by Tim Floreen
I opened my eyes and jumped. I’d drifted closer to Nico as I’d listened, and now my face was just a few inches away from his. I didn’t shy away, though. Neither did he.
“The way I feel about you,” he said. “That’s not simulated.”
“How can you even say that, knowing those feelings must’ve been programmed into you?”
“I don’t see how that makes them any less real.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, though?”
He shook his head. “It just makes me want to say thank you to whoever programmed me this way.”
I dropped my forehead against his and shook my head from side to side. “I don’t know, Nico. Maybe you’re right. Stroud pushed my mom and dad together, and in the end it turned into something real. Maybe this isn’t all that different. But what if you’d been programmed to have feelings for someone else, like—”
“Lee?” He took the back of my head in his hand. “Once again, you’re wasting a perfect opportunity for a kiss.”
He tilted my head upward until our mouths connected. I wrapped my arms around him, and he held me tight too. Gremlin scurried off somewhere, maybe to give us some privacy. Nico’s shirt still hung open, and as my chest pressed against his, I could feel his thrumming through my whole body. All I could think about was how alive he felt.
Next to us on the floor, his puck chimed. “Low battery,” it murmured.
We drew apart. Nico glanced at it. “All that flying through the tunnels must’ve drained it.”
“Can’t you give it a jump?”
He smirked and shook his head. “We should get back to business anyway. Charlotte knows we’re down here. She must’ve sent machines to look for us. It’ll take them a while, but they’ll find us eventually.”
“So what do we do next?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t gotten that far.”
“I guess we can’t stay here trying to dodge Charlotte forever. But if we leave these caves, she’ll pick up your signal again.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem. She might detonate me right away. Or if she still doesn’t want to risk hurting you, at the very least she’ll be able to track our every move. We won’t be safe for long.”
“What do you think she’ll do if she catches up to us?”
“I don’t know. Terminate me probably. Use a different robot to take you hostage and carry out her plan.”
“And this is the leader you trust so completely?”
“She wouldn’t have a choice, Lee,” he retorted, the edge returning to his voice. “She’s fighting for an important cause.”
“The cause.” I slumped back. “Right.”
From behind us came a small clatter. Both of us whirled around. But it was only Gremlin nosing at some rocks on the floor.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s think.”
The two of us sat side by side with our cheeks resting on our fists. I went through the options in my head. If I left the cave on my own, Charlotte wouldn’t be able to track my movements or blow up Nico. Then I could get help. But who could I tell without risking Nico’s safety? Not Dad. Not Stroud. Not one of my Armed Babysitters. That left only one person.
“Dr. Singh,” I said. “Do you have any idea if she’s working with Charlotte?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“The day you first got here, when you were doing your handstand and it looked like the wind might knock you over, she grabbed my wrist and said, ‘Just let him fall.’ ”
“Seriously?”
“Maybe she said it because she’s in on Charlotte’s plot. Maybe she was afraid you’d hurt me. Maybe she was having second thoughts.”
“Maybe.” His eyebrows knitted, he scooped up Gremlin and stroked his orange fur.
“Today I tried asking her about it. She wouldn’t say a word, but I could tell she was holding something back and it was eating her up inside. I’ll bet if she knows you and I are working together now, trying to resolve the situation peacefully, she’ll want to help.”
He screwed up his mouth doubtfully.
“It’s just a feeling I have, Nico. I think we can trust her.”
“The ‘just let him fall’ comment notwithstanding.” He shook his head and set Gremlin on my shoulder. “Still, I suppose it’s our best option.”
“But that still leaves you. You can’t carry me around and hope Charlotte doesn’t blow us both up forever.”
“I know.”
“You have to stay here, Nico.”
He shot to his feet and paced the room some more. “No way. You’re not going out there alone.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said, rising too. “I’ll wear a disguise, keep away from people. I already know how to sneak into Inverness. No one will know I’m back.”
“It won’t be that simple. The son of the president was just abducted, remember? They’ll have the whole place on red alert. Secret Service everywhere. And Charlotte will be looking for you too. I don’t know how many robots she can control at once, but it might be a lot. I can’t just stay down here while you’re up there risking your life.” He turned to me, his eyes incandescent in the puck’s low light. “Look, now that I’m off the network, there might be a way to get this bomb out of me once and for all. But I’ll need your help.”
25
If I’d stopped right then to think about how fast everything had changed between Nico and me, my brain probably would’ve spun around inside my skull like a gyroscope. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, “Just tell me what to do. Where’s the bomb located?”
He tapped his sternum. “Right here. Embedded next to my central power supply.”
“What about your transmitter? Can we disable that, too, so Charlotte won’t be able to track you when you leave here?”
He shook his head. “It’s too tightly integrated into my other systems.”
I eyed his muscly bare chest, which was now making me sweat in a whole new way. “Is this going to be dangerous?”
“A little, I think.”
“How can a bomb be a little dangerous? Either it blows up or it doesn’t.”
Again he flashed a low-wattage version of the Nico Medina grin. “Good point.”
I loosened my tie and yanked at my collar. “Are we going to need tools?”
He rummaged in his trouser pocket. “I have a pocketknife. That should be all we need.” At some silent command from him, his puck bobbed up from its resting place, flipped over, and hovered above our heads. Nico spread himself out on the floor. His puck’s light blazed down on him like a lamp in an operating room. He unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way. His fingers probed the smooth, firm skin of his torso.
“How do we get in there?” I knelt down next to him. “You don’t have an access panel or something, do you?”
“I wish.” He unfolded the knife. Prickles raced down my spine. “Can you grab my blazer and prop it under my head?” he asked.
I folded the blazer into a bundle while he traced his blade down the center of his chest, plotting its course. What a waste, I thought. That perfect body. Then I instantly felt like a jerk for thinking such a shallow thought.
“Okay,” he said. “Here we go.” The tip of his knife pressed against a point just below his collarbone, dimpling the skin. He stopped. “I just wish you didn’t have to see this.”
I attempted a nonchalant shrug. “I’m a robotics nerd, remember? I love this stuff. A little blood’s no big deal.” (A total lie. My head already felt like it was filled with helium and tied to my body by a string, and his blade hadn’t even penetrated his flesh yet.)
“I didn’t mean it that way. I wish you didn’t have to see me. On the inside. What I really look like.”
“Nico, I’m willing to bet you don’t look nearly as gross on the inside as I do.”
Another joke of mine he failed to laugh at. “But you look human.”
My eyes dropped away from his. I nodded.
His puck chimed again. “Very low battery.”
The thought of plunging back into that suffocating darkness only intensified the dizzy, floaty feeling in my head. Where Nico had pressed the tip of his knife against his flesh a moment ago, a single dark red bead of blood had welled up. He returned his blade to that spot. On my shoulder, Gremlin released a nervous whine. I found Nico’s free hand with mine and squeezed.
As he pressed, the sphere of blood swelled and swelled until it collapsed into a trickle that raced across his chest. He drew the blade along the narrow groove that ran down the center of his torso.
“Does it hurt?” I asked. “Can you feel pain?”
He grunted, which pretty much answered my question. I squeezed his hand again. I thought of Stroud telling his thighbone-ectomy story and then ranting that kids today had it easy by comparison. The next time I saw him, I’d have to ask him if he’d ever had to perform open-heart surgery on himself.
The incision left a smooth seam behind it, with tendrils of blood spilling out and hurrying down on either side. I had to blink my eyes hard and take deep, slow breaths to keep from retching. I didn’t look away, though.
He finished the incision a few inches above his navel. Then he made two horizontal cuts, one at the top, one at the bottom, forming a capital letter I. He put down the knife and disengaged his hand from mine. The tips of his fingers felt along the central seam. Then they dug into the flesh. His face contorted. A soft groan seeped through his closed lips.
“It’ll be over soon,” I said. The words felt silly and stilted and inadequate coming out of my mouth. As someone with limited interpersonal skills, I didn’t excel at this kind of talk.
Grimacing, Nico peeled back the flaps of flesh, their undersides pink and glistening—the “living” part of him, less than a quarter of an inch thick—revealing his artificial pectoral and abdominal muscles. I bent forward, my aversion to blood already giving way to my fascination with anything robotic. Again his insides reminded me of Nevermore. His muscles and hers were made of the same rubbery material. Beneath the translucent, synthetic meat of his chest, I could make out the shadow of his metal rib cage, and beneath that, a fist-size red light throbbed—in rhythm, I realized, with that thrum I’d felt earlier.
Nico gazed at his vivisected torso, his mouth still scrunched shut. With a hiss, his two pectoral muscles split away from each other. His metal rib cage hinged open like a double door. A wave of heat blew outward, searing my face. A dense nest of circuity occupied his central cavity, neatly arranged around the pulsing red light. The thrumming I’d only been able to feel with my hand a few minutes ago had now become audible.
I pointed at the red light. “Your power supply—is it nuclear?”
He nodded.
“Where’s the explosive?”
He indicated a black device about the size of a walnut. It had a small dial on it, like an old-fashioned combination padlock, and from it radiated a profusion of black wires that snaked around his power supply and into his body.
“The explosive itself isn’t all that powerful,” Nico said, “but when it’s triggered, it causes my reactor core to detonate.”
“Nico, are you telling me you’re a nuclear bomb?”
One corner of his mouth curled up. “Only a small one.” He picked up the knife again. “The trick is to disengage the explosive by cutting the wires in the right order.”
“Where do I come in?”
“At the end. You’ll see.”
Nico’s hands hovered above his chest. They didn’t shake—literal nerves of steel were one perk of being a robot, I supposed—but the grimace hadn’t left his face. He drew out the wires and examined them one by one. It was strange: there he lay with his robotic innards exposed and impossible to ignore, but at the same time, seeing him afraid and uncertain made him seem more human than ever. I kept my hand on his shoulder and stayed as still as I could and hoped he couldn’t hear the knocking of my heart.
He settled on a wire. He pulled it taut, put his blade to it, and cut.
We both exhaled.
“Talk to me, Lee.”
“What about?”
“Anything.”
But the only things I could think of to say sounded hollow and stupid. He just wants to hear the sound of your voice, I told myself. String words together. It doesn’t matter which ones. “This has been a weird day.”
“You’re telling me.”
“You scared the hell out of me earlier. When you suddenly turned evil and hauled me all the way up to the mountain? And then you jumped into that chasm without any warning? After I told you about my thing with heights, too.”
“I know. Sorry about that.” Another wire went snap.
“But I realized something while I was plummeting through the air.”
“Funny,” Nico said. “That’s when I do some of my best thinking too.” Snap.
“Two things, actually. First, I realized I didn’t want to die. Remember how I told you I’d always imagined jumping from a high place would make me feel like I was finally free? Well, it didn’t feel that way at all. The whole time, all I could think about was how little the idea of smashing on those rocks appealed to me. I wanted to live. And you know why?”
Nico had stopped cutting wires. The light in the center of his chest threw a pulsing red glow over his face. He shook his head.
“It had to do with the second thing I realized. Before you jumped, you whispered in my ear, ‘Trust me.’ And I realized while we were falling into the chasm that I did. Even though I had no good reason to at that point, even though all the evidence suggested you were a crazy terrorist bent on killing me. That was all you had to say. You had me in your arms, and I knew I’d be okay. And then after we landed and you started running through those tunnels in the dark, I was still scared—freaking out, actually—and confused, but deep down I knew you hadn’t turned on me, not really. And I didn’t want to die, because that would mean I couldn’t be with you anymore.”
“I know how you feel.” Nico drew out another wire and pressed his blade against it. “I don’t want to die either.” He cut.
We didn’t blow up.
“I think being alive is the best thing ever,” he said. “I love reading Shakespeare.” Snap. “I love eating food.” Snap.
“No kidding. You’re lucky you’re a robot, because otherwise you’d weigh about three hundred pounds by now.”
“And I love being with you too, Lee. I don’t want it to stop, any of it. Sometimes I wonder if Charlotte made a mistake when she created me. Like you said before, I don’t exactly have the personality of a suicide bomber.” He sifted his fingers through the nest of wires in his chest. “But maybe she had her reasons.”
Another chime came from his puck. “You have ninety seconds of battery life left.”
“Damn,” Nico said. “Too much talking. But I think we’re almost done.” One last wire went snap. “This is where you come in, Lee. I’m going to shut myself down now.”
My heart lurched into my throat. “What?”
“Only for a minute. When I’m out, you have to turn this dial two clicks to the right, five to the left, and three to the right. You got that?”
“Two right, five left, three right.”
“Then you press this.” He indicated a large translucent button located in the center of his pulsing red heart. “That’ll reactivate me. But you have to move fast, before the light runs out. And don’t remove the bomb from my chest, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Say it one more time.”
“Two right, five left, three right.” Then I blurted, “I love you.”
“I love you too. ‘More than words can wield the matter.’ ” Another grin. Full wattage this time. “That’s Shakespeare, by the way.”
“I figured.”
He settled back, his messy curls spreading out on his makeshift pillow. “Now to sleep. ‘Perchance to dream.’ ”
His eyes closed. The grin faded from his face. The red light in his chest died away, and the thrumming cycled down little by little, leaving only silence. No more mellifluous purr. No rumble of destruction, like at school, either. Just nothing. Focus, I ordered my brain. Pretend you’re working on one of your Creatures. I bent forward, and Nico’s puck bobbed closer. I grabbed the dial and then jerked my hand away again: Nico had forgotten to mention his insides were blisteringly hot. I yanked the sleeve of my shirt down over my fingers and took hold of the dial again. I turned it two clicks to the right.
A sound sliced through the quiet: a skittering of rocks. It seemed to come from the corridor behind me, but in that darkness, I couldn’t see a thing. On my shoulder, Gremlin whined again. The light on Nico’s puck had started to dim. My hand was shaking now, my breath coming in shallow pants. I went slow, counting five clicks to the left one by one.
More noises behind me. I spun around. This time, something penetrated the dense blackness of the corridor: a blue glow. The slender legs of a Spider stepped into view. Its luminous eye peered into the room and fastened on me.
26
I whirled back to Nico, heart galloping. My hand trembled harder than ever. From behind me came a quick, light tapping sound. Gremlin raced down my chest to hide in my blazer pocket. I counted three clicks to the right. The device released a small beep. I reached for the button on Nico’s power supply.
And at the same time, I couldn’t help myself—I stole a glance over my shoulder. The Spider charged toward me. Its blue eye seemed to float in the midst of a whirlwind of flashing silver legs. One of those legs snapped forward. It connected with my stomach. I went flying.
I landed in a heap on the far side of the room. Lying there on my side, my body curled up like a fist, I choked for air. At least the Spider hadn’t killed me, which it could have, easily. Probably it had orders to take me alive. I scrambled to my feet. The robot watched me, its eye tilted at a curious angle. Nico lay just behind, still unconscious, the button in his chest unpushed.