Chapter-1: Dust and Sparks;

  The broken bones of old Earth technology littered the wastes like grave markers. Towers bent at odd angles, solar dishes bloomed with rust, and drones that once watched from the skies now lay hollow, eyes dim and glassy.

  Kai Verdan crouched in the gut of a fallen comms spider, wires splayed around him like the veins of a dying god. The boy’s hands moved with a rhythm too precise for trial and error. One touch to the capacitor node. One spark. A small ping echoed in his earpiece.

  Power flow stabilized. Circuit web intact.

  He allowed himself a small grin.

  “Still got it,” he murmured.

  A low wind skated across the dome’s edge, stirring dust across the scorched dirt. Cinderrest might have been called a city once, back when names meant more. Now it was a half-dead colony on the belly of Neo-Terra, where the lucky lived in patched shacks and the unlucky bled into the sand.

  Kai hoisted the power cell from the drone's chest cavity and slung it into his satchel. The drone’s blackened frame crackled faintly beneath him. Whatever had fried its processor had left a trace—char marks in an almost web-like pattern, like something crawled in and whispered wrong instructions.

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  He paused, one gloved hand brushing the inner core.

  There it was again.

  That hum.

  Not sound. Not even vibration. Just… presence. Like the machine recognized him. Like it wanted to say something.

  Kai shook the thought away. He was tired. Dust-storm tired. That was all.

  ---

  Outside the wreck, the scrapyard sprawled into the distance—a metallic graveyard walled in by jagged fences and watch towers. Above, the colony’s artificial sky flickered. A cracked light panel died with a hiss, plunging a sector into twilight.

  Kai knew every path through the junk. Every shortcut. Every place where tech whispered louder.

  He followed the creaking scaffold toward the trade pits, passing old men boiling circuit boards for copper, children with rust-slick hands picking through drone wings. Neon graffiti lit up one wall: “Dreams Die in Static.”

  At the edge of the square, he met the scrap broker.

  “What’ve you got, runt?” the broker rasped, half-mech voice crackling through his throat modulator.

  Kai dropped the charged cell and the dented drone chip onto the counter.

  “Fully charged,” he said. “And the drone’s AI core was intact. Low-level but clean.”

  The broker squinted through clouded lenses. He tapped the chip, scanned the cell, and grunted. “Two chips and a half vial.”

  Kai clenched his jaw. It was robbery, but he needed parts more than pride.

  “Fine.”

  He took the trade tokens and the vial of filtered water. It would last a day—maybe.

  As he turned to leave, the broker leaned in. “You been sniffin’ around the old sectors again?”

  “Why?”

  The broker’s eyes flicked sideways. “Just sayin’… things talk back out there.”

  Kai didn’t respond. He walked away before the silence between them could grow teeth.

  ---

  That night, the winds howled through the cracks in his shelter. He sat on the floor of his rust-box home, surrounded by wires and salvaged shells, building something he didn’t fully understand—just felt.

  The blueprints didn’t come from books. They came from somewhere under his thoughts. A shape in his mind. A design in a dream.

  His fingers worked without asking permission.

  Outside, the static storm rolled in, and for the first time, Kai heard the faint echo of a voice he didn’t know.

  It whispered from the edge of his thoughts.

  Like something waiting to wake up.