Police officers in mirrored glasses tracked her and the rest of C3 as they pushed in with the crowd through the side streets. She smiled her widest entertainer smile, moved juggling clubs up in the air in a jaunty little dance, never letting go of them, wiggling her hips in time.

I’m just a girl, officer, she thought at the cop. I’m no threat to you.

No Nexus transmissions until they were out in the middle of the Mall. That was the plan. The entrances were the most likely places for Nexus scanners. And while they had to get within a couple feet of you to detect Nexus in your brain if you were in receive only, they could pick you up from thirty, forty, fifty feet away if you were broadcasting.

Though, frankly, if they were scanning, they’d be running out there to bust what must be hundreds of people running Nexus on the Mall already.

Of course, if that were tens of thousands…

They broke radio silence minutes later.

…feel all that?

…hundreds of them…

…mostly that way…

…let’s head that way then…

…think they came dosed, or someone else handing it out here?

…one way to find out…

They headed west, on the south side of the Reflecting Pool, towards the Lincoln Memorial, where there seemed to be the greatest concentration of people.

The concentration of Nexus grew stronger as well. Denser. The minds felt fresh, inexperienced. Some of them disoriented, even, in the rush of a synesthetic blur as Nexus 5 learned them.

…newbies…

…dosed here…

…calibration phase…

Up ahead it was growing even denser. There was something different, Angel saw. A gap in the protest, then more signs, different signs.

A counter-protest. Stockton loyalists.

And that’s where the greatest concentration of Nexus was coming from?

She pushed her way right up to it, until she was up against the orange plastic fencing that held the anti-Stockton crowd back. Ten feet away, another orange plastic fence held a smaller but equally fervent crowd of Stockton loyalists with their own angry signs back. In the gap were cops, spaced one every few feet, their presence serving to discourage the two groups from attacking each other at least as much as the fence.

She reached to cut off her Nexus communication, so close to these cops. But before she could, something hit her hard. A wave of emotion. Anger. Violence. Repugnance. Intolerance. She felt it hit Tempest and Cheyenne. Felt them hit with the same urge to shout and yell and bash, to throw themselves across the gap and hurt their foes.

She reached out with all she could, grabbed hold of them with her thoughts, and threw herself back from the fence, to the ground.

SOMEONE’S FUCKING WITH OUR MINDS! She sent.

She heard the sound of yelling, of screams, of a cop ordering people to stay back, of the fence failing, of signs being slammed into people’s bodies.