Rating: MA 15+
They left the laboratory at dawn, climbing through the shattered remains of the Sea of Glass toward open desert. Nahara moved slowly, each step requiring visible effort. Her mechanical leg stuttered occasionally, pistons misfiring, and her left arm hung at an awkward angle—circuits damaged during the Heart Eater's assault, only partially functional now.
"I can carry you," Sabaku offered for the third time.
"You barely weigh enough to carry yourself," Nahara replied, but her voice lacked its usual sharpness. "Besides, the components are overheating. The desert's heat is cooking the coolant systems. Being carried wouldn't help."
They walked. The sun rose with its customary violence, transforming the sky from predawn blue to that searing white-gold that made eyes water even when closed. And with the sun came heat—not gradual, but immediate and overwhelming, as if the star had decided patience was unnecessary.
Nahara's mechanical limbs began clicking. A sound Sabaku hadn't heard before—metal expanding, joints struggling against thermal stress. She stopped, swaying slightly, and touched her left arm. The metal was hot enough that even her callused flesh recoiled.
"It's getting worse," she said, and for the first time since they'd met, Sabaku heard fear in her voice. "The augmentations were designed for controlled environments. Underground settlements. Shaded ruins. Not... not this." She gestured weakly at the infinite desert. "The heat is breaking down the synthetic tissue interfaces. My body is rejecting the prosthetics. Or the prosthetics are rejecting my body. Hard to tell which."
Sabaku guided her to a rock formation offering minimal shade. In the cooler air—still blazing hot, just fractionally less so—Nahara's breathing eased slightly. She leaned against stone, closing her eyes.
"How much time?" Sabaku asked.
Nahara's biological hand touched her mechanical stomach plate, where augmented organs worked beneath. "Hours. Maybe a day if I'm lucky. The respiratory augmentation is overheating worst. When it fails..." She trailed off, but Sabaku understood.
Without the mechanical lung, she couldn't process oxygen efficiently. Without oxygen, everything else became academic.
"The Dune Striders," Sabaku said urgently. "If we could reach them, they could repair—"
"Three days away. Maybe more." Nahara opened her eyes, and Sabaku saw acceptance there. The kind of acceptance that comes from understanding when struggle becomes futile. "I knew this was a risk. Living half-mechanical in a world that's trying to kill everything. I just thought I'd have more time."
They sat in silence as the sun climbed. Around them, the desert stretched in every direction—indifferent to their crisis, to her dying, to anything beyond its own eternal processes. Heat shimmer made the horizon waver like memory losing coherence.
"Tell me about Tokyo," Nahara said suddenly. "The real Tokyo. Before the Collapse. Before any of this."
Sabaku blinked, shifting mental gears. "Why?"
"Because I'm dying in a desert that used to be somewhere else, and I'd like to know what we lost. What the world traded for all this sand and suffering." She adjusted position, wincing as mechanical components ground against each other. "Paint me a picture of rain and gray skies. Make me see what you saw."
Sabaku thought back, reaching past the orphanage fire, past the institutional walls, to moments he'd barely noticed at the time. The city before it became memory. Tokyo as it simply was.
"The rain," he began slowly, "never really stopped. Not constantly, but... frequently. Like the sky was a leaky ceiling no one bothered to fix. It fell soft, almost apologetic. Not dramatic like the desert's rain—no violence in it. Just persistent dampness that made everything glisten."
He closed his eyes, reconstructing the city from fragments. "The streets were always crowded, but quietly crowded. People moving with purpose but without urgency. Everyone had destinations but no one seemed particularly excited to reach them. Like the whole city was sleepwalking through a routine it had perfected."
"Vending machines on every corner," he continued, warming to the memory. "Glowing at night like small shrines. You could buy anything—coffee, soup, toys, umbrellas. They hummed constantly, that electronic hum that becomes invisible once you're used to it. I'd stand in front of them sometimes, just watching the lights, pretending each one was a portal to somewhere more interesting."
Nahara smiled faintly. "Were they?"
"No. They dispensed lukewarm coffee and false hope." Sabaku laughed without humor. "But the coffee was predictable. That counted for something."
"Tell me about the orphanage," Nahara said. "Not the fire. Before. What was ordinary life like?"
Sabaku hesitated, unused to thinking of that place as anything but site of trauma. But he pushed past the ending, found the middle.
"Ordinary was... gray walls. Linoleum floors that squeaked when wet. Fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency just below conscious hearing, so you only noticed them when they turned off. We had schedules—breakfast at seven, school at eight, free time at four, dinner at six, lights out at nine. Every day identical."
"Mrs. Yamamoto would make curry on Fridays. It was too mild, too institutional, but we all looked forward to it anyway because it was the one variation in the routine. She'd serve it with a smile that was part genuine, part professional obligation. Like she cared but couldn't afford to care too much."
Nahara's breathing had become more labored. The mechanical lung wheezed, struggling against heat degradation. But she gestured for him to continue.
"The other kids..." Sabaku's throat tightened. "Kenji would tease everyone but never cruelly. Just enough to establish hierarchy. Yuki would share her food with anyone who seemed sad. Haruto cried every night for the first month, and we all pretended not to hear because acknowledging it felt invasive. After the first month, he stopped crying. We never knew if he adjusted or just learned to cry silently."
"They sound normal," Nahara said softly.
"They were. That's what I hated." The admission came bitter. "They accepted that gray walls and institutional curry and forgotten childhoods were enough. That normal was sufficient. And I... I couldn't. Every day felt like drowning in mediocrity. Like the world had decided I was ordinary and that was my sentence."
He opened his eyes, looking at the desert. "So I studied Egypt. Obsessively. Desperately. Convinced myself that somewhere else—some time else—there were people who lived with intensity, with meaning. Who built pyramids and worshipped the sun and left marks that lasted millennia."
"And you wanted to be one of them."
"I wanted to be anywhere that wasn't there." Sabaku's hands clenched. "Even dying felt like it should be more interesting than what I had. So when the gunners came, when I was bleeding out, my last thought wasn't fear or regret. It was relief. Finally, something that mattered enough to remember."
Nahara was quiet for a long moment. The mechanical wheeze of her lung filled the silence, each breath audibly harder than the last.
"Your Tokyo sounds like my settlement before the Solarians came," she said eventually. "Safe. Boring. Gray in all the ways that make you want to scream just to hear something loud." She shifted, wincing. "I was eight when Ra's Left Hand raided us. They called it 'harvesting'—taking children for temple service, taking adults for sacrifice. Made it sound holy."
"My parents fought. They lost. The priests took me, took my limbs as 'offering to prove commitment.' Left me bleeding in the sand, assuming I'd die from shock or infection." Her mechanical fingers flexed. "The Dune Striders found me three days later. Rebuilt me. Made me more machine than human. I thought I hated it at first—the metal, the constant maintenance, the way people looked at me like I was already halfway to dead."
"But then I realized: I was alive. Still thinking. Still choosing. The metal let me survive in places that would've killed flesh. Let me matter in ways I couldn't have otherwise." She met Sabaku's gaze. "Maybe that's what we were both searching for. Not excitement. Not meaning. Just... proof that our specific existence mattered enough to remember."
The sun reached its apex. Nahara's mechanical components began smoking—literally smoking, coolant fluid boiling away, circuits overloading. She slumped further against the rock, biological lung trying to compensate for failing mechanical one.
"I'm dying," she stated with clinical detachment. "Not maybe. Not hours. Soon."
"No." Sabaku moved closer. "The sun-core—I could use it to—"
"To what? Separate my consciousness from failing metal? Make me into something else?" Nahara shook her head. "You just killed the Heart Eater to free souls from forced fusion. Don't make me into another version of that nightmare."
"But I can save you. I have the power to—"
"Power doesn't mean permission." Nahara's biological hand found his. "Let me die human. Or as human as half-mechanical orphans get. Let this be normal death, the kind the desert allows. Not transformation. Not transcendence. Just... ending."
Tears streamed down Sabaku's face. "I can't lose you. Not after everyone else. Not after—"
"You won't lose me." Nahara's breathing was shallow now, mechanical lung emitting sounds like grinding metal. "I'll be here. In the sand. In the heat that killed me. That's how the desert works, remember? It keeps everything. Remembers everything."
"That's not comfort," Sabaku sobbed.
"No. But it's truth." Nahara's eyes were closing, exhaustion and system failure claiming her consciousness in stages. "Tell me one more thing about Tokyo. Something small. Something you barely noticed."
Sabaku searched his memory desperately, finding fragments. "The... the sound of trains passing overhead. That rhythmic clatter. It made the orphanage walls vibrate just slightly. I'd lie awake listening to it, counting the vibrations, using it to mark time. Predictable. Constant. Like a heartbeat for the whole city."
"Heartbeat," Nahara repeated, voice fading. "I like that. Cities with heartbeats. Deserts with memories. Maybe your Tokyo and this desert weren't so different. Maybe they're both places where lonely kids count time and hope for something kinder."
Her mechanical lung gave one final wheeze and stopped. The silence was immediate and terrible.
"Nahara?" Sabaku gripped her hand tighter. "Nahara!"
But her biological systems, without mechanical support, were failing rapidly. Her eyes opened one last time, focusing on something past Sabaku's shoulder—the horizon, or memory, or nothing.
"Maybe your deserts weren't so far away after all," she whispered.
Then she was gone.
Sabaku held her hand as her body cooled, as the mechanical components stopped their humming, as the flesh that remained released its tension. He held her through the afternoon heat, through the sun's slow descent, through the cooling of evening.
And as darkness fell, something impossible happened.
Nahara's body began to dissolve. Not rotting—dissolving. Skin and metal both transforming into fine particles that caught the twilight like glitter. The process was gradual, gentle, as if the desert was being careful with her. Respectful.
Sabaku watched through tears as she became dust, as the wind caught her particles and scattered them across the sand. He wanted to stop it, to preserve her, but knew that would be violation. She'd asked for normal death. This was the desert's version of normal.
When the dissolution was complete, nothing remained of Nahara but impressions in the sand where her body had rested.
And from that impression, something grew.
A flower. Small and white and impossibly delicate. A lotus, blooming in sand that should have killed it immediately. Its petals caught starlight, reflecting it back in ways that suggested bioluminescence or magic or simple beauty that refused to acknowledge impossibility.
Sabaku stared at it, understanding blooming alongside the flower: The desert didn't just remember. It transformed. Took what died and made something new. Not resurrection. Not the forced fusion of the Heart Eater. But genuine transformation. Death into life. Metal and flesh into living bloom.
He reached out, touching one petal with gentle reverence. It was warm, retaining heat from Nahara's body, from the sun that had killed her. But alive. Undeniably alive.
"Thank you," he whispered. To Nahara. To the desert. To whatever force had made a kid from Tokyo and a child from sand meet and matter to each other. "Thank you for teaching me. For staying. For being real when everything else felt like nightmare."
The lotus swayed in wind that shouldn't exist, as if nodding acknowledgment.
Sabaku sat beside it through the night, keeping vigil for the friend who had become flower, watching stars wheel overhead in patterns that Earth's sky had forgotten.
And when dawn came, painting the desert in golds and reds that Nahara would never see, he stood. Picked up his pack. Took one last look at the white lotus blooming against all logic.
Then he walked. Toward the Temple of Inverse Shadows. Toward Tefra and her army. Toward the choice that would define or destroy him. Three days remained. But he walked alone now. The desert remembered Nahara. And so would he.
TO BE CONTINUED…