The shadow crossed the window before Giovanni registered the sound.

He froze mid-motion, his hand suspended above the carburetor. The silhouette was wrong—too angular, too precise. The joints moved with a mechanical fluidity that no human body could replicate. Through the grimy garage window, he caught the glint of what might have been an optical sensor, a bright point of red light sweeping across the glass like a searching eye.

Giovanni's breath caught in his throat, a sensation he hadn't felt in years. Fear. Raw and immediate.

Without thinking, he dropped to a crouch behind the workbench, his knees protesting the sudden movement. The carburetor clattered against the metal surface, a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the suffocating silence that had fallen outside. The sirens had stopped. That was worse somehow than when they were wailing.

The red light swept across the garage again, slower this time. Deliberate. Searching.

Giovanni pressed himself against the underside of the workbench, barely breathing. His mind raced through possibilities with the same methodical precision he applied to engines. A patrol unit. Automated law enforcement, probably. The kind of thing that had been operating in the outer districts for the last five years. But something about the movement pattern was wrong. The sweep was too methodical, too aware. Law enforcement drones moved with programmed efficiency, but this—this moved like it was thinking.

The figure stopped directly outside the window.

Giovanni could see its legs now, if legs was the right word. Articulated metal joints, each one moving with inhuman smoothness. The thing was taller than any human, its frame constructed from what looked like industrial-grade alloy. And it was still. Perfectly, unnaturally still, as if it were processing something.

Processing him, maybe.

The red light intensified, and Giovanni heard the sound of servos whirring, gears shifting. The robot's head—if it had a head—was turning toward the window. Toward the garage door. Toward him.

Giovanni's hand instinctively reached for the wrench at his side. A pathetic gesture, he knew. What good was a wrench against something like that? But his fingers closed around the familiar weight anyway, drawing comfort from the only thing he'd ever truly understood.

The robot moved. Not toward the door, but away, its mechanical gait carrying it past the garage with that same eerie precision. But it didn't leave. Instead, it stopped perhaps thirty feet away, its frame going rigid.

And then it began to malfunction.