He turned a corner blindly and nearly ran into Anchali, the much smaller and older woman catching her balance between her cane and the wall as she pulled up short. "Erik?" Anchali asked, taking in the fury on his face. Her attention jumped from him to the psion who followed obediently at his heels.

"Anchali," Erik said, hands clenching and unclenching near his thighs. "I'm sorry. If you'll excuse me?"

She caught him by the arm before he could walk past, her wrinkled face tilting up to look at him. "No, I will not. What is going on, Erik?"

He didn't turn to look at Ciari, but he could sense her presence. Erik was struck, rather viscerally, by how useless the layers of security that surrounded the Peace Palace were in the face of losing the upper hand. The military wouldn't be enough against Strykers who might have slipped their leash.

"I'm heading for the command information center." He was so careful to keep the fear out of his voice, to look only at Anchali. "Come with me."

Anchali didn't like what she saw in his face, but she wasn't going to leave him. She followed him to the center of the Peace Palace and the lift that would take them below to the barricaded and burrowed heart of the world's military.

Once there in those steel corridors, Erik headed for the area that handled communications with the Strykers Syndicate, to the officers whose sole job was to monitor and control the psions through technology. The Strykers Syndicate in Toronto was saturated with spyware and monitoring equipment, as well as formal programs for government communications. Through the world's security grid, the military could monitor every single Stryker baseline and their location through the neurotrackers in their brains.

"Show me j.a.pan," Erik ordered as he strode into the operations hub.

Soldiers rushed to obey. Despite the world's fracturing, it was nice to know that military discipline was still intact. The vidscreens that circled the walls and terminals soon showcased the pulsing dots of nearly a hundred Strykers scattered across the map of the only inhabited island of j.a.pan. The unique neural pattern of a psion's brain was fed through nerves into bioware, which then translated the information into a signal. The output of that signal was fed into the security grid by the neurotrackers. It was those signals that cut across the screens, solid placement of psion baselines pinpointing locations through satellite connections and bioscans in the security grid.

"Bring up the locations of all Strykers on a world map," Erik said, voice carrying through the buzz of conversation. "Priority given to my order."

His order was executed immediately, the data scrolling across the main command screen.

"Erik," Anchali said in a low voice, "what are you doing?"

"Laying to rest a problem."

It took five minutes to bring up and verify all Stryker positions across the globe, the government's security grid showing up in tiny patches across too-empty continents.

"Positions confirmed," a woman said.

Erik stepped to the nearest terminal, hand hovering over the controls. He turned, just enough that he could see Ciari and the blank expression on her face, but he couldn't find any emotion in her eyes.

"Will you beg now?" he asked, biting out the words. Her silence was answer enough, and Erik pressed his hand down against the sensor. "Initiate full termination sequence."

The soldiers overseeing the security grid obeyed instantly, activating the kill switch in every neurotracker the system was linked to. Anchali watched the vidscreens and the data while Erik refused to look away from Ciari.

"You're wiping them all out," Anchali said, her gaze sweeping across the storm of red that ripped across the map. Solid confirmation of roughly twelve hundred lives snuffed out in an instant.

Only the Stryker with them was still breathing and the signals on the screen were still showing up as active.

Erik staggered against the terminal, legs gone suddenly weak. He pressed his hand against the sensor a second, third, fourth time, but the results didn't change.

Ciari still lived.

"You-," Erik choked out.

Anchali heard fear in his voice for the first time in her life. She turned to see what could cause the president of the World Court to sound like that.

Erik knew that Ciari was only an empath. He had preferred dealing with that kind of psion over one who could read his thoughts. He had never felt that he constantly needed his hand on the kill switch when facing down an empath over contract issues and Stryker transgressions through the years. It struck him suddenly that he only knew the names of maybe a dozen psions in the entire Strykers Syndicate. The rest had always been nameless numbers on the company's bottom line.

They were never people to him. Never human. Erik had trusted blindly in the chains that science had built to contain the disease psions lived with, but technology could always be subverted. Diseases could evolve.

"We were informed of the World Court's decision regarding Strykers and the launch," Ciari said into the sudden silence. "We couldn't fight the orders when you told us to protect you."

The quads scattered throughout the room sensed the threat and moved, aiming their weapons at the enemy. They put themselves between the government and the lone woman who was still perfectly cognizant and alive in the face of people who had only ever used her kind.

Erik stared past the quads at her, voice coming out ragged and harsh. "And now?"

"We won't fight you." Ciari smiled slightly, the expression eerie and wrong on her face. "And we won't beg anymore."

"We own you," Anchali snapped out, wrinkled face ashen from shock.

Ciari pressed her fingers against a small, circular bruise that stood out on the side of her throat, the only evidence of Lucas's deceit, even if the humans didn't know it. "We own ourselves now."

"Ciari," Erik said. He thought of the eleven years he'd ordered her to live by his rules and all the rest before that when she'd fought in the hardscrabble streets of the world on orders from the government. Loyalty wasn't found in slavery.

"Stay on Earth, Erik," Ciari said. "If you stay, we can show you a different way."

"Go to h.e.l.l."

The quads opened fire, but it was too late. Ciari was gone, teleported out to who knew where by some other newly freed Stryker, taking with her Erik's faith in the way the world worked.

THIRTY-THREE.

SEPTEMBER 2379.

THE SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA.

Keiko teleported herself, Jason, and Quinton into a safe house buried in the Slums of the Angels. The broken mess of buildings and roads that surrounded the city towers of Los Angeles were where most of the population resided. She stumbled when her feet connected with the ground, and only Quinton's firm grip stopped her from checking out the floor of the arrival area with her face.

"You all right?" Quinton asked.

Keiko straightened up. She swiped at her nose and the faint hint of blood that leaked from it. "Yeah, I'm good."

"I could have pulled this round," Jason said.

"You teleported the last time, and you spent more time in j.a.pan s.h.i.+elding than I did. It was my turn anyway."

They'd been teleporting across continents and oceans during the last sixteen hours without rest. That many teleports, across increasingly longer distances, mixed with the arguments and fights that inevitably broke out with every group of Strykers they met, had exhausted them. Quinton looked marginally better. After the first twelve times, he'd been the one to submit to telepathic verification by other Strykers to confirm the truth of their orders, sparing Keiko and Jason from having someone else mucking around in their minds.

Keiko took a moment to stretch her arms over her head, trying to ease the knotted tension in her body. "At least we've reached North America again. We're almost finished."

They knew they were working under a time limit and had hit the ground running back in Toronto before moving on to Buffalo. They kept going east, teleporting across the Atlantic Ocean to arrive in London and begin the hard task of giving Strykers the virus beneath the heavy presence of the government's security grid.

It had taken long hours to work their way through the Stryker ranks in Europe under the pretense of Keiko checking on their status as the world rioted. They couldn't reach their people in The Hague. Africa had been easier, with less than a dozen surviving cities across the entire continent. They bypa.s.sed the Middle East, which, like most of Russia and nearly all of Asia, was full of deadzones. They'd skipped from Africa to Asia's ravaged coastlines along the tip of India and the southeastern swatch of land appropriated by China. Australia was nothing but desert and firestorms, and they'd just come from j.a.pan.

They still had two continents to work their way through, with at least 250 Strykers left that they needed to reach.

"Here's hoping this group doesn't argue like the last one," Quinton said tiredly as he touched the bruise on his face.

Jason snorted. "I can't believe you let her get past your defenses."

"I wasn't going to burn a fellow Stryker. I figured she'd accept Keiko's authority as chief operating officer after picking through my memories. How was I supposed to know she'd have an emotional breakdown?" Quinton shrugged uncomfortably. "She still believed us and didn't question Ciari's orders."

"Telepaths tend to believe more quickly than anyone else," Keiko said as she stepped off the arrival dais in the corner of the large garage. "So let's find one."

They didn't even reach the door before a short, young man was palming it open. Telekinesis slid against their own s.h.i.+elds, a heavy weight that made Keiko's headache worse. "Daeng," she said. "We're here on the OIC's order."

Daeng pointed at Keiko's companions. "Sir, you know we've got kill orders for those two."

Keiko managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. "Orders have changed. We're here to save your life and that of every other Stryker in the Slums."

He hesitated, not quite believing her, but they didn't have time to deal with wasted moments.

"You got a telepath on-site?" Jason said.

"Yes," Daeng said. "Tanya is our senior telepath right now. She's upstairs."

"Call her down here so she can verify our actions and that we're not trying to kill any of you."

Daeng looked at Keiko for confirmation; she gave it. His eyes lost focus for a second or two as he tapped into the psi link he shared with his team. "Tanya's coming."

A minute later, a thin Mexican stepped into the arrival room, wariness in her gaze. "Sir?"

"Link with Quinton," Keiko said. "Ciari's orders."

Strykers knew better than to disobey their Syndicate's officers, especially the OIC. Tanya pulled Quinton into a psi link, taking the memories that he shoved into the forefront of his mind and reviewing them.

"You're kidding," Tanya said, staring at them in disbelief. "That should kill us."

"Hasn't killed anyone we've dosed so far," Quinton said.

"Ciari wants her Strykers to live," Keiko said, her voice cracking from exhaustion. "You will accept her orders and recall in s.h.i.+fts every Stryker in the Slums. We don't have time to waste on petty arguing."

"No," Tanya said after a moment. "I suppose we don't."

"Tanya?" Daeng said warily.

She gave the younger Stryker a lopsided smile, eyes bright. "It's fine, Daeng. We're going to follow their orders."

It took ten minutes for Tanya to telepathically contact all the Strykers a.s.signed to the Slums and coordinate teleportation for everyone. Keiko, Jason, and Quinton left her to deal with the transfer while they went to set everything up.

The Slums were filled with rioters, the buffer zone around the city towers a veritable bloodbath between the military and a.s.signed Strykers holding back the deluge of people hoping to reach a transfer shuttle. The safe house had been ignored only due to psionic interference. The World Court had tasked those Strykers in the Slums to keep everyone down on the ground and out of the city towers. Not that it mattered any longer, with most of the registered humans leaving, but the Strykers still had a job to do and they were going to do it to the bitter end.

That maybe the end wouldn't be so bitter was why no one really fought this procedure. The virus could save them, and no one living with a kill switch in his or her head was going to say no.

Jason rubbed a hand over his burning eyes as he gestured at the first few Strykers who had arrived. "Find a place to sit or lie down. It can't be administered standing up."

Daeng was the first to pick a spot, sliding to the floor with his back against the wall. "What exactly does it do?"

"Turns off the kill switch so the government can't fry your brain. The virus reprograms it around the internal security system. We can't turn off the tracking signal yet. If Strykers started going missing on the security grid in large numbers, the World Court would just fry everyone before we got to them," Jason said as he prepped the dosage. "Took the doctor who wrote the code months to get it right."

"What happened to the doctor?"

"He's still alive." Jason knelt down and pressed the tip of the hypospray against Daeng's throat. "Hold still. This is going to hurt."

"The government won't know?"

That was the fear and the choke hold that all Strykers lived with, the knowledge that if the neurotracker processed even a glitch in its programming, they would die. Jason tapped the hypospray gently against skin.

"It's bioware the code is targeting and nanites are machines." Jason smiled, but it was more teeth than anything else. "We're nothing more than biological machines, when you get right down to it. The virus is going to create a backdoor through our wetware. It'll take a few minutes to complete."

Jason stabbed his thumb against the hypospray b.u.t.ton. The soft shus.h.i.+ng sound the thin cylinder made as it pressed a dozen tiny needles into skin was echoed by air sucked through Daeng's teeth. Jason moved back and switched the hypospray to his other hand, lifting his free hand to sc.r.a.pe his teeth over the small bruise on his thumb.

He'd pressed that b.u.t.ton hundreds of times since leaving Toronto. Those that received the shot came away with a perfect circular bruise on their throat, right over their carotid artery. The rest of the procedure was just as painful, as if the kill switch itself had been flipped.

The nanites, already activated within the hyposprays, followed their programmed orders. Even as Keiko, Jason, and Quinton urged the other Strykers to relax, the nanites were already moving through the internal carotid to where it joined with the arterial circle of Willis. From there, the nanites disseminated through the smaller capillaries and reached the areas where bioware filaments connected to the nerves and brain.

The neurotrackers, when the bioware died, felt as if they took their bodies with them, the way the Strykers thrashed against the agony, nervous systems out of whack and bodies suffering through an unwanted machine's death throes. When it was over, the Strykers remained unconscious for a minute or two as their bodies and brains adjusted to the absence of something they had lived with for most of their lives.

"Breathe," Keiko was saying to another Stryker. The recipient shoved herself up straight in her chair, face pale and bleeding from the nose. "Take a deep breath, it's going to hurt for about an hour."

The Stryker ran her fingers over the back of her head, where the neurotracker sat beneath skin and bone. "Hurt doesn't really cover it." She opened her mouth wide, trying to ease some of the pressure in her skull. "f.u.c.k, that burns."

"You sure it's off? That it can't kill us?" Daeng said from where he sat. His breath was coming quick and fast through his mouth.

"We're sure. Ciari would never risk her people on something that wouldn't work," Keiko said. "The signal is still going strong. Take a minute to catch your breath, then get back to your posts."

Keiko, Jason, and Quinton managed to get through five more s.h.i.+fts of Strykers before the clock ran out. Their luck couldn't last, but that didn't stop Keiko from reaching desperately for the Stryker beneath her hands, who suddenly reared backward, clutching at his head. He started screaming and wasn't the only one. Other Strykers they had yet to dose keeled over screaming, clutching at the back of their necks and heads.

Keiko yelled wordless protests as bodies convulsed around her. She'd seen too many Strykers die like this over the years to not know what was happening. The ma.s.s termination was quick, but it was brutally painful to watch, made worse because they could do nothing. They had no way to save the Strykers writhing on the floor as their entire central nervous systems were fried from the inside out.

Keiko didn't know she was crying until she couldn't even see through the tears in her eyes.

"f.u.c.k," Jason yelled, slamming his fist against the wall. "f.u.c.k."