“Took you long enough,” he said. His voice crackled, compressed like an old VoIP call.

He was the one who’d named every SSID after forgotten gods. He’d wired the building with poetic fury, crawling through attics in July, muttering about packet loss like a curse. The last time she saw him, he was staring at the same installer screen—unifi-installer.exe 5.4.11—his thumb hovering over “Upgrade.”

“Don’t,” she’d said.