The barricades, of broken furniture, bricks, machinery, all piled up to form a barrier.

A barrier against the army beyond it. The ranks and ranks of soldiers. With guns, and long heavy batons, and metal shields and mirrored helmets. And behind them, tanks and tank-like things, massive turrets pointing this way.

This was no movie.

“Nexus?” she heard a male voice say.

Something brushed her. She looked down, saw a hand, holding a silvery vial.

Qi’s hand snaked out from beside her, grabbed the wrist, twisted it away from her.

There was squeal of pain. The vial dropped to the ground.

“Qi!” she said. “Let go. It’s OK.”

She looked up. There was a boy in front of her, perhaps 18, 19, holding his wrist, rubbing it, a look of betrayal and annoyance on his face.

Then his eyes met hers and they grew wide.

“Holy shit,” he said.

Zhi Li felt resignation hit her. She smiled at the boy.

“We’re here to help,” she said. “Who’s in charge here?”

104
The Sooner, The Better

Sunday 2041.01.20

Sun Liu’s eyes went wide as the world expanded within him, as the nanites attached to his neurons, as new inputs entered his brain, made their way into his consciousness.

So vast. So vast.

He could feel the minds of the men around him.

He could feel the pieces of his own mind, coming together. Feel the software within the nanomachinery studying him, learning him, flashing huge swaths of his life before his eyes at once.

So amazing.

I’m a scientist, he thought. Why didn’t I ever do this before?

And then she was there.

And hell opened up, hell beyond anything he’d ever imagined possible.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, SUN LIU. The voice was the voice of a thousand dark angels, a thousand folk demons from his mother’s superstitions. All true. All true.

He saw himself through her eyes. Things she could not know. He saw himself warning Chen Pang, warning him about the car bomb, warning him the reactionaries were going to kill him and his wife, warning Chen Pang, but not warning Su-Yong Shu!

Condemning her and her unborn son to death!

No, he wanted to say. You’re dead. You’re dead. So many times over you’re dead. You can’t hurt me.

But he was inside her mind, as she was inside his. He was burning, pinned in the back of that limousine, watching Yang Wei die, feeling the unborn son inside himself die, feeling skin blacken and burn.

I KNOW YOU LET CHEN TORTURE ME, the demoness shouted into his mind. TORTURE ME FOR YOUR PETTY GAIN.

And he was reliving her pain, every nerve fiber in wretched agony, yet aware she must have had it worse, a being so much more able to feel, that thought so much faster.

Decades of pain. Centuries of pain. Millennia of pain.