With a little breathing room and a lot of the available metal around the estate, I quickly get my cloud near capacity. An old familiar headache starts to rise in the back of my brain, but I shove it aside. I don’t have time to care about pain. Now that I feel like my real self again, I close my eyes and get to work. I feel out the whole surrounding area, both inside the palatial estate and in the kilometers around it. The conference attendees are gathered in another room like this one on the other side of the building. The household staff and the other guards are in small clusters in the kitchen and a few other rooms. Guards are scattered around in pairs, all of them equipped with assault rifles. I can’t feel Lin, her father, or Yang Song anywhere. They’re probably in whatever blind spot has hidden our friends from me.

I shift my focus outside, letting my human self fade into a small corner of my consciousness. There’s a helicopter on the pad. The blades are just starting to spin and Mr. Wu is walking toward it with a couple of guards. Having them leave isn’t an option. I dig into the chopper’s engine and rip apart everything softer than solid steel. It’s enough. I dissolve the firing pins of the guards’ guns, which they don’t seem to notice as they start fussing around with the broken chopper. The pilot and the old man are unarmed. I’ll deal with them all later.

None of our people are out on the grounds, so they must all be somewhere with electromagnetic shielding.

I start on what’s easy indoors. Killing the staff would be easier, but Louise said not to, so I slap bot gags on all of them and also the guards inside the house. I dissolve all the guns the guards have and truss them all up with invisible shackles. I drag them as quickly as I can into our conference room, their clothing sliding easily enough over the smooth tiles of the palatial estate.

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“Get them all bound up, please,” I ask my sibs. Several of them are cursing loudly in languages I don’t understand. “Louise, can you keep them quiet?”

I free up my bots as Louise does some kind of pinch on each of their carotid arteries that renders each of them unconscious. She and the others start getting them stuck to the floor of the conference room like the other guards.

I turn my attention to the other conference room, the one where all the other conference attendees have gathered. Max is standing near the back, away from the others. Louise didn’t want him killed either. I give him a nudge in the direction of the doorway. He glances around, confused. I nudge him again, more forcefully this time. He takes the hint and quietly slips out through the door. Once it closes behind him, I fuse the hinges and handles. No one is getting out alive. I push more and more of my cloud through the crack under the door. None of them seem to notice the thin gray fog accumulating near the walls.

I take a deep breath and combine the efforts of the organic and silicon parts of my brain in a thousand calculations before unleashing holy hell on everyone left in the room. A storm of bullet-sized nanoballs pierce through each of their skulls, shredding each of their brains from a dozen angles. Not a single one of them gets a scream out, they’re gone so fast. Will you all haunt me? Will Xin Tan, Tanaka Isamu, Harold Skinner, Xavier Black, Heinrich Bekker, Yasmin Darvish, and all the others torment me like Father and Jeff have for the last couple of years? Like Chad certainly will?

I don’t know. All I feel now is grim satisfaction and a throbbing at the base of my skull. Is this how Father felt when he transformed the Fist of Peace from a terrorist militia to a puddle of organic paste? At least I was humane enough to make it fast, instead of eating them from the outside in like he did. I can be like Evan on this one, feeling no guilt because all I did was destroy some monsters.

Now for the shielded room.