The Avatar pushed harder, risking burnout, risking neuronal death, felt Ling shudder in agony and, finally, what remained of the girl submitted. Muscles went slack, and she slumped against the glass, breath coming fast, her tiny heart beating at a furious pace, trying to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the suddenly ravenous brain cells.

“They will kill you,” Chen was saying. “They will find you out and tear what’s left of you apart, kill that abomination of a daughter you inhabit, smash the copies made of you, and nuke the quantum computing clu… AAAAAAAAAAAAA.”

Hatred pulsed through the Avatar. She reached out with a thought and sent a burst of pain through Chen Pang, her husband, her betrayer. She pushed it through every pain center of his brain, felt him fall to his knees in agony.

“No,” she said aloud in Ling’s voice. “I will hide from them. I will evade them. I will take them by surprise.”

The Avatar waited, letting her daughter’s brain flush out toxins, letting her pulse and respiration return to normal, forcing herself to calm her daughter’s body, to replenish its supply of nutrients.

Ling remained quiescent. Sullen, but compliant.

She left Chen writhing in silent agony. Her husband had let her step into that limousine without him so long ago, hadn’t warned her what awaited. He’d been willing to let her die in that car bombing, to let their unborn son die, to let her mentor Yang Wei die. He’d lied to her, let her believe the CIA had tried to assassinate her, when it had been the hardliners in China all along. And then he’d tortured her to try to wring a few last secrets from her mind.

Chen deserved all of this and worse.

Only when she was certain Ling’s physical needs had been seen to did she reload her higher self’s models. She did so carefully, this time, staying further from the limits of her capacity, loading predominantly the United States, applying filters to the rest, trimming the probability tree to scope her search, further updating her true self’s plan with the latest information from the outside world. The net was full of acrimony, accusations, and counter-accusations, sentiment intensity spiking in anger and outrage among those who believed the new allegations and those who thought them vicious lies. One more spark was all that was needed.

The probability matrix permuted again, again, again, a thousand conformations of the web of futures whizzing by, different intersections being tried. Intermediate conclusions being reached, plugged back into her model of the future, streamlining the search, optimizing for conflict.

An ideal event presented itself, an event that could sway tens of millions of Americans, that had the potential to shatter faith, to harden hearts, to precipitate a cascade of events that could send the country into seizures, which she could parlay into chaos in China as well.

Now. how to bring that event about?