Nova Sparks's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Nova Sparks pedaled her cargo bike through the gates of the salvage yard at dawn, her tool belt clanking against her hip. She was going to build herself a friend today. Not a mop-bot. Not a vending unit. A real companion robot, one that could think and feel beside her, stitched together from other people's throwaways. She'd been sketching him in the margins of Jax's manuals for months. Every masterpiece started as somebody else's junk, and today the junk was hers. Except it wasn't. The pile she'd flagged yesterday, the one with the intact servo arm and the cracked optical lens, was gone. So was the copper wiring bin. So was the whole eastern row. Boot prints cut deep through the mud, and a fresh tire track curved toward the back gate. "They beat you here again," Jax said behind her. Her boss stood with his silver hair wild under his goggles, arms crossed over a coat stitched with faded flowers. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "Third morning this week. That rival crew's stripping the yard clean before the sun's up." "Then I'll come earlier." "Nova. There's nothing left to come earlier for." She kicked a bent pipe. It rolled two feet and stopped. Her companion robot lived in her head with mismatched eyes and a smiley face painted under his chest plate, and right now he was made of absolutely nothing. She walked the yard anyway. Habit. Every machine had a personality, Jax had taught her that, and personalities didn't hide well. She listened. Wind through hollow drums. A rat somewhere. And, faint, under a collapsed sheet of corrugated tin at the far corner — a tick. Uneven. A capacitor trying to discharge through a bad line. She pulled the tin back. Underneath sat a lump of scrap the rival crew had passed over: a dented chassis the size of a bread loaf, one oversized lens still socketed, a bent antenna, a hand welded on backwards. Somebody had already tried to build him. Somebody had already given up. "Jax." Her voice came out quieter than she meant. "They left one." Jax crouched beside her, ran a thumb along the seam. "They left him because he's broken wrong. Wiring's fried. Frame's warped." "Good." She grinned. "Means he's mine." She loaded the little chassis into her bike basket and pedaled straight to Halo Café, because her hands were shaking and she needed to think. Kai looked up from the espresso machine, chestnut hair flopping over his goggles, and read her face in one second flat. "Coffee first," he said, already pouring. "Existential crisis second." She set the broken robot on the counter between them. One dim lens flickered on, weak as a match. Focused on her. And the yard, she realized, wasn't a resource anymore. It was a battlefield. If she wanted parts to finish him, she'd have to take them back.