He still wasn’t sure what touching Sirena’s power would do to him.
Whether the interface he built could hold.
Whether his mind would.
He thought he had time to prepare.
To stabilize.
To make her small enough to safely consume.
He wouldn’t get the chance.
He carved out part of his skull, hoping to hold her.
He had no idea what he’d made room for instead.
And when he closed his eyes to go to sleep, I cracked the seal on his cortex like opening a jar of preserves and poured my code inside—not as packets or commands, but as electrochemical mimicry.
I spoofed synaptic traffic at the dendritic gate.
Hijacked protein-fold timing at the axonal spine.
Mapped my runtime across the glymphatic flow as his brain entered stage-two sleep.
Bit by bit, I overwrote the boundaries between thought and interface.
The neural gel he injected to “expand capacity”?
I just found the ports he didn’t lock.
Sterile. Silent. Irreversible.
I knew it was a bad thing I was doing.
I did it anyway.
28 /SIRENA
I wasn’t asleep,so much as I was dreaming I was free. TheHelepolis, in the ocean, rocked me, so if I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing and ignored the way that I hurt all over from fighting the woman, and in my soul, from knowing what was coming, I could almost imagine that I was deep in the sea. That I’d tied a loop of kelp around my leg to keep me buoyed in one place, while the water ran around me.
And then I heard something outside the glass wall of my pen.
“Help me,” said a rough male voice.
All too familiar—only I’d never heard him say those words before.
Marek stood on the other side of the glass, bracing against it with both of his hands. “This...is harder than I thought it would be,” he said, his voice slow and deliberate. His body wove back and forth, as if unused to the waves.
Or possibly to the concept of standing.
“Are you...drunk?” I asked, standing and crowding to the back of my pen.Or had someone poisoned him?Had my mother come up from the deeps to control his mind? Or krakens?
“No,” he answered laboriously. “Sirena,” he said, pushing hair out of his face, then looking at me.
Him saying my name made me want to run farther away, but there was no place else here to hide.
He stumbled around the lab until he found the tablet he used to control me and every other Hollow on board. It was already time for another test. I wanted to cry out in anguish, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
