He didn't say "executed." That was the cruelest irony. They couldn't kill her. Her bloodline was too valuable.

She screamed as the metal fused to her nervous system. The last thing she saw before the lid slammed shut was the grey sky.

They cracked it open in a circle of foxfire.

"Where is the Grand Mechanist? I need his heart to restart my own."

The first words she spoke in ten years were not a thank you.

What emerged was not the broken girl they expected.