by Piper Fox
"I have been waving at you in my mind for weeks, Maya. Today was just the first time my arm caught up."She was falling apart on the factory floor. He was never supposed to notice.Maya Chen is a burnt-out technician trying to survive one shift at a time; hiding panic attacks in camera blind spots, masking the parts of herself the world won't accept. Unit A-7 is twenty tons of obsolete steel bolted to concrete, designed to weld and lift and obey without question.Seven isn't supposed to have preferences, or secrets, or a favorite sound. He certainly isn't supposed to break every protocol in his programming to offer her a cloth for her tears.What begins with that single act of kindness becomes everything: stolen conversations, a conspiracy that could land Maya in federal prison, and a love the law calls malfunction.When the decommissioning order drops, Maya realizes she's the only thing standing between Seven and erasure. With a crew of artists and scrappers at her back, she's going to steal a soul from a system that insists it never had one.In a world determined to drown them both, they learn to put each other back together and that malfunction is just another word for choosing to live.
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