An idea had woken him. A thought. Holtzman had recorded that video using Nexus. He’d ignored that in the flood of bad news. Now the magnitude of it floored him. Holtzman had Nexus in his brain? He’d realized the man was off. But really? Nexus?

Didn’t that put the whole thing in doubt? Maybe Holtzman had just dreamed the whole thing in a drug haze and died of a heart attack.

He sat up in his bed, turned to bring his feet to the floor, reached for his phone to jot a note, maybe send a memo to one of the White House press staff.

The sudden light from the phone’s screen illuminated motion, a blur, something coming at him from the side.

Barnes yelled out, turned, raising a hand to ward off the blow.

Something bit into his upper arm, a needle.

He swung out with his other hand, trying to hit the dark form, finding only air.

“HOUSE RED!” he yelled, his panic phrase, his phrase that should set the alarms blaring, bring the lights up, alert the police and DHS that he had an intruder, activate his home’s own active countermeasures…

Except that the alarms should already have gone off. The locks should never have let this intruder in.

“Ooof!” A hard fist slammed into his solar plexus, forcing the air out of him, knocking him back against the headboard in his still dark, still silent house.

“Lights,” said a voice that wasn’t his, a voice he knew…

The bedroom came alive with light at the intruder’s command.

Before him was a blur, a man-shaped distortion against the wall and carpet. The figure shifted and his outline became more clear. Not high-end chameleonware, then. Something cheaper and coarser.

“I have money,” Barnes said.

“I don’t want…”

Barnes pounced in the moment of distraction, hurled himself at the man, his illegally boosted muscles shooting him off the bed in a tackle that would slam the intruder against the wall behind him.

The blur sidestepped inhumanly fast. Its knee came up. Barnes fell to the floor, curled in a ball, naked, gasping for breath, pain radiating from his core.

Something pressed against his shoulder. A booted foot. It pushed him onto his back. A blurred hand reached down, and Barnes felt a sting in his other arm as a needle was pulled out. He caught a glimpse of a syringe in that cloaked hand, its stopper fully depressed, the needle bent from where he’d rolled onto it.

Barnes gasped, struggled to breathe.

“I teach you the overman,” the figure above him said.

That voice. That voice.

“Man is something to be overcome,” the voice went on.

Oh god. Oh god.

“What have you done to overcome him?”

“Breece…” Barnes struggled for air, struggled to force the man’s name out. “Breece… I…”