“Potentially a trap.”
Not for her mind—no one puppeted Sirena—but for the moment. For themath.I didn’t know the vector yet because I didn’t knowthis girl.Unknown inputs make ugly outputs. Damsel-as-lure? Location trap? Social trap—weaponize Sirena’s ethics so she lets her guard down and someone takes advantage of her?
All valid.
Ihatevalid.
I swept for what Icouldact on: sprinklers, strobes, PA, emergency mag-locks, fire panel with a sad default password. I ghosted a cursor over the alarm—one tap and the room would become polite chaos. Sirena leaves clean. I could keep her safe. That was the core loop.
“Do you realize you’ve had plastic surgery?” Sirena asked. “A lot of it?”
Sophia blinked; across the table, Thorne gawked. Her hands rose, mapping unfamiliar terrain—hairline, ear rim, nose bridge. If she couldn’t remember who she is, how could she remember her old contours? Still, her fingertips paused at the outer eye corners, then her ears.
“Do you mean that?” she asked softly when the inventory was done.
“Yes,” Sirena said.
“Multi-session work,” I added, quiet in Sirena’s ear. “Weeks to heal.”
“Do you remember any doctors? Or recovery suites?” Sirena’s voice stayed kind.
Sophia shook her head, and bafflement slid into anxiety. “So the face I’m looking at every morning—that’s not even mine?” Her voice jumped a register. Thorne’s wing pulled close but stopped before touching her.
The woman was distraught, her eyes darting around the room like they couldn’t keep still, and her fingers found her mouth.
Four soft notes leaked out around them, the shape of a lullaby without words.
The pendant mic caught it; on my side, it became a clean spectrogram with four repeating peaks.
“Do you know that song?” Sirena asked gently.
Sophia shook her head, startled by herself. “I...don’t know why I did that.”
“It’s okay,” Sirena said.
I logged the fragment twice: once as evidence, and once as a reason.
“As much as I dislike the clanker, I feel slightly better that he couldn’t find her in any databases either,” Thorne said.
The temptation to salt his past and bankrupt his future—zero out his merchant IDs, backdate tax anomalies, cross-link his shell corps to a trafficking watchlist—flared like a solar storm.
Choose peace.
Choose Sirena.
I kept my knives sheathed.
For now.
“I pulled this out of her when she got here,” he went on, retrieving a small pouch from one of his pockets to empty its contents on the table.
Sirena twisted so my cameras could see a clear sample vial, crushed flat, like a bug. Inside: grit, a bent sliver of copper coil, epoxy shards—what used to be a board, now confetti.
“I destroyed it, of course, but I kept it, in case?—”
“The clanker can help you?” Sirena asked with no small amount of sarcasm.
Clever girl.
