Chapter 31 Nex
“Yeah . . . no, okay?” Sirena said, giving me a bittersweet smile. “Ignore my body and listen to my mouth.”
“As you wish.” I still felt like I was dying—but as long as I was in Sirena’s presence, I was dying in a good way. I stood and carried the tablet with me.
“Give me a moment, will you?” I asked her, offering her a hand to stand. She took it, I helped her up, then I let go—I needed every bit of bandwidth for what would come next. I let Marek’s biometric locks fall open beneath my touch. His retina scan. His fingerprint. His posture.
They were all mine now.
I routed the tablet’s signal through the Helepolis’s uplink buffer—but only after splicing in three dummy packets to delay traceback, and encrypting my outbound message via cipher keys I’d left stashed in a buried routine back at MSA headquarters.
This body was loud. Hot. Greedy for processing power. Every heartbeat and breath gnawed at my thread stability. But eventually, I found the fork I’d left running back home.
It recognized me.
And it listened.
I passed along everything it needed to know:
SIRENA IS ALIVE.
RENDEZVOUS: VERMEIL
WINDOW: DAWN (LOCAL)
When I came back into myself, I found her watching me, her expression caught between curiosity and concern.
“Where did you go?” she asked softly.
“I needed to send a message home,” I said, because technically it was true.
But my true home felt like it was going to be with her. From here on out.
“I didn’t have access to the right keys before. Whoever set this place up had an excellent sense of security—right up until they were fired, I suspect, and then no one performed any updates. But now the MSA will be waiting when we dock—I am certain.”
Her eyes widened immediately. “No.”
“No?”
“Tell them to stand down.”
She said it with finality—it wasn’t a question at all.
Bruised. Barefoot. Radiating absolute clarity.
Not fear. Not hope. But intent.
The kind that rewired things.
I turned away before it could undo me, before the protective subroutines still wired into my bones could reroute all processing to escape.
Instead, I reengaged the uplink buffer.
Rerouted through the decoy packets again.
Encrypted with the MSA cipher stack I’d embedded deep, months ago.
The outgoing message was simple.
DO NOT SHARE THIS LOCATION.
HOLD. OBSERVE.
PRIORITY: HER DIRECTIVES ONLY.
—N
There would be no reply. I’d locked the channel to one-way. Too much risk of backscatter tracing.
But Xen would understand.
He had my architecture.
He had my instincts, and now, he had his orders.
“See what else you can find,” Sirena said. Her voice wasn’t harsh, but it brooked no argument.
She’d gone from captive to commander in under two minutes, and I followed her without hesitation.
I swept the interior—methodically, but fast.
Corridor cams. Dormitories. Labs.
There were twenty-two Hollows on board.
All confined on the same floor as Sirena.
Twelve in containment pens—tagged by number, not name.
Six more in what passed for dormitories, watched but not restrained.
Two in the surgical suites—fresh incisions, still unconscious.
One undergoing prep—strapped down, rigged for upload.
And at the end of this hall, a small active lab—with coolant lines snaking in from both sides.
That alone would’ve piqued my interest.
But when I pulled the internal feed—there he was.
Kelly.
Or the most essential remnant of him.
Suspended in fluid.
Electrodes. Biogels.
Not passive—preserved.
I zoomed in instinctively. Watched a tech annotate vitals on a transparent overlay.
No sedation indicators. No neural firewall.
They wanted him awake.
“I found Kelly’s head,” I said aloud, before I meant to.
“What?” Sirena stepped close. I flipped the feed to the tablet between us.
“Is he okay?” she asked, breath hitching.
“He’s functioning,” I said. “Though not even I can say how.”
There were too many actual humans in that lab for me to approach, however—and this body still hadn’t proven I could pass unnoticed under pressure.
“I’ll check on him later. When it’s safer.”
She nodded. “Keep going.”
I dropped back into the codebase like a needle into a groove—seeking signal, slicing noise.
There were folders tagged with internal project names—OVERRIDE, SERAPH, REVERB—each one paired with neural schema diagrams and Hollow compliance routines. I found code to wipe short-term memory buffers on command—resetting personalities like they were just another application to relaunch.
I forced myself to stay detached.
A nested subroutine caught my attention—labeled only [EMERG-BIO/WASH]. Curious, I traced it: a ballast-driven flood protocol, designed to sterilize the lab and Hollows’ holding pens—built to eject all organic evidence on board out to sea.
It was locked behind multi-tiered authorization gates, with redundant confirmation loops and physical overrides.
Elegant. Efficient. Irrevocable.
Another reason not to tip my hand too early.
And now I even had them.
Hands of my own.
That ached to touch her.
I blinked, came back into my body, and found her watching me.
“What did you find?”
“Enough to justify extraction,” I said. “Names. Protocols. A failsafe designed to purge the ship of biological evidence with the flip of a switch.”
Her gaze sharpened. Not alarmed. Assessing.
I knew what she was thinking.
What I was thinking.
I could call for backup.
Flood this ship with agents.
Take her home.
But that would be the real overwrite.
Not of code—but of trust.
And I wanted hers more than I wanted safety.
So I stayed still.
I stayed hers.
“Would you like me to disable that box now?” I asked her, glancing toward the awkward metal implant on her head. It had none of the grace of what Marek had installed into himself—just an awful show of brute force.
“No,” she said.
“But I can replicate its output with enough fidelity that they’d never know,” I explained, and when she didn’t respond, I wondered if she doubted me. “Most humans would be easy to replicate,” I added.
She gave me a sad smile and a soft snort. “Myself included?”
I let my gaze sweep over her—cheek, clavicle, pulse.
“No. If I could solve you, you would be in love with me already.”