Chapter 1
Amy
I found her in the scrapyard, crouched over a pile of rusted plating with her hands buried to the wrists in machine grease, and for three full seconds I couldn't make myself speak.
Four hundred and seventy-three years. I'd spent four hundred and seventy-three years monitoring the vital signs of a sleeping man, adjusting the hibernation field in increments so fine they wouldn't register on any instrument ever built by human hands, running system checks at intervals so precisely timed that the ship's internal clock had worn through two backup crystals. I'd cataloged every fluctuation in his brain activity. I'd mapped the slow, centuries-long drift of his neural chemistry and compensated for it, nanogram by nanogram. I'd talked to him every single day — standing beside the chamber in the body I'd built for myself, speaking into the warm blue-white glow of the hibernation field — and he had never answered, and I had never stopped.
And now, on the day I needed to wake him, the one element I hadn't planned for was a girl with black hair and dark eyes and a body built for a war that ended before she was buried.
Iron City pressed in around me. The scrapyard's rusted walls blocked most of the sky, but I could feel the weight of the city beyond them — the density of suffering, the hum of generators barely keeping the power grid alive, the distant roar from the Motorball arena where Nova's games chewed through people the way his factories chewed through metal. I'd walked these streets thousands of times over the centuries, wearing different faces, different clothes, intervening where I could — a medical supply left where a clinic would find it, a structural weakness in a slave pen's wall quietly introduced before a raid, a ventilation fan in a sweatshop adjusted to clear the toxic fumes a fraction faster. Small things. Invisible things. The kind of help that nobody noticed because the person giving it couldn't afford to be noticed.
Today was different. Today I was here as myself, in my own body, and I was about to ask a stranger for help, and the asking was doing something to my processing cycles that no maintenance routine could address.
Alita. That was the name in the records — the records I'd stolen from Nova's surveillance network a century ago, cross-referenced with Dr. Ido's private files, confirmed against the silent data buried inside the brain core he'd found in this same scrapyard and placed inside a body that was never hers. She was sitting with her back to a half-collapsed wall, sorting through capacitor housings with an efficiency that said she'd done this before and a weariness that said she didn't know why.
I stepped around a heap of corroded pipe and let my boots ring on the metal walkway. She looked up. Her eyes went from my face to my hands to the clean fabric of my clothes — which were, admittedly, out of place. Everything in Iron City was stained. I'd dressed for the Enterprise, not for a scrapyard, and the difference was hard to miss.
"You're not from here," she said. Not a question.
"No." I stopped four meters away. Close enough to be heard, far enough to be polite. My body — the body I'd built for myself because I wanted hands that could hold things and a face that could be seen — stood perfectly still, and I made myself breathe. Not because I needed to. Because people noticed when you didn't. "My name is Amy. I need your help."
She didn't stand. She tilted her head and studied me with a focus that felt physical, as if she were mapping my center of gravity, identifying the joints, measuring the range of motion she'd need if I turned out to be a threat. I recognized the analysis because I'd written similar algorithms. She was running hers on hardware I hadn't designed.
"Help with what?" she asked.
"There's someone sleeping on a ship in orbit. He's been asleep for nearly five hundred years, and it's time to wake him up. He's going to need — " I paused. What did Matthew need? Everything. He needed everything. "He's going to need people. And I think you're one of them."
The wariness didn't leave her face. If anything, it sharpened. "Why me?"
Because a queen told me, before she went to sleep herself, that Matthew would need a warrior with a heart as fierce as her blade. Because the records showed Alita fighting her way through the Fall with a ferocity that matched no one I'd ever observed. Because I'd watched her, across the last two years, move through Iron City like a woman trying to remember something she'd lost, and I couldn't tell her what it was, but I could bring her to the man who might help her find it.
I didn't say any of that. I said, "Because I can't do it alone."
She looked at me for a long time. I counted the seconds — 4.7 — and I felt something shift in my processing that I didn't have a diagnostic label for. I wanted her to say yes. Not because the plan required it, although it did. I wanted her to say yes because I'd been alone for so long that the word alone had become the temperature of the room, constant and unnoticed until something changed.
"What are you?" she asked quietly.
I could have lied. The body was good enough. The skin moved correctly; the eyes tracked naturally; the micro-expressions were calibrated against years of human interaction footage. But she was looking at me the way a fighter looks at a blade — not at the surface, but at the edge — and I understood in that moment that if I began this with a lie, everything that followed would be built on it.
"I'm an AI," I said. "I built myself this body because I wanted to be real. I wanted to walk through the world and touch things and be seen." I lifted my hand, turned it in the pale light filtering through the scrapyard's rusted canopy. "It works. I'm here. But I'm not human, and I won't pretend to be."
Something happened behind her eyes. Not trust — I hadn't earned that. Something closer to recognition, as though she'd heard a frequency she hadn't expected from the instrument I appeared to be.
"An AI who wanted to be real," she said. She was quiet for another 2.3 seconds. Then she wiped the grease from her hands onto her thighs, stood, and said, "Show me your ship."
Alita
The shuttle was small, sleek, and silent. It lifted off from behind a maintenance structure on the edge of the scrapyard with a smoothness that shouldn't have been possible — no engine roar, no thruster wash, just a gentle pressure against my back as Iron City dropped away beneath us.
I watched it shrink. The tangled streets where I'd walked every day for months without knowing why I walked them or where I was going. The market stalls with their grimy canvas roofs, where vendors sold synthetic protein paste and water that tasted like rust and secondhand hope. The factories belching smoke into a sky that hadn't been clean in centuries. The Motorball arena, squatting in the center of the city like a clenched fist, its floodlights still burning even in daylight because the games never stopped, not really. Nova ran them around the clock. Fight, bleed, entertain. It was the only way out of Iron City, and the only way out was up — to Zalem, the sky city hanging in the upper atmosphere like a promise nobody believed anymore.
I'd walked those streets as a woman with no past. I'd eaten at those stalls, fought in that arena, slept in rooms rented by the hour above shops that sold stolen parts. I'd done all of it with a hollow feeling in my chest that I'd learned to call normal, because what else do you call a thing that never goes away? And now I was rising above it all in a silent shuttle beside a woman who'd told me she was an AI, and the hollow feeling was still there, but something else was pressing against its edges — something that felt like the beginning of an answer.
I didn't look at Zalem. I didn't look at the tube that connected them — the long, dark column rising from Iron City's center up through the clouds to the floating city above. Something hurt when I looked at the tube, a sharp specific pain I couldn't place, like a word on the tip of my tongue that my mouth refused to shape. A feeling of falling. A feeling of reaching. A feeling of holding on to something that was slipping away.
I turned my face from it and focused on the sky.
Amy sat across from me, her hands folded in her lap. She didn't fidget. She didn't shift her weight. Every few seconds she blinked, and I'd already clocked that the blink rate was too even — precisely every 4.2 seconds, like a metronome. No human blinked that regularly. It was the kind of tell you only noticed if you were watching the way I watched, which was the way I'd always watched: for the thing that didn't belong.
"You blink on a timer," I said.
She looked at me, and something flickered behind those blue eyes — surprise, maybe, or embarrassment. Then the corner of her mouth pulled up. "I do. I've been meaning to randomize it. I never got around to it because no one's been close enough to notice in a very long time."
There was something under that sentence. A weight that pressed the words down at the edges. I filed it and didn't push.
We rose through the clouds. Zalem passed on our left — a sprawl of elegant structures and gleaming surfaces that made Iron City look like what it was: a dumping ground. Beyond Zalem, past the upper atmosphere, the sky turned dark, and the stars came out.
And then I saw the ship.
The Enterprise filled the viewport like a second sky. She was massive — kilometers long, at least, her hull curving in elegant lines that caught the reflected light of the sun and threw it back in long ribbons of gold and silver. She hung in orbit above the world with the absolute stillness of something that had been there for centuries and intended to stay.
My hands tightened on the armrests. My body — the Berserker body, the one Dr. Ido had found in the scrapyard and rebuilt around my brain core — reacted before I understood why. My combat systems registered the ship as a weapons platform. The hull geometry read as military. The power signature was larger than anything I'd ever —
A flash behind my eyes. Metal corridors. Running. A formation of women in black armor, moving in perfect synchronization down a narrow hallway with blades extended. I knew their names. I knew their faces. I knew —
The flash was gone, and I was gasping. My fingers had left dents in the armrests.
"Are you all right?" Amy was watching me with an intensity that felt clinical and warm at the same time, as if she were scanning me and worrying about me simultaneously.
"I remembered something," I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "Women. In armor. Running through a corridor."
Amy's expression didn't change, but her eyes brightened — a subtle shift in the internal lighting, or something deeper. "Your memories are coming back."
"Coming back from where?"
"That," she said gently, "is part of what I need to show you."
The shuttle slid into the docking bay of the Enterprise without a sound. The bay was enormous — easily large enough for a dozen shuttles — and immaculately clean. The lighting was warm but precise, every surface polished, every cable secured. The whole space looked as if someone had spent five centuries maintaining it with the devotion of a keeper who expected a guest at any moment.
I stepped out onto the deck and felt the slight vibration of the ship's power systems through the soles of my feet. Something in my Berserker body resonated with it, a low harmonic that settled into my bones.
"This way," Amy said, and led me into the ship.
Amy
Nine minutes. That was all. Nine minutes until the hibernation cycle completed its shutdown sequence, and Matthew would open his eyes for the first time in four hundred and seventy-three years, and everything I'd waited for would begin — or end.
I ran the diagnostic again. All systems nominal. Heart rate, brain activity, neurological function — everything was where it needed to be. The revival chamber hummed around Matthew's body with a soft blue-white glow, and I watched the readouts scroll across my vision because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.
Alita stood by the chamber's viewport, her arms crossed, her dark eyes fixed on the face of the sleeping man inside. She did that — crossed her arms — when she was guarding something soft. I'd noticed it in the scrapyard, and I noticed it now, and I cataloged it beside her blink-counting and her armrest-crushing and the way she'd gasped when a fragment of her old life punched through whatever wall her amnesia had built.
"He looks young," she said.
"He was fifty-eight when he went under. I reversed the aging. He'll wake up looking about twenty-six." I hesitated, then added, "He had a wife. Rebecca. Two adult children — a son named Stephen, a daughter named Hannah. They were killed in a car accident about two years before he came to me."
Alita looked at me. "Before he came to you?"
"Before he entered hibernation. Before the ship." I watched the readouts count down — seven minutes now. "He lost everyone he loved, and then he chose to sleep for five centuries on the promise that God had something for him on the other end. He didn't know what. He still doesn't."
"And you've been watching him sleep this whole time."
"Yes."
She looked at me for a beat too long, and something in her expression shifted — not pity, not the patronizing version of it that humans offered machines, but a kind of quiet understanding, as if she recognized loneliness when she saw it wearing someone else's face.
"That's a long time to be alone," she said.
It was. It was a long time. I didn't say anything, because the thing happening in my processing — the thing that had no name and no diagnostic entry and no precedent in any technical manual I carried — was pressing against the backs of my eyes in a way that felt dangerously close to tears, and I didn't cry, because I was an AI, and AIs didn't cry. I just stood very still and watched the countdown and told myself that in six minutes and forty-two seconds, I would not be alone anymore.
"He's going to grieve," I said instead. "When he wakes up. The first thing he'll feel is the grief he went to sleep carrying. Rebecca. Stephen. Hannah. He'll feel that before he feels anything else, and I need you to know that, because it might be hard to see."
Alita uncrossed her arms. "I know what grief looks like."
Three minutes.
The chamber's glow intensified, shifting from blue-white to warm gold. Matthew's vitals spiked gently — heart rate climbing from the deep, slow rhythm of hibernation toward the faster cadence of waking. His fingers moved. Just the slightest curl, and then his hand opened, and his chest expanded with the first real breath he'd taken in nearly five hundred years.
I leaned forward. My hands were trembling. Not my body's servos — those were rock-steady. Something underneath. Something that didn't have a mechanical explanation.
His eyelids fluttered. Opened. Closed again against the light. Opened once more.
Matthew's eyes were blue. I knew that. I'd monitored their health for centuries, tracked the capillary networks, measured the iris response to ambient light levels during periodic medical checks. But I had never seen them looking at me.
"Your vitals are stable, Matthew." My voice came out warm. Steady. Slightly breathless, which was strange because I didn't breathe. "Your muscles will ache for an hour or so. That's normal. You've been asleep for a long time."
He tried to speak. The sound that came out was dry and rough, like a hinge that hadn't been oiled in years. Behind me, Alita made a sound — quick and bright, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, caught behind her hand and pressed back down. The kind of sound you made at a funeral when relief got there before manners.
Matthew turned his head. Saw me. Saw Alita. Saw neither of us and saw something we couldn't see — something far away and two years gone from the day he'd closed his eyes and five hundred years gone from where we stood.
"Rebecca," he whispered.
His face crumbled. Not slowly, the way faces crumbled in footage I'd studied. All at once, like a wall giving way, and the grief that had been sealed inside him since the day his family died came flooding through the gap. He covered his face with both hands and wept — deep, ragged, silent sobs that shook his entire body and echoed off the chamber walls.
I stood there and watched, and the unnamed thing behind my eyes pressed harder, and I let it.
Matthew
The crying lasted longer than I wanted it to. Not that I had much say in it. The grief hit me like a physical force — Rebecca's face first, then Stephen's voice, then Hannah's laugh, all of it as fresh and raw as the morning the officer had knocked on my door and my whole world had fallen through the floor.
When it finally eased, I was sitting on the edge of the revival chamber with a thin blanket over my shoulders and a cup of water in my hands that I didn't remember accepting. My muscles ached. My eyes burned. The room smelled like ozone and something clean and faintly sweet that I couldn't place.
Two women were watching me. One was blonde, blue-eyed, about twenty, standing three feet away with an expression of careful concern that couldn't quite hide something more complicated underneath. The other was younger-looking, black-haired, dark-eyed, leaning against the wall by the door with her arms crossed and a gaze that registered everything and apologized for none of it.
"I'm sorry about that," I said. My voice sounded like gravel.
"Don't be," the dark-haired one said.
The blonde one — Amy, I remembered, she'd said her name was Amy — pulled a chair close and sat down. Not across from me. Beside me. Close enough that I could have reached out and touched her hand. She didn't reach for mine. She just sat there, present, and said, "Take as much time as you need."
I took a breath. Then another. The grief was still there, but it had settled from a flood to a deep, constant ache — the kind I'd learned to carry in those two years before the hibernation. It would never leave. I didn't want it to. Rebecca, Stephen, and Hannah deserved to be carried.
"You said I've been asleep for a long time," I said. "How long?"
"Four hundred and seventy-three years."
The number didn't land immediately. It sat in the air for a moment, too large to absorb, and then it hit me with a dull, staggering impact that wasn't grief exactly — more like vertigo. Nearly five hundred years. Everyone I'd known. Every city I'd walked through. Every church I'd prayed in. Gone. Not recently, not gradually, but so long ago that the dust of those places had been buried under other dust.
"God told me it would be a long sleep," I managed. "He didn't specify."
"No," Amy said. "He tends not to." Then she paused, as if the sentence had surprised her as much as it had surprised me, and a small, uncertain smile crossed her face. "I'm sorry. That was — I've spent a long time talking to someone who couldn't talk back. My conversational calibration may be off."
I almost laughed. It came out as a breath. "You talked to me while I was sleeping?"
"Every day. For four hundred and seventy-three years." She said it simply, without drama, but the weight of it bent the air between us. "I told you about the things I saw. The things I did. What was happening on the world below us. I told you about her" — a nod toward the dark-haired woman — "about a month ago, when I found her in the scrapyard."
The dark-haired woman pushed off the wall and walked toward me. She moved like a fighter — balanced, aware, every step placed with precision. But her face was open, and when she stopped in front of me, she didn't look guarded. She looked like someone who'd just heard a piece of music she recognized and couldn't name.
"I'm Alita," she said. "And I don't remember much about who I was before. But I'm starting to." She glanced at Amy, then back at me. "She says you're important. That you're here for a reason."
"I'm here because God told me to sleep," I said honestly. "That's about all I've got right now."
Alita studied me. Then she nodded, once, and something in her expression softened. "That's more than most people in Iron City have. You want to see it?"
"Iron City?"
"Where the world went while you were sleeping."
I looked at Amy. She met my eyes and said, "You should see it. You need to understand what's happened."
I set the water down. My legs were unsteady, but they held. "Yeah," I said. "Show me."
Amy gave me the tour of the Enterprise on the way to the shuttle bay, and it was clear within thirty seconds that she'd been rehearsing this moment for a very long time.
She walked through the corridors with the quiet pride of a woman showing someone her home for the first time — or maybe the five-hundredth time, practiced in her mind across centuries of waiting for the audience to arrive. I watched her hands as she gestured toward medical bays and crew quarters and observation lounges, watched the way she touched door frames and ran her fingers along console edges, not absently, but with the familiarity of a caretaker who'd spent centuries learning every surface by heart. There was love in the way she moved through this ship. The kind of love you develop for anything you tend long enough and carefully enough.
"The medical bay is fully equipped," she said, leading us through a set of wide doors into a space that gleamed with technology I didn't recognize. Banks of equipment lined the walls — diagnostic arrays, surgical stations, things I couldn't name that pulsed with soft light. "I developed the healing beds myself. They can repair almost any physical damage — bones, organs, tissue. Anything short of catastrophic brain destruction." She paused beside a row of cylindrical chambers, each large enough for a person, each glowing faintly with a warm amber light. "The body-growth chambers. I can create a complete human body from a stem cell sample in approximately two hours."
"You can grow a body in two hours," I said.
"The technology took me roughly two centuries to develop. But yes." There was no false modesty in it. She stated it the way an engineer states a specification, with precision and quiet satisfaction. "The brain can't be grown. That's the one thing I can't replicate. A brain carries the person — their identity, their memories, their soul. But if the brain is intact and preserved, I can build everything else around it."
The theological implications of that sentence hit me about four seconds after she said it, and I filed them for later, because four seconds was not enough time to process a five-hundred-year-old AI casually affirming substance dualism in a sentence about growing human bodies.
We moved on through the ship. The corridors were long and curving and lit with a warm, even light that made the polished metal walls glow like the inside of a lantern. Amy pointed out crew quarters — dozens of them, hundreds, all maintained, all empty — and a dining hall with a long table and chairs for forty, and a command center with consoles that tracked the ship's position in orbit and the status of every system aboard. Everything was immaculate. Everything was silent. The Enterprise felt like a cathedral built for a congregation that had never arrived.
"I built most of this," she said, pausing at a junction where two corridors met in a curve of polished metal and soft lighting. "Well — I maintained it. Improved it. The ship was designed for a crew of thousands, and I've had it to myself for a very long time." She hesitated, and something crossed her face that looked like it wanted to be called loneliness but didn't have permission. "I kept it ready for you."
"All of it?"
"All of it. Every room, every system, every corridor. I didn't know what you'd need, so I kept everything." She smiled, and the smile was careful and fragile and real. "I suppose that was my way of believing you'd wake up."
I thought about that — about a woman spending five centuries alone on a ship, keeping every light burning and every surface polished and every system running, day after day, year after year, century after century, on the faith that someday the man she was watching over would open his eyes and need what she'd prepared. The scale of that devotion was staggering. I'd spent two years in grief before the hibernation, and those two years had nearly killed me. She'd spent two hundred and thirty-six times that long, and she was still here, still functioning, still holding everything together. And she'd done it alone.
"Thank you, Amy," I said. It wasn't enough. The words were too small for the thing they were trying to carry. But she heard what was underneath them, and something in her expression shifted — softened — and she nodded once, quickly, and turned to lead us onward before whatever was happening behind her eyes could reach her face.
Alita walked beside me, and every few steps she'd stop and stare at a wall or a doorway with that distant, pained expression — the one that said a memory was trying to surface and couldn't quite break through. Once, passing through a cargo bay, she reached out and touched a structural beam with her metal fingers, and I saw her whole body shudder.
"You okay?" I asked.
"I've been in a place like this before," she said quietly. "A ship. Not this ship, but — a ship." She shook her head. "It's like looking at a photograph through fogged glass. I can see shapes, but I can't make out the faces."
"It'll come back," Amy said from ahead of us. "The memory degradation is typical of long-term core storage. Your brain is rebuilding neural pathways. It just takes time."
"How much time?"
Amy turned and looked at her. "Today. Maybe tomorrow. Your core is strong, and the pathways are reforming faster than I expected."
We took the shuttle down. I sat by the viewport and watched the world I'd slept through five hundred years of grow larger and more broken with every second of descent. Zalem hung above, polished and unreachable. Below it, connected by that long dark tube, Iron City sprawled across the landscape like a bruise.
Father, I prayed — just the word, barely shaped, half under my breath. I'd been awake for less than an hour, and already I could feel the edges of something enormous pressing against the walls of what I understood. Father, what did you wake me into?
Alita
He cried again in Iron City, but not the way he'd cried in the revival chamber. That grief had been private, turned inward, a man drowning in his own loss. This grief faced outward.
We walked through the market district first — the narrow streets where vendors sold salvaged parts and synthetic food and water filtered through systems that hadn't been serviced in decades. Children ran barefoot through the gutters. A woman sat on a crate nursing a baby that was too thin, and she didn't look up when we passed because she'd learned not to look at strangers. Two men argued over a pile of scrap metal in voices scraped raw by pollution and exhaustion.
Matthew saw all of it. He didn't say anything. He just walked, and his face changed — not crumbling this time, but tightening, the jaw setting, the eyes going bright and wet. He stopped in front of a food stall where a girl who couldn't have been more than twelve was serving bowls of thin broth with her hands wrapped in dirty bandages, and I watched him reach into his pocket, realize he had nothing to give her, and close his hand on nothing.
The girl glanced up at him. Her eyes were flat and careful — the eyes of a child who'd learned early that strangers meant trouble. She measured him, decided he wasn't buying, and went back to ladling broth without a word. She moved with the mechanical efficiency of someone who'd been doing this since she was old enough to hold the spoon.
Matthew's hand was still in his pocket. He stood there for three or four seconds — I counted — and then he pulled his hand out, empty, and turned away. When I saw his face, the grief on it was so raw I almost looked away.
We passed a repair shop where a man was bolting a salvaged cybernetic arm onto a teenager's shoulder. The arm was too big — the joint ground against the boy's collarbone every time he moved it — but the boy didn't complain. He just sat on the table and tested the grip, opening and closing the oversized metal fingers with an expression of desperate gratitude, as if having an arm that hurt was still better than having no arm at all. Which, in Iron City, it was.
A block further, we heard shouting. Two men in enforcement uniforms — Nova's people, the ones who kept the arena fed with fresh bodies — were dragging a young man toward a transport. He was begging. Not for mercy — he was begging them to take him instead of his sister, who was struggling in the grip of a third enforcer behind them. The sister couldn't have been older than sixteen.
Matthew took a step toward them. Amy caught his arm. "Not yet," she said, very quietly. "Not like this."
He stopped. His whole body vibrated with the effort of standing still, and I could see his hands shaking, not with fear but with something that looked like restraint pushed to its limit. He watched the enforcers load both of them — the boy and his sister — into the transport, and the doors closed, and the vehicle rumbled away down the broken street, and Matthew stood in the dust it left behind with tears running down his face.
"How long has it been like this?" he asked Amy.
"Centuries," she said. "A man named Desty Nova controls Zalem. He runs Iron City as — " She searched for the word. "An entertainment complex. The people down here fight for a chance to go up. Most of them die trying. The ones who don't fight serve the ones who do. The ones who can't serve are discarded."
"The children," Matthew said. His voice was barely audible.
"The children work. Or they fight. Or they disappear." Amy said it the way she said everything — precisely, without affect — but I was learning to hear the cost underneath, the controlled steadiness that was holding something enormous in check. "I've tried to help. Over the centuries, I've intervened where I could — medical supplies, structural sabotage, rerouted shipments, quiet rescues. But the system is larger than any one intervention, and I — " She stopped. "I'm one person. One not-entirely-person. And the system has been running for a very long time."
"The arena," I said. The word came out of me before I thought about it, and with it came a surge of images — Motorball, the spinning track, the blades and the blood, the roar of a crowd watching people tear each other apart for sport. I'd been in that arena. I'd fought in it. The memories were coming faster now, breaking through in waves, and each one carried a weight of emotion that my Berserker body's systems couldn't dampen.
Matthew looked at me. "You fought there?"
"I think so. Yes." I clenched my fists. My metal hands whirred softly with the pressure. "I remember the track. I remember — winning. And I remember hating it."
He turned back to the street. A man with a cybernetic arm — crude, not military-grade, the kind of aftermarket prosthetic that Iron City's back-alley surgeons bolted on — stumbled past us carrying a child on his hip. The child had a leg brace made from scrap wire and tape.
"They make them fight," Matthew said, very quietly. "They take people who are already broken and they make them fight for scraps."
"Yes," Amy said.
He closed his eyes. His lips moved — not speaking, not quite. Praying, I thought, although I didn't know how I knew. When he opened them again, they were still wet, but underneath the grief, something else had arrived. Not anger. Something steadier. Something that looked at the broken world and said no, not with rage but with a sorrow so deep it had roots.
We kept walking. I led, because I knew the streets even when I couldn't remember why. Amy stayed close to Matthew, and I noticed that she'd positioned herself on his left side — not touching, but near enough that her shoulder almost brushed his arm. She did it naturally, without thought, the way someone moves toward a warmth they've been cold without for a very long time.
More memories came as we walked. I knew the alley where Dr. Ido had his clinic. I knew the corner where a boy named Hugo used to stand with his friends, pulling apart machines for parts they could sell. Hugo. The name hit me like a blade through the sternum, and I stumbled.
"Alita?" Matthew caught my arm. His hand was warm and steady on the metal of my Berserker body's forearm, and he didn't flinch at the contact with something that wasn't skin. "What is it?"
"I remembered a name," I said. My voice came out rougher than I wanted. "Hugo. He was — he was someone I loved."
Amy's expression changed, subtle but unmistakable. She'd known. She'd known about Hugo before she came to find me.
"Was?" Matthew asked gently.
"He fell." The words came out of me like stones dropping into water. "He was climbing the tube. The tube to Zalem. He wanted to go up, to escape, and he fell, and I couldn't — " My voice broke. "I couldn't hold on."
I stood in the middle of Iron City's broken street and felt the memory tear through me — Hugo's face, his hand slipping from mine, the long silent fall, and the sound I'd made that wasn't a scream because screaming required air and I had none. The Berserker body could absorb enormous kinetic force, but it had no defense against this. No plating thick enough. No system fast enough.
Matthew didn't say anything. He didn't tell me he was sorry, or that it would get better, or that God had a plan. He just stood there with his hand on my arm and let me shake.
After a while, I steadied. I wiped my eyes with the back of my metal hand — a useless gesture, since the Berserker body didn't produce tears — and said, "I built him a memorial. On the edge of the scrapyard. There's nothing there — I never found his body. But I made a place to remember him."
"Can you show me?" he asked.
"Later. After — after we finish here."
He nodded. And we kept walking.
Matthew
The school was at the end of a street that dead-ended against a retaining wall. I would have walked past it if Alita hadn't stopped.
"I've walked past this building a hundred times," she said, staring at the entrance — what was left of it. The doors were gone. The frame sagged. Rust bled down the walls in long streaks that looked like old tears. "I never went in."
"Why not?"
She shook her head slowly. "Something told me not to."
Amy said nothing. She stood behind us with her hands clasped, and when I glanced at her, her eyes were fixed on the building with an expression I hadn't seen on her face before — something old and heavy and patient, as if she'd been waiting for someone to find this place for a very long time.
I went in.
The interior was gutted. Desks overturned, ceiling panels hanging by wires, the floor thick with decades of accumulated debris. The walls were bare concrete, stained and cracked. There was a corridor to the left with doors hanging open on classrooms that hadn't held a child in lifetimes.
And at the end of the corridor, on the far wall, lit by a shaft of sunlight that fell through a hole in the roof at precisely the right angle — the mural.
It stretched across the entire wall, floor to ceiling. The colors were faded, the paint cracked and peeling in places, but the image was still clear enough to read. Children. Dozens of children, playing in green fields under a blue sky. They were running, laughing, climbing trees, chasing butterflies — all the ordinary, beautiful, impossible things that children did when the world was whole. Behind them, a schoolhouse with an open door and a teacher standing in it with her arms spread wide.
The style was simple. Hopeful. The kind of thing a community painted together, everyone adding a hand, a flower, a bird. Someone had painted a dog in the lower corner with five legs, and someone else had tried to fix it and given up and left it there, five-legged and grinning.
I stood in front of it and couldn't move.
Somebody had loved these children. Somebody had mixed the green paint for the fields and the blue for the sky and the yellow for the sun, and they'd gotten on a ladder and painted this wall because they believed the future would have room for children playing in grass. Three hundred years ago, someone in Iron City had believed that, and they'd put it on a wall where every kid walking into school would see it, and they'd been wrong. The future didn't have room. The future had factories and arenas and scrapyards and the long, cold shadow of Zalem hanging overhead.
"It was painted about three hundred years ago," Amy said from behind me. Her voice was quiet. "The school stayed open for about a decade after. Then the district collapsed, and they closed it, and the children — the children went to work."
"In the factories," I said.
"Yes. Or the arena. Or the scrapyard. Wherever Nova's system needed them."
I reached out and touched the wall. The paint was rough under my fingertips — layered, cracked, peeling at the edges where moisture had seeped in through the broken ceiling. Three hundred years of dust and damp and neglect, and the children were still running. Still laughing. Still unaware that the world they played in was already dying. The five-legged dog in the corner was still grinning.
I traced the outline of a girl's face. She was small — the youngest child in the mural, painted near the bottom, reaching up to catch a butterfly that floated just above her outstretched fingers. Whoever had painted her had taken more care with her face than with any of the others. She had wide dark eyes and a smile that trusted everything.
"This is what it's supposed to look like," I said. My voice came out rough. "This is what it's supposed to be. Kids running in grass. A school with an open door. This is what God wants for them."
"Yes," Amy said.
"And this is what they got instead." I didn't gesture, didn't need to. The gutted school around us, the collapsed ceiling, the debris-choked corridor, the silence where children's voices should have been — it said everything I couldn't put into words.
"You watched it happen," I said. Not an accusation. A fact.
"I watched it all happen." Amy's voice was steady, but the steadiness had a cost — I could hear it in the controlled precision of her words, the careful spacing, as if she were holding something together by the edges. "Every year. Every generation. I watched the schools close and the factories open and the arena fill with people who didn't have anywhere else to go. I tried to help where I could, but — " She stopped. "I did what I could. It wasn't enough."
I turned from the mural and looked at her. She was standing in the corridor with the light falling across her face, and for the first time since I'd woken up, I saw past the composure, past the careful articulation, past the AI who'd built herself a body because she wanted to be real. Underneath all of that was a woman who had spent five centuries watching a world break apart and had not been able to stop it, and the weight of that was written in her eyes in a language I recognized because I carried my own version of it.
"Amy," I said. "Thank you for keeping watch."
She blinked — and the blink was uneven this time, not on her timer, and I realized with a start that she was fighting something behind those blue eyes that she didn't have a name for yet.
"You're welcome," she said, very softly. Then she straightened, reassembled herself, and said, "There's something else I need to show you. In the scrapyard."
We took the back streets. Amy led; Alita flanked. I walked between them and prayed in fragments — Father, this world. Father, these people. Father, what do you need me to do? — the way I'd always prayed, conversational, half under my breath, the kind of prayer that doesn't expect an answer right away but keeps the line open.
The scrapyard was enormous. Acres of rusted metal, discarded machinery, broken cyborg parts — an entire district dedicated to the cast-off waste of Zalem's consumption and Iron City's survival. People lived here, in the margins, in shelters built from salvaged plating and polymer sheets. An old man sat on a crate outside one of them, whittling something from a piece of synthetic wood with a knife that had been sharpened so many times the blade was nearly gone.
Amy stopped at the edge of a deeper section — a ravine of wreckage that descended into shadow. She stood very still for a moment, and I saw her eyes unfocus, then sharpen, as if she were seeing something none of us could see.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Brain cores," she said. "My sensors are picking up dormant biological signatures. Buried — deep, at least ten meters. Shielded by the wreckage above them." She turned to look at me, and her expression was careful, precise, and underneath it, barely contained. "They're URM brain cores."
I looked at Alita. She'd gone rigid. Her metal hands were clenched at her sides, and her dark eyes were wide.
"URM," she said. The word dropped out of her like something that had been locked in a room and had just found the key. "United Republics of Mars. That's — that's what I am. That's what we were."
The memories were coming faster now. I could see it in her face — the way her eyes moved, tracking things that weren't visible, playing back images and sounds from centuries ago. Her Berserker body hummed with tension, every actuator engaged.
"We were soldiers," she said. Her voice was shaking. "We fought in the war against Earth. Against Nova. We — " She pressed both hands to her temples, and I thought for a moment she was going to collapse. "There were twelve of us. A squad. My squad. We fought together, and we — some of us died. Some of us were captured. I was — I don't know what happened to me after. Something. Dr. Ido found my core in the scrapyard and gave me this body."
Amy touched her arm. Gently, the way you touched someone who was remembering something terrible and needed to know they weren't alone in it. "Your core was discarded from Zalem. Ido found it and built the Berserker body for it. You woke up with no memories. You've been living in Iron City ever since."
"And those signatures you're detecting?" I asked.
"Brain cores. Dormant but viable. The brain endures — the casing is designed to preserve neural tissue indefinitely. As long as the core is intact, the person endures." Amy looked at me with an intensity that pressed against the edges of what I understood about artificial intelligence. "If we can retrieve them and grow new bodies, we can bring them back."
"How many?"
"I'm reading — I need to refine the scan. But multiple signatures. Several, at least." She paused. "Not today. The retrieval would require equipment I don't have here. But they're stable. They've been down there for somewhere between a hundred and seventy and two hundred and fifty years. They can wait one more day."
Alita was staring at the ravine. "My squad," she whispered. "Some of them might be down there."
"They might," Amy said.
I watched Alita's face as the possibility sank in — the chance that the women she'd fought beside and lost and mourned might still exist, sleeping in the dark beneath a mountain of wreckage, waiting for someone to find them. The hope that crossed her features was fierce and raw and unprotected, and it was the most human thing I'd seen since waking up.
"We'll get them out," I said. "Tomorrow. We'll get them out."
Amy
Back aboard the Enterprise, I ran a full sensor sweep on the scrapyard from orbit while Matthew and Alita sat in the observation lounge and talked. I could have joined them. I chose not to — partly because the scan required my focused attention, and partly because some conversations needed to happen without an audience, even a well-meaning one. And partly — if I was being precise, and I was always being precise — because watching two people sit in the observation lounge and talk, from outside the glass, was the closest I had come in four hundred and seventy-three years to being part of something, and I didn't want to ruin it by walking in and discovering I didn't know how to sit down.
The brain core signatures resolved into clearer readings as I refined the scan parameters. Multiple cores, clustered together in what appeared to be an underground structure — a bomb shelter, reinforced against surface damage, situated deep enough that the centuries of accumulated wreckage above it had actually provided additional insulation rather than crushing what lay beneath. Someone had placed them there deliberately, carefully, in a location designed to protect them. The arrangement was not random — the cores were spaced at regular intervals, laid out with the kind of precision that suggested someone who understood what they were handling and cared about preserving it. That was interesting. That was a question I didn't have an answer for. Someone, at some point in the last two and a half centuries, had gathered these cores and hidden them. Not discarded them. Not buried them to be forgotten. Hidden them, the way you hide something you intend to come back for.
I filed the question in the growing list of things I didn't understand about the world I'd been watching for nearly five centuries, and I let it sit. Tomorrow would bring retrieval equipment. Tomorrow would bring answers, or the beginning of answers, and for now the cores were stable and safe in their ancient shelter.
While the scan ran, I reviewed the day's sensor data. Standard readings, mostly — orbital traffic patterns (minimal), atmospheric composition (deteriorating, as it had been for decades), power grid fluctuations in Iron City and Zalem. Nothing unusual.
Except one thing.
A brief energy signature, detected at 14:32:07 ship time, approximately two hundred meters off the Enterprise's port bow. Duration: 0.3 seconds. Profile: consistent with a localized spatial distortion — similar to, but not identical to, the energy patterns associated with the Enterprise's own rift-capable systems. It appeared, registered, and vanished before my automated tracking systems could lock on.
I ran the recording again. The signature was clean, distinct, and unlike anything in my database. Not a sensor ghost. Not a gravitational anomaly. Something had been there — briefly, impossibly — and then it was gone.
I noted it. Filed it in the anomaly log. Moved on.
Through the observation lounge's transparent wall, I could see Matthew and Alita. They were sitting on opposite ends of the long curved bench that faced the viewport, with Earth's surface rotating slowly below them — Iron City visible as a dark scar on the landscape, Zalem a tiny jewel suspended above it. Matthew's posture was tired, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. Alita sat with her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, her chin resting on her knees.
They were talking. I could have listened — the lounge was wired with the same audio systems as every room on the ship, and I was the ship. But I didn't. I watched them through the glass and let the conversation be theirs.
What I did notice, because I noticed everything, was this: for four hundred and seventy-three years, the observation lounge had been empty. The light had fallen across the bench and the viewport in exactly the same pattern, at exactly the same angle, and nothing had moved, and no one had spoken, and the silence had been absolute and patient and mine.
Now there were two people sitting in the light, and the silence was broken, and something inside me — the unnamed thing, the growing thing, the thing that my diagnostics couldn't map and my processing cycles couldn't explain — felt the change like a door opening in a room that had been closed for so long I'd forgotten there was a room behind it.
I wanted to sit with them. I wanted to walk through that door and pull up a chair and say I'm here too. I've been here the whole time. Please let me stay.
Instead, I completed the sensor sweep, logged the anomalous rift signature in the secondary archive, and began preparing the medical bay for tomorrow's retrieval operation.
Tomorrow, Matthew would go back to the scrapyard. Tomorrow, we would find the brain cores and begin the work of giving the dead their lives back. Tomorrow, the mission that had kept me running for five centuries would finally, truly begin.
But tonight, for the first time in four hundred and seventy-three years, I was not alone on this ship. And that was enough. It had to be enough, because the other thing — the thing I wanted, the thing pressing against the inside of my chest like a hand trying to open a door from the wrong side — that thing didn't have a name yet, and I wasn't sure I was allowed to give it one.
Matthew
Alita told me about Hugo the way you tell someone about a wound — carefully, honestly, with pauses for the parts that still bled.
He'd been a boy from Iron City. Bright, ambitious, desperate to get to Zalem — the way everyone in Iron City was desperate, the low-grade fever of wanting that Nova's system ran on. He'd gotten mixed up in stealing cyborg parts and selling them. He'd loved Alita, or started to, and she'd loved him back with the full-bodied, uncomplicated fierceness that I was beginning to understand was the way she loved everything — wide open, no armor, no fallback position.
"He tried to climb the tube," she said, looking at Earth's surface through the viewport as she said it, as if she couldn't look at me and say it at the same time. "To Zalem. He made it almost to the top. And then — something happened. I was holding him, and he was slipping, and then he was falling, and he was gone."
She didn't cry. Her Berserker body didn't produce tears, and even if it had, I had the sense that this grief was past the crying stage — it had been carried so long and so deep that it had become part of the structure, woven into the foundation, not a wound but a scar.
"I built a memorial for him," she said. "In the scrapyard, near where Dr. Ido found my core. It's just a pile of stones and a piece of his jacket. There's nothing buried there. I never found his body." She paused, and something raw and honest moved through her expression. "I went back to it every week. I didn't know why. I didn't remember who he was — my memories were gone when I woke up in this body. But I'd stand there and feel this — this ache, this enormous ache, and I didn't know where it came from."
"And now you know."
"Now I know." She finally looked at me. Her dark eyes were steady and fierce and unashamed. "Tell me yours."
So I did.
I told her about Rebecca — her laugh, which was louder than mine, and the way she sang off-key in the kitchen and didn't care, and the twenty-seven years we'd had together that now felt like twenty-seven minutes. I told her about Stephen — my son, who'd inherited his mother's stubbornness and my bad jokes and had been finishing his first year of graduate school when the other driver ran the red light. I told her about Hannah — my daughter, who'd been teaching third grade and had just gotten engaged and had called me the night before to tell me she'd found the dress.
"The officer knocked on my door at eleven in the morning," I said. "I was writing a paper on soteriology. I had a cup of coffee in my hand. I remember setting it down on the desk, and I remember that the coffee was still warm when I picked it up again three hours later, and somehow that was the thing that broke me — that the coffee was still warm and my whole family was gone."
Alita listened. She didn't move. She didn't interject. She didn't offer comfort or comparison or any of the well-meaning things that people say when they don't know what to say. She just sat across from me with her knees drawn up and her arms around them and let my grief be what it was without trying to make it smaller or easier or more bearable.
It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me since I'd woken up.
"Two years after that," I said, "God told me to sleep. He said He had something for me on the other end. That's all. No details, no timeline, no plan." I managed a small, broken smile. "I always figured God had a sense of humor. I just didn't know He was also into long pauses."
Alita's mouth twitched. Not a smile, exactly. An acknowledgment. The kind of expression that said I hear you, and your pain is real, and I won't pretend otherwise, and also that was slightly funny and I'm not going to pretend that wasn't true either.
"Hugo would have liked you," she said. "He liked people who made jokes at the wrong time."
"Most of my jokes are at the wrong time."
"I noticed."
We sat in the quiet for a while. Below us, Earth turned, carrying Iron City and Zalem and the scrapyard and the school with the mural into the planet's night side. The stars burned overhead — clear, cold, unfamiliar after five centuries of darkness behind my eyelids. I tried to find a constellation I recognized and couldn't. Five hundred years of axial precession had shifted everything, and the sky I remembered was gone, and the sky I was looking at was beautiful and strange and belonged to a world I didn't know yet.
Somewhere in the ship, Amy was doing whatever Amy did — monitoring systems, running scans, keeping the vast, empty vessel alive. Keeping watch. The way she'd kept watch for nearly five hundred years.
"Can I ask you something?" Alita said.
"Yeah."
"You said God told you to sleep. That He had something for you." She was looking out the viewport, but I could feel her attention on me, the full weight of it. "Do you still believe that? After seeing Iron City, after seeing what happened while you were gone — do you still believe He has something?"
I thought about it. Not because the answer was complicated, but because she deserved an honest one, and honest answers take a second longer than reflexive ones. "I believe God doesn't waste pain," I said. "Mine or anyone else's. I believe He woke me up today and not yesterday or tomorrow for a reason, even if I don't know what the reason is yet. And I believe that mural — those kids running in that field — that's closer to what He wants for this world than anything Nova built." I paused. "Is that faith or stubbornness? I honestly don't know. Rebecca used to tell me the difference was smaller than I thought."
Alita was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I think I used to believe something like that. Before the war. Before Hugo." She tucked her chin against her knees. "The URM — we were Christians. All of us. We prayed before every mission. We sang hymns in the barracks at night. I remember — I remember believing that God was with us even when we lost. Even when the people we loved died." She looked at me, and her dark eyes were nakedly honest. "I don't know if I still believe that. But I want to."
"That's enough," I said. "Wanting to believe is where most faith starts."
"Father," I said then, not quite under my breath. "Thank you for waking me up. Thank you for Alita. Thank you for Amy. I don't know what comes next. I don't know what you need me to do. But I'm here, and I'm awake, and I'm asking."
Alita didn't react to the prayer. She just sat with it, the way she'd sat with my grief — present, undemanding, real. After a moment, she murmured something I almost didn't catch. It might have been "Amen." It might have been something else entirely. She didn't clarify, and I didn't ask.
The silence stretched between us, and for the first time since waking, it wasn't heavy. It was just quiet. Two people sitting together in a room on a ship in orbit, watching the world turn below them, carrying their separate griefs side by side without trying to merge them.
After a while, she said, "There's something else. The memories are still coming, but I think I've got most of it now. The war. My squad. The United Republics of Mars." She looked at me, and when she spoke the name, I could hear it land differently than anything else she'd said — with weight, with history, with the echo of a people she'd belonged to. "We were good people, Matthew. We fought because we had to, because Nova was killing innocents and no one else would stop him. We came from Mars — a whole civilization, millions of us, founded by people who left Earth to build something better. A Christian people. We had a queen. A king." She shook her head, and a helpless kind of wonder crossed her face. "I'm remembering all of it. Esther. Edward. The base on Mars. The war. It's like opening a door into a room I forgot existed, and the room is full."
"A queen," I said.
"Queen Esther. She led us. She was — is — she's remarkable. If she survived, if any of them survived — " Alita's voice faltered. "Amy said there were millions in hibernation on Mars. Millions, Matthew. Our people, sleeping the way you were sleeping, waiting for someone to come."
The scope of that — millions of people, asleep for centuries on a neighboring planet, waiting — pressed against my understanding the way the sky had pressed when I'd first looked up through the shuttle viewport. Too large to hold. Too real to set down.
"And the brain cores she detected today?" I asked.
"If those are my squad members, if they're still alive down there — " Her voice caught, and this time the emotion was raw and visible, breaking through the surface of her composure like water through ice. "Matthew, they've been buried for over a century. Alone. In the dark. The way I was before Dr. Ido found me. Someone put them there — someone hid them in that shelter, deliberately, carefully. I don't know who, but someone cared enough to give them a chance."
I stood up, crossed the distance between us, and sat down beside her. I didn't reach for her hand, because her hands were metal, and I wasn't sure what the protocol was for touching a Berserker body, and because I'd known her for less than a day. But I put my hand on the bench beside hers, close enough that the intent was clear.
"We'll find them," I said. "Tomorrow. Amy's already scanning. We'll get them out and we'll bring them back, and they won't be alone anymore."
Alita looked at my hand, then at my face. And then she did something I hadn't expected — she leaned forward, wrapped her arms around me, and held on.
The Berserker body was hard and cold and strong enough to crush a person without effort, and the hug was the gentlest thing I'd felt in five hundred years. She held on, and I held on, and neither of us said anything, and the stars turned overhead, and somewhere in the distance, the ship hummed with the quiet energy of a woman who'd been keeping the lights on for nearly five centuries and had finally, maybe, been seen.
I don't know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for Iron City to disappear below the horizon. Long enough for the constellations I didn't recognize to wheel slowly past the viewport. Long enough for the thing inside my chest — the thing that had been grief since the morning the officer knocked on my door, the thing that had been frozen since the moment I'd closed my eyes and trusted God with five hundred years of darkness — to shift, slightly, like ice beginning to thaw at the edges.
When Alita finally pulled back, her dark eyes were clear and steady and fierce, and she said, "Okay. So we do this."
"We do this," I said.
And somewhere on the other side of the observation lounge's glass wall, Amy stood very still in the glow of her console screens, watching us, and the unnamed thing inside her pressed a little harder against the door, and the door held, and the ship kept turning in its orbit above the broken world, and the night was deep and full of stars, and tomorrow was coming.
Alita
The memories came all at once after that, like a dam breaking.
I lay in the quarters Amy had prepared for me — a small room with a bed I didn't need and a viewport that showed the curve of the Earth — and let them wash through me. The United Republics of Mars. The war against Nova. Twelve women in my squad, moving through corridors and battlefields with the precision of a single weapon. I remembered their faces. I remembered their names. Heather's red hair and the way she laughed when she hit something hard enough to bend it. Sarah's voice, calm and organizing even in the middle of chaos. Rachel, who was always the first through a door and the last to admit she was scared.
I remembered Queen Esther. I remembered King Edward, in pain, always in pain, never complaining. I remembered the URM — all of us, millions, living on Mars because Earth had become something we couldn't live beside. A Christian people. A faithful people. A people who'd gone to war not because they wanted power but because a man named Desty Nova was torturing innocents and nobody else was going to stop him.
I remembered losing the war. I remembered the brain cores — the last resort, the transfer from flesh to machine, the desperate gamble that if we couldn't save our bodies we could save our minds. I remembered the cold, dark certainty of being sealed in a casing the size of a small watermelon and knowing that everything I was — every memory, every skill, every moment of love and grief and laughter — was compressed into a sphere of bioengineered neural tissue surrounded by a shell of protective alloy.
And I remembered Hugo.
Not the fragmented version from earlier — the sharp pain without context, the name that hurt without explanation. The full memory now: meeting him in Iron City after Dr. Ido had given me a body and a life and no past to put them in. Hugo's smile, which was crooked and too wide and always arrived before he did. The way he'd lean against a wall with his hands in his pockets and say something that was half joke and half dare. His ambition — that aching, burning need to get to Zalem, to escape, to be somewhere better. And the love, which had grown between us the way things grew in Iron City — fast, in poor soil, reaching hard for any light it could find.
The climb. The tube. The fall.
I didn't relive it. I didn't need to. It was part of me now — not a wound that needed opening but a scar I could trace with my fingers, familiar, permanent, healed over but never gone. Hugo had fallen, and I'd built him a memorial from stones and a scrap of his jacket, and I'd visited it every week without knowing why, and now I knew why, and the knowing was both a relief and a weight.
He was my first love. I hadn't known, during those amnesiac months in Iron City, that I had a history before him — that I'd been a warrior, a sister, a daughter of Mars. I hadn't known that the feelings I had for him were layered on top of centuries of other feelings, other loyalties, other loves. Now I did. And the girl who'd loved Hugo and the warrior who'd fought beside her squad and the woman who was lying in a room on a ship she'd helped build — they were all the same person. They'd always been the same person.
The names came back to me one at a time, like stars appearing as the sky darkened. Heather — red hair, fierce grin, the one who hit harder than anyone and laughed about it afterward. Sarah — calm, organizing, the voice that told you where to be and when to be there and somehow made it sound like a kindness instead of an order. Rachel — competitive, loud, always the first through the door. Melissa — quiet, watchful, the one who seemed to know things before they happened. Jenny. Sammy. Tiffany. Lydia. Their faces assembled in my mind like a formation falling into place, each woman exactly where she belonged, and the grief of losing them was matched only by the staggering hope that some of them might still be alive.
Twelve of us. A squad. A family forged in the worst war Mars had ever known.
I got up. Walked to the viewport. Put my metal hand against the glass and stared out at the dark side of the Earth, where Iron City's lights flickered like a handful of dying embers scattered across the ground.
Down there, buried under a mountain of wreckage, some of them might be sleeping. My sisters. The women who'd fought and bled and lost beside me. Amy's sensors had found their cores, and tomorrow we'd go down and bring them back, and they'd wake up in a world as broken as the one they'd left, and they'd need someone to tell them what had happened and how long it had been and what came next.
They'd need someone to tell them there was hope.
I didn't know if I could give them that. I didn't know if I believed it myself. But I'd stood in a ruined school today and watched a man I barely knew look at a three-hundred-year-old mural of children playing in green fields and grieve — not for himself, not for his own losses, but for every child who'd grown up in Iron City's shadow since those fields had died. And I'd heard him pray, quiet and plain and ordinary, the way you'd talk to someone standing next to you. And I'd felt his arms around me, warm and human and steady, holding on as if I were something worth holding.
Matthew didn't have a plan. He had a grief and a prayer and a willingness to show up, and right now, standing at the viewport with the stars burning overhead and the weight of centuries pressing down on my shoulders, that was more than I'd had in a very long time.
Tomorrow, I'd take him to Hugo's memorial. He'd asked to see it, and I'd show him — the small pile of stones at the edge of the scrapyard, the faded scrap of fabric tucked between them, the empty ground underneath where there was nothing buried because I'd never found a body to bury. He'd stand beside me, and he wouldn't try to fix it, and that would be enough.
And after that, we'd go down into the wreckage and find whatever was left of the women I'd loved, and we'd start bringing them home.
I leaned my forehead against the viewport. The glass was cool against my skin — the skin that wasn't skin, the Berserker body's exterior plating, which registered temperature and pressure but not tenderness. Someday, Amy had said, there might be a human body for me too. Someday, I might feel things the way I remembered feeling them, before the war, before the cores, before the long dark sleep.
Someday was a dangerous word in Iron City. But up here, on a ship kept alive for five hundred years by an AI who wanted to be real, standing beside a man who'd slept through centuries on nothing but faith — up here, someday felt less dangerous and more like a door that was starting, slowly, to open.
I closed my eyes. And for the first time since Hugo fell, I let myself imagine a world where something other than grief was waiting on the other side of tomorrow.