“Yes,” Singh said. “Myself, Lane, Verma, fifteen others. Yes. Two casualties. No, later. Right now, I need a secure line to our Chinese Ministry of Defense contact. This is absolute top priority, you understand? National security pri one for both nations… Say again?

“Hello?

“Hello?

“Hello?”

After communications were cut off, the wait stretched out. They had air from above. They were unlikely to suffocate.

Feng free climbed the elevator cable, but reported there was only a few centimeters gap through which the handset had been snuck, between what appeared to be another several centimeters, at least, of titanium alloy. They had no Shu this time to override its controls.

Through the gap, Feng said he could hear gunfire, explosions, screams.

Sam fretted. Kade could see it on her face. She was fretting for the kids in their care.

“I can’t reach them now,” Sarai said, talking about the rest of the children. She shook her head. “They were proxying across the net before, through a router in the building next door. But now the net is down.” She paused. “I know you told us to stay in the shelter… but we had to all work together to access the elevator. But I know, after that, they went right back into the shelter. They’re safe, Sam. I swear it!”

Sam didn’t look convinced.

Kade leaned back against the elevator wall, hot and damp and still overwhelmed by the bits of data and memory and software and weaponry unpacking themselves from Su-Yong Shu’s transmission into the nooks and crannies of his mind.

He could guess what had happened. He could trace the logic of the agent Su-Yong had sent out. What would it do, having met the real Su-Yong, and having been attacked?

It would strike back. It would try to kill anyone who might have learned anything. It would accelerate its plans.

People were dying upstairs, he was sure of it.

People were dying in China.

What would he do if it was too late, if Su-Yong was back?

Not the sane Su-Yong, the one healed by time and the input of data from a biological brain.

No. The mad Su-Yong. The one who’d been held prisoner for six months. Who’d been deliberately deprived of the input that stabilized her. Who’d been tortured by her own husband. The one who could barely tell reality from fiction, who dreamt of fire and vengeance and conquest.

What could the whole world do in that case? Drop nukes on Shanghai, while she waited a kilometer below? Would that even work?

Carry a bomb to her? Somehow get past hundreds of Confucian Fist and god-only-knows how many robotic weapons and commandeered soldiers she’d have protecting her? Were those odds of success any higher?

He looked up. Every hour that passed, the odds that Su-Yong would come back, enraged, bent on conquest, driven insane by her torturers, went up, and up, and up.