He didn’t know if he would survive the week. He didn’t know if his family would be safe. But as he hit ‘Schedule Send’ for 6:00 AM the next morning, he realized something.

He pulled out his personal phone—a strict violation of Sub-Level 3 policy—and took a single, silent photograph of the RENZEL-SPEC cylinder.

His phone buzzed. It was his boss, a woman named Helen who never smiled and always smelled faintly of gun oil.

He pulled the tarp. A cylinder, heavier than the others, etched with a single word: RENZEL-SPEC . Below it, a radiation trefoil, small but emphatic.