I felt all right.
Xen gave me a hand and helped me dismount the table—and Kelly brought up the thing he’d carried beneath his tongue this whole time, crunching it between his teeth before making a show of spitting it out.
I was myself, again, at long last and...I had two men who loved me for me.
Just the way I was.
Completely.
So I turned toward Xen. “Where’s Voss?” I asked.
His head tilted, curious. “The next room over. Why?”
“Ohhhhhh,” Kelly started in. “Take me! Take me! I want to see!” he started chanting.
I picked him up off the shelf and put him under one arm. “Oh yeah. You’ve earned this,” I promised him, while he shouted, “Woohoo!”
63 /NEX
I wasas relaxed as one could be—when the woman you loved was getting brain surgery—when Xen came back into the room.
“She took the drill. I believe she’s going to do something inadvisable.”
I sat up in bed immediately. “Like?”
“Unknown. That’s why I came here.”
“And you didn’t stop her?” I asked, ripping IVs out.
“She seemed very determined. It made her even more beautiful. And also, slightly frightening.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Not the kind of frightening you wanted to run away from—the kind you followed into battle. “Where?”
“Three doors down.”
I flew out into the hall and jogged down it, my meat-shell muscles weak from disuse, and as I burst through the door, I found her staring at Voss intently. His panicked eyes were wide, and he was fighting against the bands that lashed him to the table.
“Sirena?” I asked lightly. “What are you doing?”
There was a tiny spot on top of Voss’s head that was bleeding freely. The drill lay discarded by her feet.
“Get ’em, tiger!” Kelly crowed from the precarious position she’d put him in, on Voss’s chest, where he wiggled every time the man moved.
“All those people. All their memories,” she whispered, taking a step toward him, so close their foreheads almost touched. “He took them.”
MSA had saved all the Hollows it safely could—but returning them to their rightful locations, especially after so many had had extensive plastic surgery, was going to be a long-term international effort.
And even if they got home...they still might not remember anything.
“He stole them. And he didn’t care,” she said, finally resting her forehead on his.
I put a hand out to stop her, but Xen intercepted me. “I believe she made a hole in his neural mask,” he said.
“I’m almost done,” she announced, then waited another thirty seconds. Voss had gone still, but I could see the beating of his heart. “There,” she said, as she rose.
Then she started methodically looking through the drawers in the room, like a telepathic raccoon.
“Do we...get to know what you’ve done?” I asked her, deciding me taking the lead was more appropriate in the moment.
