His mind forked, quietly.
One branch stayed present, passive, meat-soft. Watched Sophia blink. Watched Thorne shift behind her like he was trying to become a wall.
The other?—
Calculated.
Detonation conditions:
Cardiac failure
Transmission disruption
Physical extraction
Kill-switch logic tree: irreversible. The moment the bomb suspected it’d been found, it would try to do its job.
So he didn’t move.
Only watched.
And silently began building the solution.
Stage 1:Decoy signal. Xen would fabricate a phantom feed—her vitals, her ping, her fear. All looped, all fake.
Stage 2:Internal suppression. A field at 12.3 millitesla, focused tight as a hug. He’d have to stay within thirty-six inches of her chest.
Stage 3:Faraday cage. Custom, fast. Enough copper to ghost her signal.
Stage 4:Surgery.
Done by him. Only him.
No one else was fast enough. Precise enough. Cold enough.
He sent the new plan to the team—only this time it was encrypted.
Cassia left to begin turning Annex C into the cage he needed, and Thorne warily watched her go.
Xen took a step forward. He needed to be close enough to Sophia when he took over her signal that there could be no detectable change to whoever was listening.
And so what happened next would depend on whether Thorne believed him or not.
The gargoyle texted back—not to him, but on the screen, so the Maukin could see it, and Xen could read it anyways:
Find whoever she’s transmitting to and make them pay.
