I’d failedme.
And—
Come back.
Her voice wasn’t spoken.
Not even whispered.
It brushed through the fragile threads between us like a filament of light in fog—faint, but steady. A signal I hadn’t been listening for.
Come back to me.
I blinked.
Reality reloaded. Frames resumed. The deck, the buyers, the air—thick with humidity, 84.6 percent now—everything—was still here. So was she.
Sirena stood exactly as Voss had left her, radiant and silent.
But I saw the barest shift in her posture. A fractional tilt of her shoulder—angled back toward me.
And she didn’t look at me, not directly, but her presence...expanded. Reached. Like a net just loosely brushing the edges of my awareness, reminding me: she was still here.
Still fighting.
And now it was my turn.
“She’s beautiful,” murmured Arnaud in his ivory suit, circling her. “But tell me—what’s her effective broadcast radius? Can she control at distance, or does she need line of sight?”
“Does the range change in water?” asked Rafiq. “We’ve got coastal holdings. Submersibles. The resonance in salt shifts frequency—does that degrade her effect?”
“Can she handle MIHR dolls?” Sergei asked, now far more sober. “Or is she only effective on legacy organics?”
They weren’t admiring her.
They werescoping an acquisition.
Evaluating risk. Calculating yield.
They wanted a line item with a leash.
And I wanted to kill them.
I wanted to silence every one of them with my bare hands, tear their yachts apart board by board and burn their generational wealth down to the marrow.
But—I needed them.
If Voss remained her only owner, he’d never hand over leash permissions. And without a transfer, he’d never lose control for long enough for me to hijack the handshake.
“She can command up to a thirty-meter radius unaided,” I lied smoothly. “Line of sight increases precision but isn’t required. Saltwater dampens projection by eight percent, but not reception; she should still be able to read minds at that distance. MIHR integration was a late-stage success—she can override up to forty at a time without strain. The dolls are easier than humans.”
Rafiq stepped closer, studying her eyes like they held blueprints. “Can she parse specific intent in a crowd? What’s her fidelity threshold?”
“Ninety-five percent confidence up to ten inputs. After that, it attenuates. Environmental noise can be filtered, but high-conflict zones lower clarity.”
“She’s not blinking,” Arnaud said, as if impressed. “Is that discipline? Or firmware?”
“Conditioning,” I said. “Mostly.”
