50 /XEN
Their stealth boathad no running lights. No wake. Its carbon-weave hull scattered radar like ash. Heat signature: nil. Acoustic profile: below ambient chop. They might as well have been riding a ghost.
Xen stepped out onto the deck, where Royce stood alone near the prow—the wind out here was clean. Ions and salt. Constant motion across skin. Far too exposed for Xen’s liking, but he understood the logic. Machines required airflow to prevent thermal cascade. Sometimes humans just needed to breathe.
He’d admitted his error the second Nex’s command to abort came in, which meant Royce and everyone else on board knew he’d made a mistake.
But for some reason the boat hadn’t turned around.
And when Royce didn’t say anything, Xen spoke first. “I expected you to pull us back.”
Royce didn’t turn—he merely shook his head.
“But . . . the data,” Xen said carefully.
Royce didn’t answer right away. Just kept looking out over the dark. Wind rushing over his bald scalp. A man thinking.
“There’s always data,” he said finally. “Never enough. Never clean. Never on time.”
Xen frowned. “Then how do you make decisions?”
Royce’s shoulders lifted, then dropped again. “You don’t wait for perfect. You triage. You do the best you can with what you have, when it matters.”
“That’s imprecise,” Xen said softly.
Royce let out a soft huff of breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “So is life.”
Xen looked down at the deck. “But I miscalculated. I assumed he had the situation under control?—”
“You hoped,” Royce corrected. “You hoped he did. Because you love her.”
Xen’s throat bobbed. “It wasn’t enough.”
“No,” Royce said. “It wasn’t. And it won’t be. But that doesn’t change the job. She still needs us. Now more than ever.”
Xen blinked, gaze rising. “So . . . we’re not pulling back.”
Royce shook his head. “No. We’re going forward. Imperfectly.”
He finally looked over at Xen. Not angry. Not disappointed. Just...real.
“That’s the whole game, son. You do the best you can, and then you just keep going.”
51 /NEX
I ran through allthe cameras on board until I found Kelly’s head again. They’d left him out on the deck, on the buffet table—the catering staff hadn’t known what to do with him, and the scientists hadn’t bothered to pick him back up.
They’d used diamond-tipped drills, particle lances, and plasma scalpels—and not a single thing had ever pierced his skin or injured him, not even when they poured acid into his eyes.
I made sure I was alone and the local cameras were on loop before I stepped out of the dark, then opened his jar and lifted him out.
“When they poured hydrofluoric acid on you, did it hurt?” I blurted out—because I wanted to know if my wild idea was possible.
Kelly spat out another mouthful of neural gel—not at me, for once. “When I fell from heaven? Yeah, obviously,” he said, looking up. “Oh, come on, Nex. It was a joke. It was funny,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Andnowyou smell like pussy! Is everyone else on board this ship getting more than me?”
“No jokes, Kelly—you were there earlier. You saw things,” I said, stopping myself from shifting his head so he could see the scene of the crime.
“Yeah,” Kelly said, his lips pulling into a thin line. “I know. So—I’ve got a plan.”
