The tires skidded just a bit as he found the maximum lateral acceleration they’d take. Every sound of every pebble, every twig, every bit of give and play of the tires on the road loomed loud in his mind. He absorbed the sounds, the feel of the wheel, the response of the jeep to his acceleration. The vehicle became an extension of his body. He felt Kade grab hold with his one good hand as a sharp turn pulled him out to the side. Feng spun the wheel back the other way as the road hairpinned, sending red dirt and loose scree flying. The smile came to his face of its own accord. He was alive, and free, and totally absorbed in their mad dash down this hillside road.

Fifteen minutes later, they were off a different side road, the jeep hidden in a copse of date palms. They’d heard no sirens, but Feng intended to take no chances.

“We wait here till dark,” he told Kade.

Kade nodded. “It’s the back door,” he said.

“What’s that?” Feng asked.

“I’ve been sitting here thinking about the bounty, Feng. Why do they want me so badly? A ten million dollar bounty? And alive? They’ve already convicted me in absentia. They could just kill me.”

Feng turned and looked at his friend. “So what’re you saying?”

Kade looked back. “They want the back door.”

Feng thought this over. “It’s a dangerous thing.”

Kade nodded. “It’s funny, we put it in there as a safeguard against the ERD, so that if they misused Nexus we could stop them…”

“And now they trying to get it from you,” Feng said.

“I could close it,” Kade replied. “I have the code. Another bot. A virus. It’d spread from person to person, close the back doors anywhere it found them.”

“So why don’t you?” Feng asked.

“Because there are people I have to stop, Feng.”

He felt thoughts flit through Kade’s mind. Images. A glimpse of wires and a flashing red light in that building in Chicago, before white noise and then – nothing.

Feng mulled that over. “Maybe somebody else deal with those things?” he told Kade. “Not just you?”

Kade shook his head. “I made those abuses possible. I have to stop them if I can.”

They sat in the car and waited for night. The palm trees shaded them from the worst of the sun, but it was still brutally hot.

The news brought word of a fire in a remote mountain monastery. Chu Mom Ray. No fatalities were reported.

“You saved my life back there,” Kade said.

Feng turned and grinned at him. “Not the first time.”

Kade laughed. “No. Not the first.” He shook his head. “At this rate, not the last either.”

Feng shrugged. “It’s what Su-Yong would want. Save the boy, she said.”

Kade nodded.