Rangan tried to look around, found someone atop him, shoved his way free, onto one knee on the ground. There was smoke everywhere. People were down. The stage was listing over, one corner of it gone, the rest on fire. A man was upright, stumbling around, aflame. Others were on their knees or on the ground, burning. His own eyes were on fire. He coughed, his lungs burning. He brought his hands to his face, searching for his goggles, for his mask. They weren’t there. He turned, looking for them on the ground. Instead he saw a line of riot police advancing.

Oh shit, he thought.

Rangan forced himself up. His lungs hurt, he could barely see through the smoke and the stinging in his eyes. He had to get to Angel. Move east. Move south. Move. Move. Move. He stumbled, crawled, stood, fell, stood. He remembered his scarf, pulled it up over his nose and mouth. He tried to yell out to the others with his mind, heard nothing back, and then he realized his hat was gone too. The hat with the hidden antenna that boosted his range. Shit.

He felt something change then, and he turned, looked. Through the smoke he saw a deeper yellow: Saffron robes, a shaved head, moving in the opposite direction. He felt the hate push back, felt something else touch him, a touch of that tranquility.

Then in a disorienting flash everything changed. He was outside the crowd, outside the Mall, looking down onto a hundred thousand people, not as individuals, but as a whole, a single being, a single mind.

Like Ilya would have seen it, he realized.

For that instant his own mind was clear, at peace. And in that clarity, the mind he looked down on…

That mind of a hundred thousand people was mentally ill. Insane. Drugged or diseased. Raging with a sickness.

Something else passed through him then. A feeling of being recognized.

Then it was gone – the perspective, the clarity, the peace.He was back in his body, the hate pressing in on him, the smoke all around him, screams and the sound of clashes, and the acrid sting of teargas. There were no yellow robes.

Did I fucking hallucinate that? Rangan wondered.

He coughed and turned, stumbled on towards 7th Street. He was almost there when a figure loomed out of the smoke. Rangan moved to go around him, but the man moved too, and then a fist rammed the breath out of him. Rangan doubled over in pain and shock. Then something swept his feet out from under him. He landed on his back, slamming his spine into the backpack containing the NANCie below him, in more pain, gasping. Then there was a hand on his throat, a bearded, scarred face inches from his own, dreadlocks falling around him, intense blue eyes staring down into his.

The man whispered hoarsely at him, “Who are you, compadre? And how are you causing the interference?”