Chicago flashed through Kade’s mind, a glimpse of wires and then chaos. The news videos of broken bodies strewn about, men and women whose lives had been ended abruptly.
Powers that even now were being abused.
Kade opened his mouth, reached for some answer, some way to say that he still believed in people, still believed they’d use this mostly for good, despite the abuses.
But the abbot had already turned, walking briskly away, and Kade had to rush to catch up to him.
“Here.” Thich Quang An opened a door, gestured Kade inside before him. “There is something within, for you.”
Kade bowed, and entered.
Then something hard jammed itself into Kade’s belly and he gasped. Someone grabbed him from behind and slapped heavy tape over his mouth. He thrashed and tried to kick out but men held him. Then everything went black as they brought something down over his head.
[activate: bruce_lee full_auto]
His body dropped low and twisted and for an instant the hands on him were gone.
[Bruce_Lee: Escape Succeeded!]
He felt his leg lash out and make contact with a soft target.
[Bruce_Lee: Attack Succeeded!]
Someone groaned. Kade’s body twisted again and he felt something whoosh by him.
[Bruce_Lee: You Dodged One!]
Then he felt the heat of a body nearby and his fist lashed out and–
[Bruce_Lee: Attack Succeeded!]
Oh my fucking God
pain lanced up his right hand as soft, not-yet-fully-healed bone and raw nerve made contact with something much harder. He curled over, cradling his throbbing hand as the pain brought tears to his eyes. Then something hit him in the head, hard, and the world spun.
[Bruce_Lee: Dodge Failed L]
Kade came to slowly. They were carrying him by his ankles and armpits. He could see nothing through whatever was over his head, but something told him he was outdoors again. He tried to yell but he was still groggy, and managed only a weak grunt. The tape around his mouth stifled it.
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.
Then he heard someone screaming in Vietnamese and he saw through a dozen eyes as the abbot rushed into the circle. The words were foreign but the meaning came across.
What are you doing! You said no monks would be hurt!
A bounty hunter turned and shot him in the belly. Thich Quang An crumpled forward in pain.
The assembled monks moved as one, now, gelling into a single organism with a single intent, to pull Kade away from these men. The assemblage pushed forward with a hundred limbs and one mind and Kade could see what was about to happen and it wouldn’t, it couldn’t. No more of these men would die for him.
He rallied himself, focused, multicast his thoughts to the monks around him, opened up their minds with the backdoor…
…and the conjoined will of the monks pressed down on his, blocking him with iron force from sending the passcode, from forcing them to abandon him.
A bullet took a monk in the arm, spinning him around. Another punched through a young monk’s chest. The pain echoed through Kade.
Then Feng was among them, his mind cool and hard. Time slowed for Kade as Feng’s combat trance touched his own mind, stretching out every instant into a long, deadly span.
The augmented bounty hunters moved like molasses, lumbering, overly muscled brutes turning in slow motion. The flight paths of unfired bullets shone in Feng’s thoughts, brilliant lines of red light extending from the muzzles of their guns. The bounty hunters’ bodies cast echoes of potential blows and kicks that Feng foresaw.
Feng moved like a dancer, calm and graceful. He leapt over the plane of fire of a swinging pistol, rolled under another as he converged on the first bounty hunter. His mind was utterly absorbed. This was samadhi. This was meditation. Guns exploded and the bullets were living things in Feng’s mental map, ripping out of the muzzles, shockwaves rippling visibly through the air, flinging themselves at the spots Feng had occupied fractions of a second ago.
Then Feng reached the first bounty hunter, and the man went down with his neck snapped.
A stray bullet punched into a monk’s thigh then, and the echoing pain of it snapped Kade out of the trance of Feng’s mind, back into real time. And just like that, the bounty hunters were dead, all of them, the last bodies toppling to the courtyard at Feng’s feet as Kade watched through others’ eyes. Kade lay on the ground where they’d dropped him, as Feng pulled the tape off of him, cut through the bonds on his limbs.
Kade pushed himself to his feet with his good hand, his body shaking.
There were bodies around him. A monk was whimpering. He could feel pain radiating from half-a-dozen minds. At least three were dead. Another was dying even now, the boy’s mind falling apart into a thousand little pieces and then into nothing at all. Someone sobbed.
The pain and loss hit Kade full force. His sight dimmed. His legs felt weak, and he fell back to one knee.
“No safe place for you,” said the abbot, and coughed. Kade turned to look. The man had blood across his robes, blood coming out of his month. Pain and disgust wafted off of him. “I’m not the only one,” the man said weakly. “You… not a Buddha. An abomination. Maya. Illusion.”