The download finished. He installed the Russian language pack, and the interface bloomed to life—familiar, clunky, and perfect. He opened a folder of RAW files from a wedding shoot in rural Tula. The faces of the guests, captured in the golden hour, finally looked right.

The problem was his new hard drive. It was blank, and the original install disc was a coaster in a landfill somewhere in Siberia. He needed the software, and he needed it in Russian to navigate the technical metadata he’d spent a decade mastering.

The flickering neon of the 24-hour café reflected in the rain-slicked pavement outside. Inside, Anton