The Truth in Static

It happened in the Northern Passage. He met a child named Anna. She did not look at his crossbow. She looked at the gears spinning in his torso. She listened to the ticking of his life.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out something impossible. A flower. A Cosmos Bipinnatus, grown in a pot of scavenged soil. It was useless. It fed no one. It cured nothing. It was pure, defiant beauty.

"Because you remember the dead," Anna said. "But someone has to remember the living."