Kade fired off requests from Shiva’s cloud to every mindstream aggregator he knew of, issuing searches for every publicly shared mindstream in the DC area, all data from the last ten minutes up to present. Hundreds of streams came back, annotated with tags. He re-queried on the top tags, got hundreds more, then piped the whole set into the neural data sifter Shiva’s engineers had built, fed it the patterns he was looking for: Rangan’s face as the monk had seen it, in wig and makeup; the unique signature of Rangan’s mind; Rangan’s voice; Rangan’s name.

Execute.

His mind started moving forward, thinking about the other tools he could use…

Hits came back.

Four streams had matches on Rangan’s costumed face in the last ten minutes.

Two had touched his mind in that time.

One had touched Rangan’s mind just an instant ago.

Kade fired up the stream immediately.

He was suddenly in the midst of chaos, coughing, despite the bandana around his face. His eyes burning despite his goggles, yellow and black smoke all around him, people running everywhere. There were minds bombarding his, angry minds, yelling, the sounds of fighting. Fire.

He didn’t see Rangan out of this person’s eyes. He didn’t feel Rangan’s mind. He couldn’t turn their head. He was just a passenger.

He popped out of the stream, looked at its metadata.

Please, he thought. Please have a contact address.

It did.

He reached out to the mind.

My name’s Kaden Lane, he sent, with every bit of urgency he could. I’m one of the inventors of Nexus 5. And I could really, really use a favor right now.

“Come on, Cheyenne,” Rangan said, pushing up to one knee. “Not far now. Not far.”

Rangan!

He nearly dropped Cheyenne in shock.

Kade?

He looked to his left, didn’t see his friend, looked to the right, not there either.

Holy shit, Rangan, it’s you!

He turned back to the left, saw what was maybe a fourteen year-old girl in front of him, dressed for a riot or a rave, a black and pink handkerchief over her mouth and nose, giant iridescent bug-eyed goggles covering her eyes. The girl came closer and crouched before him. He saw his own crazy clown face reflected in fun-house distorted insanity in those oversized lenses.

Kade?

Jesus, Rangan, what happened?

Cheyenne groaned. “What the fuck?”

Someone tried to kill me, he sent to the teen girl with Kade’s mind. The guy who launched the hate broadcast.

What? Kade sounded appalled. Show me.

Rangan opened his mind, flashed the memory up and out at his friend, the man looming out of the smoke, then Rangan on his back, the man’s face an inch a way. Cheyenne’s attack, the disguise ripped half-free, the mystery woman who’d saved them and turned off the hate.