I already knew why I couldn’t.You don’t think he’ll recognize you?
I felt him laugh.I wasn’t intending on breaching the surface. And besides—he’ll be too busy looking for you, his little girl.
Girl, yes. But not so little anymore. I smiled up at the cameras. I hoped Nex was watching—and if so, I gave him a wave in warning.
I didn’t know exactly what Nex—or the MSA—needed from me.
But I knew what I could give them.
Time.
This yacht wasn’t going anywhere—not with me on it.
It was time to go further below decks and sing.
53 /XEN
T+003:19:03:22
Sensor Alert: Vessel → INACTIVE
Manual Override: DISABLED
System Status: REDLINE ANOMALY
Xen froze, midway through a routing algorithm.
TheHelepolishad just . . . stopped.
He confirmed three more times. Engine cycles flatlined.
No drift correction. No repositioning behavior.
The ship wasnotmoving.
He pushed comms wide. “All stations, this is Xen. We’ve got a full stop on theHelepolis. Repeat, the yacht is dead in the water.”
Lung swore on open comms. “That supposed to happen?”
“No.” Xen’s voice was flat. “Course correction terminated. Navigation locked out. Someone on board just killed propulsion—and it wasn’t us.”
He was about to issue a diagnostic request when somethingmovedoutside their own hull.
Xen rerouted visual input from the hull-mounted cameras—low-angle feeds, depth-stitched—just in time to catch the anomaly: something enormous, refracting the light wrong, distorting it.
Non-mechanical. No running lights. No propulsion wake.
Just a vast shape moving past the lower starboard side of theHelepolis, slow and deliberate.
The sonar sweep followed a second later and failed to resolve.
“Nearby contact,” Xen said. “Organic. Unmapped. Masked signature.”
Royce’s lips lifted. “My wife,” he said, tapping his bald head, then headed up the stairs to the deck. Xen followed.
He walked to the edge and leaned over. “Omara,” he said, as a beautiful woman breached. Xen could see her, her long hair streaming all around her, looking like the moonlight itself.
“I contacted her,” she said, giving Royce a broad smile. “She is safe. She will let me know when to advance.”
