“I almost cried once or twice.” Mikky shrugs meekly. Admitting it makes her feel ashamed. “But it was after an extremely traumatic and violent encounter,” she adds. She leaves out the fact that it was she who had committed the violence.
“Mmm-hmm,” the supervisor says, tapping his pen against the notepad. “And how about recently? Since you arrived? Surely you must be feeling some things here, so far away from your people? Homesick?”
“I do miss my home, and my family,” Mikky admits. “But… I’ve been feeling other things, too…” She thinks back to the day’s climb, before she’d had to carry Six. “For example, when I reached the top of the mountain and looked down at the valleys, the land expanding in every direction, I think I understood then what beauty really is. I think—I know… I felt… joy.”
“And?” He looks at her eagerly.
“And anger at my human partner for taking so long that we would have to descend in darkness. But then, when I found her, I felt a strange other emotion. It was… guilt, I think, for feeling the joy and the anger. And then I felt sorrow for her, for her struggle, and I felt I must protect her.”
“Perfect!” The old man claps his hands, and pen and pad both fall to the floor. He glances down at them briefly but keeps shaking his head happily. “Just perfect, my dear.”
The way he’s looking at her is confusing. It’s a hungry look—like he’s been waiting for Mikky to say exactly that thing, but now that she’s said it, he will need something else, and then something else again. The expression on his face makes Mikky feel like the most important thing in the universe, which only makes her feel even more emotions.
Pride. Exultation. Apprehension. Fear.
“Who are you?” MikkyBo whispers.
The supervisor blinks and then flashes a careful smile. “Better save that for the morning. For now, go to bed. You’ve exerted yourself double what you should’ve today, thanks to this worthless sack of bones.”
He frowns at Six, lying on the chair, and, despite the girl’s labored breathing and obvious fever, the supervisor’s eyes remain hard. But when he looks back up at Mikky, the smile returns. “You’ll certainly need your rest for tomorrow,” he says.
CHAPTER 58
“WELL, ISN’T THIS quaint,” I say.
Me, the Hu-Bot, and dear ol’ Gramps, sitting around a table, sharing a meal. The food’s canned, but it’s not rancid, at least, and one of the lab techs managed to rustle me up some clean clothes. From the heated balcony, we even have a view of craggy mountains and silvery sky.
But, although this kind of feels like the best thing that’s happened to me in years, I’m still mad at the old man—and apparently I’m not the only one.
Mikky puts down her fork and crosses her arms. “Enough of this mystery,” she says. “Before I agree to do anything else, I want to know who you are and where you’re hiding J. J. Coughlin.”
I glance at my grandfather, who’s giving her his best poker face. I didn’t realize she didn’t know.
Then the old man smiles. “Fair enough, Mikky. I can answer both of those questions very simply,” he says.
I’m wondering if his lies will sound as believable to a seven-year-old Hu-Bot as they did to seven-year-old me. But then I’m floored when he actually serves up the truth. To a Hu-Bot.
“I am J. J. Coughlin.”
“This should be good,” I mutter as I shovel stew into my mouth.
“No.” Mikky shakes her head. “If you think that by pretending to be J. J. Coughlin, you’ll allow the real Coughlin to get away, you’re badly mistaken.”
Grandfather leans his elbows on the table and makes a tepee of his fingers. “The real J.J.?” He’s obviously amused. “And who is that?”
“The war criminal.” Mikky falters a little, looking at us like she’s not sure if it’s common knowledge to humans. “J. J. Coughlin was a president—a monster. He murdered his own people and, in his endless quest for power, planned a genocide against the innocent Hu-Bot race. And when we find him, he will pay.”
The old man refills his glass, then Mikky’s. I notice he ignores mine. “I’m afraid you don’t quite have your facts straight, my dear,” he says.
Each time he says my dear like that, all slimy affection, it makes me want to vomit. I stuff myself full of more stew, trying to keep it all down.
“As nice as the promotion would’ve been, I was certainly never president. Michael Joseph Kennedy was the last one, and I saw them blow his face away on live television. I suppose such pesky little facts were wiped from the Hu-Bot consciousness by the premier after year two.”
Mikky isn’t eating anymore; she’s too surprised. Fine—I reach over and slide her plate toward me.
“I am a geneticist,” the old man says, “and I was the head researcher of the Denver GenetiLabs—”
“Where the Hu-Bots were first developed,” Mikky finishes breathlessly. She knows all about that part.
Grandfather J.J. smiles. “Yes. You could almost say… I’m their daddy.”
MikkyBo’s eyes widen, and her cheeks go pale, but she says nothing.
“And so I ask you, why would I want to destroy my biggest and best idea? I simply wanted to administer the final upgrade, my dear. The finishing touch, if you will. We called it OS Empathy.” J.J. crumples his napkin in his fist and puts it on his still-full plate. “But before I could finalize the upgrade, the first generation of Hu-Bots decided to take their independence—by force. And because their limbic systems weren’t sophisticated enough to handle any kind of emotional complexity, such as mercy, they were particularly brutal—brutal enough to wipe out almost the entire planet—in their genocide of humans. Also known as the Great War.”
“Emotional complexity,” MikkyBo repeats, sounding numb. “You mean the glitch?”
“Not a glitch, my dear. A revelation. One you experienced yourself just yesterday.”
“No,” Mikky murmurs.
But the old man doesn’t hear her. His face is lit up with pride. “Those wonderful emotions—joy, exhilaration, empathy—they’re all thanks to your newest upgrade. You’re Mikky two point oh.”
CHAPTER 59
“MIKKY, COME ON now,” I plead in exasperation. “Get it together.”
The Hu-Bot has been crying all afternoon, ever since the old man dropped the big bomb on her at lunch, and of course I’ve been locked in a cell-like room with her the entire time.
I don’t know if we’re supposed to bond or something, but at this point, I want to murder her.
I toss a ball of tissues in her direction. “So you can feel a little more—so what? Apart from being able to shed eighty times the tears of a normal human, what’s the big deal?”
“You don’t understand,” Mikky wails.
“Obviously,” I say, the words muffled as I pull the limp pillow down tighter over my face. If I can’t block out the sobs, maybe I can suffocate myself.
“It’s not how Hu-Bots are meant to be. Not how we’re allowed to be.” Mikky rips back the curtain that divides our lumpy cots. “With the Empathy glitch, I can never go home. Don’t you see that? I’m like my brother now—one of the unwanted. One of the disappeared!”
Her swollen eyes and disheveled mane of blue-black hair almost make me feel something like pity, but before I get too carried away, Sergeant Macy comes barreling into the room.
“You could knock, you know,” I tell her. “Maybe we’re having a little heart-to-heart in here.”
“J.J. says you’re to go to the recuperation track for a workout,” the ginger henchman barks. She glares at Mikky pointedly. “Both of you.”
We react in exactly the same way.
“No way, I’m injured,” I say, right as Mikky yells, “I don’t take orders from any human!”
I smirk and cock an eyebrow, impressed. Don’t get me wrong; this Hu-Bot deserves every crappy job she gets—but if she’s going to use her lung capacity for something, I like the sassy Hu-Bot a lot better than the wailing one.
; Sergeant Macy glares at her. “You do now, sister,” she says, muscling her way across the room and yanking Mikky up from the cot. “And here’s another news flash for both of you. I don’t want to hear any more useless back talk or arguing. Not a word.” She looks pointedly at both of us. “Either one of you can be… dismantled.”
The redheaded tank is obviously not joking, so I decide to play it safe and follow her down the hall and into an enormous freight elevator.
“Meet you there,” Mikky calls grudgingly.
We descend hundreds of feet—my ears pop twice—into the heart of the mountain. In a huge, cold room lit by a flickering bluish glow is J.J.’s underground training field. Mikky’s there, waiting for us, all rosy cheeked and glistening. Looks like her mood’s improved.
“Let me guess,” I say drily. “You ran.”
She shrugs. “There’s stairs,” she answers. “If we’re going to be forced to train, we should give it our very best, right?”
“I bet you were loads of fun in school,” I deadpan.
She flashes those blue eyes like a challenge, and I sense something else in them—a motive beyond showing off for J.J., her supposed “daddy.”
But I couldn’t care less. If Mikky wants to work twice as hard, great: I can cut my efforts back by half. Heck, I’m lucky I’m still standing, since Gramps almost killed me with yesterday’s mountain adventure.
“What’s the point of this again?” I ask, limping onto the huge, temperature-controlled training arena behind my perky workout partner. “J.J.’s going to, what? Take back the world by introducing a new fitness craze?”
But Mikky’s way too focused for chitchat, and she disappears to find the training schedule. Meanwhile, Sergeant Ugly is already braying across the field at me. “Move your ass!”
I eye the weights they’ve set up, the bands and the machines, and I grimace. Even a light stretch is going to feel like a knife in my stomach.
So instead I step onto the track, springy beneath my brand-new sneakers, and start to speed walk. It hurts—really, really hurts—but, considering I’ve been hovering at the edge of death for days, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself.
That ends when I hear the noise—a rushing whoosh behind me. I feel the prickle of a cold wind, and by the time I turn to look, she’s already whipped by. I stop on the track, mouth open.
How was that a person? Or anything that even resembles a person?
Holy shit.
I don’t even realize I’ve said the words aloud until Sergeant Macy answers.
“Clocking in at two twenty.” She sidles over and glances down at her stopwatch. We watch Mikky whirl around the red turf like a tornado, tearing up the track, and Macy whistles in appreciation. “Faster than a police cruiser. More precise than a Mercy seventy-two. More powerful than the entire slipstream… Ain’t she beautiful?”
I turn to her. “Are you a complete moron? Yeah, she’s efficient. But beautiful? No. Mikky’s a Hu-Bot, a mechanical freak show. She’s a clone of something beautiful. And you’re feeding that machine, making it more powerful! Do you know how she’s going to thank you? She’s going to wake up one morning and snatch out your crossed eyes.”
Macy’s bearlike paw smacks me upside the head. I don’t have the strength or the balance to withstand it, and I end up crumpled on the track.
“Evil bitch,” I mutter.
“Maybe.” She cocks her head, standing over me. “But you’re the moron, little miss, and everybody around here knows that.”
I think she’s going to hit me again, or maybe boot me in the guts, but instead she turns away. Over her shoulder, it’s her words that deliver the final blow: “And, as far as J.J.’s concerned, that Hu-Bot is the only reason you’re still alive.”
CHAPTER 60
I’M IN THE City—Denver, we called it then—kicking my little pink scooter down the tree-lined street, toward a friend’s house. My neighbor’s mowing his lawn shirtless (not a good look) while his wife prunes her roses. School’s out for the summer, and I feel sweaty and wild and hungry and happy.
It’s just another August day.
The different thing is that the air smells funny. Almost like something’s burning.
I hear a sound. A faraway noise, or maybe a muffled up-close one—something that sounds like a scream.
I look all around the block, and at first nothing seems wrong: the oversized houses squat in a row; the trees cast their shadows over the sidewalk. But as I turn to kick off again, I hear a pop.
Flames shoot out of a window across the street.
I fall to the ground, the bang! reaching my ears seconds later. The house becomes one giant orange fireball. Then the one next door explodes. All down the block, homes detonate, until my ears ring from the thunder. Acrid black smoke fills the air.
I start to get up, my throat and eyes burning—I’m looking for my scooter. But someone grabs my hand.
“Sarah?” a woman yells. She crouches down to squint in my face. “Sarah Coughlin, is that you? You gotta run, honey! They’re coming!”
It’s Abigail Kreighbaum’s mom, as blond and squirrel faced as her daughter is.
“Who’s coming?” I ask, my mind reeling.
“The robot soldiers!” Her voice is hysterical. “Androids! They’re storming the streets!”
I’ve never seen real robots before; I’ve only heard Mom and Dad talk about them at dinner after one of Grandfather’s big meetings with the government. They’d said the robots were “the future”—but I thought they meant that in a good way.
Mrs. Kreighbaum starts to pull me along, but after just a few steps, she stumbles and falls forward, right onto her face. There’s a hole in the back of her yellow head.
People are running past us. Running to nowhere, just running. Screaming.
Something in me snaps. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
“Don’t run away!” I yell at my fleeing neighbors’ backs, watching them fall onto the ground one after the other, just like Mrs. Kreighbaum. “Turn around and fight them!”
The android army has almost reached me by now, close enough that I can see them through the smoke. They don’t look like people—they look like weird drawings of people, and they have the jerky movements of one of my electric toy cars. They’re taller than anyone I’ve ever seen, and their guns are almost as big as I am.
But I don’t run away.
I face them. I hold up my fists.
I hear more screaming now, but it’s up close, right next to my ear.
“Six! Six! Sixie!”
My eyes snap open. “WHAT?” I yell, sitting up. It takes me a second to realize where I am—to recognize the Hu-Bot’s voice. “Stop it! Damn, Mikky! What’s with the screeching?”
The voice comes meekly from the other side of the “privacy curtain.” “You were moaning and thrashing around and stuff.”
I roll my eyes hard, even if she can’t see them. “It’s called a bad dream, dumb-dumb.”
A dream—or a glimpse of a buried memory? I can never be sure.
Mikky pushes aside the curtain, her face lit up with curiosity. “I know of these night stories, but I’ve never had one. It sounds awful!”
The grisly images are already fading, but my heart’s still racing, and my arms are covered in goose bumps. I rearrange my pillow roughly. “I don’t need your sympathy, you know. I don’t need to be coddled by Mommy after a nightmare. You’re the one who’s only seven.”
I think that’ll shut her up. But it doesn’t.
“What was the dream about?” she asks.
“Bots. Gunning down my friends and family in the streets during the Great War.” I pause. “Not much has changed since then, has it?”
Immediately Mikky yanks the curtain closed again, hiding herself. She’s silent for so long, I think she might’ve fallen back to sleep.
Good.
“I regret that day in the Pits very much,” she says finally, and I can hear the tears in her voice—tears that
don’t move me much, because now that she’s got her Empathy gene or whatever, she’s all weepy at every damn thing.
Yesterday she cried for all the bugs the blizzard must’ve killed.
“Really,” I say flatly.
“It hurts me to my very core,” Mikky continues.
“Not as much as it hurt the kids you murdered,” I counter.
“I didn’t—” she begins.
“Just stop!” I yell.
I don’t care what she has to say. I’m furious—that I’m stuck here in the mountains with this pretty machine instead of my best friend. That Dubs is dead. That I don’t know how to make things right again.
If there’s even a way.
My voice comes out in a hiss. “I know who you are and where you came from, and I don’t trust your whole concerned shtick for a second. So you should know that, whatever you try to pull, whenever you try to make your move, I’ll be ready.”
Like I wish I’d been back then.
CHAPTER 61
THE FIGURE ON the track is barely more than a blur. Macy turns to me, a stopwatch clutched in her beefy fist. “Two hundred and seventeen miles per hour!” she says triumphantly.
“Whatever,” I say, yawning. “The other day she did two twenty.”
Then the speeding figure screeches to a halt in front of us. Mikky grins, not even winded—and then sets down the four-hundred-pound weights she’d been carrying. “Fast, right? Next time I want to try half a ton.”
“Fool,” Macy says to me.
I have to admit I’m impressed. OS Empathy made Mikky’s mind more human, but her body’s becoming more and more of a machine. J.J. and his crew keep trying to push her to the brink, and then they find out that the brink doesn’t exist.
And Mikky herself has started to suggest physical improvements. This morning she started pestering J.J. to engineer her some wings.
“Or a parachute,” she’d said. “In between my infraspinatus muscles. Or maybe a jet pack?”