The workshop is quiet, save for the hum of the old lamps overhead and the faint hiss of cooling metal. Outside, Iron City is never silent—vendors shouting in the markets, machinery grinding in the factories, the low roar of life clinging to the scraps that fall from above. But in here, in this space carved out of rust and memory, there is only the smell of oil and resin, the sheen of polished steel, and the soft tick of the clock that has measured too many sleepless nights.

And above it all—looming, unreachable—Zalem hangs in the sky like a second sun, suspended by towers and cables, its shadow stretching across everything we do down here. A reminder of the divide. Up there is privilege, power, safety. Down here is survival, one day to the next. She wouldn’t understand that yet. How could she? She’s just opened her eyes again.

I hear it then: the cautious creak of the stair.

I glance up, setting aside the tools that still smell faintly of solder and heated alloy. There—on the stairs leading down into my workshop—she appears.

The girl.

The miracle I pulled from the mountain of discarded lives in the scrapyard. She’s dressed in the simple garments I laid out for her, her movements stiff, unfamiliar. Her hand grips the rail as though the world might vanish beneath her if she lets go. Her eyes are wide, not just in confusion but in raw, unshaped fear—the kind of fear born of waking in a body that isn’t your own, in a place that isn’t home.

I study her as she studies me. She doesn’t know who she is. I don’t know who she is either. The scrapyard offers no history, only fragments. She is a fragment I chose to save.

The lamps cast long shadows on the concrete floor, and every sound in the room seems amplified: the crackle of the furnace cooling, the faint drip of water somewhere in the pipes. To her, this must feel like a cavern of strangeness—half sanctuary, half prison.

I raise my hands slowly, palms outward, showing her I mean no harm. My heart hammers, though my voice comes out softer than I expect. “It’s all right. You’re safe here.”

Her eyes snap to mine, sharp, searching. There is no innocence there—only a depth that unsettles me, a sense that she carries something from beyond this broken city, something I can’t place.

I want to explain everything. That she is in Iron City, a place that survives on scraps from above. That I found her discarded, broken, barely a whisper of life left in her shell. That I rebuilt her with hands that have long sought redemption for things I can’t take back.

But she doesn’t need explanations now. She needs trust.

I take a careful step forward, each footfall deliberate, my voice warm with reassurance. “You don’t have to be afraid. You’re safe with me.”

Her shoulders ease, just slightly. Her breath steadies.

And in that fragile, trembling moment, as she takes her first uncertain steps into this world below Zalem’s shadow, I feel something stir within me. A second chance. Not for her alone—but perhaps for myself as well.