Chapter 5 Nex
To say I hated Thorne in that moment—Sirena’s fingers tightening on the girl’s, her jaw going slack, eyes closing—would be an understatement.
Every ruin routine I owned woke up. I could salt his past and bankrupt his future; buy the ground under his club and evict his tomorrow; make regulators remember him and banks forget him; stitch his books to the kind of audits that ended in handcuffs; let insurance, licenses, and payment rails fall away like rotten teeth.
I could turn the lights on the wrong eyes and let the underworld take a professional interest.
Money was soft clay. Identities, paper. Buildings, permissions.
I had access to everything—except skin.
Which was why I felt helpless while Sirena’s heart rate spiked, her breathing rushed, and her fingers seized around Sophia’s like a dream had her by the throat.
Sophia’s face mirrored Sirena’s slackness. Thorne’s tail inched toward their joined hands, a rogue limb with its own bad ideas.
Then Sirena’s eyes snapped open and she gave a surface gasp, like a diver breaking free from water into air, even though she could breathe in both. Her free hand fumbled for the comb’s control; she let go of Sophia. The girl folded into Thorne’s side.
“Sirena?” I asked in her ear. Nothing. Not even when the gargoyle decided to be offended.
“What did you do to her?” he growled, wings flaring.
I flicked the power to the building in three even beats. Not random. Me.
Learn or else.
His nostrils flared. A hand went to a device clipped inside his shirt. “Bring water and the med kit,” he ordered while Sirena pulled herself back together.
Alone.
“Sirena?” I pressed.
Sophia had Thorne—stone palm under chin, checking her pupils. Sirena had no one.
Except me.
“Emergency protocol arming. Three. Two—”
“Don’t,” she murmured. A swallow, a cleared throat. Her vitals started trending back toward sane. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not what your biometrics say.”
“Then stop reading them,” she said—and pulled the earpiece out, tossing it to Thorne.
He caught it and crunched it in the palm of his stony hand.
But Sirena knew—and I knew—that my pendant cam was still operational.
She just wanted me out of her ear—or wanted Thorne to think they had privacy.
I wondered if the gargoyle would be that stupid.
“I need a pen and paper,” Sirena said, and Thorne added it to the list of whoever was bringing the med kit.
“What’d you see?” Sophia asked, recovering slightly.
“Not much,” Sirena admitted as the Maukin came to the door— I could see him coming from the hallway cams outside—and he handed Thorne what he’d asked for.
Thorne poured water for Sophia first, then Sirena, but Sirena ignored hers and wrote down a series of numbers and symbols: MIHR-097/BXΔ14.
5, setting the piece of paper squarely in front of my cam.
Receipt acknowledged.
I locked the frame. Bumped contrast. Straightened the page.
The prefix was new.
MIHR.
Not in my lexicon.
Not in any public-facing medical index.
The kind of code that exists only where it was born.
Internal. Isolated. Opaque by design.
Working hypothesis: facility routing or inventory tag.
R-097 read like room/route/rack.
BX wasn’t bimaxillary here; it was box/bin or bay/exhibit.
Δ14.5 was an offset—angle, calibration, deviation.
Warehouse talk. Auction talk. Lab talk.
Sophia swallowed. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to remember—anything.”
“I know,” Sirena said. “Because I looked.”
I pushed the string through buildings/freight/storage instead of medicine: cached vendor catalogs, sitemap ghosts, waybills, HS code abstracts, private security armory logs, underground auction mirrors.
“Do you . . . know what that means?” Sophia asked, her voice thin.
“No,” Sirena said gently. “And I don’t think you do either.”
Sophia flinched. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” Sirena said softly. “Not pain—absence. A window that opened onto black. And this.” She tapped the paper. “Only this.”
Returns: a lot of almosts—routing stubs, shelf maps, camera mount offsets—nothing that resolved to a place you could walk to. Which was the point, if someone wanted her unfindable.
Sophia’s eyes shone. “So I’m . . . no one?”
“You’re someone,” Sirena said, firm. “But your memories are curated. What’s left isn’t a life—it’s a label.”
Conclusion (for now): not what they did to her, but where she was staged. Back room, not operating room.
Sirena folded the paper, slipped it into her jacket. “We’ll find where that code belongs,” she said. “And then we’ll find the people who put it there.”
I marked the line. Logged. Hunting.
“It goes without saying that I’ll fund you,” Thorne said as Sirena stood.
I didn’t need his money. I needed to be the first thing she reached for when something broke.
“Even Nex?” she teased.
“Even the . . . Nex,” Thorne said, looking like it pained him.
Sirena rose on her toes as he lowered a massive black wing, so she could see the girl again. “Just get some rest, hydrate, and if you remember anything else—he knows where to find me,” she said before turning on her heel to leave.