Enver woke in his room, a crick in his neck and his mouth unusually dry. As the fogginess faded, memories of the emergency from the night before flashed back into his mind. He sat up quickly and a wave of vertigo threatened to pull him back down. How long have I been asleep?

Still dressed in his clothes from the night before he wandered down the hall of the warehouse’s fourth floor. His room was at the opposite end of the hall, next to the bathroom. Technically, he even had a shower and a tub, but not nearly enough electricity to maintain hot water and keep all the machines he needed for the Ward running. Just another in a long line of sacrifices he'd made in order to keep this place running.

At the door leading to the main staircase, his eyes drifted over to the half-closed door of Imogen, his most current wayward soul. The girl wasn't like the people he usually took in here though, more often than not they were hoping for a free place to sleep until they recovered enough to bolt. Many tried to steal some medications and then they were off. Imogen had been there for weeks. And didn’t show any signs of leaving.

When he offered to let her stay, it had been with an unspoken understanding that she would be on her way as soon as she had a chance to adjust to life in Cyn City. Coming from the ecovangelist compound had to be a culture shock for sure, and he tried to be sensitive to that. But every day she was there, it seemed like she settled in a little bit more, as if she were setting up home.

The Ward was not home for anybody, not even Enver. It was a way station for the sick and needy. You got patched up, and you moved on. That was about as much emotional entanglement as Enver could handle. Anything more might elicit some actual human feelings, and he was a fuck of a lot more comfortable with being the cyborg the military trained him to be. 

He turned and walked away, ignoring the intense desire to go into Imogen’s room, maybe the possessions she had squirreled away in there would offer him some insight as to the person he was living with. But everyone deserved a little bit of privacy, if anyone understood that it was Enver. Why the fuck else would he live all the way out here?

On the third floor, he checked on the patient from the night before, noting that Imogen had cleaned him up and re-bandaged the wound expertly. She even filled out chart notes. Something he never asked her to do but was immensely thankful for. The rest of the patients were sleeping peacefully, and the few who were in less critical states had taken to congregating in the makeshift kitchen at the end of the hall.

Normally Enver would join them, make some small talk, evaluate their mental state without them feeling like they were under a shrink’s microscope. What a cyborg went through in their lives here in Cyn City wasn't too much different from what he saw during the Trans-Atlantic war. The decisions you had to make to survive could haunt you.

Instead, Enver climbed the stairs, bypassed the fourth floor, and kept on going to the fifth floor, where Imogen sequestered herself when she wasn't out scavenging the deadlands. The door creaked open when he pushed it, and he could see the now familiar shape of the blonde girl sitting on the floor. Her skirts billowed around her legs, and the toes of her compound-issue boots stuck out of the edges. Her long sleeves were unbuttoned and pushed up to avoid mess while the high collar remained secured all the way to the top.

He peered around the room in amazement. She hadn’t noticed him there yet. She was so engrossed in her work and had something metallic stuck in her ear with a wire hanging down and attached to the machine she fiddled with. The room had been a storage area and had been covered in dusty empty shelves and boxes for years.

Enver never bothered to clear out the space, figuring if the third floor ever became overpopulated he could move patients up here, after a good cleaning of course. It never occurred to him there was another use.

Boxes laid open strewn across the room with their materials redistributed and stacked in like piles. Fabrics, machinery, even some furniture. But what astounded Enver most of all was what Imogen focused on so intently. He came up next to her, trying not to startle the girl and placed a cybernetic hand on her shoulder.

She looked up with a smile and pulled the metal piece from her ear.

“Isn’t it amazing?" she asked, as if he had any idea what she was talking about.

He nodded and squatted down next to her. The warmth of the room increased at the proximity of her body. Enver knew empirically that Imogen was attractive. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, the All-American farm girl thing that had all but disappeared in this day and age. Since she'd been in the dead lands, she had even developed a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks.

Sun damage was dangerous. The UV's shone too bright out here without shelter, but something about those little brown spots made his hardened heart flutter.

"Put this in your ear," Imogen said holding out the small black device.

"What is it? It’s not going to crawl inside and lay eggs in my brain is it?" Enver tried for a smile but managed only a weak excuse.

Imogen rolled her eyes, as she did often around Enver. He wondered if it was a habit of hers, or whether he was just particularly annoying.

"No, it's a microphone. Like the stethoscope you use downstairs to listen to patients, but listen. You can hear the interior workings of the machines if you send it to the right wavelength.

Enver placed the small thing in his ear, and Imogen placed the other end of the black wire against a small child's toy she found, an old X3 cybernetic pet designed to simulate what it must've been like when animals were more than just food. Enver listened and all he could hear was the clickety-clack of internal gears as they shifted toward their next command. Imogen placed a hand lightly on his and whispered, "Now listen deeper past the gears and commands. Listen to the heart of it.”

Enver had no idea what she was talking about. Listen past gears and commands. There wasn't anything to listen to. But with her hand on his, he couldn't help but try. He listened for a long moment and at her suggestion closed his eyes, but no matter what he did, he couldn't understand what she wanted to show him.

He took the receiver out of his ear and handed it back. “I'm sorry I don't hear it.”

"It's alive," Imogen said her face bright. “If you listen, if you slow down and really listen, there's more here than just gears, commands, and algorithms.”

Enver shook his head. "That's wishful thinking, cyborgs are nothing more than machinery. The only thing alive about us is what was left behind. The rest is no more human than that chair."

He stood up. "So, is this what you’ve been doing up here, listening to long extinct children's toys and coming up with new theories on the meaning of life?" He meant for it to come out teasing, but Imogen winced, and he knew he missed the mark. He had almost no social skills left after so many years alone.

Imogen took a deep breath and shook off the disappointed emotion that flickered across her face.

“No, come see." She stood in an easy fluid movement that reminded Enver of the way snipers could be in one place one second and then gone in the next without ever having made a noise. She pulled his attention towards the back of the room under the window she had clearly done her best to clean. He could still see the streak marks from her dry cloth as the sun filtered in.

The sun blasted the earth outside, but from in here, it’s rays felt good. And for a moment, Enver imagined he was a petal unfurling in its light. Under the window, on a desk, sat a contraption unlike anything he’d seen before. It had a solid base but was lopsided. Only one side rose up from the bottom and then arched over like a bridge but never connected back down to the base.

"What the hell is it?"

Imogen practically bounced, as she shoved him out of the way and pulled the chair out to sit. “A sewing machine,” she explained excitedly, and Enver shook his head.

“What are you talking about? We have industrial venders, or we can hand stitch up something with a rip. You said you did embroidery which is weird but pretty I guess.”

"Don't you understand? This warehouse is full of fabric. It's full of industrial fabric of all different thicknesses. We could make our own sheets, we could make our own blankets, we could make gowns for the patients to wear instead of having them walk around in their bloody clothes or worse wrapped up in a sheet. It wouldn't cost anything. I found everything I need to make it run, watch.”

Imogen slid into the chair and came close to the desk. She grabbed a piece of fabric sitting next to her that she had been working on and slipped it in the hole of the machine.

Enver frowned and crossed his arms across his chest. "We don't have the power to run machines that may or may not be useful."

Imogen beamed up at him, and her blue eyes sparkled in the dusty sunlight. In another life, he could imagine being attracted to her, leaning down and taking her heart-shaped face into his hands and placing a kiss on those excited lips. Instead he just frowned.

"I make my own electricity," Imogen said with a coy smile, and the next thing Enver knew the machine vibrated churning and whirling like a mod one cyborg and the fabric began to move.

"Under the table." Imogen commanded and Enver ducked his head. Her foot flew up and down rocking on her heel and whatever speed she moved her foot seemed to effect the motion of the needle up above.

"See? With the right machinery and counterweights, I was able to rig up a machine like we have on the compound. There's an old dry cleaner where I found thread and scissors and even more fabric. I've been wanting to make more clothes for myself, but with all this, there’s really nothing I can't make." She slowed her foot and the needle came to a stop, Imogen flung her leg around and stared up at Enver expectantly. “I can finally help," she said with earnest intensity.

Enver sat on the desk next to her contraption. “You already help. You help take care of the patients.”

Imogen lowered her head. "I know. I like taking care of the patients, but I want to do more. If I'm going to live here, I want to help make things better.

Enver couldn't stop the swell of emotion that filled his heart at the idea of someone wanting to not just do what they're told but actively contribute to running the ward. This place had been a dream for him. His two closest friends, Chance and Tane, had risked their finances helping him set it up, but the running of the place, the day-to-day management of personalities, injured cyborgs, and loved ones coming to search for them, it all fell to him.

He was glad to do it. Glad to offer some kind of service in honor of all his fallen military brothers and sisters whose families were never told what really happened to them. For all of the cyborgs who had been forced to serve a country that had no intention of welcoming them back home with a ticker-tape parade and a place in society. Some of those same cyborgs were the very people he now fixed up after the underground boxing matches at the Ball & Joint. Not that they ever let on that they recognized him. After what he had done, he couldn't blame them. This was his penance. Why would anyone want to live on the hell side of purgatory with him?

"I want to tell you that you don't have to, I want to tell you that you should do other things with your time, find someplace else to live."

Imogen's face fell as he spoke.

"But I can't. This is amazing. And I think you're right. It would really help things around here if we had a way to make it feel nice, new, and clean. Thank you, Imogen."

Her eyes filled with water but before Enver was tempted to say anything else, he turned on his heel and walked away.