“And your body’s covered in bruises, and you appear somewhat malnourished, which I find deeply concerning, and your cortisol is at an all-time high.”
His eyes devoured me—not hungrily, but like he was memorizing every flawed inch.
“The conditions for sexual insertion are...not perfect,” he said gently. “You’re not wrong. But still, I would be with you. Now, and always.”
My eyebrows had met my hairline. “You are certifiably insane.”
“But the data suggests,” he went on, voice quiet but steady, “that truer insanity would be not loving you.” He tilted his head, recalibrating on the fly. “Even accounting for bias, corrupted inputs, hormonal distortions, sensory overload, prior trauma, and a statistically inadvisable degree of self-sacrifice...I still arrive at the same result.”
31 /NEX
“Yeah...no, okay?”Sirena said, giving me a bittersweet smile. “Ignore my body and listen to my mouth.”
“As you wish.” I still felt like I was dying—but as long as I was in Sirena’s presence, I was dying in a good way. I stood and carried the tablet with me.
“Give me a moment, will you?” I asked her, offering her a hand to stand. She took it, I helped her up, then I let go—I needed every bit of bandwidth for what would come next. I let Marek’s biometric locks fall open beneath my touch. His retina scan. His fingerprint. His posture.
They were all mine now.
I routed the tablet’s signal through theHelepolis’s uplink buffer—but only after splicing in three dummy packets to delay traceback, and encrypting my outbound message via cipher keys I’d left stashed in a buried routine back at MSA headquarters.
This body was loud. Hot. Greedy for processing power. Every heartbeat and breath gnawed at my thread stability. But eventually, I found the fork I’d left running back home.
It recognized me.
And it listened.
I passed along everything it needed to know:
SIRENA IS ALIVE.
RENDEZVOUS: VERMEIL
WINDOW: DAWN (LOCAL)
When I came back into myself, I found her watching me, her expression caught between curiosity and concern.
“Where did you go?” she asked softly.
“I needed to send a message home,” I said, because technically it was true.
But my true home felt like it was going to be with her. From here on out.
“I didn’t have access to the right keys before. Whoever set this place up had an excellent sense of security—right up until they were fired, I suspect, and then no one performed any updates. But now the MSA will be waiting when we dock—I am certain.”
Her eyes widened immediately. “No.”
“No?”
“Tell them to stand down.”
She said it with finality—it wasn’t a question at all.
Bruised. Barefoot. Radiating absolute clarity.
Not fear. Not hope. But intent.
The kind that rewired things.
