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A single flicker. Then another. The chest plate rose.

Sergeant Mira Kessler stared at the words on her data-slate. J3308 wasn’t a droid. It wasn’t a drone. It was a person. Specifically, it was the designation for Unit 4 of the J-Series Synthetic Infantry—a man named Elias who had taken a plasma bolt to the skull during the fall of the Arcadia Bridge.

The procedure took forty-seven minutes. J3308’s chassis twitched, arched, then went silent. The heart-rate monitor flatlined. Holt reached for the power switch.