The warehouse was the safest place they'd had in two weeks, which meant it was tolerable.
Dim light came through cracked skylights. The team was sleeping in shifts or working on gear. No corporate sweep expected before morning. A few hours of something that almost counted as rest.
Cache had found the ball somewhere in the corners of the building. He'd been nudging it toward Mod with the patient intensity of an animal that had decided waiting was no longer a reasonable option.
Mod finally kicked it.
Cache was gone before it stopped bouncing. He was back in under four seconds, ball in his mouth, looking up at Mod with complete certainty that this would continue.
Mod kicked it again.
Aphrodite watched from across the room. She picked up a scrap of cloth, tore a strip off the end, and held it out.
Cache looked at the cloth. Then at her. Then he took hold of the other end.
She pulled. He pulled. His servos engaged, his plating shifted, his eyes got bright in a way that had nothing to do with sensors or bioluminescence. She hadn't expected the brightness. She'd expected resistance. Not that.
She was stronger than she looked and so was he and neither of them was going to be the first to let go.
"He's going to take your arm off," Mod said.
"He's going to have to."
Cache won. He did a slow lap with the cloth in his mouth, lines running gold, then dropped it at Aphrodite's feet and looked up at her.
She crouched down. Looked back.
"He knew you were worried before you crossed the room," she said. To Mod, not to Cache. Not looking at him. "He moved toward you first. Before you said anything."
Mod didn't answer. He had noticed.
Later, with the team quiet and Cache dozing near the wall, Aphrodite found the Chronos scanner from their last mission and brought it over. They ran it slowly so as not to wake him.
Lines of code scrolled across the scanner's small screen. Override protocols. Aggression triggers. Infiltration programs. And in a separate section, flagged differently from the rest: empathy architecture. A full stack of it. Corporate coders had built him to bond convincingly. They hadn't built in a ceiling.
"This one's been running a feedback loop," Aphrodite said, pointing to a flag marked Integration Error — partial loop / unresolved. "It's been doing it since before you had him. The empathy code built on itself. Past what they intended." She paused. "He's been feeling things longer than anyone planned for."
Mod looked at Cache. The dog's legs were twitching. Whatever he was dreaming, his lines pulsed warm and steady.
"If the override triggers in there," Mod said. "He won't be able to fight it."
"Naomi's firewall gives us 80%."
"Yeah."
They were both quiet. The scanner screen reflected in Aphrodite's eyes.
"He already knows we're worried about it," she said.
"I know."
She switched off the scanner. Cache's lines settled into their low steady amber pulse and held there.
They were three blocks from the building when Cache stopped walking.
His bioluminescent lines, which he had been keeping dim to save power, flared suddenly to full brightness. Then dimmed again. Then flared. A pattern Mod didn't recognize.
"What is that?" Aphrodite said.
Mod was already checking his wrist-slate. A signal, faint, moving fast through the city's network. Not heading toward Flora Labs. Not heading toward the Sentinel Nexus.
Heading toward them.
Cache looked up at him. His sensor eyes were steady.
Whatever it was, it already knew where they were.