Hayes plotted it on the map. The bounty hunters were well organized. They’d learned from their last attempt to capture Lane. They were placing teams of snipers on the rooftops nearby, armed with heavy caliber weapons to take out Lane’s traveling companion, and tranquilizer weapons to incapacitate Lane. They were waiting for the two to emerge.

And Shiva had no way to warn the boy.

Kade danced hard now, his limbs moving to the beat, his eyes closed, his thoughts lost in his own head, until the sweat dripping from his body and the beat and the amplified ecstatic rhythms of Lotus’s mind and the hundred other minds that brushed his drove everything else away.

He heard Lotus’s song, he felt her thoughts, and felt them changing, reflecting the crowd, adapting to them. The music changed as well, flowed, responded. And he realized, they were making music, the crowd, the dancers, and Lotus was channeling it, absorbing the thoughts and emotions of the heaving throng, playing their mental music back to them.

The feedback loop closed and he wasn’t just Kade any more, wasn’t just a person. He was part of something more, a living breathing heaving organism, thousand-limbed, hundred-headed, a gestalt of all these minds and bodies.

Grief leached out from him, absorbed and processed and healed by the union. He moved his arms and legs and body to the beat, thrashed his head and sent his new braids flinging, somehow perfectly in sync with the bodies next to him. He was the beat. They were the beat. How could any of them step wrong?

This is samadhi, he realized. Meditation. Complete absorption.

The walls of his ego faded, dissipated, subsumed in this merger. He caught glimpses of a thousand thoughts, of here and now, of memories and visions. He saw the world like this, saw scientist merging into greater forms, people abandoning their distinctions.

There was no Kade, he saw. No self, no other. There was just this experience, this epicness he was part of, this surging, moving, billowing, exulting radiance of an organism that was the crowd, was the DJ, was the tiny fragment called Lotus. This was real, more real than he was, more real than any individual. This was the now.

He caught a flash of a thin layer of consciousness encircling the globe and it was his thought but now it was their thought and he knew it was real, not just a fantasy, and he reached out with this thoughts so he could touch those million other minds and pull all those bright points of light into this dance, this moment, this glorious luminous union…

Kade.

Something was tugging at this fragment, pulling at it.

Kade!

Feng. Feng should be here, dancing, merging, joining them!

Kade! You’re being watched!