Sarai stumbled over something and fell to her knees in pain. Tears came to her eyes and she feared she’d lost it, but Kit and Mali were holding them together. And then Ying and Tada were with them. And then Sunisa and Kwan. They breathed as one and they were one. The walls of their minds dropped and they enmeshed one another and everything became so very clear. The guards. Five of them. Balls of static. Sam, taken by Shiva.

Kade. Kade who wasn’t like them but who understood, who’d built the Nexus that was in Sam’s mind, in Jake’s.

Kade was the answer.

They reached out to him and then he was with them, enmeshed with them.

He showed them what to do and their minds reached out to the soldiers herding them.

The static repelled them, pushed their minds away. Then they thought of Sam and they breathed in, breathed out, and focused their thoughts – and they cut through that static all around them, and sent the back door, the passcode, and the sleep center stimulus – ­and the men were falling, falling, until all of them were still.

Shiva reached out to his men as soon as the American started firing on her compatriots.

Secure the children and Lane, he sent them. There are only three intruders. All on the western side of the house. The woman is mine now.

Then he lifted his wrist microphone to his mouth, repeated the instructions for those who’d activated their Nexus jammers.

He felt his men jump to do his bidding. Soldiers reversed course, turned from the marina and other sites back towards the house, headed towards the true invaders.

Feng rolled forward at Sam’s feet as she turned the gun on him. Time slowed to a crawl as he touched the stone path with one shoulder, his back, and then his feet. The muffled staccato of a silenced burst of three boomed in his ears as she pulled the trigger and shots ripped through the air above him.

He came up inside her reach, his hands on her gun, one squeezing the latch to disconnect it from the strap around her shoulders, even as he spun hard, ripping it out of her hands as he whirled away.

“What you doing?” he yelled.

She was drawing her pistol already. She was blazing fast but he was faster. He swung the rifle he’d taken from her at her hand like a bat, made contact, sent the pistol sailing out into the night after Nakamura.