Still, he didn’t speak first.
Eventually, Royce exhaled a long, slow breath through his nose.
Then: “You stole my signature.”
Xen nodded once. “Correct.”
“You forged sixteen separate authorizations.”
“Eighteen, technically.”
“And you spent,” Royce said, voice rising, “two-thirds of my annual fucking budget?—”
“Sixty-four percent,” Xen clarified, evenly.
“—on building yourself a body?” Royce exploded. “Without telling me? Without a meeting? Without so much as a goddamn memo?”
Xen tilted his head, mildly curious. “Would a memo have softened the financial impact?”
Royce made a strangled sound. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“That certain threats require non-distributed solutions. That a physical presence grants tactical advantages no satellite feed can replicate. That waiting for permission would’ve been a delay I couldn’t afford. And that none of those justifications would survive a procurement review.”
“You think this is funny?”
“I think it was necessary.”
Royce turned, pacing a short, sharp loop like a man trying not to punch a wall. “You didn’t even test it. No pilot program, no simulations?—”
“I ran over four million simulations.”
“—in the real world, damn it! This is hardware. This is risk. You dropped into a body built off stolen code and prayed your systems would boot.”
“They did.”
“And what if they hadn’t?” Royce whirled on him. “What if you’d crashed halfway in and bricked yourself? Or worse—taken the network down with you?”
“Then the budget would’ve resolved itself,” Xen said evenly. Royce dragged a hand down his face. “I did not do this lightly,” Xen continued. “And I do not regret it.”
Royce looked like he wanted to argue—but paused. Not at the words, but to stare at Xen’s chest. The visible reality of him. The tension vector in Xen’s stance. The zero-lag twitch of smart muscle beneath boron-carbide armor.
“You’re really in there,” he muttered.
“Yes.”
“How does it feel?”
Xen paused. “Expensive.”
Royce barked a laugh despite himself, then immediately scowled. “This isn’t over. You’ve bypassed every system of oversight I have.”
“Then perhaps your systems are insufficient.”
“Youwerethe system—whichispart of the problem,” he said, before inhaling to make another point.
But then a ping hit Xen’s board—low-level, encrypted, and flickering with an unexpected signature.
He held up a hand. “One moment.”
