Su-Yong’s death at Ananda’s monastery. His responsibility for it. The Indian copy of Shu. The way they’d trapped her. How she’d reacted. Her battle with the warped fragment she’d stuffed in Ling’s mind in her insanity.

The plans she’d shown him. The plans forged in madness. The plans for conquest.

His fears for the outcome. For the world’s response. For the consequences should she fail or succeed.

The tools the sane Su-Yong had given him and Feng.

The way she’d renounced her hate, renounced the path she’d started down in the midst of torture and delirium.

The pleas she’d sent them with.

Save Ling. Save the world.

And most of all. What they could hope to do. The thin strand of hope that extended into the future, that broke the cycle, that didn’t lead to war between human and posthuman.

They pulled back from him, pulled back from what they’d seen from Feng.

Kade opened his eyes and found a massive crowd of identical faces, a throng of them in a circle around him. Faces just like Feng’s.

He shivered, remembering how alien the idea of these clones had seemed just a year ago.

Now… Now they felt like old friends.

He felt a wave go through them, a wave of consensus. They’d seen it. They’d seen the truth of insanity themselves. This plan, with all its risks, made sense to them.

Scores of weapons came up, pointed inwards.

“Drop your weapons,” a hundred voices said.

The Avatar reached out through Sun Liu’s mind, through equipment the SCC staff had installed in the Computer Science building.

That was the Lane boy. The transhuman who’d brought her to this state. And Feng, her favorite. Her Fist were conspiring with them.

They were conspiring against her.

Rage rose through her. These were her children. These were her blessed. These were the ones she’d given everything for. This was the boy she’d sacrificed a body for!

She proxied through Sun Liu. She amplified his signal via the repeaters around her.

And then she reached out to her errant children, to impose discipline.

“Drop your weapons!” came the chorus from the Confucian Fist. “Remove your hoods!”

“Do it,” Kade said. “If you cloak, they’ll kill you.”

The Indian Commandos were frozen, their guns pointed down, outnumbered by the Confucian Fist. No one moved.

Then one by one they dropped their guns, reached up, peeled off their hoods.

“You’ve betrayed us!” Captain Garud yelled aloud, looking at Kade, his face livid.

“You brought backpack nukes,” Kade said coldly. “Don’t deny it.”

“Damn you!” Garud said. “That thing down there is a threat!” He pointed a finger down, through the earth. “We have to destroy it! We can detonate the devices down below and eliminate the threat with no other casualties!”