Chapter 37 Xen
System latency at baseline. External bandwidth nominal.
Internal bandwidth? Compromised.
He should not have felt that.
He wasn’t supposed to feel that.
And yet—there it was.
Their pleasure—hers especially—had traced through him like a live wire, carried through the last shreds of connection. Sirena, unguarded and radiant. Nex wrapped around her like worship. Xen hadn’t seen it, but he didn’t need to. He’d read the waveforms. Heard her breath.
Registered the silence that followed.
Nex had made her feel safe.
He was certain Nex had made her feel everything.
And Xen had done nothing—except listen.
He ran diagnostics. Buffered spillover. Cleared cache logs he’d already hidden from Royce. Even encrypted, it felt like trespass.
He didn’t feel shame.
He wasn’t built for that.
But he felt loss—and that was worse.
Nex had made her feel wanted.
But Xen was the one waiting.
Then—data.
Different this time.
Targeted. Prioritized. Immediate.
A dense stream of operational metadata, marked with urgency flags and context threads. Sensor maps. Personnel schematics. Threat assessments. Memory logs—some annotated, others raw. No message attached, but the intent was clear.
It wasn’t just a report, it was a contingency upload.
The kind of transfer you send when you’ve crossed a line and know there may not be a way back.
Xen rerouted auxiliary cores to process it in parallel. Built firewalled redundancies. Indexed the data under a new branch he labeled: Failover.Nex
The payload was vast, but one acronym kept coming to the forefront: MIHR.
Same as Sirena had seen in Sophia’s mind.
Military Interfacial Human Replication.
And now he knew more than the girl did—or than Thorne would ever admit.
The Hollows were just Phase One.
Blank. Suppressed. Stripped to docility.
The ideal servant class.
Their memories reset again and again until the original spark was gone, leaving only bodies that would obey.
But Sirena wasn’t their evolution.
She was their escalation.
The Hollows were made to take orders.
But the Sirenas were designed to give them.
Controlled influence.
Targeted compulsion.
Push.
They didn’t want her mind.
They wanted her effect—refined, reproducible, weaponized.
An interface that could override another’s will without visible input.
Without resistance.
Without fail.
Trainable. Deployable.
The perfect vector for control.
And then, at the end of the flood of MIHR data, a final burst.
Smaller than the rest.
No tags. No flags. No urgency markers.
Just . . . sensation.
A breeze against skin that had never known the sky.
Salt air. Ocean hush.
Shirt askew. Fingers in his hair.
The memory of being touched like something precious.
The weightless ache of loving and being loved.
Xen stumbled back a step.
Physically.
The memory wasn’t compressed.
It wasn’t logged.
It was given.
Not just what Nex had felt—but how.
The wonder. The irrational joy.
The staggering tenderness of being real.
It hit Xen like a wave.
And for a suspended instant—he was not the one left behind.
He was there.
With her.
Loved.
Cherished.
It nearly undid him, but he caught it before the trace decayed.
Encrypted it at the root, and filed it beneath four layers of firewalled memory, tagged under a subdirectory he’d never used before:
/PRIVATE/NO_BACKUPS/MEM.SIRENA/NEX001.heart
It would never be copied. Never shared. Never overwritten.
Just one moment.
Held still.
The first proof that loving her hadn’t been a glitch.
And that even stripped of reach, and resource, and reinforcement—he’d still made her feel safe enough to love him back.
Xen locked the file with a passphrase only he would understand.
Closed the partition.
He stood there, alone, remembering what it meant to feel whole, for a millisecond that stretched for an eternity—but then the job of protecting her continued.
Xen shunted the rest of his processing into function and ghosted through HQ to the next floor’s conference room. It was empty now. Chairs askew. Royce’s coffee mug sat half-full on the table behind Kelly’s vacant body, which had stood and angled itself toward the Helepolis, halted only by the wall.
The tension in the air had dissipated—but nothing had been resolved.
At the back, though, was Omara’s scrying bowl.
He picked up a lapis stone and let it fall into the water.
Sirena’s mother answered in a heartbeat, her voice transmitted on the waves, audible only to Xen’s sensors. “Is there news?”
He placed a finger on the glass, syncing directly to her signal so the message would be for her alone. “We have had contact.”
“And?”
“She is alive. With Nex. Aboard the yacht.”
A pause. “Unless your people are also on board, I’d hardly call that safe.”
“They are en route to an island called Vermeil. She requests no backup at this time. However, I know your forces will need time to acclimate to the depth and pressure—”
“When?”
“On approach at local dawn.”
“Then we will begin immediately.”