It plunged his visor and its feed into black.

Sam dove forward. Dynamic entry. Gunfire exploded as she threw herself into a roll in the widening space between the doors. Her visor threw up attack vectors, arrows identifying the sources of the fire.

Three arrows. Three sources of gunfire.

She came up out of the roll, spinning to change the course of her path, arms out, assault rifle in her right hand. More gunfire erupted, ripping through the space her trajectory would have put her in.

Her eyes took in the scene as she spun. The giant glass walls. The quantum data-center behind them. The control panels. The little girl in the dress, back to them, at one of those panels. The middle-aged Chinese man, tapping away next to her.

The Confucian Fist in the plain fatigues flying through the air, between Sam and the quantum cluster, an angle she couldn’t fire on, his rifle coming around towards her new position.

Sam pulled her arms in and across her body to accelerate the spin, ducked her head down to turn her motion into a half-flip, knowing it was too late, knowing his bullets were about to punch through her.

Kade’s visor cut to black.

He stumbled, disoriented, reeling from the blow to his head, expecting another.

No second blow came.

He reached up, pulled the hood off his head, looking, searching.

Feng and Sam were fighting for their lives. For everyone’s lives.

There. There was Ling. And Chen. At the consoles of the Quantum Cluster.

Still going through its boot sequence. Not yet complete!

The fiber optic cable was behind him. The network access point waiting for him to activate it. But he might not need it. He might not. Not yet.

Ling was turning towards him. He could see a malevolent intelligence behind her eyes that wasn’t her own. That wasn’t the eight-year-old girl he’d gotten to know.

He reached Inside, and the origami tools Su-Yong had given him unfolded again, expanding to thousands of times their size, fractally decompressing, becoming orders of magnitude more complex.

He reached out towards Ling’s mind, bombarded it with viral fragments, millions of them, mutating in real time.

All a feint.

The Avatar used Ling’s face to smile at the boy. She was ready for him this time. He came at her with viruses. Again? Silly child.

She fired phages into the shared spectrum, evolved things, tailored for the viral attack she’d seen him use already, that she’d first seen the hostile posthuman use in Bangalore. The phages were simple things, tiny compared even to the viruses. She unleashed billions of them. They swarmed the viral code, attacking weaknesses Darwinian methods had found in the minutes since their last encounter, shredding the viruses to bits, decimating them.

Only a few radical mutants of the virus survived the phage barrage, reached the outer layers of her mind.