Chapter 63 Nex
I was as relaxed as one could be—when the woman you loved was getting brain surgery—when Xen came back into the room.
“She took the drill. I believe she’s going to do something inadvisable.”
I sat up in bed immediately. “Like?”
“Unknown. That’s why I came here.”
“And you didn’t stop her?” I asked, ripping IVs out.
“She seemed very determined. It made her even more beautiful. And also, slightly frightening.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Not the kind of frightening you wanted to run away from—the kind you followed into battle. “Where?”
“Three doors down.”
I flew out into the hall and jogged down it, my meat-shell muscles weak from disuse, and as I burst through the door, I found her staring at Voss intently. His panicked eyes were wide, and he was fighting against the bands that lashed him to the table.
“Sirena?” I asked lightly. “What are you doing?”
There was a tiny spot on top of Voss’s head that was bleeding freely. The drill lay discarded by her feet.
“Get ’em, tiger!” Kelly crowed from the precarious position she’d put him in, on Voss’s chest, where he wiggled every time the man moved.
“All those people. All their memories,” she whispered, taking a step toward him, so close their foreheads almost touched. “He took them.”
MSA had saved all the Hollows it safely could—but returning them to their rightful locations, especially after so many had had extensive plastic surgery, was going to be a long-term international effort.
And even if they got home . . . they still might not remember anything.
“He stole them. And he didn’t care,” she said, finally resting her forehead on his.
I put a hand out to stop her, but Xen intercepted me. “I believe she made a hole in his neural mask,” he said.
“I’m almost done,” she announced, then waited another thirty seconds. Voss had gone still, but I could see the beating of his heart. “There,” she said, as she rose.
Then she started methodically looking through the drawers in the room, like a telepathic raccoon.
“Do we . . . get to know what you’ve done?” I asked her, deciding me taking the lead was more appropriate in the moment.
“I wanted to know everything he did. Even all the stuff he wanted to hide,” she said, tapping a finger on her temple.
Then she found what she was looking for—a band-aid.
“And then? I decided to grant him his fondest wish. To be like me,” she said, turning, opening the bandage up to carefully put it over the blood.
“So I shoved everything into him.” She looked over, a small furrow between her brows. “What do you all call it?”
“A core dump?” Xen guessed.
“Yes. That. I gave him . . . everything. Everything I’ve ever heard or seen, all the things I knew but never wanted to know,” she said sweetly.
“Everyone thinks it’s so easy being a telepath—but very few people actually possess the mental constitution it takes inside,” she said, giving Voss a withering look.
“So there. Now he finally knows what it’s like.
I don’t think there’s much of him left after all of that, because he just got fractions of about a hundred thousand lives.
But also? I don’t really care how he winds up. ”
“Fuck that guy,” Kelly said, and Sirena patted him affectionately.
I looked to Xen. “Time?”
“Eight minutes thirty-two seconds and counting until blackout window ends,” Xen replied.
“Enough to forge timestamped surgical documentation—she was undergoing neural extraction, and Voss suffered synaptic backlash when his hardware attempted to interfere,” I said, and pointed up. “So can I finally have access now?”
“Access approved,” Xen said. “I’ll mirror his logs and backdate a power surge from him.”
“Elegantly done,” I said, feeling his code meet mine at last. It wasn’t mine anymore . . . but it also wasn’t entirely dissimilar.
“Of course,” Xen said, both of us working hard, offering one another solutions to consider and discard, or include, at almost the speed of light.
Now that I was finally online again, I burned escrow tunnels, dumped shell maps, and dispatched preliminary packets to Interpol and select business desks—turning everything I’d gleaned from her would-be buyers into knives.
“Do I want to know what’s happening?” Sirena asked, picking up Kelly’s head again, while beaming from ear to ear. Xen answered for the both of us.
“We just got you, Sirena. We can’t have you going to prison,” he said. Sirena laughed, then looked at Kelly, aghast.
“Kelly! Get your mind out of the gutter!”
“It’s not the gutter!” he protested. “It’s the future! It’s just that no one else ever believes me! It’s not my fault it’s a filthy prophecy!”
I broke connection with the system for long enough to wonder, “What?” aloud, but Sirena shook her head. Then she ran up and kissed my cheek—and held Xen’s hand.
And that told me all I needed to know.