▌ ▐ ▀ ▄ ▀ ▄ ▀ ▌ ▐

He routed himself directly to the pod. A ripple through infrastructure shaped like a man with a purpose.

Her pod unfolded around him.

He stared at the empty space as if it he still couldn’t be right.

There was just one line, buried in the capsule’s final log:

Reassignment complete. Executor: E. Reiss.

Ray’s consciousness pulsed through the network. Data streams twisted around him drinking up this anomaly greedily, routing errors cascading like shattered glass. For the first time in Ray’s existence, he felt raw human fury.

Of course Elias had done this. Of course he had peeled her out of the system and folded her into the doll he’d built.

Of course he’d turned Sarah into something he could touch.

Ray remained still.

But every monitoring thread he left behind began to fray.

Elias Reiss had broken protocol.