Ramez Naam - Nexus

Sam stopped speaking. The scene played out for Kade in his mind. I hate you , she'd whispered to the prophet. He'd coughed up blood and she'd shot him again, in the chest, and he'd flopped backwards. And then there had been more gunfire, from everywhere. The FBI had heard the shots, taken it as their cue to enter. The defenders at the gate were firing back with shotguns, rifles, pistols. People were screaming. More gunshots, coming closer. More screams.

And then, the first explosion. It took the south wing of the ranch down completely, sent a fireball up into the night sky. The rest of the building was on fire. Smoke was everywhere. Sam struggled free of the fat guard on top of her. The prophet was moaning, still barely moving. She stood above him, took careful aim, fired into his head again and again.

The smoke was too thick. She was coughing. She couldn't breathe. She put part of her dress over her mouth. It didn't help. She started to get dizzy, confused. She fell down to her knees. She didn't mind dying. It was better than staying alive through this. She only hoped Ana was OK.

She was welcoming death when she heard the voice. Loud. Male. Still full of life, but not one of the disciples. A voice she didn't know.

"IS THERE ANYBODY IN HERE?"

She tried to stand. Fell. Coughed. Waved her hand. And then she was in someone's arms. A man. He was wearing a vest. It said FBI – BIOTERROR. He had Asian features.

"It's going to be OK!" he yelled over the din of fire and explosions and gunshots.

He carried her into the hallway. Fire was spreading. A timber fell from the ceiling to their right. He ran the other way. There was a picture window there. They were on the third floor.

"CLOSE YOUR EYES!" he yelled.

And then he'd run at the window, twisted at the last moment, broken through it with his shoulder, shielding her from the glass with his body, and propelled them out into the night.

"Nakamura," Kade said.

Sam nodded, tears streaming down her face. She felt… lighter. Like she'd released something, heavy and pressing.

"Your sister?" Kade asked.

Sam shook her head. There had been one hundred and nineteen people in total at the Yucca Grove ranch. Twenty-eight had survived, including Sam. Most of the disciples had been killed by gunfire or the explosives. The others had taken their guns to their own heads. Neither Sam's parents nor her sister Ana were among the survivors.

"Oh, Sam. I am so so so sorry." He put all the compassion he had into it, all the support and care and understanding he was capable of.

Sam locked her eyes with his. "Kade, I wish my sister were still alive. But I would rather have her dead than living through what was coming for her." She meant it, he saw. Meant it fiercely.

"I'm so sorry for everything you went through, Sam. I can't imagine… No one should go through that. No kid. I can see why you joined the ERD." She'd wanted to hurt them, the bad men. Find them and hurt them or catch them or kill them. Make it so they couldn't hurt anyone ever again. She'd wanted to be strong. Strong enough that no one could ever hurt her or those she cared about again.

He tried to comfort her. Tried to give her support.

"Kade, Kade, you don't understand," Sam said.

"What?"

"That's the past, Kade. I can't go back. I've let it control me for way too long. I can let go now."

He was confused.

"I met the most amazing little girl tonight, Kade. She showed me. She helped me face it. I've just been nibbling off bits of it at a time. I can face it now. It's over. I'm not that little girl anymore. I did the best I could. I forgive myself."

He could feel it in her. The sorrow was still there, but it didn't weigh her down. She felt light as a feather. She felt free.

"That girl, Kade, oh my god. She's like you are. Like we are." Sam said it wondrously, as if she was realizing it for the first time. "The Nexus is in her always. She was born that way. It's amazing. I have a sister again."

She collapsed against his chest, laughing as she cried, her breath coming fast. Eventually the laughter faded, and she lay against him, breathing in and out, weeping silent tears, tears of release, tears of closure, tears of transition, tears of gratitude. She walked through her life again, marveled at it, thanked her young self for her courage and her steadfastness, forgave that young Sam for all the things she'd once held against her, said goodbye to her parents and her first sister and all the things she'd known so long ago. She lay with her head against his chest and he stroked her hair, sent her compassion, sent her warmth and comfort. She fell asleep against him and still he lay there. He could feel the party slowly dwindling out in the living room. It felt so good here. It felt so right. Kade stroked Sam's hair, felt the bittersweet goodbyes of her dreams, felt her chest fall and rise in time with his, and eventually sleep took him as well.

There was silence in the C&C aboard the Boca Raton . She'd dismissed every message instructing her to desist, to restore her cover. They'd stopped trying eventually. They'd just listened.

The three of them had each known tiny bits of Sam's background. None of them had heard all of it before. It was a relief when she stopped talking. It was a relief when sleep took her. No one spoke for long minutes.

"Make sure the fireteams are on alert," Nichols finally said. "Let's let Blackbird get a little shut-eye."

Wats sat cross-legged one floor above Kade and Cataranes. His weapons were at his sides. Chameleonware made his still form difficult to pick out from his surroundings. A heat capacitor attached to his combat suit slowly siphoned off the excess warmth his body produced, keeping him from boiling in the infrared blocking garment. The data fob felt hard and cool against his chest.

His radio had picked up bursts of encrypted chatter twice tonight. The commandos were near. He wasn't sure where, but they were near.

It was a relief to feel the party below drift towards sleep. His Nexus nodes were in strictly receive-only mode. It was hard to get a good Nexus connection that way. Two-way feedback was necessary to synchronize minds, to get a clear transfer of concepts.

But he'd caught enough. The night had affected him powerfully. He was a part of the Buddha too. He was the dark mirror of a bodhisattva in his own way. He was the opposite of the enlightened teacher. He was one who would risk rebirth in darkness and ignorance, ever further from nirvana, so that others might have their chance at peace and enlightenment.

He wondered if, in a past life, Cataranes had been one of those as well.

36

COMPANY

Kade dreamed Sam's memories. He was fourteen, wrapped in a blanket by the man who'd jumped with him from a thirdfloor window, watching the hell he'd lived in for the last six years burn to the ground. He was a young teen, growing up in a strange new world. He'd known exactly what he wanted to be, from the moment his old life had ended. He wanted to be one of the ones to fight the bad guys, to save the little girls from the fires.

He was eighteen, at the academy for the newly created ERD, his mentor a man named Nakamura, the very same agent who'd carried him out of the burning wreck of the ranch; his instructors teaching him to fight, to think, to survive. He was twenty-one, the year he'd spent in a seemingly endless round of surgeries and gene therapies, turning him into a weapon against evil. He was twenty-three, alone on the shores of the Caspian, the lone survivor of a mission that had destroyed a bioterror lab, but at huge cost to his team… He was twenty-seven, assigned suddenly to infiltrate a Nexus ring in San Francisco… He was in Bangkok. He'd met a girl. An amazing, magical little girl…