And perhaps that was just how life went.
Out on the Wasteland, Lynn sat in silence and waited, smoking one cigarette after another. No matter how loudly Zuo Zuo cried, he did not move.
Until the minutes and seconds ticked by.
Until the crying gradually faded, then stopped.
Zuo Zuo turned back into his left hand. Only this time, she said nothing more. The moment she became his left hand again, her flesh pierced his arm, riddled with erosion marks, like a lock fastening shut, as though nothing could ever pry her loose.
Lynn raised his hand, looked at his left hand, and suddenly smiled.
"I never said I was going to throw you away."
But Zuo Zuo remained silent.
Yet how could Lynn not understand what she meant? He lifted his head and gazed at the sky, sitting alone beneath the bleak black mist.
"Then let's wait together."
Time flew by.
It was only a few hours, yet it felt as long as several years.
For a moment, Lynn even thought she might not come.
But when Lynn opened his eyes again...
He clearly saw that familiar figure beneath the black mist. Like a reflection on the water, she appeared before him.
She had come after all.
The wind beneath the black mist whipped through the yellow sand and drifting dust.
Just as seven or eight hours earlier, she still inhabited the body Lynn had patched up, as though nothing had changed. She had not recovered the data she had lost. She was still that bewildered member of the Mechanical Race who knew nothing of even the Mechanical Church or the purging of flesh.
But her extraordinarily calm eyes still told him one thing.
She was back.
She stood there, her eyes like an ice field frozen since