Poor Sakura -

Sakura grabbed her toolbox and Junk, her mother’s photograph pressed against her chest. She ran until her lungs tasted of copper. The boy with the silver arm found her in a drainage pipe, knees tucked to her chin, silent tears carving tracks through the grime on her cheeks. He didn’t speak. He just knelt, removed his own jacket—threadbare, but warm—and wrapped it around her shoulders. Then he placed a paper crane in her palm. This one was different: folded from a page torn from a children’s book, the one about the star that fell in love with a lighthouse.

The cage was a repurposed cargo container, packed with fifty souls. No food. No water. Just the stench of fear and the distant hum of a city that had already forgotten them. In the corner, a little girl—no older than five—was crying for her mother, who had been taken to a different container. Sakura crawled through the packed bodies, her ribs grinding, and reached the child. poor sakura

“Why do you keep giving me these?” she whispered. Sakura grabbed her toolbox and Junk, her mother’s

Sakura was left with a rusted toolbox, a half-broken maintenance drone she called “Junk,” and a single photograph: her mother beneath a real cherry tree, petals like pink snow. He didn’t speak