She opens her mind as she rises and finds the city alive with thought, a symphony of thought, a living being, a meta-organism of never-before seen scale. Vast braided trunks of thought, tens of millions of them, connect them at the speed of light to every other city across the face of the Earth, to outposts spreading across the solar system.

She rises higher, until she is above the tallest building, and still climbing, where the air is growing thin, and the curvature of the earth is appearing, and other glorious iridescent cities loom on the green and blue horizons.

And then she can see it, even as she senses it in her thoughts.

The city, this glorious golden metropolis, with its magnificence of architecture, has been re-sculpted into a shape that can only be seen from above.

A face.

Her face. Or Ling’s

And the one mind that permeates it all, greater than all the rest.

Her mind.

For this is the golden age.

The age after her victory.

After her daughter has done her duty, and been healed.

After Su-Yong Shu has conquered the world, and remolded it, for the better.

34
Leaving New Delhi

Tuesday November 13th

Sam woke to the sound of crying, crying in the darkness.

Aroon. It must be Aroon.

“I’ll get him,” she told Jake, reaching over to touch him.

Empty bed.

Sleep peeled off her in layers.

Jake.

Her heart pounded.

This wasn’t Thailand.

Oh god, Jake. Jake with a bullet punched through his chest. Jake with a drop of her blood dripping onto his face. Jake coughing up blood.

Jake whispering, “I wish I’d known you…” when he had. He had!

Jake’s mind falling into a million pieces that no one could ever put back together.

There were tears on her face.

Aroon cried again.

She pushed herself up. He needed her.

Tug on shorts. Pull on shirt. Out the door. Into the nursery where they’d put the three youngest. All three were awake, staring at her. Aroon was upright, tiny hands clinging to the side of his crib, holding himself up, his mouth open and his little face scrunched up as he wailed with all his small might.

“Hush,” she said with a smile, reaching for him with her hands, reaching out with her mind to soothe him.

And finding nothing. Nothing in her own mind to reach out with. No Nexus.

She put her hands around Aroon, pulled him up out of the crib, held him.

He cried and cried.

“Shhh…” She said. Always before her presence had been enough. Being near her had soothed him, since that first night, since she’d sung to him, in word and mind.

She sang again, hoping her lungs and her arms around him would do the trick.

“Hush little baby, don’t you cry…”

Aroon cried louder, harder.

She closed her eyes, bounced him, still singing, tears in her own eyes.