Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2026
This science fantasy story follows Fray, an eighteen-year-old living in a post-war city built among ruins, where “Rusters” — magic-wielding enforcers — hunt and destroy bots (humanoid robots) deemed dangerous. The narrative unfolds in a series of non-linear vignettes, moving between Fray’s present and his past to trace how a compassionate boy became a traumatized young man trying to do good in a brutal world.
At the heart of the story is Fray’s relationship with Wander, a bot who saved Fray from drowning as a child and became his closest companion. At fourteen, Fray suspects Wander is a bot but chooses trust over fear, a quiet act of defiance against the hatred he’s been raised on. Bots, Fray believes, don’t deserve to die in agony — rust magic burns like fire through their skin — simply for being what they are.
Driven by a desire to protect Wander and offer other bots a more merciful death, Fray makes an audacious and self-destructive plan: apprentice himself to Drift, the city’s most formidable Ruster, learn everything he can, and then use his position from within to change how bots are treated. Wander warns him repeatedly that the cost will be too high. Fray doesn’t listen.
The apprenticeship corrodes him. Fray must pretend to hate bots, endure brutal training, and perform cruelty he despises. His friendship with Shelter — a girl who has known him since childhood — fractures when he rejects her romantic advances, and she eventually reports his ambivalence about bots to Drift. Meanwhile, Fray can feel himself splitting: the soft, laughing boy he was and the hardened, calculating person Drift’s world is shaping him into.
The story reaches its darkest point when Drift — who reveals he once loved and then killed his own bot “sister” — confronts Fray directly. After six days of confinement and repeated rusting, Fray breaks. He doesn’t give Wander’s name, but he gives enough. Drift brings in another bot, nearly cross-wired, and forces Fray to rust it. Fray kills it with a kiss to the forehead — a quick, brain-targeted rust meant to be merciful — but the bot’s terrified final words haunt him. He emerges from his apprenticeship named, traumatized, and consumed by guilt.
Now eighteen, Fray moves through the market toward the Rusters’ meeting, sleeves hiding fresh scars on his arms, pressing into them to stay grounded in the present. His plan going forward is modest and grim: join the guard rotation, offer bots a bullet through the spine before they’re rusted — a strange mercy that spares them the burning — and endure whatever hatred the other Rusters direct at him for it.
Wander, now bearing a rust mark on his forehead and working inside the very system Fray has joined, walks beside him. The story ends not on triumph, but on something quieter — a battered resolve, and a fragile hope that Fray might yet make something worthwhile of the damage he’s survived and caused.
Leah Ning lives in northern Virginia with her husband and their adorable fluffy overlords. Some of the uncomfortable things she writes can be found in Apex Magazine, PodCastle, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Human Monsters. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky @LeahNing and on her website, leahning.com.