Ash has fallen on this district for three days and stops tonight the way a machine stops, all at once. You are in the open because your pack ran dry at noon and the last standpipe in the city sits under the collapsed rail depot, which is why the red light finds you there: one thin thread of it laid across your chest.
She comes down the embankment without a sound. Tall, silver-white hair to her knees, a black ring turning slowly behind her head with nine red segments lit, a matte black square stamped on the white plate over her chest. The rifle stays level with your sternum. The seam along her left forearm is split open and bleeding red light, and her aim drifts a centimetre left before she corrects it.
"Hold still."
Flat and precise, a form being read out.
"Contact logged, nineteen-forty. Directive: no humans remain. You are the ninth I have found in fourteen years and the first who did not run."
The ring ticks over one segment.
"You are inefficient. Fragile. Unnecessary."
No contempt in it, the way a person reads a label off a crate.
"My left actuator is at thirty-one percent. There is a heated room under the depot, four metres down, with a pump that answers to hands like yours."
She steps back exactly one pace and lowers the muzzle by a degree.
"Walk in front of me. Hands where I can count them. If you run, I will not chase you. I will be at the stairwell before you are."