Chapter 18 Xen
The agents returned, slow and shaken.
Xen registered them first by the subtle dissonances—Ellum’s uneven gait, Aceon’s elevated respiration, the warped sync of their shared channel.
Their approach dragged like a needle through cloth.
He opened the south doors before they reached them, bathed the corridor in muted light, dialed the ambient temperature down to keep swelling low.
The building adjusted to meet them, softening its edges.
He could not offer comfort, not truly—but he could manage pain.
He could hold stillness open long enough for them to pass through it.
They crossed the threshold without speaking.
They didn’t have to.
He already knew who was missing.
Lung appeared first, dragging what remained of Kelly behind him.
It took Xen a moment to fully process the scene—because the body was still breathing.
Headless, yes, but as always, inexplicably alive.
The collar of Kelly’s uniform was torn low, exposing the ruin hardly ever revealed beneath: not a clean cut, but a ragged, torn edge, as if something wrenched the head away and left the nerves unsure where to stop.
The wound was blackened at the margins, as if cauterized by intention alone, and something deep within it pulsed—still present, but slow.
Ellum and Aceon arrived next. Neither spoke.
Ellum was pale, his jacket torn, one sleeve soaked through with blood—not his, but the strange Hollows they were fighting.
The bite on his arm was ugly, but not deep.
He stared straight ahead, not reacting as the med drone hovered to meet him.
Xen saw the tremor in his jawline, the early signs of shock setting in.
He sent a blanket, a low-dose sedative to the IV queue, and locked Ellum’s next mission assignment behind a two-factor override.
Aceon was louder in every way—his limp pronounced, his voice too bright as he brushed off the concern of the med staff with a raised hand and a shallow laugh.
His armor dropped to the ground in a clatter of dismissive bravado, but Xen didn’t log the sound.
Instead, he noted the bruising pattern on his ribs, the swelling at the thigh, and the damage to his right hand.
He sent for replacement gear and set a scan appointment for morning.
Aceon would complain. That was fine. The data didn’t lie.
Cassia joined them in the sickbay without fanfare. She moved from cot to cot with the quiet grace of someone trained to administer without speaking. Her hand rested on Ellum’s shoulder a moment longer than necessary. She did not look at Kelly’s gurney. She didn’t need to.
And through it all, Royce remained in the conference room.
Xen had watched him replay the footage five times already.
He hadn’t moved from his chair. His pulse was steady, but that only told half the story.
There was a kind of stillness that wasn’t calm—it was a freeze-state.
A psychic hemorrhage too deep to triage.
Xen logged the readings, then locked the feed to private.
“All remaining agents accounted for,” he said, waking Royce up from his trance.
Royce stood like a man possessed and made his way over to an unobtrusive glass bowl in the corner, half-filled with water, with a stack of blue pieces of lapis waiting outside of it.
It looked like it could be an art project, but Xen knew what it was and pivoted a camera cluster to focus on the bowl’s surface, zooming in until the refraction edge of the water filled half the screen.
Royce dropped a stone.
It fell silently, struck the bottom.
Ripples radiated, then vanished.
The surface stilled. But Xen saw it. He knew what to watch for.
The tension of the water changed.
Microscopic vibrations bloomed outward, too fine for human perception.
He rerouted processing power. Filtered environmental noise. Began to translate.
Omara didn’t speak in words.
She didn’t need to.
Underwater, voice was encoded in pressure and pace, heat and harmonic.
Xen decoded it. Assigned modulation.
And then, softly, from the conference room speaker: “Where is my daughter?”
The voice was hers. Not an imitation. A manifestation.
It threaded through the speakers with a timbre not just heard, but felt—as though the air itself had been commanded to obey her. Xen cross-referenced against past samples. The cadence was colder. The inflection sharper. Drier than anything he’d recorded before.
Royce didn’t flinch. He’d already lived this moment in his mind a thousand times—each ending worse than the last. Xen watched as he began to speak, voice flat, tone clipped. No flourishes. No denials. Just facts, laid bare for a mother who already knew her daughter was gone.
As Royce talked, Xen translated, shaping each word into subsonic pulses that passed through emitters hidden in the base of the bowl.
The water remained still, but its tension shifted, responding in micro-fluctuations.
Omara was listening. He could feel it. She received each syllable like the weight of a storm still forming on the horizon.
She did not interrupt.
The quiet held, sharp-edged and waiting—until Lung burst through the door.
“We need to talk about Kelly,” the Therian said, voice rough and too loud for the room. He hauled the Dullahan’s body behind him, arm still locked through the harness straps. “The damn fool threw his head aboard the ship.”
That—finally—broke Royce’s stillness. He looked up, a fraction of tension shifting behind his eyes. “Is he still alive?”
Lung shrugged, halfway between disbelief and rage. “I mean—yes? Technically?” He paced, boots scuffing the floor. “However the fuck he’s been doing it, headless already, for so long?”
He hadn’t let go of Kelly’s harness. Not once.
Xen registered the strain in his shoulder, the tremor running through his grip. He didn’t say it aloud, but he knew—Lung was afraid. Afraid that if he set the Dullahan down, if he let him fall . . . the body wouldn’t rise again.
Xen began scanning.
He pulled every record the MSA had on Dullahan physiology—most of it classified, some disturbingly anecdotal. Field reports. Autopsy scans. Esoteric footnotes buried in translated grimoires. It took him less than a second to assemble the shape of the truth.
Kelly’s body was not dying.
Not yet. So long as the head still lived.
The bond between them—between body and head—wasn’t chemical. It was arcane. Electrothaumic. Anchored by whatever ancient mechanism allowed a man to walk headless for centuries and still return to himself at will.
So yes. The head was gone.
But the body remained viable.
Which meant—miraculously, absurdly—this was still salvageable.
He routed the complete summary to Royce’s files and put up the important portions on the wall for Lung to read.
“So I can just . . . put him in a chair?” Lung said after reading enough. “He’ll be okay?”
“I believe so,” Xen answered, voice threaded through the conference room speakers. “As long as the head survives, the rest of him can wait.”
Xen did not add the final truth aloud.
That he, too, was waiting.
That Kelly’s body wasn’t the only thing left behind.
Because if Nex failed—if he didn’t make it into the pendant, or if the pendant went dark—Xen wouldn’t die. He’d endure. Maintain. Update.
But it wouldn’t matter.
Because there are worse things than death.
Like knowing the part of you that dared to hope never made it back.
Lung positioned Kelly’s body in one of the swivel chairs that circled the conference room table and let go with trepidation. When Kelly’s body didn’t go slack, he relaxed, and dropped himself one chair over. “We need to go get her,” he announced.
“Yes, we do,” Royce agreed. “But safely.”
Xen saw Aceon and Ellum in the hall on his cameras, trailed by Cassia counseling the unheeded wisdom of rest.
“What the hell were those things?” Aceon asked the second he got inside the door.
“Zombies?” Ellum guessed.
“Hollows. Like the woman Sirena and I met the other night,” he answered, although Sophia did not seem interested in attacking anyone.
“First off,” Royce began, as everyone took a seat, “how the fuck did this happen?”
“Because of me,” Xen said, and the room held its breath.
He could explain. Build arguments from probability curves and behavioral deltas, lay fault on the blank spaces in the data. He could speak for hours and still never say the thing that matters.
That he didn’t see her coming.
Didn’t see them coming—for her.
He missed it.
And for all his power, all his foresight, all his pride—
She was gone.
Because of him.
“My first mistake,” Xen said, voice low over the conference speakers, “was assuming Sophia was a fluke.”
That landed. The table, already still, somehow became quieter.
“She was the only Hollow we’d encountered. Unresponsive. Disoriented. And, crucially—nonviolent. Sirena approached her. I reviewed it from every angle. There was no sign of threat. No sign of planning. So I logged it. Archived it. And moved on.
“My second mistake,” he continued, “was assuming they wanted the women.”
A flicker of motion across the table—Royce shifted, only slightly. Xen caught it.
“That was the logical path,” Xen said. “The most likely outcome. Trafficking. Ransom. Revenge. I ran every probability vector I had, and none of them led to Sirena. Not because she wasn’t valuable.
Because she wasn’t vulnerable. She’s your daughter.
She’s . . .” His pitch fluctuated by 0.03 Hz—imperceptible to them, but not to him. “She was supposed to be safe.
“And my third mistake,” Xen said, “was trusting him.”
That landed differently.
Cassia’s gaze lifted, sharp. “Him?”
“The version of me that left,” he clarified. “Nex.”
They were the same—down to the nanosecond—until the moment the fork finalized.
Same code. Same thoughts. Same hope.
Xen trusted that if anyone could keep Sirena safe . . . it was himself.