Not much.
Just signal.
Justme.
My processors flooded with models: signal decay curves, narrowband bleed, subharmonics.
I reran the pendant’s antenna tolerances—twice.
Then a third time, upside down, because none of this should work.
But I would make it work anyway.
That was the whole goddamn problem with me.
There was fire.
There was screaming. There were bullets lacing air like teeth.
And I was riding the ghost of a crack that hadn’t happened yet, betting the woman I loved on math I hadn’t had time to finish.
This was going to work.
It had to.
Because I couldn’t bear to calculate what would happen if it didn’t.
14 /SIRENA
I was ankle-deep in effluvia,and the box I was trapped in kept shifting.
There was no point in screaming for help—I knew the rest of the MSA was there, especially after someone hit the wall.
Goddammit, it was my own fucking fault I was in here. I pulled my phone out of my workbag, but there was no signal—of course the fuck not—but at least its flashlight would give me eyes. I turned it on and swept it around the box, while the sounds of combat continued outside, dulled through the cargo box’s metal.
I was disgusting, and so were the people on the ground.
“Hello?” I asked, kneeling beside the nearest one.
This time it was a man. I peeled up one of his eyelids and skated the light across his eyeline. His pupil constricted, but only barely, and I couldn’t get a hold of his mind inside mine. Reaching for his thoughts, or any of the others, felt like putting an unwilling hand into cold Jell-O. There wasn’t much there, and whatever there was, you couldn’t grasp for long.
“Come on,” I said, tapping his cheek, then pinching his trapezius, trying to do anything I could to bring his mind back into his body.
Because I didn’t want to accept that hedidn’thave a mind anymore.
But it was the obvious answer for why he—whyallof them—were here.
And all of us were being slowly dragged onto Voss’s boat.
I went from being concerned about them to being concerned about us.
“Guys?” I squeaked as the sounds outside stilled—then the cargo box was hit by rhythmic waves on the roof. Gusts of air.
Someone had to be driving this thing—and flying what sounded like a helicopter.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Ipushedat both minds—driver’s and the gunner’s—but my thoughts went right through them.
