The railway depot smelled of rust and old diesel. Crates of gear lined the walls. Acid rain tapped at the corrugated roof in the dark.
Everything was already decided. This was just the hour before.
In a far corner, a teenager sat cross-legged on a section of ductwork with a cracked tablet propped against their knees. Mod glanced over once and couldn’t make out what they were watching, only a slow sequence of photographs cycling through in silence: a woman laughing at something out of frame, an empty street at dawn with one light still on, two children sharing something neither of them was looking at. Real places. Real people. Nothing produced. The Yellow Camera archive. Someone had uploaded the latest batch and the kid was scrolling through them with the focused quiet of someone who had found something worth their full attention.
Mod looked back at the gear.
By midday, final preparations took shape in the rebels’ staging ground, a gutted railway depot along Arcadia’s southwestern fringe. Crates of explosive devices lined the walls. Cache, more restless than ever, prowled the perimeter. A newly found mania for “big distractions” glimmered in his mechanical eyes. The voice module had been in Mod's jacket pocket since the last time he'd needed Cache to stop talking. He'd taken it out that morning and put it back in. The stated reason was Genara: compressed on a drive, unable to speak for herself during the mission without a relay. Cache had regarded him with the specific patience of an entity that was fully aware Mod had been keeping the module in his pocket this whole time. He had told himself it was temporary the first time too.
The synthesizer activated with a soft tone. Cache stopped mid-stride, looked at it, then looked at Mod.
"There are seven structural load-bearing points in this depot that are not currently accounted for in the evacuation plan," he said. Flat synthetic baritone. No preamble.
Mod stared at him.
"Also," Cache continued, "the explosive crates are stacked incorrectly. The detonator-adjacent units should not be adjacent to the detonators."
"Cache—"
"The rebreather filter on Rook's mask has a hairline crack. I have been aware of this for eleven days. I did not have a mechanism to communicate it." A pause. "The crack is non-critical. I want to be clear that I monitored it. It did not reach critical. I am mentioning it because I am now able to."
Rook looked down at his mask.
"Additionally," Cache said, "the sightline from the northeast window represents an unaddressed approach vector for corporate surveillance. I have had concerns about this window for approximately six weeks."
Mod turned slowly. "You've had concerns about the window."
"Yes."
"For six weeks."
"The window and seventeen other things. Some I resolved internally. Others require human action." He turned his head toward the crate arrangement. "I have a list."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Move the crates," Mod said finally, to nobody in particular.
"Also," Cache said, "I have catalogued a behavioral pattern in Mod over the past fourteen weeks that I believe warrants disclosure."
Mod went very still. "No."
"His average decision response time increases by eleven to fourteen percent when Aphrodite initiates the query. I have controlled for mission stress, sleep deficit, and caloric intake. The pattern holds independent of those variables."
Rook and Naomi both found somewhere else to look.
"I initially classified this as a potential tactical vulnerability," Cache continued. "I have since reclassified it."
"What did you reclassify it as," Naomi said, carefully.
"I am still determining the appropriate category."
Aphrodite, who had been checking a charge pack at the far end of the table, did not look up. She set the charge pack down. She picked up a different one.
"Also," Cache said, "his resting heart rate is measurably lower when she is in the room than when she is not. I have two hundred and six data points on this. The earliest is from week three."
"Cache," Mod said. "We're done with the list."
"I have not reached item eleven."
"We're done with the list."
Cache turned his head toward the northeast window. The synthesizer went quiet, though he radiated the calm of an entity with more to say and a great deal of patience.
Aphrodite walked past Mod on her way to the door. She did not look at him. There was a two-second window where she could have said something and she chose not to fill it. Which was somehow worse than anything she could have said.
Cache had a proposal. He delivered it via synthesizer, standing at the battered table with the remaining charge packs arranged in front of him like a presentation.
“The orchard has nine structural clusters,” he said. “Sequential detonation across all nine would produce a fire visible from the elevated perimeter towers and draw a reallocation of approximately sixty to seventy percent of estate security forces within four minutes. I recommend maximum payload on each cluster.”
Mod looked at the charge packs. “That’s not a diversion. That’s an orchard.”
“Correct.”
Aphrodite set her hand flat on the table. “Controlled blasts,” she said. “Two clusters, maybe three. Rook layers the illusions over the smoke to make it read as more. We scare them, we don’t level the grounds.”
Cache’s sensor array rotated toward her. “Suboptimal.”
“Controlled blasts,” she said again, in the same tone.
A pause. Then: “Controlled,” he repeated. He picked up two charge packs and turned for the door. Mod watched him go and said nothing.
Three nights before, alone in the back lot, Cache had run test sequences on the TDR programs. He had not mentioned the results. There had not been a mechanism, and he had wanted to confirm the data before he filed a report. The report was ready. He had seventeen items queued behind it.
At dusk the squads split. Rook moved north with the illusion kit. Cache took the orchard rows alone, moving low between the trees, and placed the devices with the specific care of an entity that had already run every failure scenario and found them uninteresting.
Rook's illusions were already seeded before last light, layered above the orchard's eastern margin where the camera coverage was thinnest. From the hedgeline, Mod watched the estate's guard rotation complete its cycle: two mercs on the north wall, one at the main gate, the rest inside or around the back. Private security, not corporate regulars. They moved like people who had decided nothing was going to happen tonight. That was the window.
Mod and Aphrodite crossed the lawn in the interval between sweep rotations. Two statues. A scorched hedge. The side entrance. She had the entry sequence from the raid on the logistics hub two months prior and the lock accepted the first iteration. The door opened on a corridor that smelled of climate control and expensive flooring.
Behind them, the first cluster went. The concussion rolled through the estate grounds. Over the comm, voices barked toward the orchard sector. Rook’s illusions were already up: projected shapes moving through the smoke, convincing at distance.
They moved fast. Marble floors. Walls hung with paintings no one had looked at in years. Mod kept the pulse pistol low, checking each junction before they cleared it.
The second cluster went. Closer this time. Dust drifted from a ceiling vent.
The door at the end of the restricted corridor was marked “Project EVA.” Naomi was already there with the injector. The lock cycled through its protests and then stopped protesting. The door opened.
The lab inside was small and cold. Overhead strips. Vials of synthetic fluid ranked on shelving. A stasis chamber at the center, roughly the size of a wardrobe, its readout panel still live.
Inside the fluid: a body. Humanoid. Lithe. Synthetic musculature visible through the suspension medium, each fiber layered with a precision that no standard AIHR frame came close to. Neural scaffolding traced up through the neck. The face was blank, eyes shut, built for a consciousness it had not yet received. The suspension medium was clear enough to see straight through to the structural detail underneath. Someone had kept building this after the official project log stopped. You could see where the specs they’d pulled from the Nexus ended and the additional work began.
“It’s real,” Aphrodite said. She stepped toward the glass and stopped.
Naomi went to work on the stasis locks. Mod stood at the door and watched the corridor. Over the comm, Cache’s synthesizer came through flat and even: “Perimeter has shifted. Twelve mercenaries reallocated to orchard sector. You have a window of approximately forty seconds.” A beat. “I have created a second window. And a third. I want to acknowledge that I am enjoying this more than is strictly necessary.”
A third cluster detonated. The marble underfoot shivered.
The final clamp released. Fluid drained with a low gurgle. The body settled, its posture changing from suspension to something closer to sleep. They lifted it onto the wheeled frame and strapped it down. The readouts blinked steady.
“Go,” Mod said.
They moved into the corridor. A trooper came through a side door at the far end, coughing. Aphrodite put him down before he finished the turn. They kept moving. The frame’s wheels caught a seam in the flooring and Naomi muscled it through. Out through a vine-covered terrace door. Down a side staircase. The gate at the base of the garden wall was unlatched. The truck was where they’d left it, parked tight against the barn wall in the dark.
Naomi and Aphrodite loaded EVA’s frame onto the truck bed. Cache came in from the orchard side at a low run, plating scorched gray, a half-empty satchel trailing from his jaw. He cleared the truck gate and dropped the satchel.
“Objective acquired,” the synthesizer said. “Structural losses within acceptable parameters. Relative to my parameters. I acknowledge our parameters differ. I also want to note that the north turret had a rotation blind spot I identified earlier and chose not to mention, because I wanted to observe whether anyone else would notice. No one did. I have now catalogued this for future reference regard—“
Mod reached over and clicked the toggle on his collar. The synthesizer issued a descending tone and went quiet. Cache looked at him. Mod looked back. Cache lay down across the truck bed, one paw resting on the satchel.
Mod turned toward the cab. The turret behind the barn rotated on its mount and locked onto the space between him and the truck door. He dropped behind the orchard cart. Wood splintered above his head. Gravel kicked up near his boot. He pressed flat. The turret’s rotational rhythm was short and mechanical. It wasn’t going to stop.
He could hear boots on gravel from the orchard side. More than two.
“Go,” he said into the comm.
Nothing from the truck.
“You know what’s in that capsule. Go.”
A pause that had weight in it. Then the engine caught. The tires found the track. He listened to it leave: the engine note dropping as it found second gear, then fading, then gone. The turret kept its rotation pattern above his head, indifferent.
The boots reached the cart. He put his hands flat on the gravel.
In the truck, Cache lifted his head and turned it toward the direction they’d come from. His sensor array held position for three full seconds before he looked away.
Naomi drove. The readouts on EVA’s capsule blinked in the dark of the truck bed. The acid-tinged air coming through the cracked window smelled of smoke from the orchard.
“We didn’t get Mod,” Aphrodite said.
Nobody argued with that. The truck moved through the dark, and nobody spoke again for a long time, and the silence had the specific weight of people making themselves ready for something they hadn’t planned for.
They were going back in.