Thorne laughed, bitter and low. “You don’tknowanything. You’re just a clanker.”
Xen didn’t look up. He kept his eyes on Sophia’s spine, where something that did not belong was pretending to be part of her. He reached in with a fiberhook and teased the base of a filament loose, running just enough current down it to encourage it to release from the nerve it was wrapped around.
“I know what it is to watch someone suffer and be able to donothing.To want to trade every piece of yourself for one moment of relief. I know what it’s like to hold back, even when it’s killing you—because it’s what they would want. And I know what it means to want to be seen by someone who doesn’t even know you exist. To hold your whole self in silence, because you believe you can never touch them.”
Xen didn’t expect a response.
There was only the hum of the surgical suite. The soft whisper of air filters. The quiet nothingness of a body kept steady by intention alone.
But something had shifted in the room.
The kind of stillness that came when one truth brushed too close to another. When someone who didn’t think machines could feel realized he might be wrong.
“Do you...love her?” Thorne asked, then quickly corrected himself. “No—do youthinkyou’re in love with Sirena?”
“I do not think anything,” Xen said. “I know.”
He didn’t whisper it. Didn’t look up. Didn’t stop working.
The filament in his grasp loosened with a slow twitch, pink-tinged metal glistening under the surgical lights.
A single flick of Xen’s wrist and the thread detached. He laid it carefully aside.
Across the sterile barrier, Thorne stood like a fault line under pressure.
Xen could feel the tension radiating from him even without looking—fury held in check by duty. Grief masked by impatience.
But he didn’t speak again.
Not while Xen worked.
Not while Sophia’s spine was exposed.
Not while her life still hung in delicate balance.
And when the first rays of dawn filtered in through the shielded skylights, the argument ended—not with a word, but with a crackle of stone.
Thorne turned to granite mid-glare. Arms crossed. Expression frozen.
Silent. Watching.
As if petrified not just by the sun, but by what Xen had dared to admit.
27 /NEX
I watchedMarek pace in his quarters, and I began to plan how to hollow him out.
He thought the room was secure.
And it was—from the outside.
But I was not outside. I was already here.
His wrist tablet synced automatically with the personal archive in the wall safe. He didn’t even notice the handshake when it happened.
He didn’t think about the signals his own body gave off—heart rate, gait, thermal signatures.
He didn’t know I’d mapped them all.
