Nasir felt Laila move. She activated her torch. They looked up together. The sandworm stared down on them with dead eyes. Its head opened then, and the robot crawled in through the hole. Now Nasir could see the sky through the hole in the skull.

“I thought you said you’d talk to them,” Nasir said.

“I did,” the robot said. “But they would not listen.”

They climbed out through the dead sandworm. There were small craters where the UXOs had died. The worm’s long tapered body lay lifeless on the sand. Habib lay in a depression in the sand and the sand was stained red. Nasir ran to him.

Habib moved. He opened his eyes.

“What happened?” he said.

Nasir stared at him helplessly. “It was my fault,” he said.

“It was,” the robot said. It hauled up the golden remains out of the hole. “Let me take a look at him.”

It came and knelt by Habib.

“Lie still,” it said. It worked quickly and without fuss. It neatly cut Habib’s shirt with a finger that turned into a knife. It next applied an improvised tourniquet, and when Habib cried out in pain the robot’s finger turned into a syringe and it injected something into Habib’s arm. Whatever it was, Habib subsided, and soon he was asleep, his chest rising and falling regularly.

The robot straightened.

“I could use a ride back to the city,” it said. It thought a moment. “So could he,” it said, pointing to Habib.

“What are you?” Nasir said.

“I am a robot,” the robot said. “I was made to serve your kind. So did these things, long ago. The worms and Leviathans and rocs, the layers-of-mines and the trackers-of-prey and those-who-deal-death-in-the-night. You do not remember the wars, do you? I suppose to you they may not even have names. These machines you made to fight and kill only ever fought and killed others of their kind in the field of battle. This desert was strewn with destruction and death, but what is death if you are a machine? My kind does not like to think of that time. We live to follow the Way of Robot, to serve. We still serve. But some of us were too good at killing, and others too smart to fight. They are still out there, in the desert, and some of them still fight a war that no longer has any meaning, if it ever had.”

Nasir and Laila moved Habib gingerly, into the back of the car. They got in the car and the robot climbed in and brought its finds with it.

“What is it?” Nasir said. “What was it?”

“Mind your own business,” the robot said.

Nasir started the car.

He drove fast across the dune, back to the city.

7. The Build