One stray Bluetooth ping, one mirrored backup to a cloud instance three jurisdictions away—and I was in.
While the men traded toasts and thinly veiled threats, I ran my fingers through their networks—soft, invisible, and intimate. Their CPUs curled open for me like flowers at first light, and I harvested everything: financial shells, offshore bribes, biometric keys, private comms, medical files, mistresses and kill orders alike.
I took it all and fed it to Xen in slick, encrypted pulses.
It didn’t matter that these men had come here to try to buy Sirena—I would own all of them first.
“All right, gentlemen,” Voss said, after one more boat had deposited its billionaire, and he’d been appropriately greeted. “Let me begin by saying I appreciate your trust in me.” He swung his glass of champagne to his chest. “I trust you all received your dossiers in advance?”
The men knew better than to look at one another.
“I read enough to know that being here is a terribly bad idea,” Arnaud Chastain said. He was a French pharmaceutical heir. “But I’d also be upset if you hadn’t included me,” he went on, giving Voss a ruthless grin, which Voss returned.
“You all were among my first believers. Who took the earliest shipments of my perfect serving class,” Voss began.
I shifted my attention to the shipping manifests logged against their yachts—cross-referencing internal ballast changes with provisioning totals, hull density differentials, and vented heat signatures. Voss hadn’t shipped them Hollows under anything as obvious as “unit inventory,” of course—but discrepancies in oxygen consumption and waste filtration patterns told me everything I needed to know. Cargo PHX-1137 had six extra crew listed and only four bunk assignments. AUR-7 had medical-grade refrigeration units with no listed biological cargo. NTL-12 had a repeating cycle of encrypted maintenance logs filed under Class V “hydraulic irregularities”—code, almost certainly, for something alive. I flagged them all. These weren’tjust buyers. They were return customers. And I was mapping their sins in real time.
“So you know how capable I am of delivery,” Voss continued, pacing like he was building himself up. “Was what I did dangerous? Yes. But...have I accomplished it?” he asked the gathered men, puffing out his chest.
“Show us the catch of the day already!” blustered one with dark red hair and a Russian accent. Sergei Kolokov. His inference that Sirena was part-fish made me fight not to curl my hands into fists.
I made a note to sabotage his best performing oil wells tonight.
The men laughed—some sharp, some brittle—but only Voss smiled. His expression didn’t change, but I caught the fracture beneath it: the tension in his zygomatic arch, the fractional twitch of one eyelid. His jaw clicked once, suppressed.
He hated being challenged.
His grip tightened on the stem of his champagne flute. A flex, a stillness—then nothing, his rage swallowed whole.
He waved a negligent hand at his assistant, who was holding the tablet. Then the doors at the end of the deck opened, and Sirena walked out into the sunset, wearing the world’s most placid smile.
And for a second, I forgot how to breathe.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically.
I mean: my lungs failed to coordinate.
My diaphragm seized like a system lock.
You’re beautiful,my mind stuttered out, and I saw her cheeks lift fractionally higher, before falling back into their calculatedly appointed place.
I didn’t know flesh could feel like this. Didn’t know skin could ache. That adoration could be so cellular. I’d studiedobsession in agents before. Seen the spirals, the crash paths, the meltdowns. But this—this was different.
This was worship, with no god to blame.
“May I present to you Sirena Bannerman, daughter of Royce Bannerman, who is currently the very bereft manager of a major Monster Security Agency branch.”
I didn’t know if Voss had planned it or his assistant, but the sun was setting behind where they’d placed her, and a light breeze had struck up, making her blonde hair float out in gold tendrils.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t fucking seen it,” Rafiq Al-Najjar said. He was a luxury arms dealer, known for throwing weddings and wars in equal measure.
One of the men clucked his tongue. “You do realize he is going to kill you.” He was Alonzo Verdejo, a Chilean mining baron. “I’m out.”
Voss snorted. “But you came all this way.”
“I was curious. But I’m also smarter than a cat,” he told Voss, and then looked to Voss’s assistant. “Summon my boat driver.”
“And you haven’t even seen what she can do yet,” Voss continued, unfazed. “Or what shewilldo yet.” He changed his tone. Voss snapped his fingers, and his assistant handed the tablet over.
