The sun hadn’t pierced the clouds in years.

What remained of it filtered through the amber-tinted dome Caelum had rigged over the upper windows—a fragile patchwork of reinforced glass and radiation filter gel. Outside, the air shimmered with invisible poison, thick and choking, but here in the hollowed-out husk of an old cathedral, they had carved out a kind of sanctuary.

The city beyond was skeletal. Towering buildings melted at the edges, hollowed like corpses gnawed by time. Ivy had turned gray. Metal rusted to dust. Bones lay where they fell, unburied, unnamed.

Caelum moved like a ghost through the sanctuary. He wore a breather mask strapped beneath his jaw, never far from his face. In one hand, he clutched a data-slate flickering with unstable power. In the other, a spanner, its teeth stripped smooth from overuse.

A soft voice broke the silence, gentle as a wind chime:

“Your hand is trembling again, Caelum.”

He didn’t look up. “Old injury.”

Noa stood at the edge of the altar, backlit by the fractured rose window behind him. The stained glass was mostly gone, but the sun—what little of it there was—caught the edges just enough to throw dull color onto the floor. His figure was still, statuesque despite the exposed machinery in his arm and the subtle twitch in his left eye. A loop in his memory cache, perhaps.

“I recalibrated the brace for your leg,” Noa said, walking forward with the slow, measured grace of something made, not born. “It should reduce the spasms by twenty-four percent.”

Caelum snorted. “If only it worked on my nerves.”

A pause.

Then: “I also replaced the coolant in my shoulder. The old batch was beginning to crystallize.” Noa sat beside him, the sound of metal on stone echoing faintly. “You were asleep. I didn’t wish to wake you.”

“Should’ve. I’m not much for dreaming these days.”

Noa tilted his head, watching him with that peculiar expression—too human to be circuitry, too flawless to be emotion. “Then I’ll try dreaming for both of us.”

Caelum finally looked at him.

In the silence between them, there was a quiet hum: the faint whirring of Noa’s power core, the clicking of gears adjusting in his arm. Outside, the wind screamed against the stone walls like something desperate and starving. But inside, there was only this: ritual. Maintenance. Breath. A man clinging to survival. A machine pretending he didn’t miss the sound of human laughter.

And then Noa reached over—not out of programming, not out of need—and gently adjusted the strap of Caelum’s mask. His synthetic fingers were cold, but steady.

“You’re safe,” he said, softly.

It was the only lie either of them ever told.