Chapter 3
“Sirena, this is Sophia—Sophia, this is Sirena.”
Thorne took the seat beside her. The nearer wing unfurled—canopy posture. I didn’t need telepathy to parse that. Proximity read as claim as much as cover; I logged both.
Sirena pulled out the nearest chair and sat—hands flat on the table, pendant centered on the girl. Heart rate ticked up; crown noise compensation held.
“And I assume you’re here of your own accord?” Sirena asked, voice even but a shade tight.
The girl’s eyes cut to Thorne, then back. Delay: 0.6 seconds. “As much as I know anything about me.”
Thorne didn’t move. The canopy wing stayed. “That’s why you’re here,” he said, and then nudged the girl with his elbow before tilting his chin at Sirena. He was cueing her responses; I logged the manipulation, not the gallantry.
“I’ve lost part of my mind.” The girl said it in a rush, like she was worried no one would believe her.
“Which . . . part?” Sirena asked.
The girl gave a helpless laugh. “I don’t really know.”
I logged it as both comforting and concerning. Systems remember by what they route around.
But if one is unaware one has a system, you call the detour the road . . .
“It’s just gone,” Sophia continued. “Everything from my childhood is hazy—and then there are long gaps. I know how to do things, like, cook an omelet? But I couldn’t tell you how I learned.”
An unknown identity is a risk surface; I needed more data. I decided to look closer.
“Center up,” I told Sirena, soft, in-ear. “Square your shoulders. Put the pendant on her.”
She adjusted—and the girl came into focus.
“I don’t remember my parents,” Sophia said. “I’m—I’m not even sure Sophia is my name.”
The pendant’s camera tilted as Sirena looked at Thorne. “And how did she get here?”
“I would rather not talk about that,” Thorne said. History variable: he preferred control of the narrative.
I zoomed the girl’s face across every database I could touch. Face match: none. Impossible. That meant something else was wrong.
“Stall,” I told Sirena.
“And how long have you been here?” Sirena asked fluidly, twirling a finger around, ambiguous as to whether she meant the club or Thorne’s care. Thorne set a stone-gray hand on the table between them; it fixed the negotiation in his ground.
“She would rather not talk about that, either.”
Sophia tilted her head, ducking back, giving me more angles and data—but nothing became clearer.
Landmarks didn’t agree—eyes to ears to nose bridge.
I peeled back the lighting and checked where surgeons leave whispers: fine tension at the outer canthi, faint swelling under the eyes, a hairline that interrupted and resumed, ear cartilage with symmetry it shouldn’t have, until I came to the only answer that made sense.
“She’s been altered,” I told Sirena. “Multi-region and recent. Periocular tightening, possible canthopexy. Ear work—concha/tragus shaping. Hairline revision. Nasal bridge looks grafted. Databases can’t miss what never existed. She’s a face that never lived.”
The pendant cam jumped as Sirena reared back.
“Excuse me?” she said aloud.
The gargoyle took it the wrong way. His wing tightened, protective. Log: Sophia attachment probability 0.84 and rising. “Just because you’re a telepath doesn’t mean you’re entitled to know everything—”
“No, no.” She waved him down and put a finger to her ear. I saw the motion in the pendant feed; the accelerometer spiked inside its sapphires. “And you’re sure?” she pressed.
It was the only answer that fit. “Yes.”
“You brought the clanker, didn’t you?” Thorne growled behind her. “To my establishment?”
She snapped her fingers at him without looking. “He’s a valued teammate, and your invitation was so non-specific there was a 90% chance you were inviting me to an orgy. Go on?”
“Work done,” I continued, businesslike. “Multiple sites. Periocular and ear clues date it as recent.” Then what she really wants answered: “She’s young.
Mid-twenties. No orbital plates, no zygomatic fixation, no fracture remodeling—no trauma signature.
Same hand, staged sessions. This wasn’t correction. It was camouflage.”
Her heart rate spiked and then steadied.
“That’s . . .” Sirena began, but drifted off, so I finished it for her.
“Potentially a trap.”
Not for her mind—no one puppeted Sirena—but for the moment.
For the math. I didn’t know the vector yet because I didn’t know this girl.
Unknown inputs make ugly outputs. Damsel-as-lure?
Location trap? Social trap—weaponize Sirena’s ethics so she lets her guard down and someone takes advantage of her?
All valid.
I hate valid.
I swept for what I could act on: sprinklers, strobes, PA, emergency mag-locks, fire panel with a sad default password. I ghosted a cursor over the alarm—one tap and the room would become polite chaos. Sirena leaves clean. I could keep her safe. That was the core loop.
“Do you realize you’ve had plastic surgery?” Sirena asked. “A lot of it?”
Sophia blinked; across the table, Thorne gawked. Her hands rose, mapping unfamiliar terrain—hairline, ear rim, nose bridge. If she couldn’t remember who she is, how could she remember her old contours? Still, her fingertips paused at the outer eye corners, then her ears.
“Do you mean that?” she asked softly when the inventory was done.
“Yes,” Sirena said.
“Multi-session work,” I added, quiet in Sirena’s ear. “Weeks to heal.”
“Do you remember any doctors? Or recovery suites?” Sirena’s voice stayed kind.
Sophia shook her head, and bafflement slid into anxiety. “So the face I’m looking at every morning—that’s not even mine?” Her voice jumped a register. Thorne’s wing pulled close but stopped before touching her.
The woman was distraught, her eyes darting around the room like they couldn’t keep still, and her fingers found her mouth.
Four soft notes leaked out around them, the shape of a lullaby without words.
The pendant mic caught it; on my side, it became a clean spectrogram with four repeating peaks.
“Do you know that song?” Sirena asked gently.
Sophia shook her head, startled by herself. “I . . . don’t know why I did that.”
“It’s okay,” Sirena said.
I logged the fragment twice: once as evidence, and once as a reason.
“As much as I dislike the clanker, I feel slightly better that he couldn’t find her in any databases either,” Thorne said.
The temptation to salt his past and bankrupt his future—zero out his merchant IDs, backdate tax anomalies, cross-link his shell corps to a trafficking watchlist—flared like a solar storm.
Choose peace.
Choose Sirena.
I kept my knives sheathed.
For now.
“I pulled this out of her when she got here,” he went on, retrieving a small pouch from one of his pockets to empty its contents on the table.
Sirena twisted so my cameras could see a clear sample vial, crushed flat, like a bug. Inside: grit, a bent sliver of copper coil, epoxy shards—what used to be a board, now confetti.
“I destroyed it, of course, but I kept it, in case—”
“The clanker can help you?” Sirena asked with no small amount of sarcasm.
Clever girl.
Rather than seeming abashed, Thorne rolled his eyes. “He’ll help no matter what—same as you will.”
“And why do you think we’ll help?” Sirena countered, folding her fingers together on the table.
One corner of Thorne’s lips pulled up, revealing teeth like a white picket fence, punctuated by a fang. “Because you’re not me.”
By which he meant that she was good.
I was discounted.
I shouldn’t have been.
The pendant cam rose and lowered as Sirena huffed a sigh—and I decided to take control. “Chain of custody. Now,” I told her. “We bag every shard and take it to HQ.”
She didn’t nod, but her fingers were already reaching for evidence bags in her jacket. Professional.
I kept going, still only to her: “Even smashed, it talks. Epoxy formulation is a signature. Flux residue narrows the solder line. Coil alloy and wind count trace the feedstock. Adhesive chemistry gives me supplier. Tool marks say hand-fit or line-placed. If any mask survived, I could batch the fab. I’ll pull it apart until it confesses. ”
Sirena slid two bags across the table, calm as rain. “I’m taking this with me,” she said to Thorne. “All of it.”
He grunted assent.
Sophia waited, small and silent. I’m not provisioned for want, and yet: want detected.
I wanted Sirena to stand, for us to walk out, and I could take the tracker’s wreckage and make it confess.
But Sirena’s curiosity is a gravity well.
She wouldn’t choose escape velocity.
“We should sweep the girl again. Visual here. Full scan at HQ. Shoulders, scalp, nape, soles.”
Sirena shook her head; I saw it in the cam’s slight wobble. “Put your hands out on the table,” she told the woman, and the woman did as she was told.