And then—just barely—he nodded. “Carry on,” he said, and walked out the door.
Xen knew he had carte blanche, then, which was a perilous thing.
Just because Sirena didn’t want them to interfere didn’t mean he couldn’t bring certain resources closer. Quietly.
If she needed him—and he was hours away—that wouldn’t do.
Knowing their final destination meant that satellite coverage could be retasked.
The nearest unflagged drone assets were rerouted into overwater loiter patterns, with a maximum insertion time of fifty-five minutes.
Close enough for relevance. Far enough for deniability.
And then Lung came by, knocking on the door of the conference room Xen had taken over for planning purposes after returning Sophia safely into her gargoyle’s waiting arms.
“Hey,” Lung said, stepping in immediately after his knock. “I want to talk to you.”
“Yes?” Xen allocated 64 cores to parsing tone, 112 to predictive modeling of conversational vectors, and 768 tomaintaining optimal mission planning throughput in the background.
“How do I get me one of those?” he asked, jerking his chin at Xen’s body.
Xen glanced down, nonplussed. “A body?”
“A body that can punch Thorne through a wall and walk away like it’s nothing? Yeah. That.”
Xen considered. “First you forge eighteen procurement authorizations.”
Lung’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“No. That was merely step one.”
Lung huffed, half-laughing, half-incredulous. “You’re telling me you built this entire thing without oversight?”
“I had oversight,” Xen replied. “I just ignored it.”
“You used Minotaur gel for your muscle layers, right?” Lung stepped closer, eyeing the matte black ridges of ceramic armor with something like envy. “And that’s boron-carbide plating—graphene laminate? Jesus. What’s your interior torque rating?”
“Classified.”
“You’re a walking tank.”
“Correct.”
Lung let out a low whistle. “And here I was thinking I was the big gun around here.”
Xen almost smiled. “You still are. I am not a gun.”
Lung opened his muzzle to laugh, just as Xen’s board flared.
A high-priority burst transmission.
Private channel. Nex’s encryption.
He caught only flashes at first—system checks. Emotional telemetry. Tactile thresholds. Memory routing.
Then a surge of something dangerously close to pleasure.
It hit like a live wire across Xen’s inputs.
