Feng slipped back out into the hall, a ghost in his chameleonware, as silent as death. He leveled his assault rifle at the four men, and pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked.

SAFETY LOCKED – FIRE AUTHORIZATION DENIED flashed across his vision.

Fuck!

The security men heard the click, turned, guns rising. They moved in slow motion to Feng’s eyes, turning like molasses, their eyes widening in dawning awareness, fingers tightening over triggers.

Feng threw himself forward, into a roll that propelled him at their feet. Gunfire burst from muzzles as dozens of rounds filled the air. Feng’s accelerated senses brought him each boom and pop as a discrete event. His mind filled with pressure waves and firing solutions and the neon red paths of bullets zipping through the space he’d just occupied.

Then he was up, out of the roll, a man-shaped blur moving faster than they could imagine.

Kade found Sam’s mind hard and sealed off from him. So he did what he had to. Activate the back door. Send the passcode.

And then he was in. He could feel her mind, feel the homicidal thoughts Shiva was forcing on her, feel her horror at what was happening.

Then Kade threw his mind against Shiva’s, tried to force the other man’s mind out of Sam’s. Shiva counter-attacked, jammed his will hard against Kade’s. They wrestled over her, mind against mind.

Kade felt Sam scream as their struggles tore at her, as her brain was assaulted by conflicting signals from inside itself, from Shiva, from Kade. Distantly he felt her fall to her knees, her head throbbing, pain and confusion and despair like she’d never known tearing at her…

Brute force was futile. Kade dropped to a lower layer, fired random data at Nexus nodes in Sam’s brain that Shiva controlled, hoping to confuse them. He felt Shiva reinforce them, bolstering the signal from his own brain.

Kade switched strategies again, pulled up a network connection listing, fired a kill command at Shiva’s connection to Sam’s mind, felt Shiva clone the connection before the first one died. Then Shiva counter-attacked again, hopping from Sam’s mind to Kade’s, trying to open the back door, send the passcode to crack into Kade’s mind.

And then Kade had him. For there was no back door in his own mind.

He ignored Shiva’s attack, dropped the struggle for Sam’s body, felt her topple over in pain as he did, and grabbed control of Nexus nodes in her brain as a proxy instead, using them to hop from Sam’s mind to Shiva’s.

The second back door! There were three, and Shiva only knew of one!

He activated the second one now, entered the second passcode, to break into Shiva’s mind…

Then Shiva dropped the connection, severed it before Kade could get inside the man’s head. And he was alone with Sam in her mind.