The wrench slipped in Katra's hand.
Not because of sweat—her grip was always sure—but because something outside the garage made her flinch. A voice. Low and muttered. The kind of voice that knew it shouldn't be speaking at all.
She turned down the radio. The garage lights hummed. From the cracked window, just beyond the oil-stained tarp that passed for a curtain, voices drifted in like smoke under a door.
"He's not normal. The way he ticks…"
"You mean the sound?"
"Yeah. You stand close and it's like—like a heartbeat. Makes my stomach go sideways. Who the hell ever heard of a ticking tether?"
"False Tether," the other muttered, and then spat. "Makes my skin crawl."
Katra held still.
She knew those voices—neighbors, traders, people who'd passed through her garage for years. People who never looked twice at the machines she rebuilt.
But now, they were looking.
She slid to the side of the window, just enough to peer through the slit. Two women stood by the freight lift, arms folded, their eyes flicking too often toward the garage door. They were pretending not to stare.
No—pretending not to fear.
Behind her, Tock sat on the floor, sorting washers by size. He hadn't looked up. He was humming that sound again—the one she didn't recognize, the one that wasn't music or memory. Just his own rhythm. Quiet, constant.
She stepped back and drew the curtain shut.
People didn't understand what he was. Hell, she didn't understand what he was. But now they'd named him.
Ticking tether.
The words turned over in her chest like a gear grinding where it shouldn't.
"Tock," she said gently. "Lunch break."
He stood smoothly, head tilting in that mechanical mimicry of human gesture. "We don't eat."
"Still good to rest."
They moved into the smaller back room, where the air was warmer and the shelves more cluttered. The silence felt different here. Heavier. Pressurized.
Above the workbench, the old Impala's dashboard hung like a shrine. Its analog clock, fused into place the day the world ended, glowed faintly.
03:48.
She stared at it, throat tightening. That minute—it hadn't always read that. For fifty years it had stood at 03:47. Until the night she pulled breath from gears and called a soul from silence.
And then—just one tick forward.
It hadn't moved since.
Tock looked up at the clock too, his expression unreadable. Then, quietly:
"Am I… wrong?"
The question sat there. Still. Too still.
Katra didn't move. Didn't speak.
She adjusted a coil spring that didn't need adjusting. Reached for a cloth that didn't need cleaning. Tried to quiet the static rising behind her eyes.
But the silence stretched.
Tock didn't break it. He just waited, ticking faintly, like a breath the world had forgotten how to take.
She turned toward him slowly. Sat on the edge of the workbench and met his eyes—eyes that glowed softly, not with heat or light, but presence.
"No," she said at last. Voice rough. Honest. "I don't think you're wrong."
He tilted his head. Waiting.
"I don't know what you are," she continued. "And I don't know how you're even possible. But you feel… real. Solid. Awake. Like you were meant to be."
She looked away, gaze falling on the Impala's dashboard above the bench—on the clock, still stuck at 03:48.
"For a long time, I thought I was the one who was wrong. Everyone else had their clean little lives, their perfect tether loops. Their gifted stillness. And I was just… fixing things that didn't need me."
Her fingers curled around a wrench—not to use it. Just to hold something.
"This world isn't fair, Tock. It's cold. It tells you there's no place for anything that doesn't match the pattern. But maybe it's the pattern that's broken. Not us."
She turned back to him. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"I don't know how to explain what you are. But I know what you're not. You're not a mistake."
Tock didn't move after her words. He just looked at her the way he always did—like she was something sacred, even when she felt broken down to bolts.
Then, softer than ever:
"Then we should go. Before they decide I am."
Tock's words echoed like a dropped bolt on concrete—small, sharp, impossible to ignore.
Katra didn't answer right away.
She looked around the garage—the walls she'd patched, the tools she'd worn down to the grip, the floor stained with the ghosts of a thousand repairs. Every corner carried the shape of her life. This place had been more than shelter. It had been proof that she could still make something useful in a world that no longer needed her.
She'd told herself she was safe here. That this space—unchanged for decades—was a kind of peace.
But it wasn't Tock's peace.
He didn't fit in this silence. His chest ticked like a question. He asked things the machines never asked. He looked at her like he saw things she hadn't shown anyone. He was already moving forward—becoming something else.
And if she wanted to protect him… she'd have to do the one thing this world didn't allow.
Let go.
Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.
"I'm just going to the shop," she said. "I won't be long."
Tock didn't ask to come with her. He just nodded once and turned back to the workbench—sorting bolts again, but slower this time. Like he knew.
She left the garage like a ghost walking out of her own skin.
The streets outside were quiet—too quiet. A stillness she might have ignored, once. But not now.
Now, every flickering relay light, every low hum from a passing drone scratched at the corners of her mind. Harmless things. Normal things. But they hit nerves that had long since rewired themselves to respond to threat.
Katra had always been good at silence.
It was what kept her alive, in the early years after the Ignition. When the world had cracked and the rules rewrote themselves overnight, she'd seen what happened to women who didn't find something to hold onto. Some tether. Some purpose. She hadn't been chosen like the others—hadn't bonded to a machine or found grace in the stillness. She'd just survived.
And survival rewired you.
Paranoia had kept her breathing. Caution had kept her from being erased.
So now, when her gut twisted at the sight of a drone hovering just a little too long, she didn't dismiss it. She catalogued it. Logged it like she used to log engine misfires and fractured belts.
Because instincts don't lie. Not when they've been sharpened by loss.
She passed an alley she used to scavenge through for copper strips—before the patrols started sweeping it clean. Before too many people noticed that untethered didn't mean powerless.
A whisper echoed from behind a closed door:
"False tether…"
It wasn't even said with anger. Just fear.
She quickened her pace. Not because she was sure. But because she wasn't.
That's the part they never tell you, she thought. The worst thing about paranoia is when you can't tell if it's real anymore.
When she reached the back path behind the depot, her breath caught.
Renn's door stood unchanged. The same rusted edges. The same patched frame. Nothing threatening about it.
But her hand hesitated over the knock. Not out of fear—she'd outgrown fear long ago—but because this place had never changed.
And she finally had.
She knocked—two short, one long.
The door buzzed open with that same old half-second delay. Most people wouldn't even notice it, but Katra had rebuilt enough ignition coils in her life to feel the rhythm of things—when they were working, and when they were just holding on.
Inside, the scent of dust and engine oil washed over her. Familiar. Steady. Like walking into the past.
Renn was behind the counter, as always—elbows deep in something brass and beautiful. She didn't look up right away, didn't greet her with words. Just the faint sound of a file against metal, shaping something patient and precise.
Then she looked up.
And paused.
It lasted less than a second—but it was all Katra needed. Renn's eyes, sharp as ever, locked on her. Not on her hands or her posture or the tools strapped to her belt. On her.
And that pause? That was recognition.
She'd seen Katra like this before.
Back when the world had first turned violet. When girls like them were left behind—untethered, uncertain, unwanted. Back when Katra still flinched when someone looked at her too long. Before she'd learned to wrap herself in metal and keep her voice low enough to disappear.
Renn blinked once. The file slowed in her hand.
"You're early," she said, voice flat. Measured. "Didn't think I'd see you 'til end of cycle."
Katra kept her face neutral. "Need a filter bracket. For the lathe."
A beat.
Then: "Mmm," Renn murmured, not moving for the shelf. "And do you want the truth to go with it, or just the part that fits in a bag?"
Katra didn't answer. She didn't need to. They both knew.
"You get much foot traffic lately?" Renn asked, thumbing through a drawer of mismatched parts, voice idle, like she was just filling space.
Katra's eyes narrowed slightly. "Depends what you mean by much."
Renn gave a noncommittal grunt. "Heard there were some... lively conversations down by Sector Eight this morning. Lotta women with not much to do, saying a whole lot of nothing."
She pulled out a bracket and turned it in her hand like it needed close inspection.
"Funny how 'nothing' always finds its way to the right ears."
Katra didn't reply. Just watched her.
Renn didn't meet her gaze. She just placed the bracket on the counter and kept her hands moving.
Katra didn't touch the bracket.
Didn't speak.
She just stared at it, the metal edge catching the violet hue from the shop's grimy window.
Her gut said there was more to Renn's words than idle observation—but she'd lived long enough with suspicion to know not every thread was meant to be pulled. Some things unraveled on their own.
Still, the tension in her chest wouldn't settle. The kind that didn't come from fear. The kind that came from knowing the shape of a moment before it turned.
She exhaled, slow.
"You remember when I brought you that busted wind shear unit?" she asked.
Renn's brow lifted, just a little. "The one half-melted and still humming like it wanted to kill us both?"
Katra gave a faint smile. "That's the one."
"You tried to rebuild it with copper wire and sheer will."
"You told me it'd be good for me," Katra said. "That it didn't matter if it worked."
Renn chuckled—low and warm. "And you said, 'I don't try. I finish.'"
"Damn right I did."
For a moment, they just stood there, the years between them folding in like worn paper. This wasn't how they usually talked. They kept things clean, mechanical. Professional. But under that, they'd built something. A kind of understanding, welded together over decades of unspoken trust.
Now it rose up without needing permission.
"I never said it back then," Katra murmured, voice softer, "but you were the first person who treated me like I could still make something worthwhile. Even when I didn't come with wires in my skin."
Renn didn't smile, but her voice gentled.
"You didn't need wires. You had hands. And fire. That was always enough for me."
The silence that followed wasn't heavy. It settled between them like a blanket—worn, familiar, and warm in its own strange way.
Then Renn reached beneath the counter.
Not for parts.
For a roll of old cloth, creased and stained from too many years being kept out of sight.
She laid it flat between them and unwrapped it—slow, careful, like it mattered.
Inside was a map. Hand-drawn, precise, marked with strange symbols and winding routes that didn't appear on any public grid. Paths carved through forgotten roads and hollow sectors, littered with coded landmarks.
In the bottom corner, Katra saw it—a symbol etched in deep ink.
Not a gear. Not a circuit.
A heartbeat.
Stylized like the pulse line on an old-world monitor—sharp peaks, sudden drops, the unmistakable rhythm of life. The shape the world had forgotten the moment it flatlined.
The Pulse
"I'm not asking for anything," Renn said. "Not trust. Not loyalty. But you should know—some of us never stopped watching. Some of us never stopped hoping."
Katra looked at her, eyes narrowed—not in suspicion, but in something deeper.
"You've been watching me."
Renn met her gaze, steady as ever.
"I've been watching for a sign. And one finally showed up."
Katra didn't speak when Renn rolled the map back up. She didn't have the words for what was rising in her chest—something between fear and momentum. Like standing at the edge of a drop with your foot already in motion.
She tucked the map beneath her coat.
Didn't thank her. Couldn't. Not yet.
But she paused before leaving, one hand resting on the worn edge of the shop door.
"You ever think," she said quietly, "that maybe the reason the world doesn't move anymore is because it's waiting for someone else to?"
Renn didn't answer with words.
Just the faintest nod.
That was enough.
Outside, the violet light had dimmed slightly. Not darker—just older, somehow. Worn at the edges like a photograph left in the sun too long.
Katra walked without urgency, but every step was heavier now.
The Pulse.
She didn't know the name. Didn't know their reach, their numbers, or how long Renn had been watching. But the symbol was burned into her memory—the heartbeat in defiance of the Flatline. A rhythm the world had forgotten.
And now, somehow, she was part of it.
Not by choice. Not yet. But by consequence. By creation.
She reached the alley that led back to her garage, and stopped before stepping through.
There was a weight pressing behind her ribs. Not pain. Not panic. Just... pressure. Like something inside her was stretching into a new shape.
She touched the place where the map pressed against her chest.
Tock, she thought.
He was waiting.