He was certain Nex had made her feeleverything.
And Xen had done nothing—exceptlisten.
He ran diagnostics. Buffered spillover. Cleared cache logs he’d already hidden from Royce. Even encrypted, it felt like trespass.
He didn’t feel shame.
He wasn’t built for that.
But he felt loss—and that was worse.
Nex had made her feel wanted.
But Xen was the onewaiting.
Then—data.
Different this time.
Targeted. Prioritized. Immediate.
A dense stream of operational metadata, marked with urgency flags and context threads. Sensor maps. Personnel schematics. Threat assessments. Memory logs—some annotated, others raw. No message attached, but the intent was clear.
It wasn’t just a report, it was a contingency upload.
The kind of transfer you send when you’ve crossed a line and know there may not be a way back.
Xen rerouted auxiliary cores to process it in parallel. Built firewalled redundancies. Indexed the data under a new branch he labeled:Failover.Nex
The payload was vast, but one acronym kept coming to the forefront: MIHR.
Same as Sirena had seen in Sophia’s mind.
Military Interfacial Human Replication.
And now he knew more than the girl did—or than Thorne would ever admit.
The Hollows were just Phase One.
Blank. Suppressed. Stripped to docility.
Theidealservant class.
Their memories reset again and again until the original spark was gone, leaving only bodies that would obey.
But Sirena wasn’t their evolution.
She was their escalation.
The Hollows were made to take orders.
But the Sirenas were designed to give them.
Controlled influence.
Targeted compulsion.
Push.
