The yard convulsed with the sound of breaking glass and the thin, mechanical shriek of instruments being challenged. Sparks flew like angry fireflies where a hawk's wing met steel; the harvester's articulated arms moved with an impatience that belonged to weather, slow, inevitable, unstoppable. Men screamed once, then went quiet as the instruments found what they were built to find: signatures and heat and the faint, almost dishonest thrum of a life that wanted to be more than ledger-ink.
Leo stepped into the open because the alternative was to let calculations decide the shape of a human life. The braces under his ribs hummed in a frequency that felt like the low tide of a sea; the three voices inside him crowded at the edge of his thoughts, each offering a map to ruin or salvation. He did not trust any of them. He trusted the small, simpler thing that had become his daily ethic: do not let tools turn people into data.
