Above, a scanner swept the sky, indifferent. Below, the river accepted another secret and held it for a while, until it too decided to forget.

At the lab entrance, glass had been shelved like teeth. Dodi pulled the access card from a corpse’s belt and found, with a small, private grin, that it still fit someone’s life. Inside, the air smelled of ozone and antiseptic ghosts. The prototype sat under a halo of sterile light: compact, benign—an impossible cube of circuits humming with the patience of something aware. Data that could shift the battlefield’s voice, they’d told him; a way to make commands ripple through enemy networks like poison through a river.

Tango shouted over the comms, “Do something!”

“You always pick the worst time, huh?” Tango rasped.

Dodi watched the wake fade. The world had given him a voice for a night; he’d used it to say nothing at all. That, he thought, might be mercy.

He called it Dodi’s last drop.