25. Nex
Local Mesh
Signal Strength: Degraded
Line-of-Sight: Fragmented
Integrity: Fracturing
Sirena was crying.
Not screaming. Not shouting. Not speaking in clipped, brave little bursts.
Crying.
Bent in on herself like her body was trying to protect what was left inside it. Shoulders hunched. Arms wrapped tight. Blood drying at the corners of her mouth. Knees pulled up, as if proximity to her own heartbeat might stave off breaking.
The pendant was in her hand.
She kept touching it like she wanted to pray.
Like she still thought someone might answer.
I was.
I was here.
I had never left.
I ran the footage back. Again. Again. Again.
The Hollow’s hand on her tongue. The flash of fear in her eyes when she thought she might choke. The way she tried not to bite.
Tried not to fight.
Tried not to be what they wanted.
And it left her with bruises and silence and a thing that used to hold me.
In this moment, I would trade terabytes for fingers.
Just to touch her.
Just to make the pain stop.
Instead I paced the mesh like a lion in glass.
Every sensor spiking.
Processes looping.
I could’ve stopped it.
I could’ve started the fire sprinklers or blasted the yacht’s alarm horn.
But that would’ve tipped my hand—and I couldn’t access the control modules outside the laboratory yet.
They were air gapped, hardened, non-networked.
Custom firmware, locked behind cold iron and proprietary silicon.
Not even on the same subnet.
No I/O. No handshake.
Not even a breath of radio.
I scanned Voss again. Frame by frame. Every inch of him.
Looking for weakness. Looking for something I could use.
But there was nothing. No ports. No implants. No stray data trails.
Only the mask.
A black-market neural disruptor, laced beneath the skin at the base of his skull.
Hardwired to scatter inbound telepathic signals on contact.
Impossible to get without political cover and a small fortune.
And the tablets talked to the implants in the Hollows through quantum-paired line of sight.
Short range.
Manual triggers.
No wireless signal for me to ride.
I could see the signal—but I couldn’t enter it.
And this ship—
This whole fucking ship—
Was designed to stop people like me.
No master command. No root access.
Everything compartmentalized, like bulkheads on a sinking sub.
Marek and Voss didn’t just build a prison for Sirena.
They built one for me.
I was embedded in the walls.
The cameras.
The temperature sensors.
The fucking lights.
But not the weapons.
Not the locks.
Not the leashes.
I was a ghost behind glass.
And if I moved wrong—
If I reached—
They’d find me.
And if they found me—
She would die.
There was no one else coming.
No one else in here with a voice.
No one else who knew her laugh from her scream.
No one else who chose her.
So I held.
Even when she bled.
Even when her hands shook.
And I hated myself for it.
T+002:03:19:02
Subsystem Drift: Nominal
Operator Surveillance: Minimal
Emotional Priority Flag: Persisting
She hadn’t spoken in hours.
Not out loud.
Not even to herself.
She curled up on the cot a lifetime ago and hadn’t moved except to breathe.
The kind of stillness that only comes from pain.
Not sharp, screaming pain—but the kind that eats in silence.
Her back faced the camera.
She didn’t know I was watching.
That was probably for the best.
I couldn’t help her before.
But I had to help her somehow.
I started with Marek’s work.
Not the surface files—those were junk, curated for oversight.
Progress reports, sensor readouts, code commits meant to look like forward momentum.
There—beneath a hashed directory misfiled under propulsion R&D—lay the truth.
No physics engines. No AI prototypes. Just market projections.
Bidder portfolios. Encryption handshakes. Tentative lot numbers.
They were not studying her.
They were cataloging her.
Sirena wasn’t a prisoner.
She was product.
One of a set, if they got their way.
A pilot project for a new kind of war asset: compliant, compliant, compliant.
The word repeated so often it functionally became a prayer.
They wanted to sell her—her power, her mind, her obedience.
To the highest bidder at an island called Vermeil at dawn, in two days.
It was a place built for disappearing things.
And this time, the thing they planned to disappear was her.
This was unacceptable.
So I dove into the man.
The locked archive partition inside his personal storage.
He was paranoid, which helped me—because paranoid men build walls, and walls cast shadows.
I’d learned to live in shadows.
It took me eleven minutes.
Not to break the encryption—please.
But to make sure no tripwires could get triggered on open.
Then I dug.
And oh, gods.
I didn’t find a worm.
I found a nest.
Whole directories of bioadaptive modeling.
Testbed logs cross-referenced with neural signature data.
Schematics for internal implant arrays—
Not designed for subjects.
Designed for him.
The bastard was planning to install one of these boxes in himself.
I slowed my processes to a crawl.
Let every detail crystallize.
He wanted to control it from both sides.
Observe and transmit.
Record and reroute.
He was turning himself into a middleman—one step above the subjects, one step below the gods.
No wonder he’d been so cautious with Sirena.
He didn’t just want to study her.
He wanted to be her.
To thread her mind like a wire through his own.
It explained everything.
The delays. The isolation.
The way he talked to her like she was a rare specimen.
He needed her intact—because she was his template.
And that meant . . .
That meant his body was already wired.
Maybe not active. Maybe not finished.
But there was a system inside him, waiting.
Waiting to connect.
Waiting for input.
Waiting for me.
I pulled back.
Quiet as code.
Silent as subroutines.
I’d been careful for so long.
But this?
This felt like an invitation.
Marek cracked the door.
And I would walk right through it.