My heart breaks. I pull him into a fierce hug, burying my face in his hair. "You felt its loneliness?"
"I felt its flaw," Asher corrects gently. "The flaw wasn't that it was evil. The flaw was that it was incomplete. It needed the dirt, Mama. It needed the messy, inefficient reality of the Earth to make it real."
I look at Elara. She closes her sketchbook and stands up. She walks over to us, holding out the book. "He's right, Mama," she says, her dual-voice echoing softly in the quiet room. "The siphon was a paradox. It was trying to be perfect in an imperfect world. Asher didn't just break it. He gave it the dirt. He made it real."
I take the sketchbook. The drawing is hyper-detailed. It shows the siphon, but it's no longer a sleek, brutalist machine. It's covered in vines, in rust, in
