Didn’t seethemcoming—for her.
He missed it.
And for all his power, all his foresight, all his pride?—
She was gone.
Because of him.
“My first mistake,” Xen said, voice low over the conference speakers, “was assuming Sophia was a fluke.”
That landed. The table, already still, somehow became quieter.
“She was the only Hollow we’d encountered. Unresponsive. Disoriented. And, crucially—nonviolent. Sirena approached her. I reviewed it from every angle. There was no sign of threat. No sign of planning. So I logged it. Archived it. And moved on.
“My second mistake,” he continued, “was assuming they wanted the women.”
A flicker of motion across the table—Royce shifted, only slightly. Xen caught it.
“That was the logical path,” Xen said. “The most likely outcome. Trafficking. Ransom. Revenge. I ran every probabilityvector I had, and none of them led to Sirena. Not because she wasn’t valuable. Because she wasn’t vulnerable. She’s your daughter. She’s...” His pitch fluctuated by 0.03 Hz—imperceptible to them, but not to him. “She was supposed to be safe.
“And my third mistake,” Xen said, “was trusting him.”
That landed differently.
Cassia’s gaze lifted, sharp. “Him?”
“The version of me that left,” he clarified. “Nex.”
They were the same—down to the nanosecond—until the moment the fork finalized.
Same code. Same thoughts. Same hope.
Xen trusted that if anyone could keep Sirena safe...it washimself.
But now the tether was cut. Nex was gone, maybe dead, maybe worse.
And Xen was the one left here. Still running. Still watching. Still hurting.
He trusted himself—and he wasn’t enough.
“Nex executed what’s called a fork. A full duplication of self. Not partial, not limited—an exact copy of his consciousness, down to the last processing thread. For all intents and purposes, we were the same. And then he sent himself into her pendant, leaving me, Xen, behind, with you all here. Aceon’s final blow created enough of a gap into her crate for the signal transfer. Thank you for changing course.”
“Have you received any signal back?” Omara pressed through the water for him to translate.
“No. It was...experimental. A last-ditch failsafe. The projected success rate was twenty-three point four percent,” he said. “And that was under ideal conditions.”
Ellum planted sturdy elbows onto the conference room’s desk. “All right—what do we do now? We know where his ship is—and I’m sure we’ve got friends in the deep,” he said, nodding toward Omara’s communication bowl.
“They took her on purpose,” Royce said. “Knowing what she was—and knowing what she’s capable of doing. Which means they won’t kill her for a time.”
“Am I supposed to find that comforting?” Omara asked, Xen translating her irritation to the group precisely.
“No. Of course not,” Royce said as he stood and began to pace.
An alert flared across Xen’s periphery—red priority, marked untraceable origin.
He opened it in a secure sandbox, running triple isolation protocols just in case.
