He felt the children react, twenty-five of them crammed into this private jet meant to transport a dozen adults in luxury. They tightened seat belts and huddled together and curled up in the crash position taken from Feng’s mind. The nerves were back. Fear. Uncertainty. They were amazing beyond anything Kade had ever known, but they were still children.

Kade reached out with his thoughts and open arms and the one called Kit – seven years old? – came to him. He wrapped his arms around the boy, braced them both as well as he could on the floor of the plane, and then, with little more than a bump, Sam brought them down.

Sam shut down the engines again, killed the fuel pumps, and then unclipped from her harness. Her chest was pounding. Her face was hot. She turned and Sarai was there, standing in the cockpit doorway.

Sam held her arms open and the girl ran into them, into the hug.

“I knew you’d come for us,” Sarai told her in Thai.

Sam kissed the girl’s brow, mussed her hair. She could hear Feng behind her, tapping on controls, going through the rest of the post-flight shutdown.

“Aroon misses you,” Sarai said. “He can’t feel you. I miss you, Sam. When you have Nexus again…”

Sam’s chest pounded louder. Kevin Nakamura’s face swam in her mind. Her finger pulling the trigger. Kevin’s form, just a green outline in her goggles, toppling back into empty space as her bullets punched into his face, his chest… Kade and Shiva tearing at each other in her mind, wrestling for control as she dropped to her knees in agony…

“Sarai, I…”

“Sam.” It was Kade, standing behind Sarai, by the door of the plane. A door that was opening. “Time to go.”

Kade in her mind, clawing at Shiva, the two of them ripping her to pieces as they fought one another, Kevin already dead at her hands.

Sam’s stomach churned. Something like rage was threatening to rip itself loose from within.

She pushed it down. She needed Kade. Needed him to do his part. Needed him to do play a role she couldn’t.

She took a deep breath, swallowed hard, squeezed Sarai with all the love she had in her, and then went out to meet their Indian hosts.

An officer in uniform met them on the tarmac, a Colonel Sanghita Atwal: tall, muscular, short haired, dark eyed, utterly professional and rather deadly looking. With her were uniformed medics. Beyond them Sam could see soldiers, armed, their rifles at the ready but not quite pointed at the plane. With them were emergency vehicles, the sort that responded to aircraft crashes, their amber lights slowly flashing in the pre-dawn gloom, ready, but this time unneeded.