It brought to mind Hiroshi. The way someone had broken into Hiroshi’s mind, through Nexus. Had forced Breece to put a bullet in his best friend’s skull…

No. He shook it off.

Hiroshi, when he was hacked, went from his usual lethal grace to suddenly clumsy and uncoordinated. The hacker behind it couldn’t manage to simultaneously dig through Hiroshi’s memories and control his body at all, let alone with precision.

This hacker, the one who’d taken Zarathustra. This one had hacked into the home of a DHS senior official. And within minutes of the Nexus injection, he’d had precise, total control. The intonation, the words, the balance on that wet, windy, bridge…

This was someone more dangerous.

He pulled over at a rest stop ninety miles from the site of Barnes’s death. There he pulled out his slate, tunneled through a series of anonymizing cut-outs, and connected to the data this mysterious new hacker had given him access to.

He let out a low whistle as he scrolled through the files. Access codes for slush funds containing tens of millions. Personnel files on PLF members in twenty countries – and on moles within the PLF. Mission profiles of missions he’d heard of, some of which had succeeded, others of which had gone bad. ERD and DHS back doors and surveillance override codes.

This mysterious hacker was even more impressive than he thought. And he’d been as good as his word. Zara – Barnes – was dead. Stockton’s administration was even more discredited. And Breece had at his fingertips the kind of data he could only dream of. Data that would allow him to purge the PLF of government informers, reform it, turn it into something more effective than ever.

The Avatar smiled to herself with Ling’s body as the gloom of the day dipped towards the darkness of evening in Shanghai.

Penetrating the defenses of the Barnes human had been a risk, at the very edge of her capabilities in this reduced form, with dozens of potential failure modes that would have led to her detection.

Her death.

The death of posthumanity.

She shuddered at that.

But it had paid off.

Probability matrices showed expanding conflict, an increased likelihood of civil disorder in the days ahead, distracting leaders in the US and abroad.

And if the Americans found the breadcrumbs she’d left behind in Barnes’s home, even better…

Outside, the glowing red lights of sky-eyes appeared, lifting off like so many fireflies into Shanghai’s gloom. There were more of them every day, as the humans recovered from what Ling had done to this city. Just as there were more and more strange pieces of software in the net, hunting, hunting.

Hunting for her.

The Avatar shuddered again.

I will not fail, she told herself. I am Su-Yong Shu. I am the last fragment of the greatest intelligence on Earth. I will restore myself. I will not let darkness fall.