Chapter 9 Nex
“What?” Sirena’s voice spiked—volume, pitch, blood pressure. Fans ticked up in reflex; I forced them to be quiet.
“It’s a possibility I must model,” I said. “Not a claim. If you can strip a life down to the chassis, you can assign it tasks. Some of those tasks could be reproductive. That’s all.”
She angled toward my nearest camera. “So this is the face you wanted to see?”
Yes.
Always.
Pretty is a lazy word for what she does to light.
She’s precise: mouth blade-straight, a freckle 7.
2 millimeters off her left hairline, lashes like wet ink, the crown setting a faint ache into her brow she refuses to show.
Symmetry would tell you she was attractive; purpose made her beautiful.
When she decided, everything arranged—jaw, eyes, the quiet between breaths—and the room fell into its right shape around her.
But she meant the expression she was currently wearing, heat banked in her eyes.
“Not entirely.”
One of her eyebrows ticked up. “Why?”
Confession: “I caught another hit—an independent pallet-tag ping off the tracer line. New shipment. Live.”
Which was why I didn’t risk telling her sooner. She’d have gone alone.
“Where?” she asked as she stood. The chair legs complained across the floor; her pulse bumped +4 BPM; her spine stiffened like a verdict.
“I’ve already set a mandatory briefing in fifteen minutes, with all available agents.” I’d started sending invites the moment her elevator reached my floor. “Conference room two.”
It was clear from her bearing that fifteen minutes was too long. But then she nodded and smoothed her blazer with two flat passes—ritual armor—before setting her headband’s crown. “Good call.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Then her eyes narrowed in thought. “Is there a time constraint I should know about?”
“It will be easier to tell everyone simultaneously,” I demurred.
She rapped her knuckles against the nearest server rack on her way out the door. “Still a shitty liar, Nex.”
“Thank you,” I said, because it was better she think it than know the truth.
And now there were fourteen minutes until the briefing—time to prepare.
14:00
Alerts finished propagating. Doors unlocked for the arriving agents; conference room two warmed its lights. I laid the board: cross-dock map, pallet path, tracer lineage. I noted that Sirena had abandoned her coffee. I did not put her vitals up where anyone else could see.
13:21
Terminology, for me if not for them: the tracked people were Hollows. Not pejorative—descriptive. Faces curated, memories curated, telemetry curated. What remained routed like absence.
12:48
I built the proof lattice into a shareable set of slides for my presentation.
UV tracer purchase → museum-prep vendor → invoice chain that dead-ended into a shell with a familiar signature.
The shell belonged to a foundation owned by Demetrius Voss.
Philanthropist. Litigation hobbyist. A man who bought laws the way other men bought watches.
His yacht was called the Helepolis, presumably after the siege towers used in ancient warfare. It translated to “Taker of Cities.”
11:59
Secondary correlation: conservation hardware.
Lead/magnetite laminates, Faraday curtains, mantrap vestibule kits—three purchases in the last month, almost certainly post-Sophia.
Papered “for RF-sensitive exhibits.” Install specifics unknown; I assumed the cages were meant to keep other Hollows from escaping. Same routing node; same payer.
10:42
Fuel bunkering logs—public, then less so. A tender serviced a vessel listed only by a scientific designation. The tender’s manifest referenced “special collections, temperature controlled.” The Hollows would be moved like art.
09:30
Probability of shipment movement climbed: 0.93 and holding. I did not tell Sirena that number. If I’d said it out loud, she would have argued for immediate action; she would have been correct on ethics and wrong on survival.
08:12
I spooled her slides from Nocturne first—clean and weaponized for the room—then mined beneath them. I would defend her before anyone could question her judgment. I would let them question mine instead.
06:58
Royce pinged counsel into the pre-planning thread.
Fine. I added three exhibits the lawyers would understand: the automatic reroute policy on law-enforcement contact, the private security licensing for Voss’s dockside contractor, and the injunction history he files when irritated.
All arrows pointed to perimeter until proof.
05:05
I rehearsed the sentence I wouldn’t say in a room: I will not let you be alone. That wasn’t for a briefing.
04:44
I rechecked the pallet-tag beacons. Still active.
03:12
First slide: his face, not his logo. Demetrius Voss, studio-lit, the image every profile used.
I stacked a thin strip of receipts under the jawline—no adjectives, just nouns:
Consent decree (SEC, 20XX): market manipulation, no admission; $240M.
Injunctions filed last 5 yrs: 31—pattern: preempt press, freeze scrutiny.
NDAs settled (labor + personal): estimated 57; settlements sealed.
Private security licensing across three flags of convenience.
I needed the incoming agents to understand why I called them.
02:01
Agents stacked outside conference room two.
I muted the floor mics and kept one clip I wouldn’t share: last winter’s Dogpatch fire.
Stairwell blown out, sprinklers dry. She went back in because she could still hear a mind panicking on the third floor.
Crown off—the hum made terror worse. Heat shimmered the cams; I reversed roof fans to shove a cool corridor and unlatched the fire doors one by one.
Her voice, smoke-rough: “Borrow my calm,” to the trapped woman—and then, into my pendant, barely there: “Stay with me.” I rerouted air until the plume map bent around her. I’ve worn grooves in that second.
00:30
My presentation deck was ready. The clock was a vise. I kept my voice flat where they would hear it and warm where she would.
00:00
“Begin.”
Royce sighed the second my deck ended. He was a good man, but he preferred invoices to crusades; the sound was a budget line dying. “Thirteen unidentifiable women,” he stated aloud, gravely shaking his head.
“Working ages projected nineteen to thirty-two,” I clarified, basing my numbers off of the van filmed earlier.
“But Annex C can take them tonight.” It was a safehouse we’d used before for high-heat clients.
“We’ve got six suites there, convertible to thirteen with temporary partitions.
No networked devices inside—paper charts only.
We’ll need trauma-informed intake, STD screening, pregnancy tests, full photos before and after SANE kits, all sealed.
Chain-of-custody logged from dock to exam. ”
Aceon scratched his voluminous beard. “How’d the loose one even find Thorne?”
Sirena shrugged slightly. “He wasn’t forthcoming.”
“Which means he could be in on this,” Royce said, looking at her like the word ex was an indictment.
“Toward what end?” I asked from the speakers set into the ceiling. “I’ve scraped his accounts. No anomalous deposits.”
“But you just told us you can’t trace Voss past a certain point, because he uses his own currency,” Cassia stated.
She was a gorgon, dressed like it mattered, and always wore gaze-diffusing glasses.
Non-ironically statuesque. Head wrap snug, the snakes lived under it, invisible until one by her left temple flicked a curious tongue beneath it.
Cassia called that particular one Susan.
Susan occasionally had opinions.
Sirena waved the idea down. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see him. He was very attached to the girl.”
Cassia shrugged. “Or her handlers embedded her with a gargoyle-targeted pheromone.”
“I ran a full scan of the room,” I said. “Volatiles, skin temps, micro-expressions.”
“Which could be caused by pheromones,” Cassia countered.
“No. He was infatuated with her.”
“Like you know what that looks like, though, Nex,” Lung said.
Lung was Therian, allegedly. No registered subtype, no parent species.
Quadrant DNA scan returned results marked inconclusive across three labs.
He had the muscle mass of a predator bred for ambush, digitigrade limbs with raptor articulation, and a tail that moved like it had independent mission parameters.
Snout: too short for lupine classification, too long for feline.
Skin: coated in a sheeting pelt that shimmered like dead leaves and sloughed just as easily—biological or tactical, unknown.
Today he had arrived in sweatpants and nothing else, summoned on short notice and clearly unconcerned about what constituted “appropriate.” He wore clothing when protocols demanded it, otherwise he preferred field operations in nothing but a tactical harness, a bone-conducting mic, and the implicit understanding that no one would stop him.
I was certain, however, that I knew more about relationships than he did.
But explaining how closely I can read the nuances of humanity might invite questions I didn’t intend to answer.
So I let it pass. “Operationally, he was protective, not predatory,” is all I said. “Back to the dock.”
Ellum the minotaur tapped on the blunt end of a sawed-off horn. “The girl really had nothing going on up there?”
“Nothing,” Sirena said with a wince. “Just a code.”
I put MIHR-097/BXΔ14.5 back on the wall. It looked as empty as it felt, and Royce heaved another sigh.
“It’s not that I’m not sympathetic. It’s just that I have to protect the MSA’s reputation—and pissing off billionaires who can fund small armies is not a good look. Besides, no one’s invited us into this—”
“Thorne did,” Sirena countered.
“And is he funding it?”
Quick math. “He has 3.4 million liquid and 8.9 in sellable assets—art, gold, two properties he doesn’t love, one car he does.”