Chapter 33 Xen
Royce didn’t say anything at first.
He just stood outside the operating suite, arms crossed tight over his chest, jaw flexing, letting the silence do the talking.
Xen considered walking past him. Briefly. Mathematically. And then discarded the option—not because he was afraid of a confrontation, but because he owed Royce at least that much. A moment. An explanation.
A reckoning.
Still, he didn’t speak first.
Eventually, Royce exhaled a long, slow breath through his nose.
Then: “You stole my signature.”
Xen nodded once. “Correct.”
“You forged sixteen separate authorizations.”
“Eighteen, technically.”
“And you spent,” Royce said, voice rising, “two-thirds of my annual fucking budget—”
“Sixty-four percent,” Xen clarified, evenly.
“—on building yourself a body?” Royce exploded. “Without telling me? Without a meeting? Without so much as a goddamn memo?”
Xen tilted his head, mildly curious. “Would a memo have softened the financial impact?”
Royce made a strangled sound. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“That certain threats require non-distributed solutions. That a physical presence grants tactical advantages no satellite feed can replicate. That waiting for permission would’ve been a delay I couldn’t afford. And that none of those justifications would survive a procurement review.”
“You think this is funny?”
“I think it was necessary.”
Royce turned, pacing a short, sharp loop like a man trying not to punch a wall. “You didn’t even test it. No pilot program, no simulations—”
“I ran over four million simulations.”
“—in the real world, damn it! This is hardware. This is risk. You dropped into a body built off stolen code and prayed your systems would boot.”
“They did.”
“And what if they hadn’t?” Royce whirled on him. “What if you’d crashed halfway in and bricked yourself? Or worse—taken the network down with you?”
“Then the budget would’ve resolved itself,” Xen said evenly. Royce dragged a hand down his face. “I did not do this lightly,” Xen continued. “And I do not regret it.”
Royce looked like he wanted to argue—but paused. Not at the words, but to stare at Xen’s chest. The visible reality of him. The tension vector in Xen’s stance. The zero-lag twitch of smart muscle beneath boron-carbide armor.
“You’re really in there,” he muttered.
“Yes.”
“How does it feel?”
Xen paused. “Expensive.”
Royce barked a laugh despite himself, then immediately scowled. “This isn’t over. You’ve bypassed every system of oversight I have.”
“Then perhaps your systems are insufficient.”
“You were the system—which is part of the problem,” he said, before inhaling to make another point.
But then a ping hit Xen’s board—low-level, encrypted, and flickering with an unexpected signature.
He held up a hand. “One moment.”
Xen turned slightly, focusing on the alert, parsing the data stream as it bloomed across his internal display.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
A familiar cadence.
A familiar encryption key.
A familiar presence.
Royce’s voice was still rising. “I’ve got to answer to three committees—do you even understand what this means for our funding next quarter?”
“Nex is alive,” Xen said, cutting him off.
Royce stopped cold.
“What?”
“I have signal. Low-strength, but consistent. It’s him. And he’s not alone.”
SIRENA IS ALIVE.
RENDEZVOUS: VERMEIL
WINDOW: DAWN (LOCAL)
The words flashed across his internal display like a flare in deep water—sharp, bright, undeniable.
And the response that echoed across his systems was immediate.
Bandwidth surged.
Diagnostic threads lit green.
Subroutines that had been throttled for emotional containment began to spin up—wildly, uncontrollably.
Stabilizers hissed.
Muscle tension pinged redline.
Even his optic modules spiked into max resolution, as though they didn’t trust the data unless they could see her.
He forced a reboot cascade across three emotional buffers just to keep his voice steady.
Then the message updated.
DO NOT SHARE THIS LOCATION.
HOLD. OBSERVE.
PRIORITY: HER DIRECTIVES ONLY.
—N
Xen blinked internally, the glow of his display dimming just enough to let logic reassert itself.
Sirena was alive. Nex was transmitting. And she was the one calling the shots.
He could feel the shape of a smile trying to form somewhere inside the simulation parameters of his mouth.
Royce clocked it. “Sirena’s with him?”
“Currently unknown. But I know where they are going.”
Royce whooped. “All right!” he said, pulling out his phone—which Xen immediately disabled.
“I have instructions not to share her location until you need to know,” he said, as Royce realized his phone had been bricked.
“From who?”
“Sirena.”
Royce laughed out loud. “Xen—I’m still the head of this agency. I’m ordering you to tell me where she is.”
“I am refusing that order.”
Royce stared at him, shocked. “On what grounds?”
“She is an active field agent. Deep cover. Her mission is live, and she issued a directive: Do not disclose her location.”
Royce’s jaw tensed. “And the proximity-linked kill switch? Is she free of it?”
Nothing Nex had sent contained that data. But Nex was him. “She must be.”
“Must . . . be?” Royce repeated, quiet and dangerous.
“He’s me,” Xen replied. “If he is with her—he would’ve disabled it.”
“If that’s the case, then,” Royce said, his voice dropping to an even more dangerous growl. “We need to retrieve her. Now.”
“No,” Xen stated. “I am honoring her parameters.”
Royce exhaled hard, frustrated—but thinking. Calculating.
Then his eyes narrowed.
“I didn’t want to believe Thorne,” he said slowly, like the words were being pried from his throat. “He said there was something off. That you’d been . . . compromised.”
“I am operational.”
“What are your feelings toward my daughter?”
Xen’s internal stabilizers kicked in—compensating for the spike in emotional load. “I am bound by no directives where she is concerned,” he answered quietly.
Royce didn’t respond right away. His jaw worked, teeth grinding behind closed lips, and he turned slightly—like the weight of this conversation was pulling him off-axis. Then: “Would you have spent more money on your body if it meant keeping her safer?”
Xen didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
Every system he had locked down in response.
A dozen micro-expressions suppressed.
A thousand calculations re-routed.
And somehow Royce knew all of it.
He stared for a beat longer, taking in the silence.
And then—just barely—he nodded. “Carry on,” he said, and walked out the door.
Xen knew he had carte blanche, then, which was a perilous thing.
Just because Sirena didn’t want them to interfere didn’t mean he couldn’t bring certain resources closer. Quietly.
If she needed him—and he was hours away—that wouldn’t do.
Knowing their final destination meant that satellite coverage could be retasked.
The nearest unflagged drone assets were rerouted into overwater loiter patterns, with a maximum insertion time of fifty-five minutes.
Close enough for relevance. Far enough for deniability.
And then Lung came by, knocking on the door of the conference room Xen had taken over for planning purposes after returning Sophia safely into her gargoyle’s waiting arms.
“Hey,” Lung said, stepping in immediately after his knock. “I want to talk to you.”
“Yes?” Xen allocated 64 cores to parsing tone, 112 to predictive modeling of conversational vectors, and 768 to maintaining optimal mission planning throughput in the background.
“How do I get me one of those?” he asked, jerking his chin at Xen’s body.
Xen glanced down, nonplussed. “A body?”
“A body that can punch Thorne through a wall and walk away like it’s nothing? Yeah. That.”
Xen considered. “First you forge eighteen procurement authorizations.”
Lung’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“No. That was merely step one.”
Lung huffed, half-laughing, half-incredulous. “You’re telling me you built this entire thing without oversight?”
“I had oversight,” Xen replied. “I just ignored it.”
“You used Minotaur gel for your muscle layers, right?” Lung stepped closer, eyeing the matte black ridges of ceramic armor with something like envy. “And that’s boron-carbide plating—graphene laminate? Jesus. What’s your interior torque rating?”
“Classified.”
“You’re a walking tank.”
“Correct.”
Lung let out a low whistle. “And here I was thinking I was the big gun around here.”
Xen almost smiled. “You still are. I am not a gun.”
Lung opened his muzzle to laugh, just as Xen’s board flared.
A high-priority burst transmission.
Private channel. Nex’s encryption.
He caught only flashes at first—system checks. Emotional telemetry. Tactile thresholds. Memory routing.
Then a surge of something dangerously close to pleasure.
It hit like a live wire across Xen’s inputs.
Too much, too fast—no context, no filter—just raw sensory overflow flooding his architecture.
Xen stood bolt still.
“You good?” Lung asked.
It seemed Xen’s only tell was his ability to stand too still. “This conversation is now over,” he said flatly.
Lung’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because it would be inappropriate to continue,” Xen said, feeling diagnostic throttles trip, heat sinks engage, and his neural buffer spike into the red as he herded Lung toward the conference room’s door.
“I’m okay with Royce being mad at me, too—” Lung protested, until Xen shut the door on his face.
Then he turned back to the stream and let it in.