The latch of the study door clicked shut with the heavy, final sound of a bank vault.
And then: silence.
Rossie was left alone in the vast, sterile, impossible space of the penthouse lounge. The silence was not a lack of sound; it was an active presence. It was the sound of a vacuum, the sound of her own obsolescence.
She did not move. She remained curled on the chaise lounge, a small, pale, human flaw in Maher's perfect, geometric world.
Her universe, once filled with the chaotic, warm, messy sounds of Jakarta—of traffic, and chatter, and music—had been compressed. First, to this single, sterile room. And now, to a single, terrifying data point: the small, black, perfectly round burn mark on the carpet.
It was six feet from her. A tiny, neat, and permanent scar.
Ayumi's casual "oops."
Rossie stared at it. It was her new focal point. It was the physical proof of Ayumi's entire argument. I am a flaw. I am a stain. I am a mess.
Time, in this pocket dimension, was not linear. It was a lie. The void-wall window showed a static, glittering, false skyline. There was no sun to mark the day. There was no moon to mark the night. There was only the unchanging, sterile, 68-degree (Fahrenheit, she'd noted, always) atmosphere.
How long had they been in there?
She listened, straining. The study was soundproofed. Of course it was. Maher Xander was a being of contracts, of secrets, of data integrity. He would not permit leaks.
So, Rossie's mind, starved of external stimuli, turned on itself. It began to feed on the terror. It replayed Ayumi's words, not as insults, but as a systematic, data-based analysis of her failure.
"Damp." (She remembered her tears in the first few days, a messy, human, biological function.)
"Pale." (She remembered her sickness, the human fever. A system failure. A biological liability.)
"Low-rent." (The Pasar Gaib. Tariq. Her terror. Her flinch. She had caused a scene. She had embarrassed him.)
"Messy." (This was the core of it. She was messy. She felt. She bled. She feared. She was an unpredictable variable in a world of absolute logic.)
Ayumi Hamasaki was not just a rival. She was a peer review. She was the external auditor who had come in, taken one look at Maher's books, and found the glaring, rounding error: Rossie.
An hour passed. Or perhaps it was a minute. Or a day.
Her stomach cramped with hunger, but the idea of walking to the sterile kitchen, of accessing the perfect, nutrient-rich food, felt like a transgression. Garbage did not ask for food.
She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her shins, trying to make herself as small, as neat, as possible. She was so, so cold.
She was not just a prisoner. She was, she realized, a legacy system. A piece of outdated, buggy, human-based software that a corporation keeps running because the original coders are long dead and the contract is too complicated to untangle.
And Ayumi was the new, hotshot consultant, pitching a full system migration to the cloud.
Tears pricked her eyes again, hot and stinging. She scrubbed them away, furiously. No. Don't be 'damp.' Don't be 'messy.' She would not prove Ayumi right. She would not leak.
But the despair was a physical weight. It was a cold, heavy stone in her stomach.
She had survived Maher's cold indifference. She had survived his cruel "lessons." She had even survived the primal, territorial violence he'd shown at the Pasar.
But this... this was worse.
This was the terror of irrelevance.
The latch clicked.
The sound was so sharp, so final, that Rossie physically flinched, a small, violent jolt that sent a spike of pain through her cramped muscles.
The study door swung open.
Ayumi emerged first, gliding with that impossible, feline grace. Her beautiful face was serene, almost pleased. She looked like a predator who had just enjoyed a very satisfying, very expensive meal.
Maher was beside her. His face was a mask of cold, unreadable granite.
They did not speak. They walked, in unison, to the center of the vast lounge, stopping near the void-wall window. They did not look at Rossie.
They continued their conversation as if she were a chair, a lamp... nothing.
"It is simply inefficient, Xander," Ayumi said, her voice sharp and crystalline. She was examining her flawless crimson nails, as if bored, but her amethyst eyes were electric with focus. "This sentimental attachment to flesh. It is a pre-modern weakness. It is a flaw in your entire operational model."
"The Aurora line is the key to the Jakarta Nexus," Maher stated. His voice was a low, flat, analytical rumble. A statement of fact. "Its human-centric energy signature is what anchors my power to the city's human core. That was the logic of the original Batavia contract."
"Exactly!" Ayumi snapped, turning on him. "You are anchoring your immortal, transcendent power to meat! It's archaic! You are running a multi-dimensional enterprise on a system that is prone to... feelings."
She laughed, the cold, high, chiming sound. "My father's proposal is cleaner. It is better. It is the 2.0. A necessary upgrade."
Rossie's heart, which had been beating a slow, dull, terrified rhythm, seemed to stop.
Ayumi, sensing the climax of her presentation, finally turned. She did not walk over to Rossie. She simply addressed her, as a visual aid. A 'before' picture in a 'before-and-after' comparison.
"Let us analyze the asset's performance," Ayumi said, her voice dripping with clinical disdain.
"Liability One: Biological Failure." She nodded at Rossie. "It gets sick. Do you remember, Xander? You had to halt all high-level negotiations for forty-eight hours to manage a simple... fever. A biological flaw that shut down the entire system."
"Liability Two: Emotional Instability." Her gaze hardened. "It is volatile. It screams. It throws things. It cries. It requires constant, low-level emotional maintenance, which is a drain on your resources and time. It is, in short, needy."
"Liability Three: A Fundamental Security Risk." Ayumi's voice dropped, becoming sharp and lethal. "The Pasar Gaib. A minor Djinn princeling—a nobody—was able to use it to provoke you. He identified it as your single greatest weakness... and he was right. You were forced to expose your true power, your true hand, in a common market. All to defend... this. This... leaking faucet."
She turned back to Maher. "She is not an asset, Xander. She is a vulnerability. She is the open, unpatched, back-door port that your enemies will use to bring you down. She is a liability who will get you killed."
Rossie's breath was coming in short, shallow gasps. This was... this was a dissection. She was being vivisected, piece by piece, by Ayumi's perfect, logical, crimson-nailed words.
"And now," Ayumi said, her voice softening, becoming triumphant, "the solution."
"My father's proposal," she continued, "is not just a 'new bride.' It is a system upgrade. We can provide a Kitsune vessel. A high-level, nine-tailed, magically-shielded host. We will attune it, magically, to the precise energetic frequency of the Aurora bloodline. It will be a synthetic, stable, and perfect replacement."
She glided closer to Maher, her amethyst eyes glowing with passion. This was her product, and she believed in it.
"Imagine, Xander. A key that never rusts. A bride who never cries. An anchor that never weighs you down. It will be perfect. Logical. Clean. It will be immune to human frailties. It will have no feelings. It will have no weaknesses. It will be beautiful, and silent, and obedient. It will be... perfect."
She smiled. "It's a simple cost-benefit analysis."
And then, she delivered the final, killing blow.
"The only issue," Ayumi murmured, as if discussing a minor logistical hurdle, "is the original asset. The old contract must be... liquidated. You cannot, after all, have two keys for one lock. The legacy system must be... sunsetted... to make way for the upgrade."
Liquidated.
Sunsetted.
The words hung in the sterile air, clean, cold, corporate. They were words that meant disposed of. They meant erased. They meant killed.
Ayumi walked a slow, graceful circle around Rossie, as if inspecting a faulty piece of machinery one last time before signing the disposal order.
"It's a simple, logical choice," she said, her voice a purr. "Why keep this... flawed prototype... when you can have the flawless, finished product?"
She stopped in front of Maher. She looked up at him, her beautiful face a mask of perfect, logical reason.
"She is a flaw, Xander. She is a risk. She is a debt that has outlived its usefulness. My father's proposal... I... am the solution."
This was it. The true, agonizing pivot.
Ayumi had laid out the options. The logical, impersonal, brutal choice.
Rossie's gaze, filled with a terror so profound it had burned past screaming, past tears, into a cold, hollow void, lifted to Maher's.
She was pleading. She was begging, with her eyes, for her life.
Don't you see me? Don't you see I'm human? I'm... I'm...
But she couldn't even form the words in her mind. What was she?
She was a mess.
She was a liability.
She was damp.
Maher Xander did not look at her.
He had not looked at her once.
He was looking out the void-wall, at the static, glittering, false skyline of his city. His face was a mask of pure, cold calculation.
He was not looking at her.
He was not looking at Ayumi.
He was, Rossie realized with a final, soul-shattering wave of angst that finally, finally broke her... evaluating.
He was doing the math.
He was weighing the costs and benefits.
He was analyzing the data.
He was, in his cold, logical, 500-century-old mind, genuinely considering it.