But Ihadto help her somehow.
I started with Marek’s work.
Not the surface files—those were junk, curated for oversight.
Progress reports, sensor readouts, code commits meant to look like forward momentum.
There—beneath a hashed directory misfiled under propulsion R&D—lay the truth.
No physics engines. No AI prototypes. Just market projections.
Bidder portfolios. Encryption handshakes. Tentative lot numbers.
They were not studying her.
They were cataloging her.
Sirena wasn’t a prisoner.
She was product.
One of a set, if they got their way.
A pilot project for a new kind of war asset: compliant, compliant, compliant.
The word repeated so often it functionally became a prayer.
They wanted to sell her—her power, her mind, herobedience.
To the highest bidder at an island called Vermeil at dawn, in two days.
It was a place built for disappearing things.
And this time, the thing they planned to disappear was her.
This was unacceptable.
So I dove into the man.
The locked archive partition inside his personal storage.
He was paranoid, which helped me—because paranoid men build walls, and walls cast shadows.
I’d learned to live in shadows.
It took me eleven minutes.
Not to break the encryption—please.
But to make sure no tripwires could get triggered on open.
Then I dug.
And oh, gods.
I didn’t find a worm.
I found anest.
