Lung appeared first, dragging what remained of Kelly behind him.
It took Xen a moment to fully process the scene—because the body was still breathing. Headless, yes, but as always, inexplicably alive. The collar of Kelly’s uniform was torn low, exposing the ruin hardly ever revealed beneath: not a clean cut, but a ragged, torn edge, as if something wrenched the head away and left the nerves unsure where to stop. The wound wasblackened at the margins, as if cauterized by intention alone, and something deep within it pulsed—still present, but slow.
Ellum and Aceon arrived next. Neither spoke. Ellum was pale, his jacket torn, one sleeve soaked through with blood—not his, but the strange Hollows they were fighting. The bite on his arm was ugly, but not deep. He stared straight ahead, not reacting as the med drone hovered to meet him. Xen saw the tremor in his jawline, the early signs of shock setting in. He sent a blanket, a low-dose sedative to the IV queue, and locked Ellum’s next mission assignment behind a two-factor override.
Aceon was louder in every way—his limp pronounced, his voice too bright as he brushed off the concern of the med staff with a raised hand and a shallow laugh. His armor dropped to the ground in a clatter of dismissive bravado, but Xen didn’t log the sound. Instead, he noted the bruising pattern on his ribs, the swelling at the thigh, and the damage to his right hand. He sent for replacement gear and set a scan appointment for morning. Aceon would complain. That was fine. The data didn’t lie.
Cassia joined them in the sickbay without fanfare. She moved from cot to cot with the quiet grace of someone trained to administer without speaking. Her hand rested on Ellum’s shoulder a moment longer than necessary. She did not look at Kelly’s gurney. She didn’t need to.
And through it all, Royce remained in the conference room.
Xen had watched him replay the footage five times already. He hadn’t moved from his chair. His pulse was steady, but that only told half the story. There was a kind of stillness that wasn’t calm—it was a freeze-state. A psychic hemorrhage too deep to triage. Xen logged the readings, then locked the feed to private.
“All remaining agents accounted for,” he said, waking Royce up from his trance.
Royce stood like a man possessed and made his way over to an unobtrusive glass bowl in the corner, half-filled with water,with a stack of blue pieces of lapis waiting outside of it. It looked like it could be an art project, but Xen knew what it was and pivoted a camera cluster to focus on the bowl’s surface, zooming in until the refraction edge of the water filled half the screen.
Royce dropped a stone.
It fell silently, struck the bottom.
Ripples radiated, then vanished.
The surface stilled. But Xen saw it. He knew what to watch for.
The tension of the water changed.
Microscopic vibrations bloomed outward, too fine for human perception.
He rerouted processing power. Filtered environmental noise. Began to translate.
Omara didn’t speak in words.
She didn’t need to.
Underwater, voice was encoded in pressure and pace, heat and harmonic.
Xen decoded it. Assigned modulation.
And then, softly, from the conference room speaker:“Where is my daughter?”
The voice was hers. Not an imitation. A manifestation.
It threaded through the speakers with a timbre not just heard, butfelt—as though the air itself had been commanded to obey her. Xen cross-referenced against past samples. The cadence was colder. The inflection sharper. Drier than anything he’d recorded before.
Royce didn’t flinch. He’d already lived this moment in his mind a thousand times—each ending worse than the last. Xen watched as he began to speak, voice flat, tone clipped. No flourishes. No denials. Just facts, laid bare for a mother who already knew her daughter was gone.
As Royce talked, Xen translated, shaping each word into subsonic pulses that passed through emitters hidden in the base of the bowl. The water remained still, but its tension shifted, responding in micro-fluctuations. Omara was listening. He could feel it. She received each syllable like the weight of a storm still forming on the horizon.
She did not interrupt.
The quiet held, sharp-edged and waiting—until Lung burst through the door.
“We need to talk about Kelly,” the Therian said, voice rough and too loud for the room. He hauled the Dullahan’s body behind him, arm still locked through the harness straps. “The damn fool threw his head aboard the ship.”
That—finally—broke Royce’s stillness. He looked up, a fraction of tension shifting behind his eyes. “Is he still alive?”
Lung shrugged, halfway between disbelief and rage. “I mean—yes? Technically?” He paced, boots scuffing the floor. “However the fuck he’s been doing it, headless already, for so long?”
