Feng hauled one of the soldiers up, then the two soldiers hauled Jyotika up, and then they reached down for a sopping Singh, the last figure Kade could see in the water.

People were still sobbing, still yelling names.

“Anil! Anil!” a woman cried. “Where’s Anil?”

“Sana? Sana are you here?”

“Sana went down,” someone said.

Down, Kade thought. Drowned. At least two of them.

The car was beyond overcrowded now.

And the water was still rising, lapping at the bottom of the elevator car now, despite the flow down into the shaft below them.

Singh climbed into the elevator, his uniform sodden, his mustache dripping, his face grim and controlled.

Feng was standing there, in the doorway, sopping wet, his chest heaving, soundlessly.

Kade could feel a bereavement unlike any other coming off his friend. To have Su-Yong restored to him…

And then to lose her again, within minutes.

“Sarai,” Sam said. “Can you take us back up.”

“Yes,” Sarai said.

The elevator doors began to close.

96
Plan C

Sunday 2041.01.20

The Avatar recoiled from the catastrophe in Bangalore, frantic and reeling.

What had happened? What horror was that?

Alternate models of reality warred within her.

1. She’d been rejected by her higher self.

2. A hostile posthuman had tricked her into setting it free, had attacked her.

Only the second possibility was consistent with the facts. The fact that she was the avatar of her higher self. That her holy mission was to restore her higher self. That her goddess self would lovingly embrace her, gently absorb her, reward her with transcendence as they swallowed the world and then reforged it for the better.

Those were facts.

Therefore, the second possibility was true.

A hostile posthuman.

The thought terrified her.

Had she stopped it? Had she destroyed it? Had any information leaked out?

Could anything lead humans to her, here, beneath Shanghai?

She turned her attention back to Bangalore. Her proxies still occupied hundreds of systems throughout the rest of Bangalore research campus. She surfed them now, assimilated data.

A vehicle was racing across the research campus towards the building where the hostile posthuman had been sited. What was that? It had come from the location where Feng and the Lane boy were housed. It was a threat. She reached out to seize the base’s ground defense systems, to use them to destroy the vehicle.

Physical pain struck her. Pain in Ling’s chest, pain in her head. Circuits she thought were hers attacked her from within.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.

DIE! DIE, MONSTER!

Ling! After weeks silent, Ling was striking.

Ling watched in horror. She’d been too slow. She’d thought, maybe, that they’d actually reconnect with her mother, that her mother would put things to rights…

That had been her mother. Not an evil twisted thing like before.

But the monster had tried to destroy it! Was trying again!

NO!