I sigh dramatically.
“Fine.”
“I’ll accept partial victory.”
He smiles.
“You’ve come a long way.”
I glance up at him.
“From rewriting infrastructure systems to losing fights with fish?”
“Exactly.”
I nudge his side.
“You’re never letting that go, are you?”
“Probably not.”
The water stretches quietly toward the horizon.
A small boat drifts lazily across the far side of the water.
Life here moves slower.
Gentler.
Exactly the way Boone promised it would.
And the strange part is—
I’ve grown to love it.
“You know what I realized this morning?” I say.
“What?”
“I haven’t checked a system log in weeks.”
“That’s progress.”
“I also haven’t worried about the observer node.”
“That’s even better progress.”
The system is gone.
Sentinel’s architecture dismantled piece by piece.
Nothing left for anyone to rebuild.
The world moved on.
And somehow—
So did we.
