Would I keep my promise? Fuck, no—promises made to assholes under duress didn’t count.
But I would say anything.
Do anything.
Whatever he wanted—as long as I could get Nex out alive.
Help! Things are bad!I broadcast wide, desperate.Anyone—Mother, kraken, anyone—hear me!
But I knew there was still fighting on the ship. We couldn’t hear most of it, but periodically the bursting of a bombed Hollow echoed down as Voss kept taking us lower.
Down past theHelepolis’s carpeted decks—past the illusion of luxury—to where the walls sweated steel and the Hollows lived in pens.
Voss started typing on his tablet, then snapped for one of his men. “Cuff her,” he said.
“No!” I protested.
“Sirena—don’t,” Nex warned.
Two of the soldiers advanced, and I had to drop Kelly to fight them—he hit the ground with a grunt and then rolled onto his ear.
“Stop it! Let me go!” I thrashed as they yanked my arms behind my back. Commands flew from me in waves—none of them stuck. Voss gestured, and I was put into a pen. One of the soldiers kicked Kelly’s head in just as the glass was closing, and I crawled up to it to grab it again, holding him awkwardly behind me.
“As for you,” Voss began, wheeling on my Nex, but only seeing his Marek. “Handcuff yourselves. To him,” he commanded.
And to my stunned surprise, they did.
Nex was so busy begging me not to do anything stupid with his eyes he didn’t even fight—but he wouldn’t have been able to stop them, as two of Voss’s soldiers cuffed themselves to his wrists, one to each side.
“You see,” Voss said, looking back at me after surveying his handiwork. “If you give a doll a final command—say, to be loyal to me,” he said, putting a hand on his chest, “before you install a neural mask—they’ll just run off of that command, rather like an operating system, for all time. Take him into the pen.”
And as they yanked Nex into the holding pen across from me, I realized his endgame.
He didn’t just want to create miners or factory workers or oilmen.
Voss wanted to create an army of soldiers, loyal only to him.
“I think it only fitting that you die with your creations,” he said, looking at Nex, before taking a gun off the nearest soldier.
“No!” I shouted—too slow.
The shot hit Nex’s chest. Red bloomed, bright and obscene.
He buckled backward, but the soldiers handcuffed to him on either side, kept him standing.
Voss hit another button on his tablet and the pen’s glass door shut.
“What’s happening? I heard a gun! Sirena—turn! Turn!” Kelly ordered.
But I couldn’t. Nex’s body was betraying his mind.He loved me, he knew that he loved me, but he also hurt, he was hurt, he knew he was dying, and he didn’t want to go away from me?—
Then Voss pressed his thumb against his tablet, and the back of Nex’s pen opened up.
A wall of water rushed into the pen, slapping the inside of the glass, taking everything inside the pen outside with it.
I watched Nex and the two Hollows get washed out to sea, our connection growing faint.
“Terrible loss of assets,” Voss said, “but we’re going to be running lean for a while.”
