It nearly undid him, but he caught it before the trace decayed.
Encrypted it at the root, and filed it beneath four layers of firewalled memory, tagged under a subdirectory he’d never used before:
/PRIVATE/NO_BACKUPS/MEM.SIRENA/NEX001.heart
It would never be copied. Never shared. Never overwritten.
Just one moment.
Held still.
The first proof that loving her hadn’t been a glitch.
And that even stripped of reach, and resource, and reinforcement—he’d still made her feel safe enough to love him back.
Xen locked the file with a passphrase only he would understand.
Closed the partition.
He stood there, alone, remembering what it meant to feel whole, for a millisecond that stretched for an eternity—but then the job of protecting her continued.
Xen shunted the rest of his processing into function and ghosted through HQ to the next floor’s conference room. It was empty now. Chairs askew. Royce’s coffee mug sat half-full on the table behind Kelly’s vacant body, which had stood and angled itself toward theHelepolis, halted only by the wall.
The tension in the air had dissipated—but nothing had been resolved.
At the back, though, was Omara’s scrying bowl.
He picked up a lapis stone and let it fall into the water.
Sirena’s mother answered in a heartbeat, her voice transmitted on the waves, audible only to Xen’s sensors. “Is there news?”
He placed a finger on the glass, syncing directly to her signal so the message would be for her alone. “We have had contact.”
“And?”
“She is alive. With Nex. Aboard the yacht.”
A pause. “Unless your people are also on board, I’d hardly call that safe.”
“They are en route to an island called Vermeil. She requests no backup at this time. However, I know your forces will need time to acclimate to the depth and pressure?—”
“When?”
“On approach at local dawn.”
“Then we will begin immediately.”
38 /SIRENA
I woke up sore-in-a-good-way,as opposed to the sore-from-sleeping-on-a-floor way I had the prior nights.
But the second I came to full awareness, I realized something was wrong.
The ship was still.
We’d anchored—or docked.
I lunged upright and ran to the glass to look outside. The rest of the laboratory was empty. Nex had made it sound like we had another day—where was he? Was he all right? Surely he knew we were still, too.
