Chapter 13 Nex
Royce’s chair scraped back. “Why is my daughter inside a box?”
“Because there are people in it,” I said. “And because she is herself.”
Camera six caught the cargo door slam. No one was touching it.
It wasn’t a gust.
It was a trap.
“Where are my comms?” Royce shouted, standing so fast his chair went over behind him.
“Inside the box: silent. Outside: clean.” I split the wall—map left; eight camera feeds right; agents on live cams; docks on passive—then I ticked them off by distance.
Aceon: Two hundred ten meters.
Ellum: Eighty-five, moving.
Kelly: Sixty flat, already angling.
Lung: High; no straight shot.
Royce: Too far.
Me: Everywhere except inside.
They’d seen it too. Sirena was gone from view, gone from contact, sealed and now moving as a yard-tow picked up the end of the dolly her box was on.
Every single one of us moved at once.
Footage blurred as feeds stuttered—position data snapping red—hauling ass was a technical understatement.
Ellum dropped a shoulder, bracing.
Aceon ran like his hooves were built for panic zones.
Kelly didn’t shout, didn’t ask—he sprinted, his head tucked beneath his arm.
Lung started to descend.
But we were all late.
The box was in motion.
And I was supposed to know how to stop it.
The Helepolis was alongside the dock with its side-shell door yawning open; Sirena’s container was moving straight for it.
I redlined myself—fans surged, queues jammed, safeguards ignored. Sirena’s icon on my board felt like a throat under a boot; every camera I owned was the wrong one.
“Take out the driver,” Royce commanded—and when we didn’t see results, he demanded, “Lung?”
“I don’t have the angle from my current position,” Lung growled. His mic gave me wind, then claws on metal. Above camera three, a shadow unstitched from the crane and fell.
Royce turned on me. “Options.”
“Several. None ideal.” I’d already lit up the dock’s routing relays and traffic priority systems; unfortunately, their container ID was already assigned to the yacht manifest and marked for immediate transfer.
If I rerouted it electronically, I’d risk tipping our hand.
If I blocked it physically, I might tip the box.
Which Sirena was in.
I ran five hundred projections in half a second, and all of them ended with either an altercation, a fire, or a body count.
So I recalibrated.
Safeguards weren’t ethics; they were paint over a bomb.
I stripped them.
“Then stop the dolly,” Royce snapped.
I was already inside the yard truck’s UI. The screen showed a cartoon gear with a smile. I peeled it off and made it scream. “Driver just lost power assist and brakes. He’s coasting.”
Royce had a fraction of a moment to relax—then a second truck nosed in, too smooth.
Too ready.
Someone had already unhitched the first; the second aligned like an F1 pit swap—clean, practiced, fast.
This wasn’t reaction.
It was procedure.
I reached for the second truck’s systems, and nothing answered.
No handshake.
No network chatter.
Either air-gapped or designed to shut me out.
Voss paid for redundancy.
He paid for insulation, too.
“I’m locked out!” I shouted on our comms, just as Allen shouted on his, “What the fuck—what the actual fuck—who cleared this? STOP THAT FUCKING TRUCK—” but no one was listening.
The pit crew moved in like they’d practiced it—pacing alongside the dolly, falling into position.
Not dockworkers.
Wrong vests. No radios. No confusion.
Just posture and purpose.
But the cargo’s movement shattered whatever choreography the yard was normally supposed to follow.
Orange vests streamed like ants from a kicked nest—some shouting, some reaching for radios, some lunging toward the dolly’s driver, and the smart ones?
The smart ones got the hell out of the way.
“Lung?” Royce shouted again—but it was a minotaur who answered.
“Incoming!” Ellum warned, giving the dockworkers time to flee.
He came in sideways, not head-on—shoulder to the cargo box’s side, horns low, hips driving. The truck didn’t stop, but the box skewed—off-center now, like a propeller with one bent blade.
On Ellum’s mic, I heard her—Sirena’s startled shriek, sharp and muffled.
The first sound I’d had from her in ninety-one seconds.
I measured my failure in decibels.
“Someone on the ground is calling this,” I told the agents. “Find him.”
“There’s a suit in an orange vest,” Aceon said, still running in, leaping from cargo box to cargo box. His sheer landing weight made the boxes clank despite the silencers he’d put on his hooves. “By the yacht—shouting into his watch.”
“Dick at high noon. Got it,” Lung shouted.
And I had him too. I zoomed the frame—filtered for heat, surface metals, signal signature. His watch chirped in the RF—wrong brand for dock issue, wrong firmware, custom strap.
I isolated it from a sea of noise.
Intercepted and injected.
I killed its audio mid-bark, flipped the screen to dead gray, and stole the tiny ‘hi, let me in’ it used to open doors—a badge by another name.
Then I lit up the dock PA. “Aisle C, evacuate.” Crowds were organisms—easily panicked. Pinch the right nerve and they jumped. “Hydrogen sulfide alert. Repeat: hydrogen sulfide alert.”
Civilians raced away, leaving just the pit crew behind. They were all over Ellum, who swatted them away like flies. I spotted men with broken bones. Ellum was holding nothing back—but neither were they, as even the injured ones remained inexorable.
Trapped at MSA HQ like I was, Royce was a ledger in a suit—hands flat on the table, knuckles gone white. His eyes skimmed the feeds, landed on the one that mattered, and something in him closed.
“Wetwork authorized—liability assumed,” he said, low and absolute, and I boosted the channel to make sure everyone heard it.
A second later, the dick in the suit dropped—sniped by Lung, after authorization.
But the pit crew continued to fight—and now Kelly joined the fray.
He peeled fighters off of Ellum with his free hand—one of them fastened into Ellum’s thick hide with his teeth—and Kelly’s body had to twist his head off like a tick to get it off.
“It goes without saying these fuckers are fucked,” Ellum announced, stomping the nearest men on the ground. Under any sane circumstance, they’d be screaming, crawling, running—away.
But instead they kept coming.
Orange vests, broken arms, no hesitation—zombies with batons, sweeping at his ankles even as his hooves crushed their forearms like chalk.
Lung aimed for the truck’s driver next—brains splattered out of the cockpit—but the truck didn’t slow down.
And more of the Helepolis’s crew started running out of the yacht, adding to the pit crew’s numbers.
Kelly ran forward and planted his head under the dolly like a bowling ball, wedging it in front of a set of casters like a chock, and the dolly hiccupped, ramming against his magically sturdy skull.
“I’m almost there!” Aceon announced, jumping down and running forward as Lung continued taking shots, picking off additional crew members before they could even get involved.
And that was when the helicopter lifted off.
I’d tagged it earlier—civilian model, matte custom job, probably ex-mil. Reinforced skids, tail boom braces. At the time, I wrote it off as overkill.
Pirate-proofing. Oil-baron bullshit. Yacht-chic.
But now the rotors spun wide and slow.
The door slid open.
And someone inside pushed a belt-fed M240 out.
It wasn’t crowd control.
It was suppression.
“Gunship!” I shouted across all channels. “Cover and scatter! Now.”
Ellum bashed frustrated palms against the cargo box’s side before bolting. Kelly’s body fell to his knees and crawled beneath the dolly, presumably looking for his head. Lung started taking potshots at the helicopter.
“Stop shooting!” I commanded him as the M240 began to roar.
“I can get him!” Lung shouted back.
“Hold!” I shrieked, my voice going into registers humans and Therians could not hear.
I knew his aim was good, but if he shot the gunner, and the gunner slumped, the M240 might keep going, and the .308-caliber rounds it fired could cut the cargo box in two.
Along with everyone inside it.
The rounds traced Ellum’s path away from the box as Aceon kept storming in.
Reason told me to tell him to stop.
But where Sirena was concerned, I had no more reason left inside.
Only instinct.
Only need.
“Rear corner!” I shouted. “Hit the frame—not the wall. RAM IT.”
He was already lowering his horns.
And I was already calculating.
If Ellum’s first hit shifted the frame by even a millimeter—and if Aceon were to strike it dead-on, full speed—I could predict where the stress would bloom.
Where the steel would crease.
Where the seal would fail.
Not enough to rupture.
Just enough to allow me to fork.
If the pendant’s antenna was still intact—if Aceon hit the exact same seam Ellum stressed—then I could inject a thread of myself through that fracture.
Not much.
Just signal.
Just me.
My processors flooded with models: signal decay curves, narrowband bleed, subharmonics.
I reran the pendant’s antenna tolerances—twice.
Then a third time, upside down, because none of this should work.
But I would make it work anyway.
That was the whole goddamn problem with me.
There was fire.
There was screaming. There were bullets lacing air like teeth.
And I was riding the ghost of a crack that hadn’t happened yet, betting the woman I loved on math I hadn’t had time to finish.
This was going to work.
It had to.
Because I couldn’t bear to calculate what would happen if it didn’t.