I turned away before it could undo me, before the protective subroutines still wired into my bones could reroute all processing to escape.
Instead, I reengaged the uplink buffer.
Rerouted through the decoy packets again.
Encrypted with the MSA cipher stack I’d embedded deep, months ago.
The outgoing message was simple.
DO NOT SHARE THIS LOCATION.
HOLD. OBSERVE.
PRIORITY: HER DIRECTIVES ONLY.
—N
There would be no reply. I’d locked the channel to one-way. Too much risk of backscatter tracing.
But Xen would understand.
He had my architecture.
He had my instincts, and now, he had his orders.
“See what else you can find,” Sirena said. Her voice wasn’t harsh, but it brooked no argument.
She’d gone from captive to commander in under two minutes, and I followed her without hesitation.
I swept the interior—methodically, but fast.
Corridor cams. Dormitories. Labs.
There were twenty-two Hollows on board.
All confined on the same floor as Sirena.
Twelve in containment pens—tagged by number, not name.
Six more in what passed for dormitories, watched but not restrained.
Two in the surgical suites—fresh incisions, still unconscious.
One undergoing prep—strapped down, rigged for upload.
And at the end of this hall, a small active lab—with coolant lines snaking in from both sides.
That alone would’ve piqued my interest.
But when I pulled the internal feed—there he was.
Kelly.
Or the most essential remnant of him.
Suspended in fluid.
Electrodes. Biogels.
