Chapter 10 Sirena
“What the hell?” I clicked off my crown and pulled my headband off, throwing it into the back of Nex’s server room the second I got inside. I wanted to feel when other people came up and tried to talk sense into me—so I could avoid them—but Nex? “I thought we were on the same team!”
I looked around for something to kick, but I’m pretty sure all of it would hurt.
“We are. The Monster Security Agency—” he began from the upper-right-hand corner of the room, and I held a hand up in warning.
“No. No. Do not start that bullshit with me. You know I’ve been working with you, trying to get you to remember that there are people outside these walls—people with lives. People with feelings. And you just—”
“I offered the most appropriate level of interference,” he said, his voice coming out of a different speaker, so I whirled.
“No—you undercut me.”
“Why would I do such a thing, Sirena?”
“I don’t know!” I shouted up at him. “And? To some degree it doesn’t matter why. It matters that you did.”
“You don’t know those women—” he began, trying to logic me back into his solution.
“Yes—but you don’t know women. At all.” My voice was scathing. “You don’t know what it’s like to be one. And you sure as shit don’t know what it’s like to listen to other people having to be one, every single day.”
Misogyny was alive and kicking. I’d been listening to men think about my ass ever since I’d walked out of the sea. And worse than that, I’d been listening to women thinking about men thinking about my ass, from about thirty seconds after on, because toxic masculinity was contagious.
Everyone in the world just needed to think about their own fucking ass, if they needed to think about one, and leave everyone else’s ass in the world alone.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “To guys like Voss, people—women—they’re just commodities.
It doesn’t matter that they have wants, and needs, and souls.
You have no idea how many of them I’ve had to listen to.
” Running recon outside of galas, or worse yet, attending them, getting to see the men who were possessed of such thoughts up close.
“Those women mean nothing to him. They might as well be gum he’ll pay someone else to scrape off of the bottom of his shoe. And there is no way in the world that whatever they did to Sophia, and now to whichever box of women he’ll pick up one port over, is wholesome. None.”
Nex had the graciousness to let his fans spin for a thoughtful moment before he answered, even though I was certain he was certain of how he’d respond as of the millisecond my speech was over.
What I hadn’t expected was the bluntness of his response. “Those women are theoretical, to me.”
“What does that even mean?”
“That to some degree those women are akin to Schrodinger’s cat, if you remember the experiment.”
“I do, and it’s not making me feel better about this convo.”
“Be that as it may—I do not know them.”
“They’re women, Nex. Humans.”
“Yes—and humans hurt one another all the time.”
I took a stunned step back. “I’ve been having hard philosophical conversations with you for months now. Have you . . . just . . . been humoring me? Or—just tolerating them?”
“No. I enjoy thinking—it’s what I’m good at. But our conversations don’t erase facts.”
“And so your answer to the trolley problem is, what—to just blow up the trolley, and everyone in a five-mile radius?”
“If you were on the trolley, I would become the brake.”
I crossed my arms. “That’s not how the trolley problem works, Nex.”
“And who says that? Humans.”
I snorted—and felt a small crowd of consciousnesses coming up the hall. The door to Nex’s server room opened, revealing Cassia, attended by all of the snakes in her hair hidden beneath her wrap.
“Susan told me you’d be here,” she announced, once she’d spotted me.
I found where I’d thrown my headband crown to the ground, picked it up, and she tsked. “You don’t need to put that on for me.”
“That’s great, because I’m not, since you’re imposing yourself on my private conversation,” I said, dusting the headband off.
Cassia ignored my ill manners. “They don’t understand,” she said, giving me a kindly look—even from the other side of her Optic Protek 3000 glasses, I could feel it. “Men think they do . . . but they don’t.”
While many Gorgons roamed the planet, as far as I knew, they were all descended from the same punished woman from the same mythic story.
“I suppose you get it,” I said, sliding my headband back into place.
“If my powers were a little more particular, I would’ve pushed for a later discovery as well.”
Her gaze, however, was a binary thing. On or off, kind of like Nex—and leaving behind a trail of statues would’ve been very noticeable.
“But what your father didn’t mention was that some wins are better than no wins at all. We will do good here, in a few hours, and that always deserves celebration. I’ll let you get back to your argument,” she said and turned on her heel.
I watched her walk to the door. Despite what she’d said aloud, only four out of the twelve snakes writhing around beneath her hair-wrap agreed.
Unfortunately, being around crowd consciousnesses was exhausting, even when they were partially on my side.
I reached up and turned the crown inside my headband on.
My powers narrowed down to just my own mind. My headache, however, came from not just the presence of the crown, but discovering the fact that any headway I’d thought I’d made with Nex was theoretical.
“Lowering drive voltage and adding dither so the haptics stop locking onto your trigeminal nerve. New download incoming now, three, two, one,” Nex announced, and somehow, the pain inside my head decreased a fractional amount.
“Were you saving that advance to get back into my good graces?” I asked him, with a frown.
“I’ve had a shadow process tuning this for weeks. The model finally converged. Older crowns can’t handle the duty cycle; this one can,” he said, and there was an awkward pause between us, one I was determined to make him feel.
Which was ridiculous.
He didn’t feel.
Anything.
Ever.
“If you bring in the others, I can update and refurbish them as well,” he continued.
I gave the room a half-hearted shrug. “We’ll see.”
Details of the plan scrolled up our secure channel as multiple agents became involved and a cover story was created.
We seeded a chemical-odor complaint through Port Environmental Health and Safety, then hijacked the requisition. I’d walk in—with steel-toed boots, low-profile crown—since I’d be the most likely to hear thirteen or so highly out-of-place women inside a cargo container.
And as the most human-presenting agent on-site, I was going in solo, but the rest of MSA would have a tight perimeter, either personally—inside trucks idling on the dock nearby—or distantly, through sniper scopes, one of Lung’s specialties.
I pulled my hair up into a bun and switched to a lower-profile crown, hidden in a thicker hair-tie, and prepared myself to deal with my father’s endless pacing as he considered ways to stop me from going into the field again.
He never voiced any of them, and to be fair to him, he did try to keep his thoughts to himself around me, but even with the crown on, I could still tell by the way he turned on his heel in the loading bay’s hall.
“I think we should bring two more agents,” he announced, after doing a headcount.
Cassia was prepping Annex C to hold the women, and Kelly, Lung, Aceon, and Ellum were coming with me.
Between them and their armaments of choice, it was more than enough response for a purportedly “anonymous complaint.”
“Or I should—” he continued until I cut him off.
“We’ll be fine. We’re not in any danger—because of you. So you can stay back here and tell legal to get their pens warmed up for the almost inevitable complaints we’ll receive when this is finished.”
And when it was go time, he clasped his hands behind himself, the most official of his moves. “I expect to see all of you for a debriefing when you get back,” he said.
It was as close to officially paternal as he could get without singling me out.
“See you in a bit.” I waved and got into Kelly’s idling car, where his head was already waiting on the dash.
“Buckle up!” he warned. “My body’s not a great driver.”