After a little more persuasion, they did.

An hour later she was three miles from the village, going uphill, cutting across terraced rice paddies with their genetically hacked crop, everything she owned in the pack on her back. A bare sliver of moon glinted off the puddles in the paddies. Predawn mist pooled in the lowlands below her.

Baby-stealers, the men she’d questioned had called the people from orphanage. Mae mot. Witch doctors. Sorcerers.

Superstitions still ran deep, here in the remote villages of the South.

Three hours and a dozen miles later, the sky was brightening in the east, and she’d found her goal. It was on a hilltop, what looked to be a cluster of buildings, surrounded by a rock wall topped with an electrified fence. The main gate was wood reinforced with steel.

Easy enough to get in. But her goal wasn’t an assault. It was, what? Redemption? New purpose? Family?

It was to find other children like Mai.

Sam took off her pack, sat herself down in front of the gate, with her legs crossed, and opened her floodgates, letting the Nexus nodes in her brain project her thoughts outward.

Then she began to meditate. She started with anapana, the meditation of the breath, then worked to vipassana, meditation of awareness of the body. Her mind stilled, she turned at last to the three thousand year-old practice called metta, the meditation of loving-kindness. She held her mind as calm and clear as the surface of an untouched pool of water.

Then she let the compassion rise out of her, from a deep and bottomless well. She directed the compassion outwards. At her dead sister, innocent until the end. At her dead parents, who’d done the best they could. At Nakamura, who’d saved her young life at age fourteen, and become her mentor, the closest thing in her life to a father. At the colleagues she’d left behind at the ERD. At poor little Mai, who’d helped her so much in such a short time, and who was dead because of her. At all the men and women who’d died that night in Bangkok.

She directed her loving-kindness at the ones she’d killed herself. At Wats, who’d saved her life twice in the span of five minutes, and given his own in exchange. At Kade, who’d built the thing in her mind that she’d loathed and that she now so loved. At Feng and Shu who’d saved them, as inscrutable as they were. At Ananda who’d taken them in and taught her so much. At Vipada and the monks who’d put their lives on the line to defend her and Kade. At poor Warren Becker, who’d deserved better than the death that had assured his silence.