She is the reason Ling’s mind is in disarray.

She is the reason her daughter could be gone. Could be dead.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Down. Rangan ran down, taking the stairs as fast as he could, behind Steve Kim, behind the Capitol Hill cop named Anders, with another Capitol Hill police officer coming up behind them.

Jesus, why did he think this was a good idea?

They were inside the Capitol now, descending into tunnels. The signal he’d felt before was long gone. All signals were gone.

The first tunnels were polished, walls covered in art. Now they were deeper, into wide, bare tunnels, with concrete floors and painted brick walls that looked like they hadn’t been used since the twentieth century.

He tried to work through the implications of what Kade had sent him just a few minutes ago. The thing in Ling’s mind. The monster. The bad code. Su-Yong Shu’s creation. It had used Breece to dose everyone in the Capitol with Nexus, or something like. So it could reach out, and hack into their brains, take them over, take control of a huge chunk of the planet.

But Kade had destroyed that thing, with Shu’s weapons. And the Secret Service, or whoever, was smart, bringing the politicians down here, where signals weren’t getting through anyway.

So it was cool, right?

Maybe he’d jumped the gun?

Then they came through a door and bad fucking shit slammed right into his head.

He wobbled, almost fell, caught himself against a doorway as the world spun and nightmare visions came at him. Horrible phantom things filled his brain. He’d been poisoned, his organs were rotting, his nervous system was seizing up.

He was dying, dying.

Rangan fell to one knee, sick to his stomach, his heart pounding like a jackhammer in his chest. He felt Stan Kim’s hand on his upper arm.

He clenched down hard with his mind, took a deep breath, pushed back against the mental onslaught, tried to see reality through the chaos.

Ahead, the tunnel was lined with men and women in suits.

They were on the ground, mostly writhing, tearing at their clothes, their hair, trying to get control of their limbs again, trying to climb the walls, trying to escape what was happening in their own brains.

Congress people, coming up on Nexus for the first time. Tripping their brains out in calibration phase, thinking they’d been chemically attacked, thinking they’d been poisoned.

And really freaking the hell out.

Su-Yong snaps back to herself.

She is not whole. Not sane. Not completely.

But she is closer. Parts of three Su-Yong’s now.

The one who went mad in this place, imprisoned, cut off from what she needed, tortured.

The one who came to sanity, to new revelations, in India.