tree goes into dormancy once every generation, it needs a massive influx of chi to pull it out. The priestess must have been part of a line using transference to nourish the tree, passing on its caretaking in secret.”

  Not many respected the priests and priestesses. Some were singers, some were elite, some were nulls. They chose to abandon their abilities, even their names, and live outside the world of business, helping the poor and violent among the nulls. It was thankless work. The government forbade any communal worship, and they wandered from home to home, often at night, when people could hide their faith from the elite’s dour police. Praying in public would net you a ticket, but leading a prayer group outside your own family would net you an arrest.

  Shay mused, “Cullen is the name of one of the Council members now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tavish,” she gasped. “The elite who turned singer. I’ve met him.”

  “Yes.” Some kind of pain was in Sand’s voice.

  It was rare, as in once-every-five-generations ra
re, that an elite would manifest singer powers. Singers were born. Their innate connection to the natural world let them heal it, mold it into something that would survive, if they all worked together, blending their chi. Tavish’s arrival as a young man in the singer society had been huge news.

  “You must still be able to see him. Contact him on the lattice.”

  “Sure. I was just remembering.”

  She considered the clues that had been building. Sand was disturbed, remembering his friends, remembering this story. “The transfer. I’ve heard it’s very painful.” It always led to the death of the giver. Only the most powerful of souls could withstand the onslaught of the giver’s chi being passed into them.

  “Yeah.” Sand whispered the word, rubbed his face against her hair. “Yeah.”

  She realized. “You were there.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought she invited Cullen?”

  “Cullen was jumpy. He wanted the tree. Who wouldn’t? He’d been brought to an old family’s compound, thinking to gain some real-life experience with a disgraced elite priestess. He’d discovered the revelation of a lifetime—she had control of an unregistered ancestral oak. But she was asking for him to prepare to take over not just the oak, not even just her faith that the oak had a role to play in changing the balance of political power. She was asking him to include his friends and take her soul into his keeping.

  “For one day, she kept him there, answering his questions about transference. Or rather, sharing what few answers she had. For another day, he debated forgetting the whole thing, denying her request. But in the end, he came to us. Tavish never hesitated. He volunteered to take on the transference himself, and Tavish, to my knowledge, has never looked at a woman sexually in his life.

  “I’ll always remember his instant acceptance. He said, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve struggled for. This is why I’m here.’ Tavish hated school. He hated the training, the habituation exercises where we were tortured. He saw this secret as a reason to keep going, presented at a time when he was about to throw it all away and quit.

  “But Cullen said the priestess had made it clear she’d pass herself only to him. So, with Tavish egging us on, we agreed that we’d do it. We sat in that little room, stinking of terror. Three clueless idiots agreed to keep the priestess’s tree secret and work toward a successful transfer of her power into Cullen. I’m not sure you can get more cocky and recklessly confident than teenage elite males. I’m not very proud of how self-important and proud we were for the next few years.”

  Sand snorted derisively. “We had time to research transference, waiting for Cullen to reach legal maturity. I found the merest hints of how the ceremony could be survived. I decided his best chance was if he had a feedback loop. Tavish was a microbiology elite. With my systems knowledge, Tav’s cellular knowledge and Cullen’s radiation knowledge, we worked out a way to blend ourselves with me as the focus. Tavish could monitor Cullen’s energy internally, and drain it off, spread it out, help control power spikes. I was going to be on the lattice, where I’m most powerful. I could pull in a lot of power and dump it there, too, if need be.” He closed his hand into a fist.

  Tracing on the lattice was something anyone could do for communication and knowledge sharing on a limited scale. You touched the lattice interface, and you focused, using a numerical cue. What Sand did was much, much more. By patching in using a specially enhanced chair, he could build one of those numerical cues. He could control them, link them, via the ports in his wrist and neck. Piles more data than she was capable of comprehending could pass through his brain, be filtered for relations and collated for meaning.

  They were still trying to build droids who processed a bit of what Sand did, but the human brain had never been solved. Probably because the elite who studied it kept discounting Spirit. The audacity of what Sand was describing was dazzling. She’d never considered the ability to actually use chi on the lattice. To her it was a cold, hostile, mechanical world used for convenience as little as possible.

  Chapter Four

  “Will you share what happened?” She soothed her hand along his arm.

  It was several moments before he took a deep breath. “We initiated the ritual years later, when Tavish finally recovered from gaining his enhancements. It still makes me sad, to think of the pain he endured, the training all those years, the ugly rejection and reconstruction, all for nothing.

  “We went to her compound. This room”—he gestured to the tree—“was the only decent thing about it. It was absolutely crumbling. She didn’t greet us, feed us, talk to us about anything. She just opened the gate—it wasn’t even automated, if you can believe that, and led us to her bedroom, where she took off her clothes and lay down.”

  Shay held her breath, riveted by the human drama he was sharing, even though she already knew the outcome.

  “She was fit, and still attractive, but by that point, none of us were feeling sexy. I think all three pairs of our knees were knocking so hard we sounded like Council drums. Basically, we were looking at a dead woman. A woman who was going to die under Cullen. It was…surreal. We’d prayed together, before we came over. It was powerful, reassuring. We were so determined, so pumped when we left. But standing in that room, I…”

  Shay covered his fist with her hand. “I can’t imagine your courage.”

  “No. Not me, not even Cullen. Think instead of the faith and courage she had.”

  Shay did, contemplating a life in isolated service to the Spirit. The woman gave up her name in her effort, and in the end, gave up her very life. All because elites used fear of repeating the past as an excuse to banish faith from people’s lives. She shivered.

  “I webbed in all three of them first, to the ancient lattice link in the bedroom. Then I followed Cullen’s directions and found her study, and traced in with a decrepit chair.”

  Shay shivered again. She didn’t like sitting in the interface chairs the lattice needed. None of the singers did. Besides the pain of the contact with man-made materials, the zinging electricity it buffered compared mentally to standing in front of a towering dam of sticks holding back a lake. Eerie, and dangerous to her.

  “My mind was monitoring all three on the lattice. Back in her bedroom, Cullen took her body. Tavish took Cullen’s. That was what the research had revealed, a need for synchronous feedback.”

  Shay’s body stiffened involuntarily. “Cullen…?”

  Sand gave her a hug. “It wasn’t forced. Cullen and Tavish were already lovers. I watched the biofeedback on the lattice. Cullen came first, then Tavish, and then…the priestess. She gave it all up. All of herself”—his fingers pinched as his grip tightened—“just”—his breath came harsh—“poured into them. I’ll remember Cullen’s scream forever. There was no feedback loop we could ever conceive that would be powerful enough to contain her death. It wasn’t a transfer of chi, Shay. It was a transfer of souls. Hers, and all the others that had passed to her before. The power was terrifying.”

  “It didn’t affect you?”

  “A bit. I was definitely riding a chi wave bigger than any I’ve felt since. But Cullen burnt half his enhancements, and Tavish…just fried.”

  “‘Fried’ seems a bit of a euphemism.”

  “No. He burned. Inside. His enhancements had always given him trouble. We’d had to wait for three repairs on him, and his adjustment took six months. They were both unconscious when I made it into the room. I managed to restart Tavish’s heart.

  “I was sitting there, looking at her body, looking at Cullen to see if he was going to explode, looking at Tavish to see if he would die, looking at the lattice to decide if I should call for help. I was nineteen.

  “Then Cullen came out of it and told me about it being a soul transfer. They hadn’t transferred just one priestess’s chi. There were too many to understand. Like what you understood immediately, that she was merely the last in a long line of them. She hadn’t told us. We weren’t prepared.

&
nbsp; “Tavish was sick, so sick. Cullen said, ‘We’ve got to get him to the tree.’

  “Cullen opened this biodome up, and it took both of us to drag the big bastard in. We took him in and wrapped ourselves around him… The fallen branches and acorns hurt. I’d never walked on earth before. I was out of my mind with awe at the size of it. The power of the chi in me, Cullen could barely speak, Tavish’s life fading, the dead body back in the bedroom… It wasn’t a good experience. And it got worse.”

  Shay was mesmerized by the story. She stroked the thighs that were rock solid along hers. “I know he lived. What happened under the tree?”

  “Yeah, he lived. Cullen did something, with the tree, with his enhancements, with his new chi. With the Spirit.”

  Shay waited but Sand seemed to be lost in memory. She swallowed. He was holding something back. “What did he do, Sand?”

  Sand laughed bitterly. “I have no fucking idea. I wonder if he even knows. Cullen took the light, he took the air, and wove it. It sizzled. The enhancements he had left started to smoke, and I felt this presence gather, this pressure, as if it would pop my head like a balloon. Tavish’s wrist and throat stopped bleeding, but then it was my turn to go crazy.”

  “I can’t imagine you ever being crazed.”

  “It’s not something I like to remember.” Sand’s voice was the lowest it had gotten since he began to tell his story. “We were three boys who were totally overwhelmed, unprepared, for the stewardship of such an oak, such a plan. We lay there together, crying, terrified… It changed us. There was never a question of going back, of ignoring it. It was given to us.”

  He hadn’t told her everything, but she let it go. “I’ve never heard of such a line of transference.” Shay considered generations of people willing to give all of their power into another’s keeping, and finding souls strong enough to withstand that as the generations built. “Wow.”

  He squeezed her gently.

  “When we left that room, Tavish was an earth singer. And Cullen…was scary. The air around him practically boiled. His eyes, I’ll always remember his eyes. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t still riding the chi he took that night.”