He hadn’t let go of Kelly’s harness. Not once.
Xen registered the strain in his shoulder, the tremor running through his grip. He didn’t say it aloud, but he knew—Lung was afraid. Afraid that if he set the Dullahan down, if he let him fall...the body wouldn’t rise again.
Xen began scanning.
He pulled every record the MSA had on Dullahan physiology—most of it classified, some disturbingly anecdotal. Field reports. Autopsy scans. Esoteric footnotes buried in translated grimoires. It took him less than a second to assemble the shape of the truth.
Kelly’s body was not dying.
Not yet. So long as the head still lived.
The bond between them—between body and head—wasn’t chemical. It was arcane. Electrothaumic. Anchored by whatever ancient mechanism allowed a man to walk headless for centuries and still return to himself at will.
So yes. The head was gone.
But the body remained viable.
Which meant—miraculously, absurdly—this was still salvageable.
He routed the complete summary to Royce’s files and put up the important portions on the wall for Lung to read.
“So I can just...put him in a chair?” Lung said after reading enough. “He’ll be okay?”
“I believe so,” Xen answered, voice threaded through the conference room speakers. “As long as the head survives, the rest of him can wait.”
Xen did not add the final truth aloud.
That he, too, was waiting.
That Kelly’s body wasn’t the only thing left behind.
Because if Nex failed—if he didn’t make it into the pendant, or if the pendant went dark—Xen wouldn’t die. He’d endure. Maintain. Update.
But it wouldn’t matter.
Because there are worse things than death.
Like knowing the part of you that dared tohopenever made it back.
Lung positioned Kelly’s body in one of the swivel chairs that circled the conference room table and let go with trepidation. When Kelly’s body didn’t go slack, he relaxed, and dropped himself one chair over. “We need to go get her,” he announced.
“Yes, we do,” Royce agreed. “But safely.”
Xen saw Aceon and Ellum in the hall on his cameras, trailed by Cassia counseling the unheeded wisdom of rest.
“What the hell were those things?” Aceon asked the second he got inside the door.
“Zombies?” Ellum guessed.
“Hollows. Like the woman Sirena and I met the other night,” he answered, although Sophia did not seem interested in attacking anyone.
“First off,” Royce began, as everyone took a seat, “how the fuck did this happen?”
“Because of me,” Xen said, and the room held its breath.
He could explain. Build arguments from probability curves and behavioral deltas, lay fault on the blank spaces in the data. He could speak for hours and still never say the thing that matters.
That he didn’t see her coming.
