Rangan turned. Levi was there in the corner of the room, smiling at them.

“But…” Rangan started. “You don’t…”

“Have Nexus?” Levi replied.

Rangan nodded.

“I purge it and redose,” Levi said. “Ministers get too much attention to have it all the time.

“Rangan,” Levi went on, “there’s something we’d like you to help us with.”

Rangan nodded. “Anything.”

“We help sneak Nexus children and parents down the line, to others who can get them out of the country,” Levi said. “But we want to do more, to end the persecution of these children. And to do that… we want to show people what’s going on.”

“We want to record what you’ve seen,” Abigail said. “What you’ve been through.”

Rangan went silent. There was so much he wanted to forget. The torture, the drugs, the mind games where he’d thought he was about to die. The boys, and what he’d seen in their memories, what they’d been through…

He swallowed hard, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s show ’em.”

Levi brought him coffee while Abigail set up the equipment. The recorder was an innocuous device, just a phone-sized black rectangle plugged into a terminal. Abigail did something to shield the baby’s mind, and the baby faded in Rangan’s senses.

It took hours. The storm battered the little church as they recorded, sent a keen wailing sound through the building.

Rangan showed them all of it. The bust of the party at Simonyi field. The blackmail. Being threatened with prison for them and dozens of their friends if they didn’t cooperate, if they didn’t give the feds Nexus 5, if Kade didn’t go to Bangkok to spy for them. And later, after something had gone wrong on that mission, jackbooted thugs kicking down the door of his apartment, pointing their guns at him. The restraints and interrogation. The lectures where they told him he had no rights, that they could kill him and no one would care, no one would know. The electrical shocks. The waterboarding. The twisted mind games.

The day they broke him. They day he gave up, and gave them what they wanted.

And the boys’ memories. Bobby watching his dad get shot and killed. Tim being torn out of his mother’s hands. Alfonso being clubbed across the face when he tried to bite one of them. More. The beatings. The experiments. Bobby’s last session, the one where they’d tried to force the Nexus out of him.

And the faces. Every face he’d seen in custody. Every face the boys had shared with him, the one who’d tortured Bobby, the ones who’d beaten them, stuck needles into them.