This was crazy. She had to take shelter until this passed. She fought to turn the boat between deadly waves, get its prow pointed back at the tiny island she’d just gone by.

The boat shuddered as she steered. There was a beach ahead. Three hundred yards. A gentle slope, with tall palms above it, their leaves crazily shaking in the wind. Two hundred yards. She pushed her thrusters forward towards it. One hundred yards.

And then a massive wave struck her boat from behind, lifted her up, and threw her forward at the island. The beach surged forward at her. Sam had time to catch her breath. And then her boat struck the beach at full force.

Chapter 63: Decisions

63

DECISIONS

Thursday November 1st

Kade collapsed in the bed, utterly exhausted from the work of assimilating so much of Shiva’s mind at once. Sleep took him immediately. His dreams were of chaos, of a world falling apart, of a group mind that could knit the world back together, of the heavy mantle of responsibility falling across his shoulders that he could, that he should, that he must accept.

He woke in twilight. A final memory played through his mind. Bihar. The children, burned to death in the orphanage. Thirty-five of them. Thirty-five whose names he could recount, whose faces he could recall. Thirty-five children murdered because they were different, because they were special. The horrors that ignorance could lead men to commit.

And the punishment he’d dealt out in response. The way the judge had screamed as Shiva’s men drove the nails into his wrists, pinning him to the crude cross. The anguish on all the killers’ faces as the flames rose higher. The sense of power he’d felt, of righteousness as he punished these monsters for what they’d done.

Kade shuddered with the echo of it. He knew that power. He knew that righteousness. To punish the guilty. To rid the world of monsters. He’d felt it when he’d neutered that bastard Bogdan in Croatia, when he’d stopped that sex slaver in Nairobi, when he’d squeezed his mental fist around Holtzmann’s brainstem…

He fell to his knees, gasping. He wanted that power. He craved it. He’d felt most alive these past few months when he’d let it course through him, when he’d used his back doors to cripple the bastards who used Nexus to harm others.

It would be so satisfying to use that back door for more, to reach out and fix the world, fix the problems that people couldn’t seem to solve on their own. Oh yes. It would feel so damn good.