Chapter 24 Sirena
“So what’re you going to do once you’ve mapped me?” I’d stopped hoping that Dr. Marek would consider me a human anymore—he didn’t consider normal humans humans, so why should I get any special consideration?—but he did like to preen, and he seemed to suffer from a lack of people to talk to.
And the longer he talked, the less likely he was to make me run what he calls “simulations.” Where he mades Hollows torture other Hollows and mades me try to stop them, repeatedly.
He’d upgraded their weapons from thumbs to punching to knives, and it killed me that I couldn’t get the puppets he brought in to turn against him.
There were cameras on in my room, I was sure of it, but that didn’t stop me from running my fingertips over the box on my head at night, trying to figure out how I could pry it off.
It felt raw, and hot, and puffy where my skin grew against its edges, but I’d unscrew the bolts with my fingernails and peel it all off . . . if I thought it would work.
The problem was, I didn’t.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to fight back . . . but when I did? I needed to make it good.
I needed to save up my strength—and frankly, at this point, my sanity—so that when I got the chance to use it, I could make it count.
“You mean once I’ve figured out how to control all your godlike powers?” Marek sniffed from behind his tablet, not once looking up.
“Has it occurred to you that the reason telepaths aren’t in charge of the world is because being a telepath largely sucks?”
That made him pause; then he chuckled. “Perhaps telepaths suffer from a lack of imagination.” He pondered this for a moment. “There’s never been a one of you to suffer from megalomania before?”
I shrugged my shoulder beneath the hospital gown. “I’m sure there have been. But maybe the rest of us just shut him down. I mean, the thing is, even if you do give yourself this power—”
“When I do,” he corrected me.
“When you do,” I repeated—anything to keep the conversation going, to give myself another handful of minutes without horror, “other telepaths are going to be able to hear you coming. You can’t send and shield at the same time.”
“No?” he asked, tilting his head to give me an implacable look.
“I mean—you can’t,” I said more firmly—because I wanted it to be true. “Can . . . you?”
“Hmmm,” he said, which wasn’t an answer. He went back to his screen—but then stiffened, eyes catching on something in his data.
No—not the data. He turned, just before the doors hissed open.
I couldn’t see the doors, but I’d already been trained to wince at their sound—it usually meant Marek was going to hurt people in front of me.
But this time, Marek seemed surprised, which was somehow worse. He rose too fast, smoothing down his lab coat like that would help.
The man who entered didn’t belong in a lab.
He looked like a hedge fund in weekend drag—forearms sunburnt from luxury, not labor, with sneakers too pristine to have ever touched pavement. Aviators tucked in his collar, a smile like a scalpel. Rich not in the way of comfort, but conquest.
I recognized him instantly: Demetrius Voss.
The man whose fortune backed the monsters in this place.
Whose whims had created the cages.
“Mr. Voss,” Marek said, startled. “You didn’t say you’d be—”
“I don’t say,” Voss cut in, already halfway into the room. “I arrive. People are more honest before they’ve had time to clean up.”
“But it’s a bad time—”
Voss cut him off. “You told me the moment you got a live telepath, you’d show me something worth the cost of acquisition,” he said, before glancing around like he was trying to spot where his millions had gone, and thought he might see stacks of cash fluttering in the pockets of Marek’s lab coat.
Marek stiffened. “We’ve barely begun mapping her—she hasn’t even stabilized—”
“You want me to tell our potential buyers we burned a black site and spent thirty million to stabilize something?” Voss said, voice hardening. “The drama at the dock ruffled a lot of feathers. I can’t take your word on progress anymore.”
Marek tried to step in and block his view of me. “You said you wanted measurable results—”
“I said I wanted a prototype that worked.” Voss side-stepped him, peering into my pen with the casual menace of a man who’d tap on aquarium glass just to watch a fish flinch. “Ahh. Here you are. The original.”
I didn’t like what that implied.
Voss clapped his hands once, sharp and loud. “Let’s test her.”
Before Marek could stop him, Voss turned toward the hallway and snapped his fingers. A Hollow girl appeared—escorted in by Hollow guards, dressed in my old clothes, her face eerily familiar.
My breath caught. My pendant was around the other girl’s neck.
Voss smiled at my reaction.
Marek sputtered. “Mr. Voss, I assure you, this is entirely unnecessary—”
“She’s not for the test,” Voss said, pointing at the Hollow. “She is the test. Open the door. Put her in there.”
The guards pushed the girl toward my cage.
She stumbled once, then caught herself. Her eyes flickered up, glassy and unfocused—but that didn’t matter.
What mattered was the pendant at her throat.
What mattered was that her face was mine.
I froze.
The resemblance wasn’t perfect. Her cheekbones were a little fuller, her mouth a touch narrower—but from five feet away? From a security camera? From behind a monitor with grainy uplink and bad lighting?
She was me.
She was me enough.
Enough to fool every facial recognition program the MSA relied on. Enough to ping a match on every checkpoint camera between here and anywhere else. Enough to look like me on paper, in databases, in the cold machine eyes that decided who was real and who wasn’t.
The thought made my stomach turn.
If they released her topside tomorrow, wearing my clothes and that pendant, the world would believe she was Sirena. Systems would confirm it. Nex’s searches would light up green. The MSA would pay ransoms, or follow the wrong trail, or bring her in thinking they’d found me.
And I’d still be here.
They hadn’t just built a distraction—they’d built a replacement.
I took a shaky step back, heartbeat rattling in my ribs.
I couldn’t look away. She was wearing my life like a costume.
And then the thought hit me—cold, surgical.
This wasn’t the kind of plastic surgery you bounced back from in a weekend spa stay. This kind of work was deep. Bone restructuring. Cartilage reshaping. Tissue grafts. Swelling alone would take weeks to subside. Healing, months.
They’d done this before I was taken.
She’d been prepped ahead of time.
They’d planned for me.
The edges of my vision wavered. I pressed a hand against the cold wall of the pen, steadying myself as the timeline rearranged in my head.
They hadn’t gotten lucky when they snatched me—they’d scheduled it.
Somewhere, weeks ago, on a whiteboard or a shared server, someone had drawn up the procedure to build a fake of me, and someone else had signed off on it.
They’d carved a girl to fit my face in advance.
My stomach twisted. It wasn’t improvisation. It was strategy.
And if they’d done all this before I even vanished . . . how long had they been watching me? Studying me? Measuring my bones, cataloging my scars, scanning my face from angles I never even saw myself in?
A cold, nauseating certainty settled over me.
They didn’t just want what was in my head.
They wanted to replace me.
A soft click echoed through the room. Voss had pulled something small and sleek from his back pocket—chrome edges, dark glass, about the size of a phone. He tapped the screen once with a fingertip, and the Hollow girl’s posture sharpened like a puppet yanked upright.
“What is that?” I said, voice low, even though I already knew.
A smaller sized version of Marek’s tablet—pocket-sized.
He gave the Hollow girl a slow once-over, then turned his shark grin back on me.
“I’ve got to say,” he went on in a cultured, European accent. “Seeing you two together? Bit of a kink unlocked. I’ve always liked twins. Though”—he flicked the module again, scrolling menus—“I can never decide if I prefer watching them make out or fight.”
My blood iced.
Marek stepped forward, finally. “Mr. Voss, this is completely unnecessary.”
“You’re unnecessary,” Voss said, without even looking at him. “You think you get to decide how my assets are tested?”
“She’s the prototype—”
“Which means she should be the best, no?” he said, his tone bright. “So let’s see what happens when she has to defend herself.”
The Hollow girl turned to me.
Her eyes were still empty. She was far past wherever they’d taken Sophia; there was nobody home.
But she was still a person. And she hadn’t consented to this.
I raised my hands and backed up. “Please—don’t do this. She’s not—she’s not in control.”
“I warned you,” Voss murmured, amused, and the Hollow lunged.
I dodged, barely. She was faster than me—she hadn’t been skipping meals in a pathetic attempt to protest her situation. She was stronger, too; I could feel it in the air displacement as her fist passed my ear. This wasn’t a sparring match. This was an execution.
I stumbled over a chair bolted to the floor and hit the side of my pen.
“She’s not my enemy!” I screamed.
“She is now,” Voss replied. “And if you don’t start fighting back, she’s going to kill you with her bare hands.”
The Hollow charged again.
I ducked, but she clipped my shoulder with the edge of her hand, and pain flared in its wake.
“She doesn’t want to do this!” I shouted, not to Voss—he was gone, unreachable—but to Marek, who stood frozen like he’d just remembered he had a conscience.
“She’s going to kill her,” Marek said, to no one in particular.
“No,” Voss said smoothly. “Not yet.”
“She’s just a puppet,” I spat. “What exactly are you testing—my tolerance for war crimes?”
He turned.
Slowly. Like a shark catching a current. His grin sharpened.
“Is this what you do when your VC buddies won’t return your calls?” I added, reckless now. “Stage death matches for your PTSD Barbie collection?”
His nostrils flared, and he looked at the controller he held. The Hollow’s posture locked up as he tapped his infernal device.
“You want to be clever?” he asked. “Then let’s see what your clever little tongue is worth.”
Another tap.
She moved faster than before.
Her hand slammed into my chest and pinned me to the wall. Her other hand darted for my mouth.
She gripped my jaw, hard—fingers bruising. One thumb forced its way past my teeth, and the other reached for my tongue. I scrabbled my hands against her, and felt something hard, bolted underneath her clavicle, with right angles—I knew it shouldn’t be there.
“Call her off,” Marek said, his voice strained. “You’re wasting a valuable—”
“I am the arbiter of what is and isn’t valuable in this room,” Voss corrected him as I tasted the other woman’s blood.
I was pushing her away from me—and I realized that it wasn’t that she was stronger than me—she hadn’t been doing deadlifts between surgeries—it was that she had no hesitation.
And no fear, none at all, I realized, as my teeth ground against her bone.
I didn’t want to. I knew it was what they wanted from me—and so I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of it—but I also didn’t want to bite her fingers off.
I gave up and tried to push her away from me with all my might.
It didn’t work. It couldn’t, not while this fucking box was still installed on my skull, harvesting all the data I’d been trying not to give it.
“Enough!” Marek shouted, while Voss clucked.
The woman who looked like me went slack, and I shoved her, using the chance to snatch my pendant back. I spat her blood onto the floor and watched her stand there, mute, not even cradling her bleeding hand.
“And look at that,” Voss said, showing Marek his module. “Stronger data than you’ve ever gotten.”
“I was doing science,” Marek snarled.
“She doesn’t need a tongue for science. And, come to think of it—neither do you,” Voss said, snapping for his guards before storming out the door with Marek on his heels.
The guards came into my pen and recovered the woman, and there was a brief gap where I could’ve tried to run.
The guards moved robotically, and if no one was actively controlling them, I suspected I could dodge and sprint away.
But I would still be on a boat that had a helicopter with machine guns parked on it.
I sank back against the wall, feeling more doomed than I had previously, somehow.
Maybe because the taste of my doppelganger’s blood in my mouth wouldn’t go away.
Or because the pendant I held didn’t have anyone watching over me in it anymore.
Despite the fact that they’d created a woman who could’ve been my reflection, I was completely, utterly, alone—and the only thing for it was to put my head on my knees and cry.