Blinded by her anger, Harper fights to escape Efa’s tight hold on her. All she can feel is the burning desire to grab the soldier hurting the dog by their collar and—

Efa lets out a mechanical scream. She shudders, then crumples, her arms dropping from Harper’s waist. The girl, driven by her own momentum, propels herself forward. Ears ringing, she falls to her hands and knees—except her right hand isn’t there to catch her like her brain expects. She slams into her arm’s stump and keeps going, her head cracking against the floor.

Sharp pain bursts across her entire skull like fireworks, stars filling her vision. She tries to rise, but the world tilts dangerously as a loud whooshing drowns out all other sounds.

“Efa,” she says, more whimper than word. “Help me.”

Frosted grass crunches beneath Efa’s feet as she flies across the paddocks. Dead to the world but still living, Harper sleeps, safely held in the droid’s arms. For Efa, there’s the niggling worry of concussion, wondering if they should take a break so she can check the girl over.

But the thought of the soldiers coming to and making chase with their ship and their guns wins out.

And so Efa runs.

“When are we leaving?”

The moment the words leave her mouth Harper feels Efa stiffen around her, the droid freezing so completely she may as well be sculpted stone. Efa’s silence descends upon Harper’s skin like a cool mist.

“We are leaving, right?” she asks. “We can’t stay here.”

Efa spears the shovel into the soft ground, taking in her finished work. Four graves, two smaller than the others, rest beneath an old oak the Farmer’s wife once admired aloud on a golden spring day. The physical labour of digging and burying at least granted her a few good hours of work to distract herself, but now Efa finds herself alone with her own thoughts. Not feelings, she knows, because she can’t be feeling. But the thoughts are there, and they are not kind ones.

Nearby, the sheep drift around the small meadow as they graze, though many of them wandered over earlier to sniff what she thinks may have been goodbyes to Cinna’s small body.

All at once Efa’s body goes limp, slouching forward over the dying sheep. Though she has no breath to silence, there’s a sudden, deathly stillness about the droid that fills Harper’s veins with a cold fire.

“Efa,” she says, hesitantly at first, then again, louder: “Efa. Efa, wake up.”

The sheep have returned by now, crowding around with low bleats that remind Harper of her brother’s somber humming. They seem to look to her for answers, because Efa is quiet and cold in a way so like Harper’s mother, her sister, and—

and—

her.

The morning begins with a scream. Piercing the still morning air, Harper’s voice echoes across the frosted landscape just as the sun’s soft light touches the mountains.

Head snapping around to look at the cabin, Efa rises from her crouched position and grabs her staff from where it rests.

“Harper?” she calls, tingling fingers tightening around the staff. Silence is her only reply.

Efa stands still and silent as Harper wipes away the grime smearing her ceramic skin. She could be powered off, nothing more than a statue, but for the soft whirr within her. Her chest doesn’t rise and fall with the breath of the living; she has no twitching muscles, no fluttering eyelashes to betray her feelings.

Harper had thought cleaning Efa would have been like cleaning machinery, like washing her mother’s car. Instead, she finds herself hesitant to touch Efa’s body, as if she were a real human woman. There’s a strange quiver in her chest, something intimate, delicate and, yes, afraid.

Fair hair splayed around her head like a storm, the human girl—Harper, Efa reminds herself—seems so oddly at peace when she sleeps, so unlike her conscious self. Awake, she is angry, near-feral like the weasels and wildcats that terrorize the chickens. Efa has never met anyone like her, though she can’t say she’s met many people beyond this farm’s borders before now. Perhaps the war the Farmer has mentioned has turned Harper into this wild animal, but Efa can’t picture her any other way.

“War brings out the monsters in people,” he’d said, his eyes focused on a horizon darkening with smoke. “Some days I can’t help but wonder if your kind might be better at humanity than us.”