Mind Strike Read Online Free

reduce tensions. Mothers are protective of sons when strange women are around. The stranger the woman, the more hostile a mother is to her.
    Two of the guards laughed against her shields, and Tyvor went silent as they swam out of the meeting place and up toward a mountain rising from the deep. They followed the slope upward until the sunlight showed the surface, and still, they continued to rise.
    Breaking the surface was a shock. One moment they were underwater, and the next, they had shattered the surface and were heading toward a floating dock that had merely been a line in the water a minute earlier.
    The Salassians launched easily out of the water, but Skiria had to haul herself upward one inch at a time until Tyvor reached down to lift her out of the sea.
    The dock was shifting and rocking under her feet. A guard reached out to steady her, and she smiled briefly at him.
    His helping hand to her elbow shifted to a supporting hand at her back, and Tyvor jerked her toward him. He drained his gills and said, “Enough, Rasko. She has just arrived.”
    The guard drained his own gills. “She started it.”
    Skiria blinked. “What did I start?”
    Tyvor looked smug. “See? She doesn’t even know our ways yet. You could have made an incredible gaffe.”
    The guard darkened dramatically, a deep purple rush through the paler sections of skin.
    Tyvor kept his hand on hers and tugged her along the dock toward a small house built into the hillside of a very pretty island. Flowers bloomed and a small waterwheel churned tirelessly on the side of the building.
    “The waterwheel is your power supply and it runs all the equipment in the study. You will be able to contact anyone you wish as well as receive the basics in Citadel training.”
    Her group eased down the dock and walked up the pathway to the house. The guards remained outside while Tyvor showed her her new home.
    Skiria looked around the cottage with its neat bed, small kitchen filled with a food dispenser that Tyvor showed her how to use, and the study with the com systems that could call anywhere she could think of. If only she had someone to call.
     

Chapter Four
     
     
    The first two days she was on Salass, Tyvor checked in on her for an hour. After he had assured himself she was doing well, he started to skip to every three days.
    Skiria enjoyed being by herself with no other minds in the area. She could expand her thoughts as much as she wanted and nothing got in her way. It was on the seventh day on Salass when she got her first call. The origin point was hidden, but the woman floating in the tank on the screen was definitely Resicorian.
    Skiria sat and stared at the woman in the screen. “Um, hello?”
    “Hello, Skiria Linz. I am the Archive. I am just calling to check on you.”
    “Archive?”
    The woman bobbed in the liquid that held her and she smiled. “Indeed. When you have been filing requests for information, they have been going through me.”
    “You are from Resicor.”
    “Good eye. Yes, I am. I was removed quite some time ago and have made a place in the Alliance and have been assisting my home with its new phase of life.”
    “You are in touch?”
    The woman inclined her head. “I am. She has never left me.”
    It was when she tilted her head that Skiria saw the ports and cables implanted in the woman’s skull.
    “What did they do to you?”
    “Nothing that I did not ask for. I requested these links so that I could be of use to my people. This is my destiny and I have enjoyed watching the men and women of Resicor come out to play with the other species.”
    Skiria blinked in surprise. “You have been watching?”
    The Archive shrugged and raised her hands. “It is what I do. All the information regarding the children of Resicor runs through my mind. Several of those removed are my descendants, so I have a vested interest in remaining as the main conduit of their activities.”
    “How are you speaking?”
    “My thoughts are being