robot girl

The rain slicked the rusted mountains of the Iron Graveyard, turning the oil-stained earth into a dark slurry. Deep within a ravine of discarded turbines and shattered glass, a flicker of neon blue pulsed—faint, like a dying heartbeat. Half-buried under a collapsed crane, she lay motionless: a creature of porcelain plating and exposed copper nerves. She didn't look like the heavy-duty haulers or the chrome-plated drones of the upper city. She looked like a secret. As the scavenger’s torchlight washed over her face, her ocular sensors shuttered open for the first time in a century, whirring with the sound of grinding gears and forgotten memories.