The smattering of people became a milling, then a dense throng, all trying to get in to where the lights were, where the power was back, where they could find warmth and shelter. The jeep ahead shone its spotlight into the crowd. An amplified voice ordered them to make way. Bedraggled men reached out, put their wet filthy hands on the jeep. A thud sounded next to Chen, and he turned to see a face pressed against the glass of his window, a man, wild eyed, one tooth missing, yelling angrily. Fists rained down on the car. Chen shrank away in fear, then turned in time to see a metal pipe crash into the window on the other side. It bounced off the hardened glass, then came back, again, and again.

He could hear the loudspeaker proclaiming again that the crowd must disperse. He felt his own vehicle rocking now, as the mob grabbed hold of it. He looked towards his marine driver. Their eyes met in the mirror and Chen saw fear. He felt the vehicle rock harder, the wheels on the left side coming up off the street, and he frantically grasped for something to hold onto.

ZZZZZZZZZZT!

An awful sound at insane volume filled his ears, his teeth, his bones, his bowels. A sonic weapon. An anti-crowd device.

ZZZZZZZZZZT!

It came again and Chen clenched around an ache that it brought to his intestines. The wheels of the car slammed back down onto the ground with a jerk. Chen looked out the window in time to see a gloved armored hand grab the man with the missing tooth by the hair, slam his face against the window, crunching the man’s nose, then toss him aside, a smear of blood marking the place he’d struck.

Then the car was jerking forward, the filthy crowd fleeing around them. Ahead a military barricade loomed topped by soldiers with vicious-looking weapons all aimed at the mob, and then Chen saw a gate, and a moment later they were through it, and he breathed a sigh of relief as they rolled into the empty, well-lit streets between the soaring, well-lit skyscrapers of Lujiazui.

Chen was in the elevator, minutes later, recovered now from the assault of the sonic weapon that had dispersed the crowd. He had just punched in the code for his apartment when Ling’s tutor called.

The woman was in hysterics, babbling and tripping over herself, making no sense at first. Hiding in this building, she said. Nowhere else to go. Then more nonsense, about Ling, about the outage, about Shanghai. Babbling. Nonsense.

Then it clicked. Suddenly what the tutor was saying made perfect sense. And Chen understood exactly what had happened last night, and who had been behind it.

The elevator doors opened onto his magnificent flat, and there, before him, was his abomination of a daughter.