Dust trailed behind Imogen as she made her way through the lobby of one of the many abandoned buildings in the deadlands outside of Cyn City. The land was sun-scorched and dehydrated, just like her.

She pulled sand goggles over her eyes and wrapped a scarf around her face. Her skirts left a trail in the sand behind her leaving no question that someone had been here, but that didn’t matter. There weren’t any other humans in the area of miles. Unless you counted the sick and injured cyborgs who lived in the Ward.

Glass cracked under her boots as she explored the once functioning laundry facility. An old sign on the front guaranteed chemical cleaning only, no water. No wonder the earth had given up on humanity. Chemicals in everything. Imogen had never cleaned by using anything but soap, water, and her own two hands. Anything else was preposterous.

She dismantled the track system that still had some ancient clothes hanging on it—probably preserved by those chemicals—and took some of the gearing that had run the simple mechanism. Her bag swelled with materials she had pinched from various buildings, but this promised to be the best find yet.

The air cooled, and Imogen took off her scarf and goggles, enjoying the moment of fresh air on her skin. If only her mother could see her now, hair cut short and spiked up every which way from the wind, her clothes filthy and patched together like a hand-me-down doll. Before she’d come to the city, she’d been the prettiest girl on the compound. The most wanted as a wife. But she lost all that when she lost Hiram, and her punishment for loving him had been exile.

Tears filled her eyes as her mind wandered to the baby they should have had. The glimmer of life that had sparked in her womb which the elders took from her, snuffing it out of existence. And now he was dead, killed by the elders for nothing more than loving her. Another death she’d carry with her the rest of her life.

This train of thought wouldn’t do.

She shook her head. The Earth had blessings to bestow upon her yet, even if she had to dig a little deeper to find them. And so, she resumed her scavenging, picking through the rubble and pulling out any machinery she might use. She had always had an affinity for machinery, able to fix things around the house even her father couldn’t diagnose, but she’d left it behind her as she grew into a woman, grease and calluses did not make for quality wife material.

Now that she had been deemed unmarriable, she didn’t much care about getting some grease on her hands as she took the things she found apart and put them back together, learning how they worked.

In the back of the room, where the light was dimmest, a door beckoned her forward. Light streamed in through the cracked opening, and Imogen tiptoed through the disaster zone until she could push it open.

Oh yes, this was just what she was searching for. Most of the equipment she found required electricity. Electricity she couldn’t justify taking from the Ward when every watt they had went to keeping patients alive, but it wouldn’t be too hard to retrofit or combine some of these to make something like what she’d grown up using.

By the time she left, her arms were weighed down, and her bag overflowed with metal, gears, and casings. It took forever to scramble over the debris in the store without falling on her face, and once outside, she didn’t have a free hand to pull her goggles and scarf back on.

In the distance, a plume of dirt shot up into the air and the roar of a motorcycle assaulted her ears. Combustion engines stopped being made decades ago, and yet Enver somehow managed to keep this one running.

She rushed toward the Ward, wanting to get there and squirrel away her findings before he arrived. If that monster of a bike was good for one thing, it always gave her fair warning of when he’d return. That way she didn’t have to listen to him lecture her about it being unsafe for her to wander around alone. The way he scolded her she could almost pretend he cared.

The taciturn cyborg who ran the Ward constantly made Imogen feel unwelcome, and yet it was his idea that she move in and work as a nurse in the first place. When her best friend from the compound, Verity, came to Cyn City and fell in love with a Cyborg named Chance, there wasn’t enough room for all three of them to live together. Or enough earplugs!

Since she was a trained midwife and seamstress, neither blood nor stitches were an issue for her. Until then, Enver had run the Ward alone performing every surgery, every bone that needed to be reset, every tearful child, alone. The patients pitching in when they were well enough and Chance would swing by now and then to give Enver some relief, but it wasn’t the same of having another medical professional around.

Still, cyborgs were known to be dangerous and volatile. Enver’s two metal hands and cybernetic arm terrified her, and his face was always twisted into a frown. While Chance was a nice guy, Enver fit the typical description of a Cyborg.

She hustled inside the Ward and ran up the stairs, passing the patients on the third floor and heading up to the makeshift workshop she’d set up on the fifth floor. No one but her ever went up there.

She sat on the floor and opened her bag, inspecting each find she’d pilfered. Metal wasn’t particularly hard to come by, but she had found some too strong to bend by hand that she hoped might be titanium and some already shaped into gears, motor casings, and even a ball screw. She might finally have enough to complete her project.

She got right to work taking inventory and cleaning everything she’d found, losing herself in the rhythm of her chores.

Imogen barely noticed when the sun set. When she finally stood and stretched, her body popped and cracked like an old woman. Even her hips hurt. Served her right for sitting on the floor all day. She ventured downstairs, quickly changing out of her dust covered clothes and into something that wouldn’t be a danger to the Ward’s patients’ lungs.

With her collar buttoned up at the neck and layers of skirts falling from high on her waist, she swept down to the third floor and met complete chaos.

Enver kneeled on the ground over the body of a bleeding and screaming cyborg. The large man writhed on the floor, knocking over trays of equipment and hitting Enver with his metallic arm.

“God damn-it! Where the fuck have you been? Get over here and hold him down.”

Imogen ran to the other side of the cyborg and gently placed her hands on the man’s chest, trying to sooth him with soft words and non-threatening touches.

The man reared up and slammed his wide forehead right into her nose.

Blood poured from one nostril, but the man’s face contorted in pain, so she wrapped both hands around one arm, lifted herself up and sat right on his chest.

“I can’t hold him for long!”

“Just keep him from hurting himself until I get the sedatives.”

Enver sprinted toward the back room and pulled out the key he kept around his neck. He unlocked the door, and then further inside opened the secured cabinet where he kept the medications. Around here, even antibiotics had a high street value and everything had to be secure.

The cyborg on the floor bucked against Imogen’s frail body, but she held steady, swinging one leg over his chest and straddling him like a mare. She used her knees and hands to pin down his arms and focused her weight on pushing him down. She imagined herself heavy like an anvil, unmovable like a bull. She was powerful and unflappable.

When Enver returned, he did a quick double take, staring as she rode the Cyborg like a wild boar she’d wrangled to the ground. She had to be a site with blood running down her chin and dripping onto her fresh blouse. Someday she’d have to learn that clothes just didn’t stay clean here. Maybe she’d find a way to dye everything black.

The medic slipped the needle into the man’s biological arm deftly and plunged the medication into his vein. When the cyborg finally closed his eyes and relaxed beneath her, Imogen slipped to the floor on one side.

Enver sat on the ground next to the man “How’s your nose?”

“Fine. I’ve had worse.” She shrugged. What was a little blood after everything she’d been through. “So, what’s wrong with him?” she wheezed, wiping the blood from her face.

Enver’s narrow eyes darted to the man’s leg, which hung from the plesh and a few wires attached to his thigh. The wound had surprisingly little blood and none of the man’s actual body seemed to be injured.

Imogen glanced back at Enver. “It hurts when the metal breaks? I thought it was cybernetic.”

He huffed. “The cybernetics are connected to the brain through neurotransmitters. He feels that leg just as much as you feel yours.”

“I thought half the point of these things was to not feel so much pain. Isn’t that why we have cyborgs.”

Enver stood and began pulling the man toward an open bed further down the main aisle. His tall frame appeared thin at first glance, but it was an optical illusion, his shoulders were narrow but covered in muscle and his body moved with raw power. Imogen had never met anyone so strong.

The men on the compound were often hard-bodied from manual labor, but Enver’s quiet demeanor and tendency to disappear into the background meant every time she glimpsed the muscles on his back bunching, like they did as he lifted the man twice his width onto the cot, she was surprised all over again. With his dark hair and strong features, he’d be attractive if he wasn’t always so curt.

And if he wasn’t a cyborg.

“Come help me get him positioned. I’ll try to find a cynker to come put him back together tomorrow.”

“There’s nothing we can do for him?”

“Unfortunately, not. The cynkers don’t bother us out here because we don’t operate in the slums and because we don’t mess with the mechanics. If I start trying to fix his cybernetics they won’t take kindly.”

“So, we sedate him and hope?”

Enver sat in the chair next to the bed and sighed. “You making me feel bad about it isn’t helping anything.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“Right, I know. Another thing you just don’t understand. You’ve been here long enough you should know all this. If you paid attention to more than whatever hobby shop you have on the fifth floor, you’d have figured out by now Cyn City isn’t a very nice fucking place.”

“Clearly.” She held his eyes and straightened her back, but the black pools that stared back at her were unwavering. After a moment she turned on her heel to get an IV. She’d become quite good at putting them in, barely ever even got a wince from a patient. Not that this one would care one way or the other.

When she returned and started setting things up, Enver didn’t even acknowledge her presence. She might as well be a full automaton for all he cared. As she worked her annoyance flared for no reason other than if they were both going to live and work here, they should be able to have at least a civil conversation without him turning into a hulking jerk.

She finished hanging the IV and turned to Enver, ready to put the cards on the table so they could at least find some peace in each other’s presence, but he made her so mad with his insinuations that she didn’t care or that she was stupid. No one had ever treated her with such indifference before. Let alone disdain.

When she looked at him, Enver had slumped in the chair, his head lolling to the side and against the concrete wall of the warehouse.

Sleeping like this, his face relaxed, he was appealing, his strong features became exotic. She wanted to run her fingers over the lines of his jaw and cheekbones. His wild black hair appeared to have grown straight out of his head at all angles, his wide-set narrow eyes and flat broad nose. He had full lips, and without his usual sneer, she saw how full and inviting they were.

She tiptoed to the other side of the cot and set her hand on Enver’s shoulder. She could feel the planes of his muscles and the point at which man turned to machine. With one arm and two cybernetic hands, he was more cyborg then she knew what to do with. But even at his surliest, he inspired no fear in her.

Just frustration, and a desperate need to be seen.

“Enver.” She shook gently. “Enver, go sleep. I can stay down here with him and come get you if he needs more medication.”

“Okay…” he murmured, still half asleep. “Thanks Imogen, I don’t know how I did this so long without you.”

And like that, he was gone.