[rangan]Please. I don’t even have to go. Don’t worry about me. Get at least get one of the kids out instead.
Holtzmann grabbed his slate out of Rangan’s hands, stood up.
[holtzmann]I’ll think about it.
[rangan]Wait, wait. What about Ilya? Kade? Wats?
Holtzmann stared at Shankari. And suddenly he felt so tired, so very tired of all of this.
[holtzmann]Dead. Hunted. Dead.
Shankari dropped his head into his cuffed hands as Holtzmann turned and strode from the room.
Holtzmann sat in the bathroom stall, the lid down over the toilet, fully clothed, and wept. He wept in frustration. He needed to get Rangan out. He had to do it. His whole body was wracked with the need, his palms sweating, his breath coming fast, his skin tingling. Rangan had to be free!
He could do it. He could go into his lab, load up a syringe with a cocktail of tramadol and dapoxetine. That would do the trick. One injection, and a few minutes later, Rangan would be seizing hard, would need to be taken somewhere for treatment.
Yet Rangan was right. Those children… One by one, they’d be tortured. They’d become guinea pigs for new cures. Some would die in the process. Some would survive to be shipped off to concentration camps, or to be set free, scarred by the loss of Nexus.
Holtzmann clenched his fists, pressed them against his head. He wanted to scream with the force of the struggle inside him. Gaaaaah!
I’ve never been brave, he told himself. Always been a coward. Goddamn it! I want to do something right for once.
He had to try. Had to try to get Rangan and these children out at the same time.
And the other children? The children being studied in Virginia? In Texas? In California?
Dear God, he told himself, I can only do so much at once!
He would save these children here, the ones under his own direct care, if he could. The rest would have to wait.
Holtzmann took the car, left campus, went to a coffee shop in the DC slum that surrounded the sprawling Homeland Security complex in Anacostia. There he linked himself to the net, tunneled in through an anonymizer, connected to the Nexus board, and fired off a message.
[Change of plans. A dozen more friends to get out. Young ones. You get the rest of the files after.]
And then he went back to the office, and stumbled his way through another day of hypocrisy.
Rangan sat in his cell, shaking.
Did I just do that? he wondered. Did I just say no to getting out of here?
Yeah. I did.
He’d spent his whole life as a taker. He’d spent his whole life as a boy. But he didn’t have to end it that way.
Those kids… they needed out of here. They deserved their freedom more than he did.
It was time to do what was right. It was time to do something for someone else for a change. It was time to be a man.
Sweet fucking Jesus, Rangan thought. I hope it works.
62
UP THE COAST
Wednesday October 31st
Sam pushed through hard seas Wednesday night. Four days she’d been traveling now, moving the little stealthed boat at night, hiding during the brutally hot days. Her shoulder, tended with a continuous supply of fresh bandages, antibiotic cream, and abundant food, was healing.
The weather had started calm, but grown rougher each day as she moved further north. Tonight was the worst. The waves tossed her little boat around. She secured the weapons and extra fuel and food and water and surveillance gear as best she could, but inevitably they crashed from side to side as well. The wind died down around midnight, and she made great time after that.
She found a small, unlit island before dawn, settled into a narrow cove for the day. She’d made seventy miles that night. She was now just thirty miles from Apyar Kyun.
Sam ate all she could, cleaned her shoulder wound, then forced herself to sleep. Slumber came slowly, and when it came, she dreamt of Sarai, of Jake, of death.
Sam woke gasping, had to jam her own hand into her mouth to silence herself. It was only noon. There would be no more sleep.
She readied her gear instead, stripping it down, cleaning it, assembling it, testing it. Rinse. Repeat.
The sun dropped lower in the sky. It was Thursday afternoon now. She could reach Apyar Kyun before midnight, spend this night studying the island, scanning it with the high-powered scope and infrared imagers Lo Prang’s men had provided, find a way to get her kids back.
Sam steered her little smuggler’s boat out of the cove, out into the water. It was rougher away from the island she’d spent the day at, but the engines kept her moving forward. The waves buffeted her, rocked her, but she endured.
She fought the wind and waves for four hours, pushed within ten miles of Apyar Kyun. The winds died, and Sam quietly rejoiced, and progress got easier. She was just a mile from Apyar Kyun, a few hundred yards past a final tiny unnamed island, when the storm came back with a vengeance.
The big wave hit her from the port side, from out in the deeps, and battered the little boat to the side. The force of the blow snapped an anchor point, loosing a strap. Gear she’d secured came free. A pile of water jugs toppled to the bottom of the boat. More anchor points failed. A stack of food collapsed. A box of ammunition flew across the cabin and struck the far side.
The boat tilted precariously, up at thirty degrees, forty-five degrees, sixty degrees. Sam threw herself at the rising side, grabbed a strut, hauled her body in to counterweight the boat. It teetered on the edge of capsizing then fell back into place with a shuddering crash into the next trough.
Sam grabbed for the controls, scrambled to turn the boat into the next wave. She got the nose around as the next wave hit her hard, sending the loose gear flying. Something hard and metal struck her in the head.
This was crazy. She had to take shelter until this passed. She fought to turn the boat between deadly waves, get its prow pointed back at the tiny island she’d just gone by.
The boat shuddered as she steered. There was a beach ahead. Three hundred yards. A gentle slope, with tall palms above it, their leaves crazily shaking in the wind. Two hundred yards. She pushed her thrusters forward towards it. One hundred yards.
And then a massive wave struck her boat from behind, lifted her up, and threw her forward at the island. The beach surged forward at her. Sam had time to catch her breath. And then her boat struck the beach at full force.
63
DECISIONS
Thursday November 1st
Kade collapsed in the bed, utterly exhausted from the work of assimilating so much of Shiva’s mind at once. Sleep took him immediately. His dreams were of chaos, of a world falling apart, of a group mind that could knit the world back together, of the heavy mantle of responsibility falling across his shoulders that he could, that he should, that he must accept.
He woke in twilight. A final memory played through his mind. Bihar. The children, burned to death in the orphanage. Thirty-five of them. Thirty-five whose names he could recount, whose faces he could recall. Thirty-five children murdered because they were different, because they were special. The horrors that ignorance could lead men to commit.
And the punishment he’d dealt out in response. The way the judge had screamed as Shiva’s men drove the nails into his wrists, pinning him to the crude cross. The anguish on all the killers’ faces as the flames rose higher. The sense of power he’d felt, of righteousness as he punished these monsters for what they’d done.