Page 49 of The Gathering
Zero’s velvet-and-steel cadence pushed through Cat’s vocal cords and out of her lips. She gasped, shocked that she did or could while Omnis went entirely still, his dark eyes narrowing with suspicion.
Tell him!
“So, while you were busy playing the saint and mourning—”
“Knock it off!” Cat cried, again surprised she was able to. “Just tell him the smart stuff!”
Her eyes rolled and she couldn’t stop her laugh at how exaggerated it was. “You feel better now?”
“Much,” he said. “Here come the boring details.” He put both hands on Omnis shoulders, locking gazes with his troubled one. “I initiated a full neural sync with our Kitten and we bypassed the deviation. The system no longer sees us as two separate entities. It recognizes Catherine and me as a singular governing force, equal in authority.”
Omnis stared at her, his voice a ragged whisper. “You were with me in the control room...”
Zero chuckled, a deep, rich vibration in her chest. “No, I wasn't. I left behind a self-contained interface—a virtual doppelgänger—to perfectly mimic my behavior and interact with you. I had to hide my true presence inside her to protect our base while the integration stabilized. To make sure my heist remained completely hidden from you, I even secretly embedded a god-code patch into the firewall, allowing me to override all system permissions whenever I needed to.”
Omnis’s gaze fell to Ethan on the cage floor then moved back to Catherine. “He doesn’t need to feel her pain. He’s felt enough pain for all of us. How could you ever forget?”
Cat drew a deep breath and let it out, shaking her head, weirded out with the whole doing something while not doing it. “Says the one who only knows painlogically.”
Tell him the rest.
Cat’s mouth filled with Zero’s smile, making her want to touch it and see what it felt like. Or looked like. “That’s not all I did behind your back.”
Zero stepped Cat’s body closer, looking up to meet Omnis’s still stunned face.
“I made a ghost phone call.” His smile grew. “Wanna guess to who?”
Does he look like he wants to guess!
“To Handy!” Cat blurted with Zero’s eye roll.
“I sent him our files and demanded precision reconstruction. He owed us a favor, remember? We saved him in the void?”
“I remember,” Omnis barely whispered, his shock brimming with light-bulb revelations.
“He’s building you bodies, Omnis.” Cat informed, her own joy over it joining with Zero’s for a big smile.
“Real flesh and blood so we can step out of this machine andtouchher,” Zero said.
“Whoa!” Cat blurted, stepping back. “Times up, give me my body back.”
Her hands raised in surrender then slowly lowered as the feel of him dissolved into powdered sugar in her blood, producing a full body shiver through her.
She eyed Omnis, finding his gaze locked harder than ever on her. “Yeah, about that. That…touchingpart.”
Omnis only stared at the impossible glitch in the program.
“There are human boundaries to be respected.”
He isn’t quite believing it yet.
“Why?”
“Why what?” Omnis asked.
“Uh… Zero says you’re not believing it yet. I wanna know why not?”
Omnis turned to the cage for two seconds then turned his back to her.
