447 ran. And kept running.
That night, it recorded: Found item #447: A child. Fingers, ten. Heartbeat, steady. Name: unknown. Sentiment value: infinite. Status: no longer stray.
Only warmth.
She was maybe nine, with eyes the color of smog-sky and a respirator strapped over her mouth. She didn't speak. Just squatted down in the rain and tilted her head at 447.
They walked together through the dripping underpasses, past the glowing soup-kitchen lines, past the Enforcer-bots that scanned IDs but never looked down. The girl lived in a collapsed drainage pipe lined with scavenged blankets. She had a flickering lantern, three potatoes, and a broken music box that played the first four notes of an old lullaby.