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      There were tears on Sam's face now. She didn't know why. She could feel Kade watching her, concerned. She had no answer for him.
      Each person had not one thread, but many. They intertwined in parallel, each connected to the others. Thoughts and memories shifting and flowing. Sandra's first fumblings with other girls in her preteen years. Antonio's comprehension of quantum programming, the edges of understanding any of it just beyond what Sam could capture. Jessica's rapture in freefall dives from twelve thousand feet, the adrenaline of jumping, the calm of popping the chute, her bliss every time she hung below that fabric wing and steered herself to the ground, singing and breathing and soaring untethered.
      She knew Sandra's love of the stillness, the meditative, I-amin-my-body glory of her daily practice. It spiraled within Sam, found her memories of sparring bouts, the absolute beauty of a perfect strike or block or dodge. The serenity of perfect form, the adrenaline of a hard and close fight, the endorphic come-down bliss that followed. And… and…
      She felt Kade, still. He was with them, with her. And his mind… his mind… She knew the beauty of the Nexus core. The sublimity of its design that awed him, staggered him. She tasted the pure abstract space within him where he did his best work, apprehended a tiny bit of the protocol he'd built with Rangan, the semantic layer between individual neural connections and whole thoughts. It was a glorious thing, a map of all the kinds of pieces of thoughts, an ontology of consciousness. It existed in him in part of his mind beyond doubt or fear or even consideration of others. Part of him so beautiful and yet so distant and so alien and so very, very much hers for this brief time.
      Sam saw through his eyes. Saw the flows of thoughts and emotions and experiences as bits and packets and traffic patterns, not cold and dry, but gorgeous in a symphonic way, an orchestral way. They were individual instruments coming together to create a richly textured whole, greater than the sum of its parts. She saw his aspirations, to transcend the boundaries of individual minds, saw how Ilya had shaped his thoughts, saw a glimpse of the path he thought might just be feasible, his wonder at a future nothing like the past.
      She was crying then. Crying because Kade's mind was so crystal clear and his vision so pure and so awe-inspiring in its way and yet so terrifying to her. Crying with Josephine at shared loss, of parents ripped away in youth, of childhood lost. Crying at the loss of Kade's parents so recently. Crying at a memory of pain and fear that Sandra had uncovered, Sam wounded in the night, left arm hanging useless, blood dripping into her eyes, terrified, not sure if she would see the dawn, not sure she could get past the one last guard…
      She was confused, disoriented. Memories that made no sense were arising. Josephine experienced Sam's memories of her parents' last Christmas in San Antonio. Yet she also knew Sam's sorrow at the death of them, years in the past. At the horror of something not clean, not fast, not accidental…
      Leandra's experiences in proteomics touched Sam's identity as a data archeologist. Sam worked for corporations to unlock value from their legacy intellectual assets. Not Third World government databases… Not records of human and transhuman experiments…
      She felt their collective concern. Kade most of all. Felt them reaching out more tendrils to her, to soothe her, buttress her. Each contact triggered a memory. An all-nighter in college cramming for her differential equations mid-term. Her first triathlon, that place beyond exhaustion, beyond bliss, beyond anything but moving her body again and again and again… Pushing herself that hard in the Iranian Caspian, north-east of Sari, terrified out of her mind, trying to make that rocky beach in Turkmenistan, not knowing if backup would truly be there…
      Sam was