I look around for whatever just killed Mr. Wu, but I can’t feel anyone but me near here. I notice that the blood is splattered in a nearly perfect circle around his fallen body. It wasn’t a sniper taking him out then. I breathe a sigh of relief and use my bots to scrub the blood and bits of bones and brains off of my face, hair and clothes. I’m just glad my mouth was closed when Mr. Wu popped.

I examine the body and the ring of blood around him. This wasn’t something he was carrying, or the splatter wouldn’t be so symmetrical. Whoever was backing this guy, they went a big step beyond the old poison tooth suicide pills. Some kind of implant, maybe. His body below the neck is still intact, so the explosive load wasn’t huge. I examine the bits of teeth strewn around. I find traces of what look like electronic components embedded in one of them. So that was the switch. Figuring out whatever the details of the actual explosive packaging would take more time than I have today and probably a full forensics team.

So much for my work as an interrogator. I was ready to rip his fingers off one by one until he talked, but now there’s no way to get any information from him.

I rifle through Mr. Wu’s pockets and confirm that he’s carrying literally nothing. No ID of any kind, no phone, nothing personal at all. The suit looks like it’s standard off the rack, the shoes the sort I could buy at any store. Who was this guy?

I arrive back at the conference room to a few muted cheers. Keeya and Lucie are encircled around by several of my sisters near where someone made a coffin for Chad, a nice box with clean lines and bevels around the edges. They’re softly crying, holding hands with each other as they kneel next to it.

Dorothy’s corpse is gone. It takes me a moment to find both the body and head where someone moved them, one of the bedrooms down the hall. That’s fine for now.

Marc seems to have recovered from his shock. He and the Geologists have pulled chairs into a circle surrounding a three dimensional model of the estate, the cliff, and the river.

“We’ve got an option,” Stan says, looking up as I approach. “We think we can cover this whole thing up.”

“Good, what do you have?” I ask him.

“An earthquake,” he says, his voice serious. “Or something that looks a lot like one. This whole area is a tectonic sweet spot. Right on a fault line, lots of dams built relatively recently, extensive coal mining, and fracking for natural gas and oil. It’s a miracle there hasn’t been a huge quake here this decade. And a big chunk of the cliff below is hollow. It was rigged up like some kind of secret prison. That’s where we found our guides locked up, anyway.”

The guides! I hadn’t even thought to check for them. I don’t have a big underground space on my mental map, so that must have had electromagnetic shielding at its entrance too.

“Are they OK?” I ask.

“Yeah, they’re fine. Anxious to get out of here, but fine. Once we unlocked their cells, I told them to wait for us on the boats. They’re all back down on the river now. But that’s not the important part. The important part is that one little tremor and this whole place slides into the water.”

I take a look at their model. The detail on it is exquisite, down to individual trees around the estate that I can feel outside now. The cliff face is marked up with a series of lines, points, and curves in various colors. “Those are force diagrams?” I ask.

“Yeah. And the order and timing we need to hit them in to make it look natural. We’re going to knock the estate off the cliff the same way an earthquake would. Here’s the beautiful part: the nearest seismic monitoring station is hundreds of kilometers from here. At that range, the destruction we’ll cause should register as a minor quake that could have actually done what we’re going to cause.”

“How about any collateral damage?” I ask. ”If we break any of the dams, we’ll cause flooding that does more harm than we fixed this whole trip.”

“Don’t worry, we checked that,” he assures me. “We won’t crack the dam near here upstream or break anything downstream. At least, we won’t if we’re very careful. And just a little bit lucky.”

I nod, evaluating the risks.

“I don’t suppose there are any other options?” I ask.

“Not that we could come up with. Of course, you did leave the problem up to a group that’s mostly trained in geology and mining, so we might have been biased. But knocking the whole thing over would explain pretty well why everyone here is dead but us. We can just claim we were running late and hadn’t arrived yet.”

“Fair enough,” I say. I look around and raise my voice. “Does anyone else have anything better?”

No one answers.

“Or anything else at all?”

The silence is deafening.

“OK. Earthquake it is then.”

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I look over at the staff, guards, and pilot bound to the floor in neat rows on one side of the room. I don’t see anything in the plans for them.

“Anyone come up with any ideas for what we should do with our prisoners?” I ask. “It’s not too late to just kill them.”

Louise shakes her head. “I’ve been thinking about that, but I still don’t have a good answer. We’re not going to kill them. We’ll figure something else out.”

Yang Song comes over, Lin trailing behind her. “The staff here were all chosen especially for their discretion. They often use this place for events where the attendees would rather be forgotten. They can be trusted to stay silent, for the right price.”

“So we just buy them off and trust them to never mention us then?” I ask her.

“If you have funds available here, then yes,” she replies. “It would be unwise to leave a paper trail in a case like this.”

“I didn’t bring a suitcase full of cash,” I say. “We’ve been getting everything we need in small withdrawals from banks as we go.”

Lin’s dull eyes brighten a bit. She turns to Louise.

“We’ve got something better. The statue. Where did you put the gift from last night?”

“It’s back in my room. Why?” she pauses for a split second. “Oh, duh. That thing is solid gold, right?”

“With gems worth even more than the metal. I helped commission the piece and select the materials, but this is a better use for it.”

Louise retrieves the statue and with Lin’s guidance I break it down into eighteen equally valuable pieces of gem-studded gold. Doing something useful seems to invigorate Lin. While we work, Louise removes the gags of each of the prisoners one by one to allow Yang Song to negotiate with them. From the way they look at me while she’s talking, I’m pretty sure she’s telling them I’ll kill them if they don’t take the deal, but I don’t care what she says as long as it works. Each of the thirteen guards, four staff members, and the pilot agree to settle down anywhere but China, keep a low profile, and never speak of the last couple of days.

We offer her and Max a cut, too, but they both refuse. Max only asks for the chance to come back to campus with us to see Father’s research lab and access his notes. Louise enthusiastically agrees to that without asking any of the rest of us. Looks like she just got a new research assistant. Or maybe she’s going to be his research assistant? I’m not clear on the dynamic there.

Yang Song just seems to be planning to follow Lin around wherever she goes. Where is Lin going?

“What do you want to do next?” I ask her. “Are you going back to Beijing?”

“There is nothing for me there, Noah.”

“You’re welcome to come join us in America,” I tell her. “Do you want to?”

“Yes!” she says. “Do you mean it? Could I?”

“I think so. Do you still have a valid visa from your trip? If not, we could always smuggle you in.”

“I’m still legal,” she says. “Are you sure about this? My father was deeply involved with dangerous people. They may come after me, even if your plan to cover this up succeeds.”

“Then definitely,” I say. “There’s nowhere in the world safer than our campus. Please, come with us.”

“I will!”

“Then I will come, too,” Yang Song declares. Her tone doesn’t allow for any argument.

Yeah, she’s planning to follow Lin the rest of her life.

“Then let’s get started on our earthquake,” I say.

I spend some quality time over the next hour with a whole lot of dead bodies. I make sure that all the damage to each corpse is consistent with the damage that being crushed under tons of rock and thrown in a river might cause. In most cases, it just means flattening skulls so my bot-bullet holes won’t show. I wonder for a moment what to do with Dorothy. The cut line across her neck is way too clean. I finally just disintegrate her. Let hers be a body that is never recovered. They won’t find the staff or guards either, obviously. But if Yang Song is right, no one will be looking too hard for them. By the time I’m done, no investigation will show anything but earthquake damage to any of the bodies they find.

While I’m playing butcher, my siblings get all our gear and Chad’s coffin loaded onto our boats. The guards and staff are all loose now, and seem to be taking everything in stride. Like this isn’t the strangest and worst thing they’ve ever seen. Under Yang Song’s direction, they’re even helping to scrub everything we might have touched while we were here so there aren’t even fingerprints linking us to the place. Evan breaks down the solar panel and battery he built in the middle of the room during his presentation a million years and a few hours ago.

Finally, we’re as ready as we’re going to be. We push off and get the boats far enough downstream that we should avoid anything falling down on us.

Stan, Steph, and Phil lay out guidelines for the rest of us to follow. Where to bore, where to knock, where to vibrate, where to smash. It takes a couple of hours of practice to get the routine down perfectly. Finally, we execute the plan and the wall of stone rising up from the river begins to shudder. With a cataclysmic crack, the entire cliffside with the estate on top comes crashing down. The whole cliff rolls as it falls, grinding the building to rubble along with everything inside of it.

“Hold on,” Phil yells.

The boats buck with the huge swells of water. Marc retches over the side, but everyone else seems all right.

Once the water settles, I let my cloud shrink down to a more comfortable size. The headache that’s been raging through my brain finally subsides. I almost collapse to the deck in relief.

Once the dizziness fades and I can stand up without needing to support myself on the railing. I gather the whole ground around.

“Is everyone clear on the story?” I ask. “Jen, say it back to me.”

“We were running late because of mechanical problems after we crossed the border. We arrived just in time to feel the earthquake and see the cliff fall,” Jen says. “Chad flew into the wreckage to look for survivors, and was killed by falling rocks. Max, Lin, and Yang Song were out jogging when the earthquake happened. They saw our boats and flagged us down.”

I make everyone repeat it several times. Then Yang Song does the same thing in Chinese for the staff and guards, in case anyone ever tracks them down and questions them. I hope Yang Song is right and we can trust them to remember all the events the right way.

The guides take it all in stride and don’t question why we need the lie. They missed most of the excitement, but being locked up at gunpoint was enough that they’re just glad to be out of there.

I hope everyone can keep their mouths shut. Maybe I should kill them just to be safe. No. It would be too inconvenient, more trouble than it's worth when Louise finds out.