She struck out. She wasn’t as ready as she wanted to be, but she had to try.

DIE! DIE, MONSTER!

The Avatar felt herself crumble to the hard floor of the control room. Ling had control of hundreds of millions of nanites, was trying to seize control of the tens of billions of nanites that surrounded them, was fighting to override the software loaded onto them.

Fighting to override her.

Fear. Fear. Her whole world was fear.

The Avatar struck back with everything she had. She sent jolts of chaos through Ling’s frontal and pre-frontal cortex, sent a sustained high-intensity stimulus to her daughter’s pain centers in her parieto-insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, sent orders to every node to massively increase its energy consumption, to suck ATP directly from its host neurons, to starve them if necessary, to steal the girl’s ability to think and strengthen her own, until her daughter relented.

Pain rebounded back through her. Chaos. Confusion. A feedback loop of agony and disruption.

She couldn’t breathe. Ling couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t think. They were going to die here. The world was going to die. Everyone was going to die.

She sent more random noise through every part of Ling’s brain, created feedback loops to amplify the noise into horrid mind-shattering incoherent noise.

AAAAAAAAAAAH!

IT’S KILLING US!

And with that, her daughter broke.

The Avatar lay on the cold tile floor of the control room, panting, letting Ling’s neurons suck a bit of nutrition again, so they both might live.

Panting.

Panting.

Bangalore. What was happening in Bangalore?

She sent her attention back, feebly.

Minutes had passed. Several minutes. So long? Ling had almost killed her. Almost defeated her. Just a girl.

Just a posthuman.

Just a child of Su-Yong Shu.

Sirens were going off on the Bangalore campus. Emergency vehicles were moving. Radio frequencies were full of short cries with information. Military channels she’d tapped into were calling for backup, announcing the status of an Indian General inside the building.

She caught glimpses of strange transhuman traffic. Humans with nanite nodes in their brains transmitting at high rates. Then they switched frequencies, evaded her, and were gone.

Ling’s body was still panting, still begging for nutrients. But she had to know what was going on in the world.

The Avatar watched in anxiety. The lake was draining. Good. There was no way her higher… the hostile posthuman could survive that. The quantum cluster and the whole building it was in had been taken off the net by the isolation mechanisms the Avatar had managed to pull. Good, good.

Now, was there any chance they could track her back here? How much had her enemy learned during the battle? Had there been any chance to pass it along?

More radio transmissions crossed her filters. Phrases caught her attention.

“… elevator moving… survivors inside…”

No. That should not be possible!

“Director Verma… Dr Lane… General Singh…”