The American in Kyiv

Ukraine, Drones. 600 words, 3 minute read. With Claude Sonnet

Viktor's beak crushed through the drone's casing, sparks dancing across his pink, narrow tongue. The taste of lithium and circuit boards – breakfast for the third time this week. Three stories below, civilians scrambled for cover beneath the awning of a bombed-out café, pointing upward as smoldering pieces of Russian technology rained down on Kyiv's emptying streets.

Sunlight ricocheted off a thousand broken windows, turning the city's skeleton into a glittering labyrinth. Where office workers once typed at computers, pigeons now nested in abandoned cubicles. Viktor banked past the thirteenth floor of what used to be an insurance company, his wingtip brushing against a curtain fluttering through a shattered pane.

A vibration in the air. Viktor cocked his head, focusing. The sound wavered between A-flat and G – enemy drone, not one of theirs. Ukrainian drones purred at a higher pitch, a detail he'd internalized after countless training sessions with pieces of bloody rabbit as rewards. There – a glint of metal by the twisted spire of the international center, trying to hide in the building's shadow.

The wind rushed past as Viktor tucked into a dive.

One hundred meters.

Seventy.

Forty.

The drone jerked left, its algorithms detecting the threat too late. Viktor's talons, honed by generations of salmon fishing in American rivers, punched through plastic and metal as easily as scales. Wires sparked and snapped. The drone's rotors screamed, then died.

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Back at the converted parking garage they called base, Viktor landed on his perch, dropping the mangled drone at Oleksandra's feet. She crouched, turning over the wreckage with a gloved hand. Her tablet showed a fresh impact marker on the map – Viktor’s fifth red dot this week.

Movement caught her eye. At the far end of the garage, handlers fitted the next bird, Hawk-eye, with a new tracking bracelet. The peregrine falcon preened, showing off the sleek British-made camera harnessed to his back. A small crowd had gathered to watch, their whispers echoing off concrete walls: "Fastest kill time yet... Ten seconds from launch to intercept..."

Viktor's talons gripped the perch tighter. The rabbit meat Oleksandra offered lay untouched.

Another explosion rattled the windows. Three kilometers east, judging by the sound. Viktor's wings twitched, muscle memory ready to launch. His gaze fixed on a point between the buildings where black smoke began to curl skyward.

Oleksandra's radio crackled. Static, then: "Single contact, bearing zero-three-zero."

Through the garage's open wall, a high-pitched whine cut through the city's background rumble. Viktor's head snapped toward the sound – two distinct tones, not one. His body tensed, recognizing the harmonics of twin attack drones.

Across the deck, Hawk-eye's handlers rushed to prepare for launch, checking cameras and calibrating tracking software.

They hadn't heard the second drone yet.

Oleksandra's fingers hovered over her tablet, awaiting launch authorization. But Viktor had already left his perch, wings spread wide against the morning sun. Behind him, Hawk-eye's handlers shouted in surprise as the falcon launched too, both birds riding the same thermal in an unplanned tandem ascent.

The American eagle and the British falcon, banking together toward the sound of twin engines.

In the moment before he tucked into his attack dive, Viktor caught his reflection in a skyscraper's mirrored surface – no longer the pristine white head and brown wings of his airshow days, but something weathered, scarred, and magnificent. Like Kyiv itself, he had been transformed by war into something harder, fiercer, and unquestionably free.

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