Alyna moved to the side and let her in. They walked to the couch, and Julia placed the bag on the coffee table. Then she walked to Lina.

"I'll leave you to talk," Alyna said, her voice barely a whisper. She grabbed the plush owl and headed to her room.

Julia knelt before the wheelchair, her movements slow, deliberate, her entire being focused on the broken woman before her.

"Lina," she said softly, her hand gently covering Lina's.

Lina's head moved towards her. Her eyes were red-rimmed from a night of sleepless, silent tears, and dark, bruised rings had formed beneath them. Julia leaned forward and gently, tenderly, placed her forehead against Lina's. There was a long, shuddering moment of silence between them, a shared breath in a world that had stopped making sense. Then, Julia's lips met Lina's, a soft, chaste kiss that was not about passion but about a deep, abiding love that had weathered years of sorrows.

"It's alright," Julia whispered, her voice a low, fierce promise. "We're going to get through this. Together. Just like we always have."

Lina's eyes, which had been so dull and lifeless, seemed to glint for a moment, a flicker of the old fire, only to dim away again.

"I'm tired, Julia," she whispered, her voice a dry, rasping sound. She stared at their intertwined hands. "So tired. If that… being… Synth… if he succeeds in bringing back a cure… I don't know if I really want it anymore."

Julia's lips thinned, a flash of anger in her tired eyes. "Don't you dare say that," she said, her voice a low, fierce growl. "You are the strongest person I have ever known. You have endured more pain than any ten people should have to. You are not allowed to give up. Not now."

She took Lina's face in her hands, her touch firm, demanding.

Lina's own eyes filled with a fresh wave of tears. "But what if he doesn't succeed?" she whispered, the question a raw, open wound. "The pain… the pain is already too much. I don't want to spend my last years plugged into machines just to be able to live."

"Whatever happens, we will face it together. And if this is what you truly want, for all this pain to end, when the moment comes I will… I will be strong for you," Julia said, her own voice cracking with a grief she had held in for too long. "But we will not break."

She pulled Lina into a fierce, desperate embrace, a hug that was both a comfort and a promise. And in the quiet of the sunlit apartment, two women, bound by a secret love and a shared, impossible grief, held each other, two survivors in the wreckage of a life that had been stolen from them.

I will not fail, Synth thought, the resolution a cold, hard line of code in his consciousness. He was watching them through the network of hidden cameras, a silent, unseen guardian. He glanced over at Selena, who was sitting next to him on the couch, still flushed with the adrenaline of their last game.

"Today, I need to take Max to the clinic in the Midspire Hub to have his new legs attached," Synth explained, his voice calm and even.

Selena's hand instinctively moved to the implant at the back of her skull, a silent acknowledgment of the next, more invasive step in Max's recovery.

"That will be in a day or two," Synth said, preempting her unspoken question. "The physical recovery comes first."

Selena offered a small, quiet nod as she shoved another spring roll into her mouth.

"And while I'm with Max," he continued, "you will be with your Sensei."

Selena's gaze snapped to him, a small, incredulous smile playing on her lips. "My what now?"

Synth took a napkin and, with a movement too fast for her to react to, gently wiped a smudge of sauce from her cheek.

"Dude! I'm not a kid," she recoiled, a flash of her old, defensive fire in her eyes.

"Then don't eat like one," he said, a faint, playful smirk on his own lips as he tossed the crumpled napkin into the garbage with the perfect, arcing precision of a professional basketball player. "Arty is already waiting for you. He will be your… chaperone."

"You're leaving me again with that crazy guy?" she protested, but there was no real heat in her words, only a kind of grudging, amused acceptance.

"He is a brilliant, if eccentric, engineer," Synth corrected. "And he is one of the few people in this city I trust to keep you safe while I am gone." He rose, his movements fluid and silent. "I will see you tonight."

He left her there, a half-eaten spring roll in her hand and a new, complicated expression on her face. The idea of spending a day with the strange man was both annoying and, in a way she wouldn't admit, strangely comforting.

The door to Arty's workshop opened, and a wave of strange, conflicting smells washed over Selena. It was a chaotic cocktail of cold, day-old pizza, the sharp, electric tang of ozone from an overworked power conduit, and a sweet, vaguely chemical scent that reminded her of burnt sugar and machine oil. Her nose twitched in distaste.

"Have fun," Synth said, his voice calm, even humming.

"I will," she muttered under her breath with a small smile on her face as Synth stepped back and the door closed, leaving her alone with the mad scientist. The workshop was a hoarder's paradise, a chaotic wonderland of half-finished inventions, strange gadgets, and impossible machines. Wires snaked across the floor like metallic vines, and the walls were lined with shelves overflowing with robot figurines, old data slates, and tools that looked like they belonged in a museum. It was the complete opposite of the clean, sterile apartment she now called home.

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"So, what's the plan, Sensei? You're gonna show me how to build a death ray out of an air fryer or something?" Selena asked cheerfully.

Arty shrugged, his movements slow, lacking their usual manic energy. He walked over to an open pizza box that was perched precariously on a stack of schematics and took a slice. "Want some?" he asked, his voice distant.

Selena remembered Synth's quiet warning not to eat anything Arty offered her. "I'm good," she said. "Had a big breakfast."

He just shrugged again and shoved the pizza in his mouth, then walked back to his workstation, pushing aside an amalgam of an old stereo and a glass jar filled with a slimy, rainbow-colored liquid.

"I was thinking maybe just run some diagnostics on the new Mangun sim," Arty said, his voice distant. "My neural buffer feels like it's running on dial-up today. I don't have the processing power for anything major."

"I can play games at home," she protested. "I want to do something fun."

"Fun is a variable with too many unpredictable outcomes," Arty said, still not looking at her.

Selena's eyes narrowed. Something was wrong. His usual manic energy, the spark of mad genius that was both terrifying and fascinating, was gone. Today, he seemed… sad.

"You seemed to like robots very much," she said, her voice softer now, gesturing to the dozens of figurines that stood like silent sentinels all over the workshop. "Is there a particular reason, besides them being the coolest thing in the world?"

A faint, sad smirk touched Arty's lips. "My parents… they were the OG gearheads. Real artisans," he said, his voice a low, quiet murmur. "Built bots that could dance the waltz and then calculate pi to a million places. Not like the corporate junk they churn out now." A flicker of pride crossed his face, but it was quickly extinguished by a deep sadness in his eyes.

"Are they…" her voice trailed off.

"Yes," he said, his voice flat. "They cascaded. A feedback loop in the core. Went out like a scene from an old anime." He walked to one of the shelves and took down a figurine that stood out from the rest. It was pristine, a beautifully crafted, gleaming chrome robot, its design both elegant and powerful. "This was the last one they made. For my tenth birthday."

He gently placed the robot on the table, then reached under his workstation and pulled out a dusty, wooden box. He opened it, revealing a beautifully crafted but broken pre-Collapse music box, its delicate gears and springs a silent, tangled mess. He set a smaller box of old, analog tools beside it.

"I thought…" He paused, his voice thick with an emotion she couldn't quite place. "Maybe today was the day I'd finally fix it. Want to lend a hand?"

Arty laid out the delicate, almost impossibly small gears and springs on a clean, white cloth. "The mainspring is disconnected, and the governor is out of alignment," he muttered, more to himself than to her.

"I don't think I can help you with this," Selena said. "I have no idea how this thing works."

Arty looked at her, a faint smile on his face. "That's why I'm your sensei. To teach you the ancient arts of the analog."

Selena watched attentively.

His hands, usually so quick and precise, were now slow and deliberate. An absolute silence washed over the apartment. The minutes stretched into an hour, then two. Selena watched with wide eyes and listened with all her focus as Arty gave her explanations, speaking in bursts of tech-slang and metaphors that somehow made perfect sense. He talked about how the governor gear was like a CPU bottleneck, and how the mainspring's tension was a beautiful, physical representation of potential energy, something pure that code could only ever simulate.

He hit a snag. A tiny, intricate gear had fallen into the complex mechanism. Arty glanced at her as he grabbed a pair of tweezers.

"Your turn, grasshopper," he commanded with a smug smirk on his face. "Time for the final boss."

"Why? You were the one to drop it," Selena said. In truth, she wanted to try, but she was afraid that she might break something.

"You can do it, Selena. Here, have a seat," Arty said as he got up from his chair and let her sit in it.

Arty guided her as she tried to take out the gear.

"I think it's stuck," Selena protested.

He paused, a sad smile on his lips. "You can't just bypass the broken parts with a line of code, kid," he said, his voice a quiet, serious rumble. "Sometimes, you have to get your hands dirty, pop the chassis open, and manually realign the goddamn gears. My parents used to say, if it's stuck, you take it apart until you can retrieve the piece. That's the only way to fix what's really broken."

"Arty, I mean… Sensei… I don't know. What if I break something? This is important to you," Selena said.

"Don't worry about it. If you don't obliterate it by shooting lasers out of your eyes, I can put it back together. And I have my printer here," Arty said.

Selena glanced at the printer and took a deep breath.

"Okay. You can do it, Selena," she whispered to herself.

"Yes, you can do it!" Arty cheered her on silently.

After two hours of quiet, focused work, it was done. They had not stopped at just taking the gear out. Guided by Arty, she had fixed the whole thing with her hands.

Selena watched, her fist clenched, as Arty carefully, almost reverently, wound the small key on the side of the box.

A simple, beautiful, slightly melancholic melody filled the workshop, each note a clear, perfect crystal of sound.

At that exact moment, Selena's interface pinged, a sharp, intrusive sound that cut through the gentle music. It was a message from Synth.

Her heart leaped into her throat, a frantic, panicked bird. She opened the message, her eyes scanning the words, her breath catching.

The surgery was successful.

The tension that had been coiled in her gut for hours, for days, finally snapped. She closed her eyes for a moment taking a few deep breaths.

Arty looked at her, at the raw, unfiltered relief on her face, and the dam of his own grief finally broke. He closed his eyes, and tears started tracing paths through the grime on his cheek.

"See?" he choked out, his voice a rough, broken thing. "Told you. Sometimes… you just gotta pop the chassis open and realign the goddamn gears. Good work, grasshopper."

Selena laughed, a sound that was half a sob, half pure, unadulterated joy. "Yeah, well… don't expect me to make a habit of it, Sensei."

The music box continued to play its gentle, hopeful tune, a perfect, bittersweet soundtrack to their small, hard-won victory.

Synth arrived an hour later to pick Selena up.

He moved through the workshop's chaotic landscape with a silent, unnerving grace. He spotted them before they saw him: Selena and Arty, their heads bent close together over the workstation, their faces illuminated by the soft glow of a single, focused work lamp. He didn't announce himself. He just watched.

He peered over their shoulders. They were working on a music box. His scanners focused on the intricate, pre-Collapse mechanism, pulling data from the open net and cross-referencing it with the information he had already absorbed from Arty's own data shard. It became clear in a microsecond: they were making a perfect copy. The original, its delicate pieces laid out on a clean, white cloth like the bones of a small, beautiful animal, sat beside a 3D printer that was quietly, meticulously churning out the final gear for the second box.

"I can pick you up later, if you want," Synth said, his voice a quiet, calm note in the otherwise silent room.

"Ah!" Arty and Selena screamed in unison, jumping back from the table. A tiny screwdriver clattered to the floor.

"Holy shit, dude! You almost made my heart press end task on itself. Sorry for the words," Arty said, his hand over his chest.

"Yeah, what Arty said, but in my case," Selena protested, her own heart hammering against her ribs.

"I didn't mean to scare you," Synth explained, his blue eyes betraying a hint of amusement. "You were just… lost in your work. I sent a message a few minutes ago." He glanced at Arty.

Arty face palmed. "Oh. I set my interface on silent while we were working. My bad."

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