I turn my attention back to the room where the small, fleshy part of me still stands. My siblings, at least the ones that have fully shaken themselves out of shock, have begun arguing with each other about what to do now.

“It’s rescue time,” I announce loudly, bringing clarity to the chaos. “Evan, Louise, you’re with me. Everyone else, keep working on a way to keep us from being international terrorists. Andrea, if you can spare any attention from your magic with the cameras, there are some people outside with a broken helicopter. I’ve broken their guns, but keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t cause any trouble or start hiking out of here. And can someone please do something about Chad? A coffin or something?”

Max arrives at the entrance to the room just as we’re heading out.

“I’m coming too,” he says firmly. He must have heard me from down the hall.

I’d rather he stay out of trouble, but it’s his funeral. I stoop down to grab Dorothy’s gun and hand it to him. I doubt it will do him much good, and from the way he’s looking at it, he doesn’t have any more idea how to use it than we do. But he’s a smart guy, I’m sure he’ll figure it out. At least this way he’s not completely defenseless.

Evan and Louise take positions on either side of me as we march down the hallway. Max trails a few paces behind us. Back in the conference room, I feel my other siblings get to work. My index’s map leads through a labyrinth of vacant hallways and up some stairs to a reinforced door on the second level that looks like it belongs more in a high security military complex than a palatial rural estate.

“You two noticed the shielding already, right?” I don’t bother to whisper. A security camera is pointing right at us, and whoever is in there certainly already knows we’re here.

“The blank zone inside, yeah,” Even replies.

I dissolve the hinges and locks on the massive door and give it a shove, letting the boom of its fall officially announce our presence.

Inside the large room beyond the door, a cage extends from floor to ceiling, the bars enclosing it from above as well. The thin vertical bars are several centimeters apart, with cross bars every eighty centimeters. I probe with my bots. This isn’t an ordinary faraday cage. It’s got some kind of active disruption going on, maybe a current producing a strong magnetic field around the bars or something.

A margin of a little over two meters separates the cage from the walls of the room. Inside the cage, General Liu and Yang Song sit with guns in their hands across from Valerie, Lucie, and Keeya who are bound to their chairs with zip ties. Lucie and Keeya are a mess, makeup streaking down their faces, dried mucus crusting from their noses to their chins. They’ve clearly been crying their eyes out and haven’t been able to do a thing to clean up. I guess they know about Chad.

Lin stands near the far end of the cage, a swelling redness surrounding one eye. That’s new since I saw her last. Someone is going to pay for that one.

The only other furnishing inside the cage is a row of monitors near the side of the cage opposite the General. Thick wires run from a port in the floor of the cage up to them. I can see security footage showing the two conference rooms, one set full of the carnage I left downstairs, the other set still showing us and the rest of our siblings sitting quietly under Dorothy’s watchful eye. The image of Dorothy shifts in her chair and waves the gun around, pointing it at Marc before lowering it. Andrea’s illusions are even more perfect through the camera.

To Evan, Louise: Can we just rush him? We can’t get through the cage with bots directly, but it looks like we can pick up the security door and ram it through those bars.

From Evan: Too risky. I know you’re fast, but it doesn’t take long to pull a trigger. Let’s try to negotiate. If he wanted the hostages dead, they’d be dead already.

“That’s close enough,” General Liu says as we step over the fallen door and into the space between the cage and the walls.

“Valerie, are you all right?” Evan calls. His voice, though calm, has a dangerous edge to it, a cold fury that I’ve rarely heard from him.

“A few bruises, nothing serious,” Valerie says. Even under this pressure, she’s keeping cool. She really might be as great as Evan thinks she is.

“Keeya?” Louise asks. “Lucie?”

“They are all fine, Evan,” General Liu says. “And they will continue to be fine as long as we can reach an understanding.”

“The last time you wanted to reach an understanding with us,” Louise says hotly, “our brother got shot in the head. I don’t think I want to reach any more understandings with you.”

Keeya and Lucie squeeze out a few more tears each. Yeah, they knew already. They must have seen everything up until Andrea fooled the cameras.

“He will win, who knows when to fight and when not to fight,” the General replies. “I am wise enough to know when I am in a fight I can no longer win. But for my and my daughter’s sake, I must do what I can to stay alive. Surely you can understand that.”

“Like I said, I’m not looking for any understanding with you,” Louise says. “Let our people go.”

While they talk, I look frantically for any way to get my bots into the cage without alerting the General. Any weakness in the field. I’m not finding any.

“And be subject to your whims with no leverage?” he asks rhetorically. “I think not. Unlike my benefactor or colleagues, I had tremendous confidence in your abilities and resourcefulness. I suspected that Ms. James would fail in her duties. I arrived here in time to see what you do to those who oppose you.” He indicates the monitors with his off hand. I wonder what my hellstorm of destruction looked like from the outside. “My daughter and I will not meet that same fate.”

I penetrate the outer walls in a few places until I find the power conduits that lead to the cage. No good, they’re shielded in the same way. My bots disconnect as they approach too close. Someone who had a lot of knowledge about our tech helped design this. Damn that Dorothy. I quietly bore into the floor, sending a contingent of bots into the subfloor and feeling for weaknesses on the underside of the cage. My headache intensifies as I focus on the senses of so many of my little selves, but I don’t care. If I fail, my people will go through much worse.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“While I respect your strength,” General Liu continues, “and I understand that you have the upper hand, it is clear to me that just letting your friends go will not provide a sufficient guarantee of our safety. I propose that you all return to your boats, float downstream, and take a stay in a nice hotel. My treat. Once I confirm you are all there, these fine young women will be escorted down to join you. They live, we live.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of trust in you just now,” Evan says, stepping into the space between the wall and the cage. “Seeing how you betrayed us and killed our brother and tried to steal our tech and all.”

The bars run under the cage as well, with wires on one end of each bar. That must be where it feeds in the current that powers the disruption field, but of course those are shielded too. Pain flares as I check each one methodically all at once. There’s got to be a flaw or two in here somewhere. No one builds something this complex perfectly.

“Your brother’s death was most unfortunate. I assure you, it was not what I had in mind. Ms. James came to us with a most positive recommendation from our benefactor. I did not have the option to refuse her services.”

“Who are you working for, anyway?” I ask, stalling for time. “What’s more important to you than your country and your honor?”

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss that,” he says, shaking his head. “It would be worth much more than my life.”

Worth a try. I would have liked to know but I don’t care enough to push it. Mr. Wu is still outside by the broken helicopter, he probably has more answers anyway. I can’t afford to pick at whatever stupid illuminati conspiracy rabbit hole this is with my friends’ lives on the line.

“Fine,” I say. “Then how about you put your guns down while we talk.”

Max steps sideways in the space between the cage and the wall on the side where the General is seated. If he notices, he doesn’t seem to care. However, when Louise inches closer to the cage door, she gets a threatening look as the General extends his gun that much closer to Valerie’s face.

The video feeds. They’re going through that field, and they need to do it without massive field effects on the wires or the picture would be garbage. If I can slip my bots inside whatever protects that thick cable, I can get them inside the cage. I find where the video wire comes out from the floor and into the subfloor, then penetrate its shielding a couple of meters away from the cage. It’s tightly packed with several layers of conductive polymer around the actual wires, and once my bots get inside it, the only way I can keep a connection to them is with a tight daisy chain relaying my mesh network inside the cable. I have to manually control each one to maneuver in a space that constrained. I start flowing bots along the wire, but it’s painfully slow going and makes my mind feel like it's on fire.

To Evan, Louise: There’s a weak spot in the cage. Keep him talking. I need time to get my bots in there.

They nod almost imperceptibly in acknowledgement.

“We know how quickly you can act, but you have not seen how quickly we can,” General Liu says to Louise. “I believe that uncertainty is an important part of our negotiation. Please step back away from the door.”

Louise steps back and Max takes another step sideways, further into the space between the wall and the cage. Again, the General only seems to care about the three of us. I guess he doesn’t consider Max a threat.

“How about this,” I suggest as I slide more bots through the protected cable. I’ve got enough in the cage now to start doing some damage, but not nearly enough to ensure that I can take both the General and the bodyguard out without one of them shooting. “You leave Yang Song here to ensure our good behavior, while you put your tail between your legs and run like the coward you are.”

To Evan, Louise: Just need to keep him talking a minute more. Less maybe.

“If I didn’t have such confidence in your ability to deal swift death, I would agree,” the General says. “But you’ve shown such capability that I will not open that door before your departure.”

Max is behind the General now. I see him start to move his hand toward his waistband. Shit. Is he going to try to shoot one of them from behind? Even if there weren’t two of them there, I don’t trust him to make a clean enough shot on either of them that they couldn’t still kill a hostage. I catch his eye and shake my head as subtly as I can. He nods and continues slowly working his way around the cage.

“So it’s your way or the highway? You think we’ll just leave?” Evan says.

A few hundred more bots make it through. Would they notice the subtle vibrations if I started eating away at their firing pins? Maybe. Too risky still.

“Only if you care about the well-being of these women,” the General replies. His calm veneer is fraying. The hand not holding the gun is starting to shake. “If you’d like to end this standoff by seeing how quickly Yang Song and I can pull triggers, you are free to decline my generous offer.”

I force more bots through as quickly as I can. I have enough now for a single point-shield. I want to protect all three of them, but the way he’s breaking down, I’m not sure I’ll have time. His gun is trained on Valerie, hers alternates between Chad’s girlfriends. If I have to choose, it’s Valerie. Sorry, Keeya and Lucie.

“Father, please,” Lin begs. “Let them go. They are good. They would honor their word.”

He snaps back at her in Chinese in a way that makes her flinch and cower. I know now where that swelling around her eye is from. From her reaction, it’s not the first time either.

Max’s slow walk has him nearly behind Lin now. He quietly and slowly draws Dorothy’s pistol. With Lin’s body between him and the other two in the cage, they wouldn’t be able to see it.

“I am out of patience,” the General declares. “Leave now, or they die.”

I force more bots through the narrow shielded wire faster than I thought I could, each one occupying more of my brain’s attention than I can spare. I can almost form a second shield. I’m so close.

“Please, father!” Lin cries, tears running down her cheeks. “They saved my life. You cannot do this to them.”

Another snarling barrage of Chinese goes her way. I form the shields floating invisibly along the lines between each gun and its target. They won’t stop the bullets, but they’ll deflect them off course enough that hopefully they’ll only be grazed. The slight dilation in the General’s eyes tells me he’s about to act.

To Louise, Evan: Break down the cage, now! We need to move!

Evan reaches down with hands and bots and lifts the fallen security door. He flings it downward into the cage with enough force to tear through the bars like they were made of tissue paper.

While he’s doing that, a whole bunch of things happen almost at once. I think I have the order right here:

Two deafening cracks fill the air as two shots fire.

I feel the sting of bots crumbling as one of my shields deflects one bullet.

The bullet aimed at Valerie zips through the bars just over her shoulder and embeds into the wall. The shot was already off, my shield couldn’t have deflected it that far.

The barrel of the General’s gun smokes as he tumbles forward, falling to the floor.

Yang Song drops her unfired gun and raises her hands in surrender.

Max covers his face with his empty hands.

Dorothy’s smoking gun falls from Lin’s hand as she recoils in horror.