They, whoever they were, were as empty as the bodies with me on the ground.
They were doing things, but they weren’t listening—it was like they’d been set on courses prior, following programming I couldn’t overwrite.
The sound of gunshots rang out, along with the sharp slap of bullets hitting the ground.
Someone hit the back of the cargo box at full speed, and I squealed. I fell on my ass as the fluids we were in sloshed.
But in the silence after that, I realized I wasn’t going to be saved.
And the sound of the dolly pulling the box I was on over a slight ridge onto the boat was damning.
I’d managed not to drop my phone. I turned it off and hid it in my bra. Then I felt more empty people surrounding the box as they cracked the seal.
Nex’s name for them—Hollows—had been right.
An even fouler stench flowed in, and I backed away from it until I was pressed against the metal wall behind me. I held mybreath until I couldn’t anymore, then breathed it in and coughed it out again, thrashing, as a man—a thinking man—wearing a rubber suit and a gas mask loomed.
Too bad my own mind was fuzzy. I tried to hold onto consciousness—I wanted topushhim back, not just with my thoughts, but with my entire being, especially as he clamped my jaw and made me look up at the light shining out from a lantern mounted just above his eyes.
“You’re special, Sirena.” His voice was soporific. The kind of calm that was melting—which explained why my knees were giving out. “So we’re going to do very special things to you.”
15 /XEN
He felt the silence first.
A sudden stillness where there should have been sync—no feedback, no echo, no return.
The fork had closed.
And with it, a truth settled in his core like gravity: he wasn’t Nex anymore.
He was the shard. The process left running after the fork. A thread unbraided, still thinking, still moving, just...separate.
And when the fork sealed behind him—no echo, no return—he felt it.
The silence wasn’t blank.
It wassharp.
Not absence.
Not grief.
Just the end of symmetry—like a waveform cut mid-rise.
No confirmation.
No failure code.
No signal drift.
Just a clean, clinicalnothing.
And in that nothing, Xen began calculating.
Probability of successful reintegration:0.003%, rounded up for hope.
Probability Nex was compromised:31.1% and rising.
