Rangan could feel insanely diverse calibration trips all around him. Oceans and forests. Fantasy lands. Choose Your Own Adventure stories. Childhood replays. Body hallucinations. Abstractions. Death and rebirth experiences. A woman in a power suit just a few steps from him, with her back to the wall, whose face he was sure he’d seen before, had gone to a super-vividly realized heaven, had met her own personal God. She still had her eyes closed, was still holding on to that memory of towering Archangels with their flaming swords and the Lord on his throne too bright to see and the glowing cubic city of New Jerusalem that she’d been carried up to.

Heaven seemed pretty damn cool, Rangan had to admit.

There were dozens of paramedics down here now, going from person to person, checking pulse and heart rate, administering tests. Rangan saw men and women in suits point at him. He saw the paramedics give out pills more than once to people who were highly agitated.

Sedatives.

There were dozens of Capitol Police down here now too. Rangan let his eyes drift over them. How long before they hauled him away? Not long, he figured.

A man in a suit lumbered down the hallway, stumbling through people, a tall man, in his fifties, maybe, a familiar face, he came straight up to Rangan and Rangan shied back.

Stan Kim came to his feet beside Rangan, a little unsteady.

“Help me!” the new man said, his eyes wild, his face leaning in way too close to Rangan’s. “I can’t have this in my head. Get it out of me!”

Rangan held up his hands, let the music fade.

“OK,” he said. “You can purge it. I’ll show you how.”

Rangan opened his thoughts, reached out to the man, showed him how to bring up a command prompt inside Nexus OS, felt the man get it, felt the command prompt come up.

Now, [nexus purge], Rangan sent.

Then he saw the message flash across the man’s mind.

ACCESS DENIED.

Oh shit.

This wasn’t the same version as the standard Nexus. This wasn’t the same as the version that had gone out to millions of people with the chemreactor hack. Those were normal. Those could be purged.

But the one they’d dosed the Capitol with…

The man’s eyes went wild. His hands went up and he lunged forward, grabbing Rangan around the throat, slamming him against the wall.

Rangan gurgled in surprise. He felt shock rise up from minds all around.

“Foster!” Stan Kim yelled.

“He’s stuck this in our brains!” the man strangling Rangan yelled. “We can’t get it out!”

Then the woman Rangan had seen, the one who’d gone to heaven, was on her feet, next to him.

Her hand smacked the man strangling Rangan across the face, hard.

And suddenly Rangan was free, gasping, hands rising to his throat.