The Scrapwright's Ember

Priya Anand strips dead war machines for scrap, and the war has been very good to her. It ended years ago. Nobody told the veterans. When she cuts a combat chassis out of a crater and it asks her, politely, to stop, she does the sensible thing: hides it in her shop, says nothing, and starts looking for a buyer. Then the chassis remembers. A battle the Union won and buried. An order it refused, and the officer who gave it, who is a colonel now, and who has spent eleven years making sure no machine and no technician could ever say it out loud. Priya has a war machine in her back room, a colonel on her trail, and nowhere left to hide but the road. Ember has a memory that could burn the whole story open. Between the two of them there is exactly one reason to keep running, and it stops being a professional one fast. A woman. A machine. A truth with a very long tail.