Dawn, a hesitant thief, tiptoed across the city’s flayed corpse. Elara “Glitch” Reyes, queen of the scrap heap and princess of the boneyard, felt its chill creep beneath her ragged leather jacket. The sky swirled with a tapestry of ash and dust, the sun a tarnished coin peeking through the tattered shroud.

Below, the city lay sprawled, a leviathan devoured by time and the Sundering’s ravenous maw. Towers, once monuments to hubris, stood as rusted teeth in a skull of concrete and steel. Shard-glass windows, vacant eyes, stared sightlessly at the sky, reflecting the sun’s jaundiced gaze. Vines clawed their way through the cracked asphalt, reclaiming the concrete jungle for the whispering wilderness, drawing water from the old sewers of this metropolis. 

Elara “Glitch” Reyes, a silhouette scraped from the city’s dust and the Sundering’s fury, perched atop the rusted vertebrae of a fallen monorail. Her frame, taut and wiry as desert vine, was draped in a patchwork of leather and salvaged canvas, torn from countless scrambles through the city’s skeletal embrace. Beneath the grime, brilliant green eyes, perpetually flecked with flecks of copper and solder, scanned the horizon, ever watchful. The cities weren’t safe.

Her fingers, quick and precise as the wind across the sand, danced a practised ballet across the exposed circuits of a downed drone. Its armoured plates were rusted, and the once cyclopaedic camera eye gazed vacantly shattered. 

His nimble fingers tried to coax life into the fallen soldier of war. The circuit board erupted in a small shower of sparks as she ran voltage through the system, followed by the smell of burning plastic. Glitch licked her lips, chapped and perpetually stained with the metallic tang of solder. She murmured forgotten lullabies, coaxing the ghost of sentience back into the drone’s vacant eye.

The drone twitched its skeletal wings, servos groaning in protest. It lifted, a wobbly Icarus defying the gravity of its decay, its single, cyclopean eye blinking at the bruised dawn. Glitch grinned. Then, the drone groaned and fell back to the dust with a crash. 

“Wrench it to hell!” The young woman spat. She knelt back by the broken shell. It was gone. In the twenty-two years of her life, she only managed to bring two old machines back to life. Today, it wasn’t going to be three. The machine lay belly-up on the cracked asphalt, a metal Icarus betrayed by its wings. Glitch perched on its lifeless carapace, nursing a dented canteen that held the day’s ration of precious water. The sun, a bloated ember trapped in the bruised sky, bled heat onto the city’s broken shell.

Even in the desolation, the majesty of the past refused to be entirely erased. Towers, once monuments to hubris, now stood as shattered teeth in a skull of concrete and steel. Shard-glass windows reflected the sun’s jaundiced gaze in a thousand fractured nightmares. Jagged shadows, ghosts of buildings long devoured by the Sundering’s hungry maw, stretched across the cracked earth, monuments to a world drowned in fire.

The city whispered its history in the rasping wind. Twisted metal and blackened bones of forgotten vehicles littered the avenues, remnants of a panicked exodus swallowed by the storm. A skeletal bus, its roof peeled back like a sardine can, stood frozen in eternal gridlock. There, the charred husk of a supermarket gaped like a monstrous maw, and shelves were stripped bare by scavengers and time.

A shiver crawled down Glitch’s spine. Cities, even these ghosts of grandeur, were magnets for trouble. Feral and desperate scavenger packs roamed the concrete canyons, seeking whatever they could find to survive. They worshipped at the altars of decay, hunting the living scraps left behind by the Sundering’s fiery breath.

She scanned the horizon, her eyes narrowed against the glare. In the distance, a plume of smoke, a bruised finger pointing to the sky, marked the territory of the Razorbacks, a notorious pack known for their rusted blades and even rustier morals. Further off, a glint of sunlight on broken glass betrayed the lookout of the Vultures, scavengers who built their nests in the skeletal towers, preying on the unwary.

Glitch adjusted the scavenged leather harness across her chest, the weight of her tools and trusty blade a comforting hum against her ribs. She wasn’t prey, not today. She pulled out a few wires and valuable parts of the drone and stuffed them into her satchel. 

She rose, her boots crunching on the desiccated earth, and adjusted the scavenged backpack that held her treasures. The drone of flies buzzed around her, which lulled Glitch into a half-dream beneath the sun’s scorching gaze. Her eyelids drooped, and the desolate cityscape shimmered, morphing into a tapestry of memories woven from whispered stories and faded holo-vids. 

She saw her parents, faces etched with lines deeper than the canyons sculpted by erosion, their eyes holding the echo of a vanished time. They were survivors, scientists both, who’d navigated the Sundering’s maelstrom and emerged blinking into this blighted dawn. They spoke of a world drowned in greed, where warnings of a dying planet were tossed aside like rusted gears, where wars ignited like tinder in a parched land. Of cities that choked on their smog, rivers poisoned veins, and forests reduced to pyres.

Their voices, roughened by dust and regret, wove tales of glittering towers that touched the clouds and machines that hummed with the pulse of life. Machines, they said, not as extensions of greed but as tools for harmony, bridges between humanity and the world it so tragically neglected. They taught her their secrets, whispering the language of circuits into her ears, showing her the forgotten poetry etched in the silicon hearts of forgotten devices.

Glitch traced the faint scar on her temple, a whisper of the day she lost her parents. The searing heat, the choking ash, and the screams ripped from throats turned raw. Her parents shielded her from the attack. They saved her, but the fire’s touch left its mark, a constant reminder of their sacrifice and the world they couldn’t rebuild.

A noise jolted her back to the present. Her parent’s voices, faint echoes in the wind, whispered a final truth: “The world may be broken, Glitch, but hope, like a stubborn weed, refuses to be entirely uprooted. Tend it, nurture it, let it bloom even in the cracks of desolation. For in the wasteland, every spark counts, and every story, no matter how fractured, whispers the promise of a new dawn.”

“They were naïve.” Glitch shrugged. Glitch kicked the lifeless drone, its metal carcass groaning like a wounded beast. The sun, a vengeful eye in the ash-choked sky, seemed to leer at her failed repair. With a sigh that tasted of dust and disappointment, she left the fallen machine.

The mournful banshee wind sang through the rusted teeth of collapsed bridges and ripped tattered awnings like ghostly flags. Here and there, remnants of the past poked through the ruin – a shard of mirrored glass reflecting the sun’s distorted gaze, a faded billboard boasting forgotten brands, a half-buried statue, its stone face eroded by fire, time and ash.

Suddenly, a glint of something caught her eye. Amidst the urban decay, a building stood, not entirely fallen, but leaning precariously against the sky. Its scorched and scarred facade still bore a faded inscription: Lockheed Martin. Below, a rusted road sign, half-buried in rubble, displayed a name: North Bethesda, Maryland.

The name stirred something deep within her, a whisper from her parents’ stories about where they worked. A flicker of curiosity, a spark against the wasteland’s suffocating bleakness, ignited in Glitch’s eyes.

She approached the building cautiously, her fingers hovering near the scavenged blade strapped to her chest. The entrance, a gaping maw framed by twisted metal, beckoned with the promise of forgotten secrets. Her breath caught in her throat as she peered inside. The thick and oppressive darkness held the echo of collapsed floors and whispers of machinery long silenced.

But something else drew her gaze, a faint luminescence emanating from the depths. A terminal, half-buried in debris, flickered with an alien glow, its screen displaying cryptic symbols that danced like fireflies in the dark. Glitch felt a tremor of excitement, a tug on the cord of forgotten knowledge. This, she sensed, was more than just another scavenged scrap. This was a whisper from the past, a door creaking open into the lost world of her parents’ stories.

A skeletal giant gnawed by time and the Sundering’s fire, the Lockheed Martin building loomed before Glitch like a rusted behemoth. Sunlight, filtered through the dust-choked sky, cast long, hungry shadows that stretched across the fractured concrete. The air, thick with the metallic tang of decay, carried the mournful sigh of the wind whispering through shattered windows. But Glitch, queen of the scrap heap, princess of the boneyard, felt only a tremor of excitement thrumming in her veins. 

With a practised eye, she scanned the building’s skeletal frame. Twisted girders jutted like broken bones, offering precarious handholds and catwalks to the nimble. Tenacious and defiant moss had colonized the cracked concrete, its emerald fingers providing fleeting footholds. With a dancer’s grace and a spider’s agility, Glitch began her ascent.

Her boots, whispering secrets to the dust, found purchase on rusted beams and crumbling ledges. Her fingers found anchors in the jagged teeth of decay. She flowed a wisp of shadow against the sun-bleached canvas, defying gravity with each daring leap and silent climb.

Inside, the factory floor sprawled, a cathedral of rust and shadows. Dust motes danced in the fractured shafts of sunlight, like ghosts waltzing to a song of forgotten machines. Rows upon rows of towering monoliths, silent sentinels of a bygone era, stood frozen in time. Glitch’s breath hitched in her throat. These weren’t mere machines but leviathans of steel, war machines sculpted from forgotten dreams.

Once gleaming with lethal intent, their surfaces were now dulled by dust and left to die. Yet, beneath the patina of decay, Glitch sensed a slumbering power, a whisper of potential waiting to be reawakened. She approached one of the machines drawn by an invisible magnetism; she tapped the deactivated controls, tracing forgotten glyphs on cold metal. Nothing. 

A groan abruptly shattered the silence. Disturbed from its slumber, a robotic sentinel stirred within its metal carapace. Its rusted joints creaked like tortured bones, its single eye glowing red. Glitch, a hummingbird dodging a hawk’s talons, danced away from the awakening behemoth. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the factory’s mournful sigh.

The robot lurched forward, its movements ponderous and clumsy yet imbued with terrifying strength. Glitch vaulted over deactivated arms and slid beneath grinding gears as the factory guardian stirred.

Each clang of metal, each hiss of escaping steam, became part of the desperate dance. She scaled the deactivated conveyor belt, her boots kicking up dust motes like startled stars. Beneath her, the giant scanned, searching for the intruder. 

She swung from a hanging chain, a pendulum against the factory’s oppressive embrace. Finally, with a surge of adrenaline and a daring leap, Glitch landed atop the behemoth’s head. Quickly, as the desert wind blew, her fingers danced across the deactivated control panel. The red eye blinked, then faded.

With a groan that echoed through the silent factory, the war machine deactivated, its metallic sigh a concession to Glitch’s daring. She stood atop its dormant form, a small figure silhouetted against the fractured sunlight, her chest heaving, a triumphant grin splitting her dust-smudged face.

“By the sundering!” She gasped as she lowered herself off the beast. It stood twenty feet tall, and a giant automated mecha on each arm were two massive cannons. 

As the dust settled, revealing the vast hall still filled with slumbering giants, Glitch felt a surge of fear. So, this was how the war had been—not humans fighting or the shells of aerial drones she encountered, but giants capable of levelling buildings at a glance. 

A prickling unease crawled down Glitch’s spine as she delved deeper into the building. The silence, once oppressive, now felt pregnant with a different kind of tension. There were no echoes of scavengers, no telltale signs of past plunder. This pristine tomb of technology, untouched by the usual vultures of the wasteland, gnawed at the edges of her curiosity.

Then, a glint of bone, bleached white by the sun filtering through cracks, snagged her eye. Crouching, she brushed away the dust, revealing a skull, its vacant sockets staring sightlessly at the sky. This wasn’t just a forgotten factory; it was a graveyard.

Further down the corridor, more bones materialized, forming grim constellations on the dusty floor. Huddled together in macabre tableaux, their silent screams echoed in the cavernous halls, this was what was left of people who had ventured here before. 

Glitch’s throat tightened. She moved down the corridors. The air here clung with the cloying scent of mildew and decay. Sunlight strained through a veil of dust and shattered windows, cast long, skeletal fingers across the abandoned desks and overturned chairs. Here, even the silence screamed, amplified by the echoing creak of Glitch’s boots on the cracked tile floor.

Suddenly, a metallic groan resonated, a death rattle clawing its way from the shadows. Glitch pressed herself against the wall, her breath shallow in her dust-choked throat. A Sentinel, a smaller model of the leviathans on the factory floor, lumbered past, its rusted joints protesting with each agonizing step. Its single eye, a dull red ember in the gloom, swept the room with practised precision.

The Sentinel was ancient; its once pristine armour was now a patchwork of dents and gouges. Once smooth and predatory, its gait was now a jerky shuffle, each movement punctuated by the groan of tortured gears and the hiss of grinding metal. Yet, in its decrepitude, it held a chilling efficiency. Its aged sensors, though dulled, were still keen enough to sniff out life in the dead air.

Glitch held her breath, her heart hammering inside her ribs like a trapped bird. Her fingers were clenched white-knuckled against the rough wall, itching to draw her blade. If the Sentinel noticed her, a single whirring pulse of its rifle would end her as the other poor souls entered this building.

The metallic groan of the Sentinel snagged at Glitch’s fraying nerves, dragging her back to a day choked with dust and screams. She was ten, a skinny wisp amidst the chaos, clinging to her father’s hand as her home had been destroyed. The air, thick with the tang of ozone and burning metal, tasted of panic and ruin.

Then, the flash. A crimson bloom against the dusty sky, a malevolent eye-opening in the smoke. A raider with a laser rifle spitting tongues of molten death as her life was ripped apart. The shriek of metal vaporizing, the sickening thud of bodies crumpling. Her father, shielding her with his own flesh, a crumpled marionette against the storm of fire.

The memory, a shard of obsidian lodged in her soul, cut through the present with chilling clarity. She saw her mother’s eyes, wide with a terror that mirrored her own, the crimson bloom reflected in their depths. She felt the searing heat licking at her skin, the choking taste of ash in her throat. Hearing the screams, a chorus of agony swallowed by the city’s death rattle.

The echo of the Sentinel’s groan morphed into the rhythmic pulse of the laser rifle, and each groan a beat in the macabre drumbeat of her memory. Her fingers, phantom sensations tingling along her spine, itched to be out of here.

Taking a ragged breath, Glitch pushed the memory down, burying it back under the layers of her survivor’s shell. The past, a hungry beast, could wait. For now, the present gnawed at her. The Sentinel’s rusty shadow still lumbered through the office.

The minutes stretched into an eternity, each tick of her internal clock amplified by the silence. The Sentinel’s red eye scanned the gloom, which seemed to linger on her hiding place, its dull glow boring into her soul. Her muscles screamed in protest, her legs threatening to buckle under her.

Then, with a final groan, the Sentinel lurched on, its rusted form disappearing into the office maze. Glitch gasped, the air rasping in her lungs like sandpaper. Her legs gave way, and she slumped against the wall, her body trembling with a cocktail of fear and adrenaline.

This forgotten corner of the factory wasn’t just a museum of technology but a mausoleum of forgotten nightmares, patrolled by ghosts of steel and oil, the army of a war that ended half a century ago. 

As the guardian continued its route, Glitch spotted a metal door, slightly ajar. A soft blue light beckoned. She pushed it open, gritting her teeth as the rusty hinges groaned like tortured souls, worried the sound would draw back the guard. She waited for a long moment, listening. There was nothing, so she slipped inside. 

Inside, a sterile chill washed over her. The room, once a medical bay, judging by the gleaming chrome tables and flickering monitors, was somehow still powered. A skeletal figure, strapped to a medical bed, its ribs stark against the emaciated flesh, held her gaze. Tubes, like metallic vines, snaked from its desiccated limbs, disappearing into the inert form of a medical robot beside it.

The robot, its sleek form dented and scratched, bore a faded inscription on its chest: “Hope.” A cruel irony, Glitch thought, bile rising in her throat. Hope, its circuits cold and lifeless, stood vigil over a body.

The skeleton, its skull tilted at an unnatural angle. A soldier, perhaps, from the war that birthed the Sundering, his limbs torn away, kept alive by a machine that eventually succumbed to its own mortality. Glitch left the dead soldier and his nurse and cautiously continued through the building.

Glitch navigated the executive maze with the wary grace of a desert cat, each step calculated, each shadow a potential hiding place. The Sentinel’s metallic echo still thrummed in her bones as she worked across the abandoned desks and overturned chairs. 

She walked through the halls. There was more tech in this place than she had seen in her life! Half-buried terminals nestled amidst the debris of a laboratory, machines she couldn’t fathom lay dormant. Dust, like an encroaching desert, had claimed most of the room, burying beakers and microscopes under its silent shroud. Yet, amidst the decay, a terminal flickered, a defiant firefly in the gloom.

The scratched and dulled screen displayed a kaleidoscope of cryptic symbols, glyphs of a forgotten language dancing like fireflies trapped in amber. Glitch crouched, brushing away the dust with reverent fingers. 

But the interface, a spiderweb of faded lines and unresponsive buttons, resisted her touch. Keys, crusted with rust, yielded only groans of protest. She watched the screen for a long time as it continued to run numbers and symbols she couldn’t comprehend.

Her fingers tapped across the unresponsive keys, coaxing, cajoling, whispering forgotten languages she gleaned from her parent’s faded holos. Slowly, like a glacier stirred by a dream, the terminal responded. A flicker, a blip, then a hesitant glow that chased away the shadows. The glyphs, once gibberish, coalesced into words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Glitch’s eyes burned as she devoured the final flicker of the terminal’s dying light. Lines and schematics, blueprints for weapons that could crack planets woven from woven from nightmares. The audacity of creation, the hubris of mankind, laid bare in flickering pixels.

And then the final entry: a date etched in digital stone: fifty-two years, seven months, and six days ago. A single, desperate phrase burned across the screen: “What have we done?”

The terminal sighed, its glow collapsing into darkness. Glitch slumped back, the weight of history crushing her chest. The shadows, deeper now, whispered secrets not of hope but of folly. Once a cradle of ingenuity, this laboratory now stood as a mausoleum of ambition, a chilling testament to the day mankind reached too far.

***

Dust devils pirouetted across the cracked asphalt, swirling around the remains of monuments that once whispered of a nation’s power. Ash, his weathered face etched with the harsh lines of survival, navigated the ruins of Washington, D.C., with the practised ease of a desert nomad. Memories, fragmented and sepia-toned, flickered in his mind’s eye – a wide-eyed boy in a crisp uniform, saluting a flag that no longer fluttered, his laughter echoing through the marble halls of the Capitol, now a mausoleum to a fallen era.

He paused by a rusted hulk of a car, its chrome hood peeling like sunburnt skin. Glinting in the dying sun, a scavenged blade lay abandoned on the passenger seat. He picked it up, its worn handle familiar under his calloused fingers. He flipped it over a couple of times. It was a good blade. 

He continued his trek through the pulverized remnants of civilization. He checked a boarded-up shop, his fingers brushing against the faded lettering: “Capitol Books & Curios.” Inside, dust motes danced in the stale air, settling on shelves stripped bare by generations of scavengers. After a day and night of travel, he had hoped to find some food and some water. 

Then, a flicker on the horizon. A distant figure, silhouetted against the skyline, scanned the wasteland with wary eyes. Ash crouched behind a crumbling wall. Scavenger is likely another soul eeking out a meagre existence in the ruins. He knew their ways – the wary glances, the constant vigilance, the desperate hunger for scraps in a world stripped bare.

It could be worse. It could be a member of a gang. He resumed his walk, keeping a safe distance. But then, a new sound pierced the silence – a metallic groan, a rhythmic clang that echoed through the cracked concrete under his boots. It wasn’t the usual symphony of wind and dust; this was something different, something alive in the city’s slumbering heart.

Curiosity tugged him closer. He rounded a corner and, in the distance, the silhouette of the old Lockheed Martin factory. One of the many wings that had brought this new world. Ash knew that factory, not from the tales, but first-hand from the faded memories of his soldier days. He could hear the clanging metal in the distance. 

He had to get closer, to see, to understand. But as he crept towards the factory, another sound reached his ears – the guttural shouts, the clang of weapons and the stamping of boots. He looked north and could see several armed scavengers approaching the factory cautiously.

Ash crested a rise of rubble, the desiccated bones of a pre-Sundering billboard jutting out like a crooked rib from the city’s cracked spine. From here, the old Lockheed Martin factory sprawled in all its rusted majesty. 

A figure emerged at the base of the factory’s maw, staggering under the weight of an incongruous burden. A girl, barely more than a wisp against the factory’s hulking form, struggled with armfuls of scavenged tech—circuits and wires snaking like metallic vines. Her dust-coated clothes hung loose on a frame barely thicker than a scavenger’s blade, her dark hair matted against a sweat-streaked forehead.

Before Ash could call out, adrenaline curdling in his gut, a guttural roar shattered the silence. A gang of raiders materialized from the opposite side, their silhouettes warped by the heat haze, glinting with the promise of violence. They were burdened with blades and firearms. Ash cursed under his breath. This wasn’t just about curiosity anymore; this girl, this unlikely scavenger child, was about to be devoured by wolves.

He shouted, his voice hoarse against the wind, “Hey! Get out of there! Scavengers!”

The girl, startled, whipped around, her emerald eyes flashing suspicion. Her jaw clenched, her fingers tightening around the salvaged tech. “Who are you?” she snarled the word a defensive hiss in the dust-choked air.

“Help!” Ash barked, already drawing his pistol. He was aware he had no bullets, and the worn metal was cool against his palm. “Drop it and run!”

His warning hung in the air, a desperate plea lost in the girl’s distrust. Before he could explain, the scavengers were upon them. 

Spitting on the ground, the girl dropped her scavenged bounty, wires and circuits scattering like startled beetles. She unsheathed two blades in a flash, their edges glinting in the harsh sunlight. 

“Aw hell.” Ash grumbled to himself.