He settled down on his heels to be closer to her. “Good.”
“I’ve set squads of kraken beneath each of the other yachts, all waiting for her signal,” she said and he nodded deeply.
“But how much longer?” Xen demanded.
Omara startled, then turned with delight. “You!” she cried. “In the flesh!” Then she leaned closer, conspiratorially. “She is in love with your friend.”
Xen didn’t respond right away.
He wasn’t built for mysticism, nor for moonlit declarations or oceanic prophecy.
But Omara’s words hit like a system shock anyway—because heknewit was true. Every recent behavior from Sirena, every decision Nex had made. The alignment was irrefutable.
She loved Nex.
And that changed the math.
Not because it made Nex more loyal.
But because it made Sirenavolatile. Autonomous. Unpredictable.
She was no longer a hostage to be recovered.
She was avariable—one with agency, conviction, and the most dangerous motive of all: something to protect.
Xen blinked once. His neural queue reorganized. Every active model for potential escalation updated at once.
“ . . . Understood,” he said.
And beneath it, faint but undeniable, something almost like hope curled at the edge of his code.
Maybe they had a real shot.
54 /NEX
Luckily,everyone who knew Marek was scared of him—so when someone else tried to join me in Kelly’s lab and I shouted, they scurried away like rats.
I’d swept the lab’s cluttered countertop clean with one arm and laid out my stolen parts like I was prepping for surgery: disassembled sensors from the command deck, a pressure-reactive implant shell from the medbay, the shattered husk of a receiver from the detainment wing.
Voss’s transmitter hadn’t just been mechanical—it had biological redundancies, authentication loops tied to his heartbeat and sweat pH, a quantum salt handshake from the leash to the implant core.
And none of that was standardized. All of it was locked behind proprietary garbage.
Which meant I had to rebuild it. From memory. From inference. From scratch.
I didn’t have blueprints, and I didn’t have time—but I had motive.
I rerouted the lab’s power grid into a closed circuit to prevent remote interference. Boosted the table’s ventilationfans. Rewrote the firmware on the desk’s diagnostic pad so I could use it to run simultaneous voltage and biofeedback tests.
Each component I cannibalized sparked like a confession.
There were no backups and there would be no retries.
If I got this wrong, Sirena would die.
If I got it right, I was giving control of her leash to a disembodied head with a superiority complex and a porn addiction.
Some days there were no good choices.
