Page 53 of The Sovereign, Part One (The Sovereign Saga #1)

“Then it’s fair to say Hyperion Proper stands on your foundation, sir,” Maxim said with a nod.

I smiled as Lev turned and took my hands with a warm smile that seemed to be reserved just for me. “Come. I’ll escort you to my office.” As we walked, his gaze swept the corridor. “Gila says the walls have more eyes than they used to.”

I glanced back at Maxim. “That’s why we’re here.” My voice was barely above a whisper, but Lev nodded quickly, signaling he was acutely aware.

We trailed him down a private corridor, bypassing the public access Ascens. He led us to a side panel, pressed his palm to the reader, and the panels to a private Ascens opened. After a quick ascent, the panels parted. We climbed the few steps to the upper tier and then filtered into his office.

“Where’s Gila?” I asked, scanning the dark room.

“On an important errand, I’m afraid,” Lev said as the panel sealed with a hiss and then an audible click.

The space was the same as the last time I’d visited.

No integrated lighting. Without Gila there to work, no interface.

The walls of Lev’s office were empty, the space broken only by his former desk and a wide display table filled with layered panels of analog switches and older interface strips.

Equipment I hadn’t seen since childhood.

Lev caught my eye and grinned. “Gila put this together just a few days ago. You’re looking at history.”

“It looks… untraceable,” Maxim said.

Lev gave him a knowing glance. “That’s because it is.”

Maxim didn’t sit. “You’ve bypassed central surveillance.”

Lev leaned back against his desk, arms folded. “I wired this office myself, long before we consolidated comm routing. Most Sovereign have never even heard of the old Network Relay Chambers. Yours still exists beneath the Laundrette, does it not?”

“It does,” I said.

“But it’s inactive,” Maxim added. “I checked the network once Isara and I began to question… It’s inactive.”

Lev nodded once, uncharacteristically pleased with Maxim’s partial answer.

“Good. After consolidation, those chambers were deemed obsolete. Even those Hyperion didn’t fill in are overlooked by the average Sovereign.

But if those few still in existence are still active—and most are—they leave a blackpath channel The Citadel can use to run system checks on anyone they suspect of bypassing standard surveillance.

This office isn’t on any schematic. I made sure of it.

More importantly, Gila made sure of it.”

“You mean it’s not indexed,” Maxim said. “No Citadel overlay, no data trail?”

“That’s why I claimed this small wing decades ago. I knew what The Citadel had planned for the city. As far as they’re concerned, this entire section doesn’t exist.”

“And they don’t question how you account for your time here?” Maxim asked. “Either you’re elevated enough in rank that no one audits your usage imprint, or you’ve redirected the monitoring AI with a synthetic activity stream, something it registers as routine.”

Lev looked mildly amused. “That’s a very sharp observation. Which one do you think it is?”

Maxim didn’t answer.

Lev narrowed his eyes. “Very good, Maxim. And without twitching an eye. This is good. It’s very good.”

“What… what does that mean?” I asked.

Lev only winked at me, gesturing for us to sit. I sank into one of the rigid, utilitarian chairs, but Maxim remained standing, his posture subtly angled toward me, similar to the way he stood when Joss was around.

“Always ready to intercept, aren’t you?” Lev’s tone was mild, but the glance he gave Maxim was sharper. “You don’t even know what you’re bracing for. That’s the interesting part.” Lev laced his fingers together and studied me for a long moment. “Now. Why are you here?”

I took a breath. “We’ve encountered something. But before I explain, I need your promise for discretion.”

He didn’t blink. “Of course.”

“I mean it, Lev. It’s dangerous. For me, but more for Maxim.” I hesitated. “It would devastate me if something happened to him.”

The heat of Maxim’s hand was on my shoulder, and he gently squeezed.

“Isara.” Lev’s tone softened, and he leaned forward just slightly.

“Your papa and I were boys when this city was still learning to walk. I carried you when you were too tired, and I watched you grow from that little spitfire who tried to hotwire a snacks dispenser into the woman now sitting before me in her Vesture. I have no interest in watching you fall directly under The Citadel’s lens. ”

My throat tightened. There was a sincerity in his words I didn’t expect. He wasn’t just reassuring me. He was warning me that this was just as serious as I believed. He wouldn’t have made the distinction otherwise.

I nodded. “All right.”

I glanced at Maxim, and he gave me the barest nod.

“We’ve been… testing boundaries,” I began. “Situationally. Nothing overt.”

“Context,” Lev said.

“Small infractions at first. And then… larger ones.”

“Clarify.”

“Premature domestic preview to start for most of Day Two. The following day and since, we… we, er… we…” I sighed, unable to say the words to the man who’d been a father figure to me.

Maxim saved me. “We’ve shared private, emotionally charged interactions. While we didn’t engage in anything explicitly prohibited, the level of connection, physical and otherwise, was more personal than the protocol allows at this stage.”

Lev’s brows lifted faintly, but he didn’t look surprised.

“And?” he asked.

“And nothing happened,” I said. “No alert. No auditory cue. Not even a flag. I’d have considered it luck if it had only been once. But it’s happened more than once. Every time—nothing.”

Lev tilted his head. “You were testing The Citadel.” I’d have thought his words to be accusatory if he didn’t seem so impressed.

“We should have at least been flagged,” I said. “Based on what’s allowed, and what isn’t, we absolutely should have. And I checked my log. No annotation. Not even a shadow line.”

Lev leaned back, his lips twitching with amusement. “Well. That is interesting.”

Maxim was far from amused. “What does that suggest to you?”

Lev looked between us, then settled his gaze on Maxim. “That depends. What made you take that risk?”

I adjusted in my seat. “Maxim is… different. I noticed not long after we met.”

“How long?” Lev asked.

“The morning of Day Two. Joss approached us during a breakfast date. Maxim was,” I hesitated again. I hadn’t thought this through, explaining Maxim’s behavior in front of him.

“Jealous,” Maxim finished. “I was jealous, on alert. Joss felt like a threat, although I couldn’t explain why.”

Lev’s eyes shimmered with delight. “Tell me, Maxim, from a behavioral standpoint, how would you classify your response?”

“Lev,” I snapped, impatient with his demeanor. “Why aren’t you outraged? These are your protocols, your code he’s somehow evolved beyond.”

“Oh, we shouldn’t speculate.” He was smiling now. “But I will say this, if your Supplicant has a behavioral divergence and he’s bypassing infractions, that’s not simply a system glitch. That’s engineered.”

“I know,” I said. “I keep thinking about my Veritas. I’m not like most Sovereign, but this—” I shook my head. “This isn’t something I could have caused, right?”

Lev’s tone was calm. “If the Veritas operated without oversight, it would be possible. But, no, Isara. This isn’t your fault.”

Silence stretched between us.

Then Lev turned back toward his desk and ran a finger along one of the panels, activating a small, embedded console with manual controls.

He didn’t look up as he spoke. “When you came to me the day of your Eidolon, do you remember what we discussed?”

“Yes, why?” I asked.

“Your curiosity,” Lev continued, “breaking the rules.”

“I remember,” I said, impatient.

“And the next time you visited me, we spoke of The Vale. The Ruhat. And of Blight.”

The word ignited against my already dry nerves, and I had to fight the urge to squirm. “Lev, what does any of that have to do with Maxim?”

“It wasn’t meant to be,” he said, a sudden tinge of sadness in his voice.

“This… utopia.” He swept a hand overhead with exaggerated, sarcastic awe.

“Grieving our children, so often, was too much. And not just our own. Our nephews and nieces, our grandchildren, our neighbors’ children.

So, I constructed a system where no one argued over the little love we were allowed to keep.

Where there were no betrayals, no cold beds, no guesswork.

No crime, hunger, stress. Every detail accounted for. Every discomfort removed.”

He looked past me, toward nothing, as if his eyes had settled on the rusted bowels of Hyperion, beneath its polished surface.

“But in all my calculations, I didn’t account for the flaw in the design: Humans weren’t made for unbroken contentment.

Eliminate friction, and the mind doesn’t relax, it stagnates.

The neurocognitive centers of our brains are shaped by adversity—the areas that foster grit, resilience, and meaning go quiet.

The Birth Crisis was too much. It also wasn’t enough.

When nothing hurts, nothing grows. And we were never meant to live untouched by pain.

” His gaze found mine again. “Blight isn’t a myth.

Not a malfunction. It’s a rebellion. You give someone a life and love so perfect it can’t be questioned, and the mind will do whatever it must to survive the certainty.

It will find the cracks. And if it can’t, it creates them. ”

Maxim spoke, still behind me. “You meant to create a cure, but it came with teeth.”

“Yes. Yes!” Lev sat forward, waving away Maxim’s words.

I knew he was only angry with himself, but I’d never seen that expression on his face.

“What I’ve built didn’t soothe the human mind.

It triggered something worse than grief: Blight.

” He paused, then his expression brightened a bit.

“So, I engineered a countermeasure to the intervention. And that correction… is Maxim.”