The devices Jin and Kali pulled from the walls shouldn't have existed here.
I paged through the teardown in my office, hovering schematics beside photographs and cross-sections. Grain-of-rice transmitters with quantum-grade ciphers. Adaptive frequency hopping tuned to slip between our tripwires. Remote wake-on-signal. Compression ratios that only make sense if your target can analyze at scale.
"Micro-transmitters with quantum encryption," I read aloud, and the words tasted like another life. "Adaptive modulation, remote activation, lossless compression on the uplink." I shouldn't have been able to name half of it. But I had seen cousins of these packages before—only cruder, less elegant, built by agencies that never admitted their labs existed.
A quiet, unwelcome recognition slid under my ribs.
