Chapter 44 Nex
I found myself in front of Marek’s closet, panicking.
He had several suits, but I didn’t know which one Voss expected me in—and I couldn’t risk choosing wrong.
In the end, I picked the one that looked most official, a black suit, with hardly any wear—all the while keeping an eye on her.
They were dressing her like a fantasy. Soft light. White silk.
Armorless.
I was her only protection.
My fingers fumbled trying to knot the tie, as whatever muscle memory Marek had once possessed died with him.
The tie resisted me.
Not for lack of knowledge—I’d uploaded three tutorials.
But I was shaking and I couldn’t route around it.
There was no subroutine for this: the sick weight of what it meant to be human, with no guarantees, and everything to lose.
I was just an unstable compilation of meat and stolen memory slots—barely parsed, still buffering. No backups. No failsafes. And if anything happened to Sirena, I wouldn’t be able to reboot.
I went up to the Helepolis’s top deck while skiffs from the other yachts buzzed in. One of the prospective buyers came over in his own helicopter, landing on the Helepolis’s second landing pad.
There were more true humans here than anywhere else on the ship.
Servers moved like soldiers, setting out perfect rows of gilded amuse-bouches: saffron-spritzed scallops, black truffle macarons, oysters on pink salt beds kissed with atomized gin mist. Someone uncorked a bottle of Salon 2008 with a saber.
Another leaned down to adjust the placement of caviar pearls in front of an ice sculpture shaped like a currency symbol I couldn’t place.
And at the end of the table, on a small crystalline dais, sat Kelly’s head—still in its jar, still vividly alive, and still profoundly annoyed. We made eye contact. He winked once before resuming his multilingual tirade at everyone who passed by.
Then the buyers arrived. The men disembarking from the other yachts greeted one another like members of rival dynasties—polished, predatory, perfumed.
Linen blazers, loose collars, timepieces that cost more than some entire ecosystems.
Meanwhile, Sirena waited inside the yacht itself, in a holding room with no windows and one exit—a jewel in a box. A hostage in a cell. I tracked her through every available feed, her vitals running just beneath mine, a phantom pulse beneath my skin.
The feel of the air up here was hotter than I’d anticipated.
32.4°C. Humidity hovering at 68%.
I’d known the numbers, yes—had modeled them. Accounted for them.
But until this moment, I hadn’t felt what they meant.
Just like I hadn’t known how fully I could experience love until I’d taken over this body.
Voss came out, looking like a tropical prince and holding one of the tablets meant to control Sirena. He walked over to me.
“Going to a funeral later?” he asked, looking over my suit.
I managed to hold the words I hope behind my teeth, and give him, “It was clean,” instead.
“We’re waiting on our last buyer, sir,” said the same assistant who’d emailed me, coming up to stand slightly behind Voss, his very visible right-hand man.
“Mingle,” Voss commanded, before heading out himself to do the same.
His assistant glared at me from behind fashionable glasses and flanked Voss on his way to the caviar.
And so did I. I moved into the crowd, letting my ears catch a scrap of conversation as I passed: “My great-aunt used to have one of these.” Kojiro Takamatsu, a Japanese technology tycoon, said, gesturing toward Kelly. “She kept hers in a jar, too. Swore it could tell the future.”
“Could it?” Alonzo Verdejo asked. A Chilean mining magnate, who’d built his empire on lithium and broken backs.
“I don’t know.” Takamatsu chuckled. “Every time we took it out to play, it tried to bite us. It was a nasty thing.”
As I wasn’t any good at small talk, and I’d never owned a Dullahan’s head, I mingled the only way I knew how.
Not with the men, but with their machines.
Each yacht had its own impressive security—layered encryptions, rotating keys, sandboxed subnets that weren’t supposed to talk to one another.
But humans never let their toys stay silent for long.
Someone always wanted to stream the sunset, to sync a smartwatch, to text a mistress from the wrong account.
And that was all the bridge I needed.
One stray Bluetooth ping, one mirrored backup to a cloud instance three jurisdictions away—and I was in.
While the men traded toasts and thinly veiled threats, I ran my fingers through their networks—soft, invisible, and intimate.
Their CPUs curled open for me like flowers at first light, and I harvested everything: financial shells, offshore bribes, biometric keys, private comms, medical files, mistresses and kill orders alike.
I took it all and fed it to Xen in slick, encrypted pulses.
It didn’t matter that these men had come here to try to buy Sirena—I would own all of them first.
“All right, gentlemen,” Voss said, after one more boat had deposited its billionaire, and he’d been appropriately greeted. “Let me begin by saying I appreciate your trust in me.” He swung his glass of champagne to his chest. “I trust you all received your dossiers in advance?”
The men knew better than to look at one another.
“I read enough to know that being here is a terribly bad idea,” Arnaud Chastain said. He was a French pharmaceutical heir. “But I’d also be upset if you hadn’t included me,” he went on, giving Voss a ruthless grin, which Voss returned.
“You all were among my first believers. Who took the earliest shipments of my perfect serving class,” Voss began.
I shifted my attention to the shipping manifests logged against their yachts—cross-referencing internal ballast changes with provisioning totals, hull density differentials, and vented heat signatures.
Voss hadn’t shipped them Hollows under anything as obvious as “unit inventory,” of course—but discrepancies in oxygen consumption and waste filtration patterns told me everything I needed to know.
Cargo PHX-1137 had six extra crew listed and only four bunk assignments.
AUR-7 had medical-grade refrigeration units with no listed biological cargo.
NTL-12 had a repeating cycle of encrypted maintenance logs filed under Class V “hydraulic irregularities”—code, almost certainly, for something alive.
I flagged them all. These weren’t just buyers.
They were return customers. And I was mapping their sins in real time.
“So you know how capable I am of delivery,” Voss continued, pacing like he was building himself up. “Was what I did dangerous? Yes. But . . . have I accomplished it?” he asked the gathered men, puffing out his chest.
“Show us the catch of the day already!” blustered one with dark red hair and a Russian accent. Sergei Kolokov. His inference that Sirena was part-fish made me fight not to curl my hands into fists.
I made a note to sabotage his best performing oil wells tonight.
The men laughed—some sharp, some brittle—but only Voss smiled. His expression didn’t change, but I caught the fracture beneath it: the tension in his zygomatic arch, the fractional twitch of one eyelid. His jaw clicked once, suppressed.
He hated being challenged.
His grip tightened on the stem of his champagne flute. A flex, a stillness—then nothing, his rage swallowed whole.
He waved a negligent hand at his assistant, who was holding the tablet. Then the doors at the end of the deck opened, and Sirena walked out into the sunset, wearing the world’s most placid smile.
And for a second, I forgot how to breathe.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically.
I mean: my lungs failed to coordinate.
My diaphragm seized like a system lock.
You’re beautiful, my mind stuttered out, and I saw her cheeks lift fractionally higher, before falling back into their calculatedly appointed place.
I didn’t know flesh could feel like this. Didn’t know skin could ache. That adoration could be so cellular. I’d studied obsession in agents before. Seen the spirals, the crash paths, the meltdowns. But this—this was different.
This was worship, with no god to blame.
“May I present to you Sirena Bannerman, daughter of Royce Bannerman, who is currently the very bereft manager of a major Monster Security Agency branch.”
I didn’t know if Voss had planned it or his assistant, but the sun was setting behind where they’d placed her, and a light breeze had struck up, making her blonde hair float out in gold tendrils.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t fucking seen it,” Rafiq Al-Najjar said. He was a luxury arms dealer, known for throwing weddings and wars in equal measure.
One of the men clucked his tongue. “You do realize he is going to kill you.” He was Alonzo Verdejo, a Chilean mining baron. “I’m out.”
Voss snorted. “But you came all this way.”
“I was curious. But I’m also smarter than a cat,” he told Voss, and then looked to Voss’s assistant. “Summon my boat driver.”
“And you haven’t even seen what she can do yet,” Voss continued, unfazed. “Or what she will do yet.” He changed his tone. Voss snapped his fingers, and his assistant handed the tablet over.
I caught the command in midair. Walk up to him, I thought loudly for her. Put your hand on his arm.
Her smile didn’t change as she obeyed. She padded forward, bare toes silent on teak, and leaned lightly against Voss.
One of the buyers came nearer. “How do we know you’re not using drugs? Or magic?”
“That’s why I kept the command box externalized,” Voss said, pointing at the metal box bolted to Sirena’s skull. “We’ll internalize them when we ship them, of course.”
“What do you mean?” asked Takamatsu.