Free Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 by Ramez Naam

plane, and then, with little more than a bump, Sam brought them down.
----
    S am shut down the engines again, killed the fuel pumps, and then unclipped from her harness. Her chest was pounding. Her face was hot. She turned and Sarai was there, standing in the cockpit doorway.
    Sam held her arms open and the girl ran into them, into the hug.
    “I knew you’d come for us,” Sarai told her in Thai.
    Sam kissed the girl’s brow, mussed her hair. She could hear Feng behind her, tapping on controls, going through the rest of the post-flight shutdown.
    “Aroon misses you,” Sarai said. “He can’t feel you. I miss you, Sam. When you have Nexus again…”
    Sam’s chest pounded louder. Kevin Nakamura’s face swam in her mind. Her finger pulling the trigger. Kevin’s form, just a green outline in her goggles, toppling back into empty space as her bullets punched into his face, his chest… Kade and Shiva tearing at each other in her mind, wrestling for control as she dropped to her knees in agony…
    “Sarai, I–”
    “Sam.” It was Kade, standing behind Sarai, by the door of the plane. A door that was opening. “Time to go.”
    Kade in her mind, clawing at Shiva, the two of them ripping her to pieces as they fought one another, Kevin already dead at her hands.
    Sam’s stomach churned. Something like rage was threatening to rip itself loose from within.
    She pushed it down. She needed Kade. Needed him to do his part. Needed him to play a role she couldn’t.
    She took a deep breath, swallowed hard, squeezed Sarai with all the love she had in her, and then went out to meet their Indian hosts.
    An officer in uniform met them on the tarmac, a Colonel Sanghita Atwal: tall, muscular, short haired, dark eyed, utterly professional and rather deadly looking. With her were uniformed medics. Beyond them Sam could see soldiers, armed, their rifles at the ready but not quite pointed at the plane. With them were emergency vehicles, the sort that responded to aircraft crashes, their amber lights slowly flashing in the pre-dawn gloom, ready, but this time unneeded.
    Medics saw to their wounds with cold professionalism. Soldiers watched carefully. Any time Sam looked around, there were at least a dozen ringing her, another dozen around Feng, far enough back to take several strides to reach, their rifles in both hands, safeties off.
    Further out, she saw sets of powered combat armor, occupied or being piloted remotely, in a loose perimeter around them.
    The Indians were certainly taking this seriously.
    She tried to ignore it, to focus on the kids.
    She watched as they splinted the ankle of a girl named Arinya who’d twisted it in the chaos, as they dealt with minor cuts and abrasions and burns. Off to the side she saw a medic rig a proper sling for Feng’s arm, saw another dealing with Kade.
    Kevin’s face swam in her mind again. Her bullets slammed into him. Shiva’s will controlled her. Controlled her through Kade’s back doors.
    Goddammit! she told herself. Shiva did that. Not Kade.
    She felt her fists clench. Sweat was beading on her forehead. Fight-or-flight. Adrenal response.
    This wasn’t rational. It was physiological. Kade was just a proximate trigger.
    She knew what it meant, knew all about this.
    She had to nip it in the bud now.
    “I need something,” she told a medic. “A beta-adrenaline blocker, a strong one. Or a serotonergic.”
    Stop the near-permanent imprinting. Stop physiological response from amplifying the emotions, from heightening the stress response, from turning these last few hours into a trauma that would last for years.
    The Buddhists and the shrinks agreed. The body was the seat of emotions. Quell the physiological response and you could dampen the psychic pain as well.
    “Are you having a heart attack?” the woman medic said to her, an eyebrow raised.
    “I’m post-traumatic,” Sam said, keeping her voice as level as she could. “It’s setting in. Standard protocol is to stop it now,