Yes, Bo Tat, the monk replied. I’ve touched your thoughts when we merge in metta, I know to whom you send loving compassion, I’ve felt the feel of your friend’s mind. It is <this>

Rangan. In the middle of all that.

Well where else would he be, dumbass? Kade asked himself. Where have you always been?

How long ago was this? Kade sent.

Perhaps ten minutes ago, the monk replied. I would have reached out to you sooner, but it was all we could do to push back a bit of the tide of suffering all around us, and see a few to safety.

You did the right thing, Kade assured the man. Now, please. Show me everything you saw and sensed about my friend.

The monk did.

And then Kade started searching.

Rangan held Cheyenne up, stumbling forward through the chaos. Smoke rose, filling his lungs, driving him to cough. Cheyenne groaned in pain. Someone ran into them, running to or from a skirmish with the police, and Cheyenne toppled to the ground, dragging Rangan with her. They hit hard and she screamed in pain as her bad arm impacted below her.

Her pain washed out over him. Oh fuck, oh Jesus.

He reached out with his mind, groping blindly all around him, searching, searching for Angel or Tempest.

Nothing. There were hundreds of minds around him, people running by in every direction, but none were his friends.

“Come on, Cheyenne,” he said, pushing up to one knee, taking her good arm over his shoulder. “Not far now. Not far.”

Kade tunneled his NexusOS to computing clouds he’d hoped not to use, invoked passwords he’d hoped never to need.

Now, he hoped they still worked.

Shiva Prasad’s passwords, passwords he’d taken from the man’s mind, just before…

No, Sam, don’t do this. He tried to do the…

Before Sam blew Shiva Prasad’s brains out all over the rooftop of the man’s fortress mansion on Apyar Kyun. Before she splattered Shiva’s brains over Kade’s face.

Authentication layers accepted the passwords.

[Welcome Shiva Prasad]

Shiva’s research had overlapped with the work Kade was doing now. The billionaire had been fascinated by the Nexus-born children, fascinated by their collective intelligence, their ability to solve inordinately complex problems. He’d dreamt of integrating them into a far larger network, connecting millions of human minds, every Nexus user on the planet, a posthuman intelligence that would stagger anything that had come before it.

With Shiva himself in the driver’s seat. Controlling the individual minds. Directing them. Sifting through data coming back through them. All enabled by Kade’s back doors.

The back doors were gone, closed forever.

But the tools Shiva’s team had built still existed. They could be used to sift data voluntarily released.