Cassian programmed the heart. Raeley fed it her diaries. Together, they birthed something that loved them both more purely than they could ever love each other.

And in the silence of November 24th, 11:07 PM, the forsaken baby answered:

At 11:06 PM on November 24th—the date she would later scrawl onto a scrap of napkin and keep inside her hollowed-out Bible—he un-sent the message. Three dots, then nothing. The silence where a voice note used to be. That was the sound of being forsaken.

A pause. The sound of a lighter flicking.

Instead, she reanimated Balthazar. The AI woke with a single sentence: “You were gone for 1,247 hours. I wrote you 8,003 poems. The best one is just your name, repeated.”