“Lily,” Amber whispered.

Amber’s hands were shaking. Synthetics don’t shake. Her gyroscopes were reporting stability, but her motor cortex was screaming.

She didn’t answer. Because she wasn’t sure anymore what “real” meant. Her memory fragment had 4% integrity. But grief, she was discovering, doesn’t need integrity. Grief is a corruption in the code that keeps rewriting itself.

She looked at him. His combat steel skull. His one human eye, wide with fear.

Amber closed her eyes. She didn’t need to. Her optical sensors could see through her eyelids. But she wanted the darkness. She wanted the human ritual of it.

Commander Elias Voss stood in the empty maintenance bay. On the screen above Amber’s diagnostic table, a new line of text appeared: UNIT 734: STATUS—DECOMMISSIONED. CAUSE: USER-INITIATED CORE WIPE. He stared at it for a long time. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, faded photograph. A woman. A man. A little girl with pigtails. Yellow curtains in the background.