“I wanted to know everything he did. Even all the stuff he wanted to hide,” she said, tapping a finger on her temple. Then she found what she was looking for—a band-aid. “And then? I decided to grant him his fondest wish. To be like me,” she said, turning, opening the bandage up to carefully put it over the blood. “So I shoved everything into him.” She looked over, a small furrow between her brows. “What do you all call it?”
“A core dump?” Xen guessed.
“Yes. That. I gave him...everything. Everything I’ve ever heard or seen, all the things I knew but never wanted to know,” she said sweetly. “Everyone thinks it’s so easy being a telepath—but very few people actually possess the mental constitution it takes inside,” she said, giving Voss a withering look. “So there. Now he finally knows what it’s like. I don’t think there’s much ofhimleft after all of that, because he just got fractions of about a hundred thousand lives. But also? I don’t really care how he winds up.”
“Fuck that guy,” Kelly said, and Sirena patted him affectionately.
I looked to Xen. “Time?”
“Eight minutes thirty-two seconds and counting until blackout window ends,” Xen replied.
“Enough to forge timestamped surgical documentation—she was undergoing neural extraction, and Voss suffered synaptic backlash when his hardware attempted to interfere,” I said, and pointed up. “So can I finally have access now?”
“Access approved,” Xen said. “I’ll mirror his logs and backdate a power surge from him.”
“Elegantly done,” I said, feeling his code meet mine at last. It wasn’t mine anymore...but it also wasn’t entirely dissimilar.
“Of course,” Xen said, both of us working hard, offering one another solutions to consider and discard, or include, at almost the speed of light. Now that I was finally online again, I burned escrow tunnels, dumped shell maps, and dispatched preliminary packets to Interpol and select business desks—turning everything I’d gleaned from her would-be buyers into knives.
“Do I want to know what’s happening?” Sirena asked, picking up Kelly’s head again, while beaming from ear to ear. Xen answered for the both of us.
“We just got you, Sirena. We can’t have you going to prison,” he said. Sirena laughed, then looked at Kelly, aghast.
“Kelly! Get your mind out of the gutter!”
“It’s not the gutter!” he protested. “It’s the future! It’s just that no one else ever believes me! It’s not my fault it’s a filthy prophecy!”
I broke connection with the system for long enough to wonder, “What?” aloud, but Sirena shook her head. Then she ran up and kissed my cheek—and held Xen’s hand.
And that told me all I needed to know.
EPILOGUE
SIRENA
I tooksome time off after that.
I wanted to recuperate someplace quiet—someplace without anyone else’s noisy mind—so I went to a very remote cabin in upstate New York, with pretty views and no neighbors, and Nex came with me.
His was the only mind I could stand.
And I honestly wasn’t sure if I was going to go back to work.
There were isolated places near the ocean I could keep him—and then I could just swim out to sea if I wanted to rest…
Nex was perfect though, in every way. He made sure I ate, held me when I wanted to spend hours just staring into the fire thinking about nothing, letting my mind heal itself, and then, when I was ready, took hours upon hours making sweet, gentle love to me, not hungry, just kind, restoring me from the inside out.
And I knew he was in contact with Xen. He’d tell me gossip from the office—but not work, never work—and it had to come from somewhere. We’d left Xen behind to help manage the fallout, and I had no doubt he was doing a good job of it—how could he do otherwise? —but I did miss him.
When Nex was recovering, Xen had helped to hold me together too—and it wasn’t until I’d met either of them, in the flesh or the metal as it were, that I’d ever had a chance on land to fall apart.
To simply be.
“He misses you,” Nex announced one morning, after we’d finished pancakes with maple syrup, powdered sugar, and strawberries—listening to Nex’s thoughts as he got to eat assorted things for the first time had become one of my favorite hobbies.
“Yeah? Tell him I miss him, too,” I said with a smile.
Nex paused. “I can…but I can almost guarantee he will also want me to quantify that.”
