Then the Senator stepped back, out of the line of the cameras, a smile playing at his lips, not even close to reaching his eyes.

Rangan swallowed hard, pulled the mask down over his face, suddenly aware of all the police. And also aware that a majority of those 120,000… no, wait… 125,000 people were tuning in to him over the Mesh.

He stood up straight, raised his arms, and told them with word and thought.

“We can do this!” he told them, hope and optimism beaming out. “There’s a tipping point ahead! Keep bringing more people in, and we can cancel out the attack.”

There was still so much hate out there. They were still a minority, growing fast but still there were four people not running Mesh for every one person who was…

Then he felt another mind touch his. A mind he’d brushed in passing that day on the National Mall. The day everything went to shit.

He looked down and there was a bald man in orange robes climbing the stairs, threading his way between the imposing riot police, smiling slightly, his mind giving off tranquility.

This, this is what the crowd needed.

Rangan gestured and the monk came onto the stage without a word.

Rangan reached out and touched his mind to offer him Mesh, found that the monk was already running it, and smiled.

“Listen to this man,” Rangan said into the cameras, into the minds of those following him. “He has what we need.”

And then he redirected those minds to the monk, and watched and felt as peace rippled out, as it flowed out of a hundred thousand minds, into all of those around them.

As peace flowed out of them like water, to meet the more numerous hot flames of anger.

Kate looked at the message on her terminal.

[Insider: Not good enough. Give me something concrete!]

Then she looked up at the wallscreen. At the chaos. At what Breece had done. At what he’d done to his own people.

He hadn’t listened at all.

“Damn you,” she whispered. “I loved you.”

Then she typed out the message.

[ERD_ SECRETS: The man who killed Barnes goes by the alias “Breece”. His real name is Andrew Marcum. He was behind DC, Chicago, and Houston. He’s in DC now. His current location and full bio follow.]

“Shooter’s in position,” the Nigerian said. “We’ll only get one shot before they triangulate.”

“Take it,” Breece replied.

Rangan watched the numbers climb.

263,000. 267,000. More than a third of the crowd running mesh, running firewalls cutting off the hate, broadcasting active countermeasures all around them!

They were doing it. Out there, he could see violence subsiding with his own eyes. They were approaching a tipping point.

He heard Stan Kim next to him, yelling to one of the cops.

“Get on the horn to your commander,” Kim was saying. “Tell him he needs to cease fire! The crowd’s calming down!”