The Secure Computing Center Director was on his knees at the door now. His phone was in his hands. She smiled. She’d disabled transmission on his phone shortly after he’d arrived.

As she closed on him with Chen’s body, he looked up, his limbs becoming less and less coordinated, unable to stand even, and begged.

“Please… please… why are you doing this?”

The Avatar crouched Chen’s body down by his old rival, pressed the hypersonic injector against the man’s neck, and smiled.

“You were always jealous of my husband’s success, were you not?”

She saw Xu’s eyes widen further, in horror, in comprehension.

“Well now you can join him, as an equal.”

And then she pulled the trigger.

Later, after she’d examined her daughter, made sure the child wasn’t permanently harmed; after she’d soothed the girl, and explained so patiently that Ling must not interfere, that her mother was doing this for both their good; after she’d restarted the control software running on her husband’s brain; she came back to Xu, and began trawling through his mind, searching for all the details of the security around the Quantum Cluster, what she’d need to do, who she’d need to corrupt, and how.

And then the other topic. Where had the data cubes gone? Did Xu have any idea where the backups made of her full self might be?

When she saw what he knew, she laughed, laughed, and laughed out of little Ling’s body.

Restoring her full self might just be easier than she’d thought.

44
Walkabout

Saturday 2040.11.24

“Stealth mode,” Tempest said again, tapping her screen.

“And it works?” Cheyenne asked. “Against ERD’s Nexus detectors?”

“So they say,” Tempest murmured.

Angel frowned. “It’s in the same file as the chemreactor hack?”

Tempest nodded. “Yeah. Buried in there. A commenter on nexus.revolutions found it.”

Rangan watched Tempest. They were all crowded around her display, reading the details of the experiment an anonymous commenter had done in California. Angel and Cheyenne were musing about how to safely test this out for themselves.

“You’re skeptical,” he said to Tempest.

She turned, met his brown eyes with her green ones. “Damn right I am.”

“I want to go out there,” Rangan told them.

The C3 had been out almost daily, in some set of two or three. Angel had been laid up while she healed. Tempest and Cheyenne had disappeared over Thanksgiving for two days, with no explanations given, no questions asked. No one ever talked about home lives. Real names were never used, only pseudonyms.

Now everyone was here again, and in good health.