Then he felt other minds. Three of them. A handful. A dozen. Monks closing in. They were all around him. Their minds were linked and that linkage encompassed him, showing him what they saw, a dizzying image of himself, black bag over his head, carried by hugely muscled Asian men while three more armed with guns and knives moved with them.

Two dozen monks. They moved to block the way of the bounty hunters, minds serene, trembling a bit, but calm and determined. A faint breeze ruffled their orange robes. Their faces were still, their mouths set in impassive lines. Not a sound came from them but the rustling of their robes and the soft shuffle of their sandaled feet.

Kade tried to speak. He tried to reach out to them with his thoughts, but the world still spun.

Then he saw the gun come up.

No.

He focused, forced himself to concentrate.

Run… He tried to shout it with his mind. It came out as a whimper instead.

A bounty hunter put the muzzle of his pistol between the eyes of a monk. And Kade recognized him… one of the monks who’d opened the gate, who’d reached out to touch him… Just a boy, just a boy.

Run!

The bounty hunter said something in Vietnamese, and Kade understood it through the minds of the monks.

“Get out of my way or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“You cannot have him,” the young monk replied. And Kade saw it from the monk’s perspective, saw the ugly brute of a bounty hunter, the shaved head, the tattoos across his scalp, the bulging muscles, the dark hole in the muzzle of the huge gun, the man’s thick finger on the trigger. He felt it all from the young monk’s perspective, felt his heart beating in his chest, felt the boy’s terror and his awe of Kade and his utter resignation to this moment.

“Like hell I can’t,” the bounty hunter said.

His gun boomed and the bullet burst open the boy’s skull and exploded Kade’s world. The shock of it sent Kade’s mind reeling, then rippled through all the other monks. Dimly through the chaos he felt some of them reflexively bring their hands up, their minds recoiling. One leaned over to vomit, and the pain and fear and chaos and loss threatened to overwhelm them all. These weren’t Ananda’s long trained monks. These were just boys!

The second shot took another monk in the gut. Kade felt the bullet burst his own midsection open and the pain tore through the cobwebs in his mind.

The monks almost broke. Instead he felt their minds harden, felt them come together. Determined monks moved to drag away their fallen comrades and the collective mass pressed in on the bounty hunters. Three dozen monks. Four dozen monks.