The familiar-looking woman stared at the man who’d been strangling Rangan, saying nothing. And Rangan could feel in her mind who she was now.

Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security.

Christ.

“This man is a terrorist!” Foster said.

“You’re confused, Senator Foster,” Engels said. “It’s probably the drugs.”

She turned to Rangan. “It’s time you left.”

129
Final Sacrifice

Tuesday 2041.01.21

Feng struggled back to his feet, panting. He could feel the minds everywhere, the connection, like the things he’d felt with the monks, the things he’d felt on the dance floor, but so much bigger.

Su-Yong was sane again. Or closer

Ling. Ling was crumpled, but breathing.

Kade. Oh no, Kade.

Then Su-Yong spoke.

“Nuclear attack,” her loudspeakers said. “Shanghai is about to be vaporized.”

He felt it come into his mind, the knowledge of what was coming, the two ICBMs, minutes away from their launch deadlines, cut off entirely from the net.

Ten million tons of TNT equivalent.

Five hundred Hiroshimas.

Feng saw the first explosion through Su-Yong’s mind.

The first fireball would rip out of the night sky, blazing from nothing to a temperature of more than fifty million degrees Celsius.

In the first hundredth of a second it would expand to more than two kilometers across, instantly vaporizing cars, trees, people, buildings.

The massive flash of heat would fry everything it touched for tens of kilometers around, sending temperatures soaring by hundreds of degrees, setting skin and grass and wood and even sometimes metal on fire.

The pressure wave would strike Shanghai in all directions with winds of nearly a thousand kilometers per hour, ripping apart buildings, destroying concrete and steel and carbon fiber, ripping through the skyscrapers of the Pudong, shredding the lower apartment towers that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.

The sudden wind would fan the flames, turn them into a conflagration, a thousand-degree-Celsius firestorm that would consume everything not already destroyed for almost twenty kilometers in every direction.

Forty million people would die.

Then the world would react.

Then the radioactive fallout would spread on the wind.

Feng gasped.

“You have to stop it!”

Su-Yong spoke again through the loudspeakers, her voice resigned.

“You must leave now,” she said. “And I must die.”

“What?” he heard Sam say.

Stop the missiles, Su-Yong! Feng sent her.

From Kade he felt only resignation.

“The odds of failure are unacceptably high,” Su-Yong’s voice said. “There are so many ways I could stop the attack. But each of them has a chance of failure. Even one percent is too high.”

NO! Feng yelled. I’ll take the chance!