And I went still.
Nex clocked the change. “All right. I’m feeling better about this plan now.”
“What I need from you is for you to tell me what Voss expects, since I won’t be controlled by this thing. Will you be able to intercept his commands, and then hold them clearly in your mind? So that I can pretend to follow them?”
“Of course—but does that mean you can read me? Right now?”
I lifted my hand and waggled it. “I could...but I’m trying not to.”
“Why?”
“Because it feels rude.”
“Is it?” he asked, and I laughed.
“I don’t know, Nex—I’ve never really done this before,” I said, drawing an imaginary line between me and him.
“Well, I don’t care if it’s rude or not. I only want whatever keeps you safe.” He put out his hand. “And I always want to know what you’re thinking—so it would be unfair to deny you the same.”
I gave him a soft smile as I took his hand. “Just keep thinking louder than the rest of them, okay?”
“How do I do that?” he asked, looking panicked.
“Just keep being in love with me,” I said, rising up on my toes to kiss his cheek. “Now,” I said, surveying the woman I’d stopped. “Should you be here when I wake her up, or not?”
“Probably not.”
“Okay, then. I’m good for a bit. There’s tangles in my hair that’ll take hours to get out. Go take a shower and do some Marek things—and eat, please? Believe me, the person who’s worn flesh her whole life, on the frailties of the human body?” I said with a tease. “I need you at your best condition for this to work.”
“Having to sleep for a third of the day is incredibly inefficient.”
“So is love, yet here we both still are,” I said, shooing him away. “You fix the cameras; I’ll fix this.” I tilted my head at the woman.
He stepped back to do as he was told, and then hesitated. “I do love you. One hundred percent,” he said with a room-illuminating smile.
“You should be more worried aboutyougiving something away, from you looking at me like that,” I said, laughing. “But I love you, one hundred percent, too.”
39 /NEX
The secondI returned to Marek’s room, I stripped off his clothing and got into the shower, activating the uplink to Xen as the water hit my skin.
For a moment, I let myself feel it—really feel it. The water. The heat. The new nerve endings I’d been ignoring all night. It was distracting. Inefficient. Overwhelming.
But once the novelty passed, I focused.
I briefed Xen on the yacht’s early arrival at Vermeil and the presence of armed rivals in the harbor. While he couldn’t contact me directly, I knew he wouldn’t have left anything to chance.
He was me, after all.
I could only hope he already had forces within range of the island, because once Sirena gathered enough intel to identify the players and their jurisdictions—if they had any—we were going to need to shut this down, with force.
I’d already done my part—the virus I’d dropped into Voss’s systems last night was beautiful.
It replaced data at the same rate it consumed it, keeping the volume constant and the patterns plausible enough to survive a casual inspection.
And becauseIhad written it—I, the architect of MIHR—it would pass for truth.
At least, for as long as Voss trusted me.
