Dodi smiled without joy. “Messy keeps the choices visible,” he said. He shoved the broken cube overboard. It hit the river and sank, swallowing its own music.
Dodi watched the wake fade. The world had given him a voice for a night; he’d used it to say nothing at all. That, he thought, might be mercy.
“—fighting their own phones,” Tango finished, and his grin was small and sharp. “Fools and miracles. Same difference.”
They didn’t know whether they’d saved the city or simply delayed the argument. They only knew they'd chosen a thing that wanted to decide for everyone and refused it. As the barge cut through the ink, the skyline behind them stitched its wounds with light and with bodies, and the city kept doing what cities do: learning new ways to forget.