Willful Machines (34 page)

Dad dropped into his chair again, his cheeks streaked with tears. I'd never seen him cry before, not even after Mom died. “Forgive me, son.” His face crumpled. For once, he looked like he'd forgotten all about the camera broadcasting his image across the globe. “I don't want to lose you, too.”

“Do it,” Stroud growled. “Be a man, Lee.”

Be a man.
For a second I imagined myself setting off the bomb. The blast would shut down the Spider holding me, and I'd escape. Then I'd find out why the hell my grandfather had done all this. I'd expose him. I'd stop him. With Nico's help.

If Nico survived.

Or else . . .

Behind me, the black lake yawned wide, ready to swallow me up. To be or not to be?

“Do it now,” Nico said. “Remember, Lee, you promised.”

Seven seconds left on the clock. Just enough. “I love you, Nico,” I said, addressing his mutilated body, even though I knew—or hoped—he wasn't there anymore. I didn't even care that Stroud and Dad and all the people around the world watching right now could hear me. Then I turned to the little robot on my shoulder. “Gremlin.” I nodded my chin toward the missing windowpane behind him. “Leap.”

Gremlin didn't hesitate. He tugged twice on my earlobe and hurled himself through the opening. The blue eye of the Spider holding me, along with every puck in the room, swiveled to see what had just happened. Not me, though. I didn't watch as he plummeted down, down, down. I'd already brought the fingers of my right hand to the watch on my left wrist. I pressed the buttons.

Three.

Two.

One.

A flash of light filled the room. Behind me, the entire window finally shattered.

M
y body flew back. Guided by pure instinct, my hands shot forward and grabbed the Spider's forelegs. For once, my black-box brain did its job. A smash came from far below me as the glass from the window landed on the terrace. I hung there, my feet kicking over empty space, the wind and rain buffeting my back. My heart drummed, without any answering purr from my blazer pocket. The robot limbs holding me rocked a little. Otherwise, the Spider didn't move. Its blue eye had gone dark.

I swung my legs into the room and landed in a sprawl underneath the robot. My eyes went straight to Nico. He'd tumbled back against the wall next to the fireplace and slid to the floor. The red light hadn't even finished draining from his heart. I scrambled across the room, wading through the pages of Stroud's memoir eddying in the wind. Dead pucks lay on the floor here and there. Above, the projector had stopped working too. Dad's face had vanished from the wall. I crouched next
to Nico. The embers in the fireplace, almost dead themselves, threw a soft orange light across his ravaged face.

“You did it,” Stroud said, with disbelief in his voice.

I'd almost forgotten about him. Something deep in my chest seemed to flare at his words and then pulse with a blazing heat, like I had my own nuclear reactor concealed there. That man who'd made me kill the person I loved. That man who'd terrified me practically my whole life. Without thinking, I stood and grabbed the two-foot metal thighbone from its place above the mantel. I gripped it in my hands. The thing had a satisfying heft. I strode across the room to where Stroud sat, still pinned in place by his Spider.

“What are you doing, Lee?”

I stood over my grandfather and raised the bone above my head. Outside, the helicopter thundered past. With a big hole in the wall in place of a window, the room had turned deafening. The rumble of the waterfall. The moan of the storm. The roar of the fire that would probably reach us any second. And now the helicopter. All of it combined to create a noisy static that made my brain feel like it might explode.

“Lee, put that down!”

I wanted to tell him I knew he was behind everything that had happened. I wanted to demand answers. Why had he staged all those attacks? Just to further my father's career? Why create Nico? For God's sake, why make me fall in love?

Stroud sat up straighter. He pushed his chin forward. His
ice-blue eyes shone.
I was a US Marine
, those eyes seemed to say.
A hostage for nine years. Professional interrogators spent days on end beating and torturing me, grilling me for information. And
you
think you're going to get me to talk?

I brought the club whistling down.

It bashed into the foreleg of the Spider, knocking it out of the way.

“You're free, sir,” I muttered.

Behind me, the door crashed open. I spun around, the thighbone still ready. But this time humans, not robots, stormed into the room: a team of five soldiers, all in helmets and night-vision goggles and black body armor. They stopped in a pack near the door and snapped their rifles from point to point as they scanned the room. I threw down the bone and put up my hands.

“Don't worry, it's me, buddy.”

I recognized that surfer drawl. Ray yanked down his goggles.

“You okay?” he asked. “Any injuries?”

I shook my head. “Nothing serious.”

The other soldiers fanned into the room, helping Stroud, examining the Spiders. One soldier tapped the robot standing near the window with his rifle. It clanged but didn't move.

“It's all right,” I said. “They're dead.”

Ray beckoned his puck. “Let POTUS know his son's all right. Headmaster Stroud too. We have them both.” He waved
the puck away. “What happened, Lee? We were watching on our pucks, then everything went black.”

“I detonated a bomb. A special one that destroys anything electronic.” For the first time since setting it off, I glanced at the watch on my wrist. The hands had stopped at 9:19, and the device felt warm against my skin, but otherwise it appeared the same as before. I held it up for Ray to look at.

“Don't tell me you built that thing too.”

“I didn't.” I nodded at Stroud. “I got it from him.”

Ray turned to him, squinting. “From you, sir?”

Stroud stood up from his chair and straightened his tie. He nodded but didn't offer any further explanation.

“Well,” Ray said, “it's a good thing you had it, buddy.”

I didn't say anything more either. As much as I wanted to, I knew I shouldn't start shouting accusations now.

From somewhere in the building came a crash.

“That's the fire,” Ray said. “It's getting close. We need to get you two out of here. The helicopter's going to pick us up from the roof.”

“What about Dr. Singh? She was inside too.”

“It's okay, buddy. She signaled us from the window. We already got her out.”

“How is she?”

“Hanging on.”

“Damn,” one of the other soldiers said. He bent down next to Nico and pushed at his chest with a gloved finger. “What the hell?”

I was on the other side of the room in a heartbeat. “Don't touch him. Just back off. Now.”

The soldier threw a questioning look at Ray, who must've given him a signal. He stepped away.

I dropped to my knees next to Nico and stroked his metal cheek. Let Ray and the others think what they wanted. I rubbed some blood from his still-intact left ear. I felt ashamed for thinking it, but I'd miss this body. The smooth skin. The wild corkscrews of bronze hair. The eyes, honey brown with filaments of gold. Even the crooked teeth. All those things were part of Nico too. Still, I supposed he could have a new body made that looked exactly like this one. Another perk of being a robot.

I pressed my cheek against the rubbery muscle of his chest, still slick with his blood. His thrum had disappeared. That living heat of his had started to fade as well. Wherever Nico was—if he was anywhere at all—he wasn't here.

Still, I couldn't just leave his body for the fire to devour. He'd carried me a long way. Now I'd carry him. Maybe bury him in our cavern. I pulled his arm over my shoulder, hoisted him up, and turned to Ray. “I'm ready to go.”

H
ours later I perched on a green molded-plastic chair in a hospital waiting room with my knees drawn into my chest and my arms wrapped around my legs and my puck, a cheap one I'd bought in a convenience store across the road, hovering a foot in front of my face. I'd stared at the puck's little screen for so long my eyes had gone blurry. Mostly pretending to watch the frenzied coverage of the crisis at Inverness Prep. In reality, just waiting.

Gremlin sidled around the back of my neck, pulled on my lobe, and released a concerned whine. I stroked his fur. “At least
you
made it back to me, huh?”

He'd materialized on my knee less than half an hour after I'd made my escape. I'd been sitting in the back of an ambulance just inside the school's front gate, letting a doctor sew up my shoulder and watching Inverness Prep's burning spires collapse one by one, and suddenly there he was. Still drenched from his plunge in the lake, his little joints squeaking after
the long climb back up the cliff face, but otherwise intact.

No word from Nico, though.

As soon as I'd sat down in this waiting room, I'd set up an anonymous puck account and sent a message addressed to Th1neEverm0re. I'd told myself I shouldn't expect an answer right away, and then I'd spent the next hour pacing back and forth across the linoleum with the puck practically glued to my nose anyway. At one point Bex, who'd come with me to the hospital, had asked, “What's that in your hand?” I'd looked down and seen a silver raven tiepin. Not mine, but Nico's. I had a dim memory of stuffing it into my blazer pocket after he'd given it to me down in the tunnels—once again, I'd failed to return it—but I had no idea how long I'd been clutching it.

Now, to pass the time, I looked up the line from
Hamlet
Nico's puck handle referred to. It came from Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia, which ended with the words, “Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, HAMLET.” Miss Remnant had told us what Hamlet meant by the phrase “this machine”: his own body. The choice of words struck me. Hundreds of years ago, I imagined, Shakespeare had already figured out what we really were: just machines. (
Why “just”?
Nico would say.) “I'm yours,” Hamlet was telling Ophelia, “for as long as my body belongs to me.”
But what about after?
I wanted to know.
What then?

Outside the window, the sun had come up, stuffing the clouds with light. They still hung thick, but at least the rain had
stopped for a while. Bex sat next to me, stroking her earlobe and watching the news on her own new puck. On my other side sat Ray, his arms crossed, one of his legs bouncing up and down like a jackhammer. True, he enjoyed breaking the rules every once in a while, but even he had a limit, and at that moment we were breaking a lot of rules. For one thing, I wasn't supposed to be here. Dad believed Ray had me hidden away in a safe house, where I'd stay until the Secret Service had confirmed the terrorist threat had passed. I'd spoken to Dad briefly on Ray's puck before we'd left Inverness Prep. He'd seemed happy to see me alive—for a second I'd thought he might break down all over again—but part of me still wondered if he'd been in on the conspiracy too. I didn't
think
so. On the wall in Stroud's office, I hadn't seen the wise-movie-dad persona my father always presented to cameras. I'd seen true grief. At least I thought I had, and now I wanted to find out for sure. Which was one of the reasons I'd come here.

Trumbull appeared at the door, his arm in a sling, his head bandaged, his sunglasses failing to conceal one blackened eye. His injuries had proven less serious than I'd thought. A broken humerus, some head trauma, assorted scrapes and bruises. I'd asked Ray to take me to him when we'd first arrived, and I'd found him awake in bed. Right off the bat he'd wanted to know why I was at the hospital instead of the safe house—typical Trumbull—but then I'd told him the whole story of the past few days, including the truth about Nico and my suspicions
about Stroud, and explained what I wanted to do. “I know it's asking a lot,” I'd said, “especially now. But can you make some calls to your connections in the Service?”