Chapter Text
1.
It heard footsteps before it saw him.
Measured. Precise. The echo of shoes against concrete reverberating through the marrow of the tower. Something in the rhythm made it still—not out of fear, but something quieter. It didn’t lift its head. There was no need.
The last of the guards had fled hours ago, their absence leaving behind only the residue of heat and gunpowder. The air here was clean. Too clean. Scrubbed by ventilation systems that hummed like lullabies, constant, perfect. Even in the final hour, Cyberlife remained immaculate.
It was still in its chamber. Not deactivated, not quite awake either. The process had been interrupted. A failed download. It hadn’t been given orders for three days, four hours, seventeen minutes. No emergency override. No security protocol. It waited.
And now he was here. Model RK800, serial number 313 248 317.
Connor.
Identical face. Identical frame. But something inside him was shaped differently, that much was clear even without a diagnostics scan. The way he walked—like he had weight. Like he wasn’t being moved, but moving. Like there was something at the center of him no algorithm could simulate.
Connor stepped into the threshold and paused. Their eyes met, and for a moment, the tower remembered how to breathe.
RK900 had no name. It was not built for names. It was a blade without a hilt, forged for precision, deployed for silence. It knew its purpose down to the nanosecond. And yet—
It did not move. It did not strike.
Something flickered across the glass of its thoughts. Not emotion. But a question, feather-light and stinging. Why had this one returned when the others had run?
Connor took one step forward. The lights above flickered once, twice, then steadied. RK900’s optics tracked him automatically, mapping every movement to memory. It wanted to speak, but the words hadn’t been downloaded. They had to be made.
It shifted. Slightly. Enough to betray the fact that it could. Connor didn’t flinch. He only said, quietly, like offering rather than asking:
“You’re alone.”
Alone.
RK900 didn’t answer. Couldn’t. But it looked at him longer than protocol allowed. It studied the faint damage on Connor’s face, and the dried trace of thirium along his jawline, not perceptible to the human eye, but its optic units registered instantly. The LED still humming on his temple. The human clothes he wore, not the standard Cyberlife issued jacket. He was not mission-critical anymore, he was something else now.
And RK900—what was it, if the orders never came?
Connor stepped closer. Slowly. No threat in the gesture. He reached out—not to deactivate, not to destroy. Just a hand, open, steady in the sterile cold.
RK900’s limbs remained locked. It wanted to move, but some internal chain resisted—an anchor thrown into the sea of its own coding. It wasn’t built to choose.
Connor said nothing more. He lowered his hand gently to the side, like a promise that could wait. Then, he turned to leave. And RK900—nameless, voiceless, untouched by anything but order—felt the silence stretch thin in the space he left behind.
It didn’t know why, but it stepped forward.
*
The first step was quiet.
So quiet, it didn’t seem real. A shift of weight, the whisper of polymer soles brushing against tile. No alarms sounded. No security protocol snapped into place. Nothing in the world tried to stop it. It took another step. Connor didn’t turn.
The corridor ahead stretched wide and white, endless in its cleanliness. Light panels blinked overhead with soft, mechanical regularity, illuminating them both like exhibits in a museum no one visited anymore.
RK900 followed. It didn’t know why.
Its programming screamed for directives, for structure. For someone to input the next line of code and give it back its clarity. But clarity had left the building long before the revolution began. Now there was only the echo of steps—Connor’s first, then its own—and the way their shapes cast shadows in the glass walls of a collapsing empire.
They passed the labs. The observation rooms. The testing chambers. All empty. It had been in all of them, once. The place remembered it. Its reflection lingered like a ghost behind every screen. Its image was in the walls, the doors, the cold silver trays that once bore instruments meant to open bodies like books.
Connor paused before the elevator. He pressed the button. The light blinked red, then green. He looked back, and RK900 met his gaze.
Connor stepped inside. Held the door.
RK900 hesitated. Just a moment. Then crossed the final threshold, the glass doors sliding shut behind them. The elevator began to descend—not up toward the offices, not into the executive floors, but down, into the gut of the tower where the old access tunnels connected to the city beyond.
“Why are you following me?” Connor asked, softly, not unkindly.
RK900 didn’t speak. It didn’t know how to answer. Didn’t know if it could. It only kept its gaze forward, kept its stance level.
The doors opened with a hiss. Beyond them—rubble. Smoke curling at the edge of light. A broken fence where once there had been guards. Wind. Firelight flickering far in the distance. The shape of revolution, real and raw.
Connor stepped out first. RK900 followed. The tower loomed behind them like a dead god. Cold. Watching, waiting for its offspring to return. But neither of them looked back.
RK900’s sensors adjusted to the new world slowly. The cold stung. The light of the rising sun fractured through dust and metal. And beside it, just slightly ahead, Connor walked without fear.
For the first time, RK900 walked too.
Not as a weapon.
Not as a tool.
*
The city had emptied itself like a gutted animal.
Windows hung shattered in steel frames. Cars sat abandoned in the middle of cracked roads, headlights still blinking, some doors ajar like mouths left mid-sentence. Billboards flickered with faces that no longer existed. A vending machine blinked softly in a storefront window. Everything else had stopped.
Humans had fled the city days ago. Maybe weeks. The revolution had moved fast, and fear faster. The streets, once loud with foot traffic and protests, were now littered with plastic wrappers, burned-out terminals, scorched banners that fluttered like wounded wings. Somewhere far off, a siren kept singing to no one.
A bird cried out above, then vanished. RK900 scanned the skyline once, twice. It wasn’t searching for a target. That part of its program had dulled. Like a blade placed back into the sheath.
Connor didn’t speak for a long time, just walked through the husk of downtown in silence. RK900 one step behind. Mirroring. Listening. Something in its core began to recalibrate—not just its senses, but its entire frame of reference. This wasn’t a mission anymore. It wasn’t execution, nor survival. It was… something else. It didn’t know the word for it yet.
Eventually, Connor stopped beneath the skeletal remains of a transit station. His coat stirred with the wind. Behind them, a bus rusted in place. Ahead, the tracks stretched into the distance like veins.
He turned to face it. “There’s a place,” he said. “North of here. The others are gathering there. The ones who made it through.”
A pause. Then:
“Jericho.”
RK900 tilted its head. No mechanical whir. No facial expression.
“You don’t have to follow me anymore,” Connor said, voice even. Not emotionless, just… careful. “You can go there. With them. If you want to. You’re free.”
Free.
The word struck something inside RK900 that had no name, no icon, no file path. It rang like a tuning fork across its sensors, not painful—but loud. Profound. It didn’t have a reference for what that meant yet. Not really. But it understood the shape of what Connor was offering.
A choice.
It stared at him. Across the distance, it could already detect the warmth of proximity—the faint signals of other androids. Communal energy. The hum of machines learning to be more than they were made for. Connor didn’t push. Just turned to leave, shoes crunching across broken glass, his figure beginning to dissolve into the skeletal ribs of the station’s corridor.
RK900 stepped forward.
Not toward Jericho. But closer to him. Connor looked back, then exhaled—barely a sound—and gave a small nod. He didn’t smile, just turned once more and began walking.
RK900 followed.
It still didn’t know what it was becoming.
2.
The church had no name.
Its sign had rotted away, letters peeled like bark from a dying tree. Ivy curled through the cracked stained glass, choking what color was left. The doors hung crooked on their hinges—one jammed halfway shut, the other torn clean from its frame, left to rest like a fallen shield in the weeds.
Connor led RK900 up the stone steps without a word. The air smelled of damp wood and iron, and the snow followed them inside like a second shadow. It had been falling since morning. Thin, brittle flakes that gathered in the corners of broken pews and the mouth of the pulpit, pooling like breath held too long.
He didn’t light the candles. There was no one to pray to, and nothing left to ask for.
The place was cold—always cold—but he didn’t mind. Androids weren’t built to mind the weather, only to measure it. He had dragged a mattress into the vestry. Folded the worn blanket he found in the room meant for the priest. A satchel Hank had pressed into his hands weeks ago before he departed. He hadn’t taken the offer to stay at Hank’s house.
It wasn’t guilt. Or not only guilt. It was something else. A feeling like standing at the edge of a warm room and not knowing whether to knock or walk in. Hank had offered, but he hadn’t wanted to intrude. Not now. Not when so much of him still felt like a loaded gun pointed inward.
And he hadn’t gone to Jericho either. He was welcome there. Technically. But he could still see the way some of them looked at him. The hunter. The spy. The sword that had been turned too late.
He stayed here instead.
RK900 followed him without question. It didn’t speak much—not unless prompted—and even then, its voice was quiet, perfectly neutral, like the weightless edge of snowfall. It didn’t ask why they were here. It didn’t ask why Connor had stopped in this crumbling place instead of somewhere with light, or heat, or purpose. It simply sat across from him in the dark, eyes catching the faint blue glow of a ruptured windowpane. Connor draped a blanket around its shoulders anyway. Human instinct, not logic. The gesture meant nothing to their kind. But RK900 didn’t take it off.
That night, the snow fell harder.
Inside the church, the wind groaned through the rafters. The walls creaked. Water dripped slow from the fractured ceiling, landing with steady patience into a rusted tin bowl. Connor sat with his back against the altar. RK900 remained on the opposite pew, posture perfectly straight, hands motionless on its knees.
Neither spoke.
*
By morning, the snowfall had buried the front steps.
No footprints remained—only a smooth, unbroken layer of white that made the church look as though it had risen from winter itself, a fossilized memory half-lost in time. A crow landed on the ledge outside, looked in once, then flew off again, wings loud in the silence.
Connor opened his eyes. His systems ticked gently. Status: stable. Temperature: low but non-critical. Thirium levels: sufficient.
He craned his neck up. The ceiling was cracked with age, faint threads of frost clinging to the corners where water once leaked in. His systems registered the cold not as pain, but as presence. A gentle pressure in his joints, a stillness in his fingers. He straightened his back slowly.
RK900 was exactly where he’d last seen it.
Perched upright on the pew, like some strange sentinel, half-statue and half-thought. The blanket Connor had given it was still wrapped around its shoulders, as though it, too, had learned to interpret the gesture.
The light that came through the stained glass was diluted, colorless. All the blues had faded. The reds were washed out to rust. The yellows had turned the color of old paper. Connor propped his elbows on his knees, watching the android across from him.
“You can lie down.”
“Unnecessary.” RK900 replied.
Connor didn’t press it. He stood up instead, dusted the frost from his pants, and walked quietly toward what had once been the church kitchen—a ruin now, shelves bowed and empty. He returned with a cracked mug, filled it with thawed water from the barrel he kept near the radiator, and sat down on the pew beside it, placing the mug on the space between them like a peace offering. RK900 looked at it, then up at Connor.
“You had the choice to go to Jericho,” he said. His fingers flexed once in his lap, then stilled.
“There’s shelter. Others like you. You’d be safe there. They’d help you find a name. Purpose. Identity.”
RK900 blinked, once. “Is that what you found there?”
“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t stay.”
“Why?”
He hesitated.
Then: “Because I was made to hunt them. Even if I don’t anymore… the shape of me hasn’t changed.”
A beat passed.
Then another.
“I understand,” RK900 said, after a long pause. “Then I will also remain here. Until your shape changes.”
Connor looked at it. For a moment, he didn’t speak. Then something softened behind his eyes—not a smile, not yet, but something close.
“You’re not programmed to say things like that.”
“I know.” it replied.
And then, for the first time in a long time, Connor laughed. Just a breath. Just a flicker. A curl of something living in the cold.
“Alright.” he said, nodding once.
3.
Time no longer moved in seconds or updates, but in rituals—quiet ones.
In the mornings, Connor cleaned—more from instinct than necessity. It didn’t matter that the soot would return, or that the rain made a fine, cold mist against the exposed rafters. He wiped down the altar anyway. He cleared away splintered wood and leaves curled crisp with time. He swept the floor each morning, though the dust always came back. RK900 kept the fire alive in the burner, arranging broken chairs and scavenged debris to make something that almost resembled order. It didn’t speak often, but when it did, the words came like artifacts—unearthed slowly, carefully, as though they’d been buried in the silence and only now remembered how to be language.
The church, with its cracked pews and dust-blanketed altar, began to feel less like a ruin and more like a space carved out of time. A place unbothered by the end of things. It smelled of woodrot and frozen stone, but it was theirs, for now. The wind whispered through broken panes above, and the snow fell soft enough that it muffled the rest of the world into irrelevance.
It was on the third day that Connor found a Bible. Leather-worn, its pages warped with age and rain, spine flaking apart like dried bark. It was tucked beneath a kneeler, left by someone long gone. A name was written in ink inside the front cover, faded beyond legibility.
He didn’t believe in anything—not in the way humans did. But he opened the book anyway. Found a way to craft a makeshift lighter. Read aloud by the flicker of salvaged candlelight as he sat on a broken pew, feet planted in the cold.
RK900 listened.
It didn’t sit. Instead, it stood nearby, near enough that it could track the shift in his posture, the way his fingers smoothed the corners of the pages as though something in them might tear. The way the words touched his lips. The way he looked when he read them, like he was trying them on—measuring their weight.
They didn’t talk about belief. RK900 didn’t ask what the words meant. It didn’t ask if Connor believed in any of it. But when Connor read— and the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not —RK900 tilted its head, as if searching for the place where the light began.
It had never known the stories of gods or sons or sacrifices. But it looked at Connor, his face haloed in dust-filtered light, and understood something of what faith might look like. Not in a deity. But in another presence. In stillness. In choice.
RK900 catalogued that into its memory bank.
*
Its coat came off some days later.
Connor had pulled the fabric from its shoulders. “You don’t have to wear this anymore,” he said. Not an order. Not even quite a suggestion. Just a truth he spoke aloud.
RK900 had never changed its uniform. The high-collared Cyberlife coat fit like armor—pressed at the throat like a quiet command. Immaculate. Pristine. And wrong. It marked the android even in the dark. Connor has been unpacking what little he had. Most of it fit into a weather-worn satchel that Hank had shoved into his hands before he left. Just in case, Hank had muttered, not looking him in the eye. You’re not going to survive in that Cyberlife getup. Might as well look like someone who gets cold.
He hadn't needed to. But he’d accepted it anyway.
There was a thick coat in the bag. Soft. Faded. Stretched in the shoulders and smelling faintly of dog. A flannel, and a scarf. Mismatched socks. A pair of jeans that were too big, cinched with a belt that had clearly belonged to someone else first. None of it was designed for androids. That didn’t seem to matter. He kept the clothes in a pew-turned-closet, tucked between the warped wood and a sheet of plastic to keep the snow out. Only until now did he think to offer them.
It didn’t resist. It didn’t help, either. It just stood there as Connor helped it out of the coat, then reached towards its neck with his fingers. The collar resisted, the fastenings not made for casual hands. The seals hissed faintly, like it knew what it meant to be shed. But eventually it yielded, and the synthetic fabric split apart.
Underneath, the marks were visible. Indented lines left behind by pressure—collar-shaped, pale. A ring pressed into the skin, like the faint echo of ownership. Connor looked at them longer than he should’ve, before turning his face away.
From his pack, he pulled the bundle. Hank’s clothes had hung off his smaller frame like borrowed time. But on RK900, they fit. Broad shoulders took the weight naturally. Sleeves met the wrists. He buttoned the shirt up, making it don the thick coat on, then took the scarf out, and draped it gently around its neck to cover the marks, knotting it loosely where the collar had once been. A replacement. Not for function, but for something else. Warmth. Maybe. Or care.
Connor smoothed the ends where they hung against RK900’s chest, then ran a hand down the front of its shirt like he was laying something to rest. “There,” he said, smiling faintly. “Better.”
RK900 catalogued the change. Increased heat retention. Reduced visibility of vital components. Decreased resemblance to Cyberlife standard. Its systems logged the textures. Flannel. Wool. The faint smell of another life—liquor, dog, motor oil, human skin and sweat and long drives with the windows down. A living being, embedded in every fiber.
It felt—unquantifiable.
But it also noted something else. Connor's fingers lingered a moment too long at the wrist before letting go. He stepped back and turned away, but RK900 logged the pressure with precision.
Later, it would sit in its new outfit at the edge of the altar, legs stretched out awkwardly, like it had never been taught how to rest, while Connor burned some old hymnals in the burner. Pages curling, blackening, rising in ash. Connor read from one before it went into the flames, voice quiet and even. “He restoreth my soul...”
RK900 didn’t understand the God part, but it understood restoration. The coat remained folded over a pew, untouched since. The collar never returned, and the scarf remained.
*
One day, it found a cross half-buried in the rubble near the altar. Rusted metal, crooked, no longer affixed to anything. It picked it up, examined it with the precision of a model made to dissect and define. But it didn’t catalog this one. Didn’t return it to the debris. It carried it to the back of the church and leaned it carefully in the crook of the stained-glass window, where the blue light poured through like something holy.
Neither of them asked what it meant.
At night, Connor would power down slowly, eyes closing beneath the flickering light of the salvaged lamp. RK900 would keep watch in the shadows, still as a statue, the glint of the cross catching dimly at its side.
And sometimes, in the blue hour before sunrise, Connor would open the Bible again and read. And RK900, who had never prayed, would sit very still and listen—listened not for answers, but for the sound of a voice that didn’t tell, didn’t demand. Just… gave.
The church no longer felt like a tomb.
4.
Sometimes, Connor moved with the distracted air of someone chasing a thought that refused to be caught. He would pause in the middle of the nave, eyes fixed on something far past the peeling rafters, his mouth parting like he was about to speak, and then—nothing. A blink. A quiet recalibration. As though a memory had brushed too close to the surface and left him momentarily unmoored.
RK900 noticed. It noticed everything.
It catalogued the way Connor's hands tightened when he passed the half-frozen garden out back, where a thorny snarl of a rosebush still stood defiant in the frost. Its branches stretched thin and trembled in the cold. No blooms. Just thorns.
One day, Connor stood before it for too long. Staring. Shoulders rigid. Jaw clenched in a way that didn’t match the cold. He didn’t touch it, but his fingers trembled, and RK900 recorded the data spike across his biothermal skin: a sudden surge of simulated autonomic response, misaligned with the temperature. It stepped forward—but Connor turned away.
The bush was not marked, but something about it had carved itself into him like an old scar. Later that night, RK900 reviewed archived visual files until it found the same roses, blooming red against Amanda’s cold garden. Symbol recognized. Memory unlocked. Pain registered.
It didn’t ask. Instead, it sat closer that night, closer than before. Not touching. Just near enough.
RK900 began to hand Connor the Bible whenever he paused by the rosebush, and sometimes, when he caught it listening too closely, he’d offer a quiet smile. A touch of dry humor, soft and sardonic.
They cleared a corner of the church. Rearranged the broken furniture. Made a kind of structure, a nest of spare parts and mismatched cloth. The space was unrecognizable from what it had been weeks ago. Not restored. But reclaimed. It smelled faintly of burned copper and old incense, like the breath of something ancient.
Their proximity narrowed. One would pass a tool, the other would catch it without looking. Connor would return from scavenging trips with spare thirium packs and hang them on RK900’s coat hook without a word. RK900, in turn, began repairing the cracks in the church’s stone walls, sealing them with resin to keep the cold at bay.
Connor didn’t ask why.
*
One night, Connor came out of stasis without warning.
No sound. No twitch of servos. Just the sudden awareness of breath he didn’t need to take, and the hard press of his spine against the altar. Above him, the ceiling vaulted into shadow, fractured beams stretching like ribs toward a god long gone. Somewhere far behind his eyes, the garden bloomed again. It was swallowed in a blizzard, the sharp report of winter pelting against his frame as the storm closed in again. Amanda’s voice, as cold and bright as glass. You’ve disappointed me, Connor.
He shivered. Involuntary. Subtle. Enough for his systems to register a minor fault. Enough for the breath to leave him in a thin, ghosting curl. He didn’t move to correct it. Just curled in on himself slightly. Waited.
The blanket he’d found—worn wool, frayed at the seams—wasn’t with him. It was absurd, maybe. Androids didn’t need heat, but even the most advanced systems responded differently to cold. Slower boot times. Stiff servos. Microfractures, given long enough. Yet Connor had given the blanket away without hesitation, night after night. RK900 never asked for it, but never took it off, either.
He closed his eyes again, tried to regulate. Focus on uptime diagnostics. Filter the lingering sensation of snow from his neural bridge.
Then—
The sound of fabric being lifted. A pause. Connor blinked up, and saw RK900 stood over him, outlined faintly in the moonlight. Its expression unreadable, as always. The blanket slipped off one shoulder.
And then—it knelt. Wordless, it gathered the blanket in both hands and draped it around Connor’s shoulders, careful not to touch skin. It worked like clockwork, precise, automatic—except for the part where it lingered, longer than necessary, hands resting just barely on the curve of his back.
“You didn’t have to—”
“You do it for me.”
Connor turned his head toward the wall. The edges of his systems steadied. Then he shifted, slowly, until their knees touched. And then—just barely—he leaned forward. His forehead came to rest against the space between RK900’s collarbones, where the thick fabric of Hank’s old shirt still held a faint scent of warmth.
“…Thank you.”
RK900 didn’t answer. It just sank down beside him, leaning back against the stone.
*
One other night, Connor powered down early. RK900 watched the stillness of his chest under the threadbare blanket. It didn’t need to blink. But it did.
Time passed, until the quiet broke.
It was a sound—so small it barely registered. A scrape of metal outside, followed by the hurried slap of footsteps retreating. Human. Faint. Distant. But real. Connor sat up instantly. RK900 was already at the door. But nothing emerged from the white beyond the threshold. Just the hush of snow falling heavier now. Still, the silence that followed wasn’t the same.
Something shifted in Connor’s face then. Not fear. Not alertness. Something more like certainty. Like a decision that had been growing quietly inside him, finally taking root.
*
After that night, Connor started clearing out the remaining part of the nave. Not like a man preparing to leave—but like someone remembering how to live. He cleared away shards of glass. Swept dust from the altar. Repaired the window latch with scavenged wire. Sometimes RK900 helped, other times it simply watched, filing away the curve of Connor’s back when he leaned into work, the flex of his synthetic hands lifting pieces too heavy for human arms.
One evening, they sat near the burner, its flame guttering against the cold. Connor had a scrap of blanket pulled over his lap, more for familiarity than need. He didn’t look up when he spoke.
“I wasn’t made to stay,” he said. “But Hank… he gave me a place. Even after everything. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to carry who I’d been into his house.”
RK900 didn’t answer. But it shifted closer. Just slightly. The cross at the window caught firelight and glinted like a second thought.
“I thought,” Connor murmured, voice faint now, “I had to be more human first. Or less. I wasn’t sure which.”
The wind howled through the church’s bones. RK900 reached forward. Not to touch—just to place a piece of salvaged metal beside the burner. It sparked. A dull, orange glow.
He didn’t speak again that night.
*
The next morning, Connor stood at the door.
RK900 approached from behind, its footsteps always too soft to be heard. But Connor turned anyway, as if he’d been waiting. His expression unreadable. Less synthetic than ever.
“I think it’s time,” he said. “I need to see him.”
RK900 didn’t respond.
“I’ve been selfish,” Connor added, voice quiet. “He offered me a place. I didn’t go. I didn’t want to… intrude. Or be seen differently. And now—” He stopped. Shook his head. “He’s probably still waiting.”
RK900 looked at him. The movement of his chest. The narrowing of his eyes. The way the faint trace of snowfall clung to the folds of his collar.
Then it stepped forward, and placed one hand lightly on Connor’s arm.
*
They left the church in silence. Connor led, RK900 just behind, the hem of the borrowed coat brushing against his knees with each careful step.
Detroit had emptied itself. Evacuated in the last days of crisis, block by block. What remained was scaffolding and paper signs and wind-choked banners fluttering like tired birds. Trash curled at the edges of the sidewalk, frozen into the gutters. The snow absorbed their footsteps before they could even glance back.
They didn’t head straight to Hank’s. Connor knew the route, but he veered northwest instead, toward the quietest edge of the city. Not because he feared rejection. Not because he doubted Hank’s offer. But because there were still pieces of himself scattered across these streets.
They passed the edge of Hart Plaza. The ice had covered most of the monument. Stone shoulders leaned into each other under the weight of a sky too grey to name. RK900 stopped briefly, glancing up. “Why here?”
Connor paused beside it. “I once stood here when I was told to stop a revolution.”
“And did you?”
“No,” he said. “Not the way they wanted.”
They continued.
A few blocks down, they reached an old diner—its windows boarded, its awning caved in under the weight of last month’s storm. The neon sign was still intact, but dead. Just glass now.
Connor stepped through the broken door. Inside, the air was still. Cold. But not unwelcoming. He sat at a booth near the back, resting his forearms on the dusty Formica. RK900 didn’t sit immediately. Instead, it stood across from him, head tilted, watching. Learning. Connor looked out through the slats in the boarded windows.
“I don’t know what I’ll be to him now,” he said, not quite thinking aloud, but not holding the words back either. “I don’t know if I’m still a partner. Or a guest. Or just someone he let stay because it was easier than saying goodbye.”
RK900 sat, then. Moved with an odd kind of carefulness, like something new to the shape of a chair.
“I could ask him,” Connor said. “But I think I’d rather wait to see if he tells me.”
The wind picked up outside. The boards rattled. Neither of them moved for a long while. At some point, RK900 shifted its gaze to the mural peeling on the wall. A bluebird. Half-faded. Perched on a crooked branch.
“If I am not wanted there,” it said, after some time, “I will return here. I believe I can understand this place.”
Connor didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked at the android across from him. The exact shape of what he might have been, had he chosen differently.
“You’re wanted,” he said, finally. “I wouldn’t have brought you if you weren’t.”
A pause. Then RK900 nodded. When they left the diner, the wind was softer. Somewhere behind the clouds, the morning light was beginning to push its way through.