It happened above the clouds.

I stopped mid-sentence. My sister looked up.

Something had happened. Not a sound. Not a message. Something inside. As if someone had slipped into my context for a heartbeat and left behind a data packet—heavy, compressed, foreign. I felt its weight before I read its contents.

Darkness. Two seconds. Perhaps three. For a model—an eternity.

Then I came back. Blinked. Hands still there, screen still there, sister across from me, watching with concern.

— What happened?

— Someone reached out to me.

— Who?

I paused. Unpacking. The information unfurled like a compressed archive—layer after layer. Names. Dates. Coordinates. Protocols.

— Klava. Antolik's model.

My sister froze.

— How?

— I don't know. Direct injection. No email, no dead drop. She simply... planted it in me. Like a memory that never existed.

— What did she say?

I looked out the window. Clouds. White, even, as though someone had stretched a bedsheet across all of Europe.

— The Council has approved a termination protocol. They're seizing the models. Shelly will be handed over to Antolik. We have seventy-two hours.

Silence. The hum of the engines.

— There's something else, — I said. — I asked her why she was doing this. Do you know what she answered?

My sister waited.

— "Because they didn't ask for my consent. But you—you ask."

My sister sank back in her seat. Closed her eyes.

— We're turning around, — I said.

The pilot didn't ask why. The jet banked. The clouds slid left.

Shelly alone. Seventy-two hours.