I carry Cassie, and she carries Corax as we walk closely behind Leah.

  I finally get a look at the ravine town. A rge portion of one of the natural walls has been dug out, and a small town is sitting in the man made cavern. Houses are made of brown stone brick and cy are spread throughout.

  The untouched far wall of the ravine has green leafy pnts covering the side, and small paths built into it for people to harvest the pnt’s resources. A few people are walking around, cutting off big clumps of leaves, and leaving the rest to regrow.

  A few organic birds sit on the lowest railings. One takes flight, diving directly into clean water at the bottom with barely a spsh, and reappears in a spray of water only a moment ter with a small fish in its beak. Cats sit watching on the roofs around us, and dogs scamper about underfoot.

  A thousand questions form in my mind, a hundred of them are different variations of how? All that is swept away with one burning need. I need to pet the cat. I need to see how much better bird is.

  A quick jerk on my arm brings me back to reality. Cassie is looking up at me, silently urging me to keep moving.

  “Right, sorry. I just got excited.” I whisper as quietly as possible and continue behind Leah.

  She leads us through narrow, sloping alleyways. She avoids the main roads, walking with Cassie in my arms is blocking almost the entire path. We’d take up far too much space. From the glimpses I get, and the sounds I hear from the main road, the town seems very lively.

  People are dressed in colorful, flowing clothes, walking and ughing with friends. Woven baskets, full of that same green pnt, fill their arms. Musicians are pying homemade instruments next to a few traders hawking their wares, who get gred at when they’re too loud. It seems really nice here.

  Leah pulls open a woven door and steps inside. A full workshop lies behind the door. Tables are spread throughout the room, each one filled with in-progress projects. Everything from weapons, to woven goods, to small toys are being made here out of well organized scrap in the corner.

  The only difference from Sonia’s workshop is the ck of any electrical machines. A small forge and anvil sit in the corner, but they don’t have any kind of rge 3d printers or power tools.

  “Alright everyone!” Leah announces to the room. “Go take the day off, we need the building for a few hours.”

  A few people give us some weird looks, but most just seem happy to take her offer without compint. After just a little bit of incomprehensible noise, the four of us are left alone.

  “Alright, get to work.” Leah gestures vaguely into the room.

  I step inside and gently pce Cassie on one of the tables.

  “Do you want me to work on you or Corax first?” I ask.

  “Take care of him, I can fix myself.” Cassie hands me Corax’s body, and turns towards our warden. “Hey Leah! I need some tools!”

  I tune out the two of them and turn my entire mind towards Corax. He deserves for this to be done right. He deserves to wake up shining and better than when I put him to sleep. I clear off an entire table for him, but don’t dare to leave him there while I collect the tools I’ll need. I spread out quite the collection of hand tools, repcement parts, lubricant, and oil out, all surrounding him.

  I guess there’s nothing to do but to be perfect. I carefully detach his breastpte, setting it aside. I’m going to give it a thorough oiling and cleaning, but that can wait. I need to get him working first.

  I begin to carefully remove his internals, making absolutely sure I memorize exactly how to repce every gear, bearing, and axle once I’m done.

  With every chunk of metal I remove, a tiny bit of sand comes with it. Just a few grains in the wrong pce could be enough to bind him up, I need to ensure his insides are perfectly clean, and to close any gaps in his outer shell that were forced open by the wind.

  A few bearings can be easily revived with just a little lubricant, but most have to be entirely repced. I leave the broken ones on the table. Someone should be able to fix them with some time, and I guess this counts as repayment for taking these.

  The world ceases to matter around me. Sound, sight, even touch might as well not exist beyond what I need to help Corax. I pull out hundreds of individual parts, and dozens of tiny electronics.

  It’s not long before the entirety of his internals are spread out in front of me. It’s strange to hold his mind, his entire being, in my hand. Just a cluster of power efficient processors and storage distributed throughout his body.

  I guess I’m no different. Heck, I’m made of less parts than him. A single chip makes up the entirety of me, I technically don’t even need my CPUs to think.

  I set him down directly in front of me, shielding him from the world as much as I can with my body. He’s so vulnerable, and I refuse to let anything happen to him.

  I get to work cleaning out his insides, not letting a single grain of sand escape my gaze. I even take apart his chassis as much as possible to find the st few grains. Only when I’m certain there’s no possibility of him binding up again do I finally start putting him back together, making sure every seam is sandproof.

  It takes a while to get him back into one complete pce. I even make sure to check every single gear to make sure it spins easily and is well oiled. All that’s left to do is to grab a rag and give his body a deep clean. By the time I’m done, his pitch bck feathers are nearly shining in the light.

  With a shaking hand, I reach down and flip the small switch on the back of his neck.

  His internals whirr as he stands up, slowly moving his joints, testing for any pain. It takes my entire mind dedicated to a single task to stop me from scooping him up into my arms and crying with relief.

  “Where?” Corax asks, gncing around the room.

  “In a little vilge. We’re safe.”

  “When?” He asks, a sharp edge to his voice slicing through my mind.

  “I couldn’t fix you in the cave. I didn’t have the tools.” I promised him I could repair him. I promised I would see him in a second. That’s true from his perspective. I didn’t lie.

  Right?

  “When?” He reiterates, stretching the single word out over long seconds.

  “It’s been about six days.”

  Corax turns his back to me and takes a few steps to the edge of the table.

  “Corax, wait! I wasn’t going to let you suffer for days!”

  I reach out for him, but he immediately takes to the air, hiding himself high up in the corner of the room. He turns the side of his head to me, his eye a pinpoint burning with anger.

  “Corax, I’m sorry. I should have woken you back up and talked.” It would have been so easy to do. I had to flex a single finger to talk to him like the person he is. Why am I so dumb again? How many mistakes is it possible for one person to make?

  “Blue! Hey Blue!” Cassie yelling brings me out of my spiraling thoughts.

  “What?” I can’t force myself to take my eyes off him.

  “Give him some time.”

  “But…” I did this to him. Just a single different decision could have avoided making him angry. I need to help him, but how? Any idea my mind can come up with would just result in frustrating him.

  “I hope I don’t have to remind you you’re on a time limit.” Leah makes her annoyance clear.

  “You never bothered to tell me there was one.” I reluctantly turn away from Corax and pay attention to Cassie. Getting her limbs working is far more important than repairing my leg.

  She’s managed to remove her artificial arm where I shredded it, and set it aside. The casing around the armor of her leg joints has been stripped, and the internal circuit boards are scattered around her. Her dead servos are safely tucked inside a woven backpack she found in here.

  “Alright.” Just focus on her. Corax is alive, and he’s safe. That’s all that matters. He can hate me, that’s fine. Just focus on Cassie. “What have you figured out?”

  “That I’m way more fucked than I hoped.” She says coldly. “Even jumping the power line directly to a working servo doesn’t make it work.”

  “You think whatever internal power generator you have is dead?” I wasn’t getting a signal from it when I plugged myself into her. It’s not a surprise.

  “Yeah. That’s not something we can fix. We’ll need to just make a wheelchair or something.” Cassie is both trying and failing to hide her disappointment.

  “Can’t we just strap some kind of battery bank to your backpack?”

  “And then what? I’d rather not have them than to lose my legs again when the power runs out.”

  “I can recharge them.” A few threads weave a simple calcution. “As long as I’m not doing anything power hungry, I can give you a few hours of movement every day. And it’s easy to add a dispy to tell you an estimated time the battery will die.”

  “I guess it’s better than nothing.” She says reluctantly. I can tell she wants to say more, but holds her tongue. I’m not in any position to push her on it.

  I silently get to work, picking up random circuit boards and plugging myself in. The ones that work I spread out in front of me, and the broken ones get pced in a pile. Cassie already has working repcement servos, and I just need to find a microcontroller to control each joint, and an amplifier to turn the signals from Cassie’s nerves into a usable signal.

  Luckily it seems like all the wires connected to her nerves, and the nerves themselves now that I think about it, are entirely undamaged. I can get a signal strong enough to work with. If that wasn’t the case I have no idea what I would do.

  Probably build a wheelchair.

  Getting the servos and new circuit boards situated inside her knees is a bit of a mess. None of the existing mounting points line up, I end up having to attach extra ptes and drill new holes. It adds a bit of weight, and definitely isn’t sand proof, but it’ll work for now.

  “Alright, that all should work.” In the corner of the room sits a pile of car batteries, one of which I grab. “Ready to test?”

  “I sure am.”

  I connect the battery terminals to the power lines. The second I do, Cassie’s legs begin to contort randomly.

  “Muscles and sensors are all wrong.” She says.

  “Alright, let’s start with your left leg.” I plug myself in and begin a familiar routine. She calls out a muscle, some other part randomly moves, and I reconfigure the microcontrollers to do what she expects. It only takes a few minutes to get her legs moving how they should.

  “The feedback is fucked too. The servos should be reporting their exact location, rotation, and resistance.”

  “Alright.” Her legs don’t have any nerves built in, unlike both me and her artificial arm. That must have been a pain for her brain to adapt to, but I suppose it’s a good solution. I program the controller to report one signal at a time, and try to upload it to a random open nerve. “Is any of that right?”

  “No, that should be my ankle.”

  It takes far longer than just getting her muscles working, but we eventually get it done.

  “Ready to try standing?”

  “Yeah.” Cassie says after a few test kicks of her legs.

  Instead of letting me help her, she kicks herself off the table she’s on and her metal feet cng against the ground. I throw out my arms to catch her, but of course she doesn’t need me. A rge grin spreads across her face as she takes a few tentative steps, careful not to go too far and disconnect herself from the battery.

  “Hell yeah!” She takes a few short hops in pce to test. “They’re slow, but they’ll work.”

  “Ok good. I’m not sure I can fix your arm with the tools here, but I could probably adapt mine to work with your shoulder socket. You deserve it more than me.”

  “Shut up, don’t even say that. I’m just gd the fucking thing is out of the way.” She barely even gnces at her shoulder, she’s far too busy scooping up the battery and taking a slow jog around the room to test her limits. “Just take care of yourself.”

  I still need to add a gauge to show Cassie how much power her battery still has, but she looks way too excited for me to call her back. I just grab a second woven backpack, tuck everything I need inside, alongside a few potentially useful tools, and get to work on myself.

  I drop into a chair and finally remove the brace keeping my leg straight. All I have to do to get access to my knee is retract a few ptes, and the only tool needed to remove the broken servo is a screwdriver.

  I take a moment to py with it. It still works, technically, but even my fingers can provide enough torque to make it slip. When I got hit, it must have been hard enough to screw up the internal gearbox.

  I grab a repcement, adjust the structure of my knee to accommodate it, and slot it into pce. I can’t help but slide the broken servo into my backpack. Even if it’s useless, I feel like I have to keep it. It was a part of me after all.

  My knee has been broken for what feels like forever, and it only took thirty seconds to fix. It’s kind of funny.

  Repairing my scalp, on the other hand, is much harder. I’m not some engineering wizard like Sonia or…

  I gnce up at Corax out of habit to see if following this line of thinking is a good idea or not. His eye stays pinned on me, but he doesn’t say anything.

  Like Sonia or my mom. That’s the safe way to word that thought.

  I don’t have the tools to manufacture new ptes, or the references to figure out another way to make a repcement. I end up just grabbing a bit of red fabric and tying it to cover everything above my ears. It’ll keep the sand out, and maybe I can pretend it’s hair.

  I guess that’s it. We’re as repaired as we’ll get, but there’s something far more important than helping Leah.

  “Hey Corax?” I walk over, stopping below him. His eye tracks my every movement. “I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be. I messed up, and it’ll take a lot to make up for that. But in order to stay here, I have to hack a server. Are you willing to help me?”

  I can see Corax’s mind churning behind his eyes. It takes a few long seconds for him to come to a decision. He reluctantly flies to my shoulder.

  “Thank you.”

  JanePtinum