Chapter Nine

  Jeremy tried to hold his hand steady as he inched the screwdriver closer to the metal joint, a screw less than half an inch long clinging to the magnetic head.

  The sun was setting, shining orange light in through his bedroom window, and the sound of crickets outside harmonized strangely well with the whirring of machinery within. A computer sat nearby, its screen black with walls of tiny green text scrolling past too quickly to read. In just a few minutes, it would be the only source of light in the small bedroom, but the boy at the desk didn’t seem to notice.

  The screwdriver shook in his hand, and Jeremy held his breath, biting lightly down on his tongue as if he could squeeze a little more concentration out of it. A magnifying glass the size of his head was propped up in front of his face, making the nearly-microscopic hole look as big as a basketball hoop, but that didn’t make getting the screw into it any easier.

  “Come on, thread the needle,” he whispered to himself. “Just like you always—”

  His hand gave an unexpected twitch, striking the metal and knocking the screw up into the air. It hit the floor by his feet, disappearing into the thick carpet below. Cursing, Jeremy dropped the screwdriver and spun around in his swivel chair to chase it, but the sudden motion caused his right arm to bang against the magnifying glass’ metal stand.

  His breath caught in his throat, and his face turned pale as pain lanced up and down his arm beneath the cast that was wrapped around it, and for a minute he thought he was going to throw up.

  The pain faded slowly, and he hunched forward in his chair to gasp for breath. Sweat and tears were running down his face in equal measure, and he looked down at his cast in disgust. Bright yellow bandages wrapped around his broken arm, keeping it in a permanent L-shape.

  “WE LOVE YOU, SWEETIE! ~MOMMY AND DADDY,” had been written on it in black permanent marker. The word “WE” had been sharply underlined. Something else was written below it, but his parents had scribbled over it until it was illegible.

  He glared at the metal arm lying unfinished on his desk as if this were its fault. Normally he didn’t have any trouble assembling his robots, but with the cast on his right arm, he was forced to work exclusively with his left, and…

  A wave of anger suddenly rolled over him, and before he knew what he was doing, he had kicked the side of his work desk. The tower of books and boxes of spare parts wobbled, then fell over, upsetting another box that was on the floor and spilling their contents all over the floor.

  “No!” he yelled, jumping to his feet. Now it would take hours to find that stupid screw!

  With a frustrated half growl, half whine, he kicked his chair so that it rolled into his desk, almost knocking his computer monitor over as well. Face red, he started to pace back and forth across his room, his broken arm held awkwardly against his chest the entire time.

  A minute later, a knock came from his door.

  “Jeremy, honeybun?” a sickeningly sweet voice said on the other side. “Are you okay? Do you need Mommy’s help with anything?”

  “Or Daddy’s!” another voice added.

  “I’m fine!” Jeremy answered, desperately hoping they wouldn’t barge in anyway.

  “Are you sure, pumpkin pie?” his mom asked. She was practically cooing at him, as if he were two years old instead of fifteen. “Your arm must feel terrible! Why don’t we come in and—”

  “No, it’s fine!” Jeremy snapped, fighting to keep the irritation out of his voice. “I’m fine! Just…leave me alone, please.”

  His mother’s tone changed in the blink of an eye, “Don’t you take that tone with us, young man!”

  “Do you want those machines of yours to end up in the trash again?” his father added.

  White hot panic flooded Jeremy’s veins. “No! I- I’m sorry! Don’t throw them away, please!”

  He hated how pathetic he sounded, but not as much as he would have hated to watch a year and a half’s worth of work be carried away in the garbage truck. They would do it, too—had done it more than once. To them, Jeremy’s possessions were nothing more than little metal hostages for them to take away if they ever thought he was getting too rebellious.

  “That’s better,” his dad said, his voice softening again. “Now, do you want us to come in and take care of you?”

  “No, thank you,” Jeremy forced himself to say. He glanced at the window, finally noticing the fading orange light coming from outside. “I was just about to go to bed.”

  “Good boy!” his mother exclaimed. “A growing young man needs his sleep! Night night, sugar dumpling!”

  Jeremy breathed a sigh of relief when he heard their footsteps carrying them down the hall, and he sat down on his bed. His heart was still racing at the thought of losing his robots again. He looked around at them, one at a time, doing his best not to imagine how empty and quiet his room would be without them.

  “Viggo, lights on,” he said.

  At his command, a metal arm that was bolted to the wall next to his door sprang to life. It uncurled, reaching down until its claw-like hand was pinching the lightswitch, and raised it up. His bedroom lights flicked on.

  When he had gotten started, just a little bit after noon, the day had been bright enough for him to work purely from the sunlight coming in through his window. Nine hours had passed since then, he noted with disgust, and he had barely been able to get anything done thanks to his current…he glared hatefully down at his broken right arm…handicap.

  He glanced at his worktable, but quickly discarded the idea of trying to get any more work done. He would need to locate the lost screw first, and he knew he wouldn’t have the patience for that tonight. Better to just go to bed like he had told his parents, even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not after the scare they’d just given him, and…

  Other things.

  “Elijah, fan,” he said.

  The arm that was bolted to his ceiling reached out and jerked on the chain that controlled his ceiling fan, turning it on.

  “Ian, power down.”

  Yet another arm began pressing keys on his keyboard in a slow but precise order, closing out of all the programs and putting the computer to sleep.

  Over a dozen such robots populated his room, each programmed to do some miniscule task that he could have just as easily done himself. What they did wasn’t important—he simply liked the fact that they existed. Little metal imitations of life, built and animated by his own two hands. How anyone could not find that fascinating was beyond his understanding. And no matter how many he made, he always wanted more.

  He looked at each of them in turn, from Viggo—the first of this current batch—to Orlando, lying unfinished on his desk. Were they his friends? No. As lifelike as they could be, Jeremy was well aware that they weren’t actually alive, and you couldn’t be friends with something that wasn’t able to return your affections. That didn’t make him any less fond of them, but it didn’t change the fact that he only had one real friend.

  Jeremy sighed again, lying down on his bed still fully clothed. It wasn’t comfortable, but he didn’t feel like wrestling with his cast to get his shirt off. Instead, he just laid there, staring up at his lights and watching the fan spin around and around, almost hypnotically, wondering with growing dread how he was going to break the news to—

  Taktaktak!

  He closed his eyes and groaned.

  Taktak! the knuckles rapped sharply on his window again.

  With his heart sinking into his stomach, Jeremy sat up. The top half of a face was poking up from the bottom of his window, and its eyes lit up when they saw him moving.

  He cursed silently to himself. He had hoped that she wouldn’t show up tonight. That would have given him until at least tomorrow to figure out the best way to let the cat out of the bag. He already knew there wasn’t a good way to tell her this, but maybe he could lessen the impact. A controlled explosion rather than an all-out nuclear blast.

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  So of course she had shown up right at sunset, like clockwork.

  “Sean,” he said, “open.”

  Yet another arm flipped the latches on his bedroom window and slid it up. The figure outside hoisted herself onto the second floor windowsill, and then slipped almost catlike into the room.

  “Evenin’, neighbor,” Miranda said, springing to her feet and beaming at him.

  Looking at her, despite the situation, Jeremy felt some of his anxiety melt away.

  They were only two days into summer break, but her light brown skin was already as tan as if she’d spent a week lying on the beach. Her curly black hair bounced up and down like a garden of springs, and even though her teeth were a little too big and had a noticeable gap, when she smiled at him it always looked like the sun itself was shining just behind her freckled face.

  She was about as different from Jeremy as night was from day, with his pale, almost vampiric skin, bland-as-oatmeal face, and limp black hair that refused to stand up even if he poured an entire bottle of gel onto it.

  Before he could react, she leaned in and gave him a quick kiss on the lips, then giggled at how red his face turned.

  “So, how’s the arm?” she asked.

  He sighed, looking at his desk. “Not good. I tried to get some work done, but—”

  “Not the robot, you dork!” she interrupted him with another laugh.

  He stared at her blankly. “Huh? Oh! Yeah, it’s about as good as can be expected. The doctor says I’ll be able to take it off in about five or six wee—hey, hey, careful!”

  He flinched when she grabbed his cast and held it up to the light, as if she could see through it like an envelope and judge how the bone was healing. She was uncharacteristically gentle, though, turning it this way and that to look at it from different angles.

  Her eyes fell on the mass of scribbles just below his parents’ note, and her expression soured.

  “They did that right after you left,” he explained guiltily, looking away.

  “And you just let them?” she demanded.

  “What was I supposed to do? Tell them no?”

  “It’s on your freaking arm, isn’t it?”

  Jeremy could only shrug, ashamed. “Sorry.”

  Miranda eyed the cast with disdain again, then let him go and collapsed into his computer chair. Suddenly, she grinned. “Rave time!”

  Jeremy shook his head. “No, don’t—”

  “Viggo, lights off!”

  Click. The room went dark.

  “Viggo, lights on!”

  Click. They came back on.

  “Viggo, lights off!”

  Click.

  “Viggo, lights on!”

  Click.

  “Miranda, stop it before—”

  “What’s going on in there?”

  Jeremy’s eyes widened, his face going pale again as the doorknob began to turn. Miranda leaped to her feet and dove behind his bed, as silent as a breeze, just as the door swung open to reveal his father’s disapproving face.

  “N- Nothing,” Jeremy said.

  “There’s nobody in here, is there?” his dad asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

  Jeremy shook his head. “No, just me!”

  His father stared at him for a few seconds, then started to close the door. “You’re supposed to be getting ready for bed. Any more noise, and you’re grounded!”

  The door clicked shut, and Jeremy let out the breath he’d been holding.

  “Any more noise, and you’re grounded!” Miranda said in a mockingly deep voice. She stood up, curling her face into an exaggerated copy of his dad’s expression. “You know thinking for yourself is against the rules! Your mom and I will give you a lobotomy if you don’t cut it out!”

  Normally, her impressions of his parents were enough to make Jeremy laugh. Tonight, though, there was so much pressing down on him that he felt like he was giving a piggyback ride to a whale.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, looking down at his shoes. Outside, the sun was a deep orange semi-circle on the horizon.

  “So, what’d you end up telling them happened?” Miranda asked as she sat back down in his chair.

  He shrugged. “I just told them we were climbing trees.”

  Miranda grinned. “Well, that’s true enough, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  She was right, they had been climbing trees when he’d broken his arm. What Jeremy hadn’t told his parents was that they were only in the tree because a bear had chased them up there.

  That had been yesterday morning, when Miranda had shown up at his window at the crack of dawn telling him to follow her. After a half hour hike into the woods, which Miranda knew better than her own home, she had ecstatically pointed out the bear as it lounged lazily on the edge of a stream. Jeremy had been at a complete loss for words. It was just a black bear, not even six feet long from head to tail, but it was still a bear!

  “Are we safe here?” Jeremy had asked.

  “Of course we are!” Miranda had scoffed. “They’re more scared of us than we are of—”

  The universe had chosen that moment to hit them with a double dose of irony, as the bear suddenly let out a roar and came charging straight across the stream toward them.

  Jeremy had let out a scream that—while warranted, in his opinion—would never be his proudest moment. Miranda had only said “Whoops!” before the two of them had gone sprinting back into the woods. Jeremy would probably have tried to run all the way home, but Miranda had grabbed his hand and practically carried him up a nearby tree until they were twenty feet above the ground.

  The bear had run right past the tree without giving them even a passing glance. Whatever had spooked it, it hadn’t given two squats about them, as Miranda would have said.

  The two of them had just sat there up in the tree for a minute, gasping for breath and trying to slow their hearts down. Then Miranda had burst out laughing. At first, Jeremy had just glared at her with indignation. They had almost died, and she was laughing? But eventually her infectious good mood had wormed its way into him as well, and he’d laughed right along with her.

  And then the branch had broken, dropping him out of the tree and breaking his arm.

  “It was worth it, though, right?” she asked, her eyes gleaming. “Seeing the bear, I mean. How many people get to see a real, live bear outside of a zoo? That’s worth being stuck in a cast for a few weeks, isn’t it?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer. He had thought the same thing once a handful of painkillers had convinced him that he wasn’t dying a very painful death. He’d told the nurses all about it while they had wrapped his arm up, and he had been surprised at how…inconsequential the broken bone had seemed. His arm would heal in a month, but the memory of the adventure he and Miranda had gone on—even if it had only lasted a few minutes—would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  But then, as always, his parents had come in to ruin everything.

  Jeremy’s eyes darted over to the dully colored flyer lying on his desk, less than a foot away from where Miranda was resting her elbow, and a drop of sweat rolled down the side of his face.

  You need to tell her, he thought as his stomach did somersault after somersault inside him. It isn’t fair for you to keep this to yourself!

  He had rehearsed a hundred different variations of this conversation in his head over the past day and a half, but try as he might, he couldn’t force his mouth to say it. Not when one wrong word could easily end up burning the only bridge he desperately wanted to preserve.

  Jeremy could hardly remember a time when he hadn’t been friends with Miranda. They’d met in the first grade, and even though they had virtually nothing in common, she had immediately gravitated to him. Jeremy liked to read, and Miranda liked to play in the dirt. Jeremy loved building things, and Miranda loved lifting up rocks to see if there were bugs underneath. Jeremy actually enjoyed doing his homework every night, and Miranda would sometimes fail to show up at school for days at a time, before reappearing during recess with a shiny new bruise on her forehead and a grin a mile wide on her face.

  And yet, something about them just fit together, like a pair of jigsaw pieces that came from different puzzles but had been cut from the same pattern.

  Her father was a trucker and a single parent, and despite his best efforts, he spent more time on the road than he did at home. While the first few years of Miranda’s life had been spent riding from coast to coast in the passenger seat of his semi-truck, eventually Elias Jackdaw had begun to worry about her education and social life—or, more accurately, the lack of them—and had reluctantly begun leaving her alone at home while he’d gone off to earn his living.

  This led to Miranda becoming almost completely independent before her seventh birthday. She could cook, she did her own shopping, and kept herself on a reasonably healthy diet. She even knew how to do basic handiwork, and could fix most of the problems around her house without calling anyone to help.

  And Walter and Anne Faulkner despised her for it.

  These days, Jeremy knew it was because they thought her independence would rub off on him, making him more likely to question the stranglehold they had on his life. At the time, though, the lengths they went to to keep him away from his best friend bewildered him. Miranda, on the other hand, had gleefully taken it as a challenge.

  Over the past nine years, she had worked tirelessly, finding and exploiting every gap in their defenses with the efficiency of a professional saboteur. No matter what corner of town the Faulkners tried to smuggle their son off to, they would always find her there waiting for them. Book club, piano lessons, swim class, tennis. She had somehow even managed to worm her way into his all-boys little league team.

  They’d thought they had finally won when they’d signed him up for Boy Scouts. The look on his mother’s face when she’d come to pick him up on the first night, only to find Miranda giving the troop a lecture on the various kinds of birds they could find in the woods outside town, was a memory Jeremy would cherish for the rest of his life.

  As the years went by, he had occasionally stopped to wonder about the wisdom of what they were doing. Every time they chipped away at his parents’ patience, it was like prodding a sleeping lion. How many times could they get away with that before it finally awoke?

  What they didn’t realize was that day had come and gone. The lion was awake, and had already set its sights on both of them—all because of five poorly chosen words:

  “Miranda and I are dating.”