## Chapter 1 — Rogue's Booth The bass in Afterlife had settled into the kind of thump that meant nothing was on fire. Ace felt it in the floor before she felt it in her chest. Smoke hung under the lights in slow sheets. Someone at the bar was lying about a job in Watson, and someone else was letting him, because the lie was cheaper than the correction. Night City called this a quiet night. The city had survived another week. Corps had stolen from corps. Gangs had shot at gangs. Mercs had rounded their near-deaths up to the nearest legend. Stability, by local measure. Ace cut through the crowd the way she always did, not fast, not looking for space. Space arrived. A man with a cracked optic started to step into her line and thought better of it halfway through the motion. Mai walked at her shoulder, silver hair taking whatever neon it was offered and giving none of it back. Shammy came half a step behind, and the press of bodies loosened around her without anyone deciding to move. A regular nodded. Another didn't, which was wiser. At the end of the bar a drunk lifted his glass, found Ace already looking at him, and discovered a sudden and sincere interest in the ice. Shammy's mouth moved, almost a smile. "Still effective." "I didn't do anything." "You looked at him." "Exactly." Mai's mouth twitched. From her, that was most of a laugh. Rogue's booth sat where it always sat, raised just enough that the room had to come to her. Tonight the booth was wrong before they reached it. Not armed wrong. Not the particular stillness that meant someone in the back was about to do something stupid. Just wrong. Rogue was alone. One arm on the table. Drink untouched. The look on her face could have curdled the milk Night City pretended it still had. Ace stopped at the edge of the step. "What's broken?" Rogue looked up. The sourness didn't leave. "Good to see you too." "You look annoyed." "I am annoyed." "Then the diagnosis holds." Rogue sighed, the sound of a woman who had already lost an argument she hadn't started. "I hate talking to you." "No you don't." "Fair." Mai slid into the booth. Shammy took the side that faced the room without making a point of it. Ace stayed on her feet a moment longer, reading the table, then sat. Nobody filled the silence. The bass kept its pulse. A glass broke somewhere near the stairs and nobody turned. Shammy tilted her head, not at Rogue, at the thing Rogue had been refusing to look at directly. "You've been staring at that package for at least twenty seconds." Rogue closed her eyes. "Thirty-seven." The box sat between the untouched drink and the edge of the table. Small. Black. Plain. No markings, no route tag, no corp stamp, no handwritten threat. In Night City the absence of a logo was usually a logo that had paid to be absent. Mai's attention settled on it the way it settled on anything that refused to explain itself. "You scanned it." "Three times." "You opened it." "No." "X-ray." "Twice." "Mass spectrometry." Rogue pointed at her without looking. "That one." "Results?" Rogue took the drink at last, as if the answer required alcohol to leave her mouth. "Nothing." "Nothing." "Nothing." Ace frowned at the box, then at Rogue. "Everything has something." "I know." "You sound upset." "I am upset." Shammy looked from the box to Rogue and back, patient in the way weather is patient. "I feel like I'm missing context." Rogue pointed. "That is the context." "That's not context." "Exactly." Mai folded her hands. The questions came clean, one at a time, no performance in them. "Someone delivered it." "Correct." "When?" "Three days ago." Ace raised an eyebrow. "You've been losing to a box for three days." Rogue's finger came up. "Don't start." "I wasn't." "You were about to." "I was." "See?" "Fair." For a second Rogue almost smiled. The box was still there when the second ended, and the smile went with it. Shammy leaned in, not touching. "Who sent it?" "No idea." "Message?" "No." "Threat?" "No." "Demand?" "No." "Contract?" "No." Mai's frown was small and precise. "No sender. No route. No compartment. No radiation. No biological signature. No electronics." "No. No. No. No. No. No." Ace looked at Rogue. Then at the box. Then at Rogue again. "You hate this." "I hate this." "Because you don't know what it is." "Because I don't know what it is." That tracked. Rogue did not fear the unknown. The unknown could be shot, bought, or buried. What she feared was the unknown that had already been paid to become known and had refused the transaction. One of those became a job. The other became paperwork. Rogue hated paperwork more than she hated most people. Shammy laughed once, quiet, the sound folding into the bass. "That's almost sweet." Rogue stared at her. "Take it." Shammy blinked. "What?" "Take it." Ace shook her head before the word finished landing. "No." "Yes." "No." "Absolutely yes." Mai looked amused, which was the dangerous setting. "What exactly are we taking?" "The box." "Why?" "Because I don't want it." Ace crossed her arms. The leather creaked. "That sounds like a trap." "Everything sounds like a trap to you." "Because most things are." "Annoyingly true." Shammy glanced at Mai. Mai glanced at Ace. Ace glanced at the box. Nobody touched it. It sat there with the particular menace of an object that had failed, so far, to be menacing, and was therefore winning. Rogue exhaled, long, and put the real problem on the table beside the fake one. "I've already spent money on this." The three of them looked at her. "I had people scan it. Specialists. A tech team. A netrunner." She rubbed her forehead with two fingers. "And they all told me the same thing." "What?" Mai said. "Nothing." The silence that followed had weight. Ace broke it by laughing, not loud, not for the room. Just enough that Rogue's eyes came up. "You find this funny." "Someone weaponized confusion." "I don't see the joke." "I do." Rogue groaned into what was left of her drink. "This is why I drink." "That's not why." "No." "It really isn't." "No." Shammy was smiling openly now, which in Afterlife counted as a public event. "You've spent three days being defeated by a cardboard box." Mai covered her mouth. Not shock. Containment. Rogue looked at all three of them the way a woman looks at a fire she did not set and is nevertheless going to be billed for. Then she pointed at the package again. "Take it." "No." A credchip came out of Rogue's pocket and clicked against the table. Ace looked at it. Mai looked at it. Shammy looked at it. Rogue slid it forward with one finger. "Take it." "Are you bribing us?" "Yes." "That's not usually how jobs work." "I don't care." Mai turned the chip without picking it up. The number on the face was insulting in the polite direction. "You're serious." "Deadly." Shammy's fascination had stopped being polite. "You really want this gone." "More than you understand." Ace looked at the package. At the chip. At the package. Rogue watched the exact moment curiosity beat the part of Ace that kept her alive, a small shift in the shoulders, a hesitation that lasted less than a breath. Rogue smiled. It was not a kind smile. "You already decided." "I hate when you do that." "You absolutely decided." "I didn't." "You did." Mai reached across the table and picked up the box. Shammy sat up straighter. Ace made a sound that was mostly surrender. Rogue's shoulders dropped for the first time since they'd walked in, and all three of them saw it. Ace narrowed her eyes. "That's suspicious." "Not my problem anymore." "That's worse." "Also not my problem." Rogue finished the drink, stood, and the conversation ended because she had decided it had. Halfway out of the booth she stopped, looked back over her shoulder, and delivered the least reassuring sentence available to her. "I have absolutely no idea what's inside that box." She walked into the noise and was gone. The three of them looked at the package in Mai's hands. The chip sat where Rogue had left it. Shammy spoke first, light as a suggestion that was not a suggestion. "We're opening it." Mai nodded. "Obviously." Ace sighed. The sigh of a woman who could already see the shape of the mistake and was going to make it anyway, because the alternative was letting Rogue win twice. Nobody argued. --- The safehouse took them an hour. Rain on the windows. The city doing its usual impression of a circuit that had never been grounded. Mai set the box in the middle of the table and worked the seal with a tool that cost more than most people's rent, slow, no drama. The lid clicked. Inside sat a small metallic thing. Robot, if the word was willing to stretch. No weapon. No display. No visible cell. No plate, no stamp, no apology. It was about the size of a closed fist and had the blank courtesy of an object that expected to be liked. They stared at it. It stared back, inasmuch as a thing with no lit eyes can stare. Five seconds. Ten. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere below them a pipe knocked. Ace folded her arms. "That's it?" The eyes lit. Bright green. The head turned, a clean little rotation, and found her. "HELLOU!" The voice was cheerful in a way that had never been in this apartment. High. Certain. Pleased with its own arrival. Ace blinked once. Looked at Mai. Looked at Shammy. Looked at the robot. "...what?" ## Chapter 2 — HELLOU! The robot kept its green eyes on Ace. Ace kept hers on the robot. Mai had not moved her hands from the edge of the table. Shammy had gone very still in the way she did when a room changed temperature and she was deciding whether to mention it. Nothing else happened. The eyes stayed lit. Innocent, if a machine could manage innocent. Cheerful. Suspicious by the simple fact of being both. Ace pointed. "What is that." "Robot," Mai said. "I can see that." Shammy tilted her head. "It seems happy." "HELLOU!" Ace closed her eyes. "Stop doing that." "HELLOU!" "It understood me." "It did not," Mai said. "How do you know?" "Because that would make this worse." "Fair." They watched it. No wheels. No obvious joints beyond the head. No muzzle, no port she could see, no serial, no scuff that said it had ever been anywhere. Just metal and two points of green. Mai reached, slow. The head tracked her. She poked the crown with one finger. Nothing. She picked it up. The weight was wrong for the size, light in the way expensive things are light. She turned it under the lamp. Shammy leaned over her shoulder. "What does it do?" "Currently," Mai said, "it says HELLOU." Ace rubbed her forehead. "Excellent." Ten minutes later the table had tools on it. Scanner. Analyzer. A sensor array Mai kept for nights when the city lied about what it was made of. The robot sat in the middle of the mess, unconcerned, eyes on whoever was nearest. Mai had three panels off. Behind them was more metal. Not circuitry. Not a cell. Not the little shame of a cheap speaker. Metal, and then metal. She set a driver down with more care than the driver required. Ace, from the doorway, watched her instead of the robot. That was more informative. "You look annoyed." "I'm curious." "You're annoyed." Mai looked up. "I removed three panels. No internal structure. No power source. No processor. No storage." She gestured at the thing in her palm. "Then what is this?" Ace pointed. "Robot." Shammy laughed into her wrist. Mai stared at Ace for a second that contained several professional opinions, then went back to the empty panel. Ace lasted another five minutes. She stood. "Move." "No." "Move." "Ace." "Move." Mai sighed, and moved the expensive equipment to the far end of the table. Shammy sat up. "Oh no." Ace picked the robot up. The eyes blinked. Twice. She narrowed hers. It blinked again. Shammy pointed. "It knows." "It does not know." "It absolutely knows." Mai quietly relocated the analyzer another foot. A wise woman. Ace held the robot at eye level. The green reflected in her iris. "You are annoying." The robot seemed, insofar as a fist of metal can seem, delighted. She didn't look away from it. "Question." "No," Mai said. "You haven't heard it." "I know it." "Answer anyway." "No." Shammy leaned back, tea forgotten. "I think she should." Mai didn't turn. "You are not helping." "I know." The robot lasted one second. Ace closed her hand. Metal folded with a sound like a can under a boot, then cracked, then went. Pieces hit the table. One skipped toward Mai. One toward Shammy. One rolled, polite, off the edge and under the counter. Ace opened her fist. Nothing in it but a smear of silver and the end of the problem. Mai looked at the wreckage. At Ace. At the wreckage. "Happy?" "Yes." Shammy looked at the piece by her cup. "A little." The next fifteen minutes were peaceful in the specific way a ceasefire is peaceful. Mai scanned fragments. Shammy put water on. Ace sat on the couch with her boots off one heel and the particular looseness of a woman who had solved a thing by ending it. Victory. Problem gone. Life, briefly, good. At fourteen minutes and fifty-three seconds Mai looked up from the analyzer. At fifty-six she frowned. At fifty-eight she looked at the clock. At fifty-nine she stood. Ace noticed. "What?" Mai opened her mouth. "HELLOU!" The voice did not come from the table. It did not come from the floor, or from the piece under the counter. It came from behind them, bright as the first time, pleased with itself. They turned. Slowly. The way people turn when the room has already told them they will not like the view. The robot sat on the kitchen counter. Intact. Eyes green. Looking at Ace. "HELLOU!" Ace stared. Mai stared. Shammy stared, and lost. The laugh got out before her hand did. Ace pointed, calm in the way a blade is calm. "You." "HELLOU!" "Don't." "HELLOU!" She stood. The shadow under her boots thickened by a degree, not enough to bend the room, enough to suggest the room should consider its options. The robot did not consider them. Fearlessness in something that small was an insult with a budget. Mai looked from Ace to the counter and back, then reached for her pad. "Ace." "What." "I need fifteen minutes." "Why." Mai's eyes had the light they got when the world offered her a locked door and forgot to hide the hinge. "I need to know how it did that." Ace looked at the robot. The robot looked at Ace. "HELLOU!" Ace closed her eyes. Somewhere in a building with a logo and a legal department, a project manager was about to have a month. Ace did not know that yet. She knew the counter. She knew the green. She knew Mai was not going to let this go, and that Shammy had already decided the evening was improved. She opened her eyes. "Fourteen," she said. "You get fourteen." Mai was already pulling the scanner back across the table. ## Chapter 3 — The Fifteen Minute Rule The second appearance changed the category. Not the return. The return was already bad. The problem was the manner of it. The crushed pieces were still on the table. Mai had them in a tray, labeled, because Mai labeled things when the world stopped cooperating. The robot on the counter had no seam where Ace's fist had been. No heat. No witness mark. It sat the way a guest sits when the guest believes it was invited. Mai spent the next hour proving things that should not have required proof. She scanned it. Again. The readout agreed with itself and with nothing else. Ace watched from the couch. Shammy had tea and the expression of a woman attending a play she had already recommended. The robot occupied the middle of the room by the simple method of being looked at. Exactly fifteen minutes after the counter greeting, it said the word. Ace's eye twitched. She did not give it the satisfaction of a second twitch. By the fourth cycle the apartment had stopped pretending to be an apartment. Portable analyzers. Two field scanners. A sensor array balanced on a stack of books Shammy had not approved. Three holographic panes Mai had dragged out of a case that usually stayed shut. One improvised rig made of cable and spite. One Ace, decreasingly amused. One Mai, increasingly not. The robot sat at the center and announced itself when the interval arrived. No more. No less. Ace walked behind Mai's chair and looked at the panes over her shoulder. "Anything?" "Yes." "Good." "Nothing makes sense." Ace stopped. "That's not good." "No." "It sounds bad." "It is bad." Shammy looked up from her cup. "What have we learned?" Mai pointed at the display without turning the point into a lecture. "It does not move." Ace blinked. "It keeps appearing in different places." "Correct." "That's moving." Mai exhaled through her nose. "The object we destroy never leaves. The object that appears never arrives." Ace stared at her. Shammy stared at her. Mai stared back, which meant she had already heard how it sounded and had decided accuracy outranked comfort. Ace pointed at the robot. "You're doing the thing." "What thing?" "The thing where you stop speaking human." Mai considered the panes. "Fair." At the fifteenth minute the robot spoke. Ace didn't look. Progress, or surrender. Neither encouraged her. Mai expanded a graph. Then another. The points sat on the line as if they had been placed there by someone with a ruler and a grudge. Every cycle. Every appearance. Every reconstruction. Not close. Not within tolerance. Exact. Shammy came to stand behind the chair. "You're smiling." "No." "Yes." Mai didn't look away from the line. "I have an engineering problem that appears to violate several laws I use before breakfast. It reconstructs without an observable material input. It ignores causality in a way I can measure." A corner of her mouth escaped. "And yet." Shammy smiled, small. "You like it." Mai sighed. "Unfortunately." From the couch: "I heard that." "I know." "You are not adopting the robot." "I know." "You sounded like you were thinking about it." "I was not." "You were." Fifteen minutes later the word arrived on schedule. Ace threw a pillow. The pillow missed, hit the sensor array, and the array complained in a tone Mai would make her pay for. The robot remained emotionally unaffected, which was the most offensive thing it had done all day. By evening the wall display had filled. Cycle numbers. Timestamps. Failed theories in Mai's cramped hand. A list of things reality had apparently resigned from. Ace studied the board, then the clock, then the robot. The robot studied her back, green and patient. "How long?" Mai checked the pane. "Forty-two seconds." Ace sat. Crossed her arms. Waited. Shammy noticed. "Oh no." Ace ignored her. Thirty-five. Thirty. Twenty-five. Mai noticed on the twenty. "Ace." "What." "Are you timing it?" "No." "You are." "No." Five. Four. Three. Two. One. "HELLOU!" Ace closed her eyes the way a person closes them in a church they do not attend. Shammy laughed. Mai tried not to and lost by a margin she would not be recording. "I hate this." "Why?" Shammy asked. "Because I knew exactly when it would happen." "That's normal." "No." Mai pointed at the wall, gentle. "Statistically, yes." Ace pointed at the robot. "Statistically, I am throwing that out the window." The robot did not look concerned. Concern was not in its budget. The apartment went quiet for almost fifteen minutes. Then the word. Ace stood, went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and took down the heavy metal mixing bowl Shammy used when she was prepared to feed more people than had been invited. She walked back. She set the bowl upside down over the robot. The green vanished. The room held its breath out of manners. Three seconds. "HELLOU!" From inside the bowl. Shammy folded over the arm of the couch. Mai put her face in one hand. Ace stared at the bowl. The bowl, metaphorically, stared back. She pointed at it. "I am declaring war." Mai nodded. "Reasonable." Shammy, still laughing, nodded too. "Completely reasonable." The bowl answered. Ace looked at the clock. Then at Mai. "Message Reyes." "I already did." "What did you tell her?" Mai's pad lit with the reply before she could invent a softer version. Ace read it over her shoulder. Reyes, who had a talent for arriving at the worst possible minute and treating it as a personal compliment, had asked how bad it was. The bowl said the word. Mai typed one line and sent it. Worse than that sounds. ## Chapter 4 — Ace Declares War Reyes arrived twenty-three minutes later, which put her between cycles and therefore in the worst possible chair. The door opened. She stepped in, shut it with her heel, and stopped. The wall display. The scanners. The cable. Mai, barefoot, hair tied wrong. Shammy with tea she was no longer drinking. Ace on the couch with the expression of a woman who had already lost three arguments and was prepared to lose a fourth in public. And, in the middle of the floor, an upside-down mixing bowl. Reyes pointed at it. "What is that." Nobody answered. Answering would have required a sentence, and none of them had a sentence they were willing to own. She pointed again, slower. "What is that." Mai didn't look up from the pane. "It's complicated." "That's a bowl." "Correct." "Ace." "What." "Why is there a bowl in the middle of your floor?" The bowl saved Ace the trouble. "HELLOU!" Reyes froze. The room, out of solidarity, froze with her. The bowl remained committed to being a bowl. She looked at it. At Ace. At Mai. At Shammy. Back at the bowl. Then she sat, carefully, on the arm of the couch, the way a person sits when the furniture might also be a negotiation. "Start talking." Five minutes later she was laughing hard enough that Shammy had to take the tea out of her radius. Ace hated the sound and hated, more, that it was earned. "It is not funny." Reyes wiped one eye with the side of her hand. "It is extremely funny." "It is not." "You put a bowl over it." "Yes." "Because you thought that would help." "It was worth testing." "It talks through the bowl." "I noticed." The bowl confirmed the point. Reyes nearly went off the arm. Shammy looked pleased in a way Ace filed under crimes. "I told you she would react like this." Ace pointed at her. "You are part of the problem." "Probably." "Definitely." It took another twenty minutes for Reyes to become a person again. Mai put the panes where she could see them. Schematics. Graphs. A column of numbers that got worse as it went down. Reyes read. The smile thinned, then went, then came back as something else. "Huh." Mai glanced up. "Huh?" "Huh." Ace frowned. "That's not useful." "No." Reyes tapped a pane with one nail. "That's Zetatech architecture. Old habit in the lattice. They sign their work even when they swear they don't." Mai nodded. "I know." Reyes stared at the model, then at the bowl, then at the model. "They built this." "Apparently." "Why?" The bowl answered. Reyes closed her eyes. "Not helpful." Mai enlarged a reconstruction estimate. The numbers sat there, ugly and neat. "I estimated resource consumption." Reyes' face changed. "How bad?" Mai hesitated. The hesitation was the bad part. "Mai." "Very bad." "Numbers." She enlarged the column. "Conservative. Several million eurodollars." The room went quiet enough to hear the refrigerator. Ace blinked, which from her was a speech. Reyes stared at the figure, then laughed once, short, not because it was funny. Because it was insane. "They spent millions." "Yes." "To annoy you." "Yes." The bowl spoke. Reyes pointed at it with the solemnity of a toast. "Best investment they ever made." Ace threw the second pillow. It hit Reyes in the shoulder. This improved nothing and satisfied Ace for nearly four seconds. An hour later she stopped trying to understand the robot and started trying to win. The freezer came first. Shammy cleared a shelf. Ace set the robot between a tray of something Mai had labeled and a bottle neither of them would admit to owning. Door shut. Timer on the pane. They stood in the kitchen like people waiting on a verdict. Fifteen minutes. The word came from the living room. The robot sat on the coffee table, pristine. The freezer, when Mai opened it, still held the crushed silver of the previous unit, cold, inert, done. Mai took a note. Ace swore, quietly and with architectural precision. Reyes laughed into the cushion. Shammy put the kettle on, because someone had to keep the room from becoming only this. The hydraulic press was a favor called in two blocks over, a man who owed Ace a debt he would now consider paid in full and then some. They watched the ram come down. The sound was final. Fifteen minutes later the robot was on the workbench behind them, eyes green, and the pancake of metal was still under the ram. Industrial acid was Mai's concession and her regret. She set the conditions. She recorded the dissolution. She did not record the language Ace used when the fifteenth minute arrived and the robot greeted them from the sink. The rented crusher was worse, mostly because they had to drive to it, and the robot greeted them from the passenger seat on the way back while the crusher yard still held the evidence. The fifth method Mai requested, politely and without room for appeal, not be written down. It ended the same way. Fifteen minutes. The word. A new unit. The old one wherever Ace had left it, dead and useless and somehow not the point. By two in the morning the apartment looked like the aftermath of a war conducted by people with too much equipment and not enough dignity. Fragments in trays. A burn mark on a board Shammy would mention in the morning. Reyes asleep in the chair with her boots still on. Mai awake, because sleep had become a theory. Ace on the floor with her back to the couch, watching the robot on the table, waiting for the interval the way a sentry waits for a gate that has already failed. "HELLOU!" She didn't throw anything. There was nothing left in reach she was willing to sacrifice. "Tomorrow," she said. Mai, without looking up, answered. "Tomorrow it will still be fifteen minutes." "Tomorrow I will be angrier." "That isn't a variable I've been able to plot." From the chair, eyes closed, Reyes said, "Put it on the graph anyway." The robot's eyes glowed. Ace turned her face to the ceiling and listened to the city, and to the clock in her head that had started, without permission, to count. ## Chapter 5 — Mai Declares Science Morning arrived badly, which in Night City was a style. Nobody had slept in any way a doctor would sign. At six the robot spoke from the kitchen. At six-fifteen it spoke from the arm of the couch. At six-thirty it spoke from the bedside table, which Ace did not remember authorizing. She opened one eye. The robot sat among a glass and a knife she kept for reasons that were not domestic. Green eyes. Perfect posture. The pleasure of a thing that had won an argument by continuing to exist. "HELLOU!" "No." It remained optimistic. Across the room Shammy laughed into a pillow, the sound muffled and unhelpful. "You look tired." "I am going to commit engineering." "I don't think that's a charge." "It should be." Mai had not slept at all, which was the worse version. The living room had become the aftermath of a corporate acquisition conducted by one woman and a pot of coffee. Displays still up. Models rotating on a loop. Three cups, one of them forgotten until it had developed a skin. A breakfast Shammy had left and Mai had not seen. And Mai herself, upright, lit from below by her own work, blinking less than a person ought to blink. Shammy stopped in the doorway. "Oh." "Hm?" "Oh no." Mai looked up. "What?" "You've entered research mode." "No." "You haven't blinked in six minutes." Mai considered this with the fairness she applied to data and rarely to herself. "...fair." The robot announced itself from the bedroom, faint through the wall. Mai pointed in its direction as if it had volunteered. "See?" "What am I seeing?" "The problem." She stood. The tiredness was still in her shoulders. The rest of her had already left it behind. "The opportunity." Shammy narrowed her eyes. "That's the look Kiro gets before terrible decisions." "Kiro makes terrible decisions." "You make scientifically justified terrible decisions." Mai opened her mouth. Closed it. "...fair." Kiro arrived an hour later, which meant someone had texted her, and Ace knew who. The door opened. Kiro took one step, took in the wall, the cables, the bowl still on the floor because no one had had the heart or the energy to restore it to kitchen duty, and stopped. "What happened." Nobody answered. Answering had not improved anyone's morning. Kiro pointed at the panes. "Why does your living room look like a conspiracy documentary?" "HELLOU!" She jumped. The robot had chosen the shelf by the door, eye-level, delighted. "What the hell was that?" Reyes, awake now and occupying half the couch as if she paid rent, lifted a hand without sitting up. "There she is." Kiro stared. "What." "The second victim." "I'm not a victim." The robot disagreed on schedule. Kiro looked at it for a long second, then at Mai, then at the trays of dead metal. "Okay. What is that." Twenty minutes later she was in the chair beside Mai, both of them bent toward the same model, both of them gone from the room in every way that mattered. Ace knew the sign. Shammy knew it. Even Reyes knew it, and Reyes made a career out of arriving after the sign had already become a problem. Two very smart people discovering something very stupid. The most dangerous combination available without a corporate charter. Mai rotated the model. Kiro pushed the resolution until the image started to lie, then pulled it back. They stopped at the same time. "Oh no," Kiro said. Ace sat up. "What." Mai looked concerned. Kiro looked impressed. Neither expression was a gift. Mai pointed at the projection. "This isn't a product." Reyes frowned over the back of the couch. "Meaning?" "Meaning nobody sane would sell it," Kiro said. "This is a prototype. A mean one. The kind that doesn't have a market because the market would ask questions and the questions would have answers." The room took that in. Reyes spoke first, careful. "Someone built a self-repairing nanotech prototype. Spent millions. Then used it to annoy Ace." Mai nodded. Kiro nodded. Shammy nodded, which Ace would remember. The robot, on the shelf, offered its only contribution. The room collapsed in stages. Reyes first. Kiro second, hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking. Shammy third, openly, no apology in it. Mai lasted longer than Ace expected and lost anyway, a breath of a laugh she tried to turn into a cough. Ace sat in it. Watched them. Watched the robot. Watched, with no pleasure, the last twenty-four hours arranging themselves into a shape she could not shoot. Kiro wiped her eyes and ruined the moment by becoming a scientist again. The laugh stopped. She looked at the robot. At Mai. Back at the robot. "Oh no." Mai heard the tone. "Oh no?" "Oh no." Ace pointed. "Words." Kiro pointed at the green eyes. "If we can understand how this works—" "No," Mai said, which was a lie she was already losing. "Yes." "No." "Yes." Shammy put her face in her hands. Ace stood. "Absolutely not." Neither of them heard her. Mai was already thinking in the direction of the model. Kiro was already calculating what the model would cost them in sleep. The robot watched, patient, green, on time. Fifteen minutes after the last word, it spoke. For the first time since the box had opened, it was not the most dangerous thing in the room. ## Chapter 6 — Zetatech Confirmed By afternoon the apartment had found a new dysfunction, and the robot was not it. The robot was predictable. The robot was consistent. The robot was, humiliatingly, the most emotionally stable presence on the lease. The problem was the scientists. Mai and Kiro had entered what Reyes, from the couch, had started calling the Zone. Food optional. Sleep theoretical. Sentences leaving the room in a language the room had not agreed to. Everyone else suffered in the ordinary way, which was to say they made more coffee and pretended this was a choice. The robot spoke. Neither scientist looked up. Ace pointed. "See." Reyes nodded. "I see." "They didn't hear it." "They heard it." "Then why didn't they react?" "Because they're doing science." Ace frowned. "That isn't an answer." "It is if you've known Kiro long enough." Across the room Mai turned a molecular simulation with two fingers. Kiro expanded the layer under it. They frowned at the same defect. "That can't work," Mai said. "It absolutely can't," Kiro said. "Then why does it?" "No idea." "Interesting." "Oh, very." Ace looked at Shammy. Shammy looked back. No words required. The room had tipped from annoying into the kind of interesting that got people visited by lawyers. The robot interrupted, cheerful. Kiro pointed at the pane without looking. "There." Mai nodded. "There." Ace blinked. "What." Kiro finally lifted her head. "The signal." "What signal?" "The HELLOU." Ace regretted the question immediately, and then, ten minutes later, regretted it with data. They had built a chart. Waveforms. Harmonics. A resonance model that looked like a weather system designed by someone with a grudge against weather. Atmospheric measurements. Probability trees. All of it hung on a tiny machine saying one cheerful word every fifteen minutes, and the chart updated when the word arrived, automatic, smug. Reyes stared at it for long enough that Shammy poured her water she didn't drink. "You two are insane." "Correct," Mai said. "Fair," Kiro said. Then Mai stopped. Completely. The stop she did when the room could wait. Kiro saw it before anyone else. "What." Mai enlarged a section. Then the section under it. Then the signature hiding in the noise, a repeating courtesy the lattice made when it thought no one was rude enough to look. The room quieted without being asked. Shammy sat up. Reyes stopped scrolling. Ace paid attention, which was the tell. Mai looked at them, slow. "I know where the nanotech comes from." Nobody breathed wrong. "Zetatech." Nobody looked surprised. Reyes had already named the architecture. Mai shook her head. "No." Now they looked surprised. She expanded another layer. The signature changed age. Not current production. Not the work of a division that had to survive a quarterly review. "This isn't current Zetatech." Kiro's eyes widened. "Oh." "Oh." Reyes frowned. "Translate." "It wasn't built by a product division," Kiro said. "And it wasn't built by R&D. R&D leaves fingerprints because R&D has to justify its snacks." Ace folded her arms. "Then who?" Mai zoomed until the model was almost abstract, and pointed at the part that wasn't. "Black budget." The silence after that had a different weight. Reyes sat up. "You're kidding." "No." Kiro looked almost impressed, which Ace filed next to Shammy's nod as evidence for a later trial. "They used black-budget nanotech. For this." "Yes." The robot spoke. Nobody reacted. They were busy looking at the number Mai had revised, which was no longer several million, and was no longer interested in being conservative. Ace pointed at the green eyes. "...that." Mai nodded. "That." Reyes laughed again, harder, because the shape of it had finally finished arriving. "They weaponized annoyance." The word came on time. She didn't fall off the couch. She was already braced. The buzzer cut through the next silence. Mai checked the camera. Her face did something small. "Oh." Shammy smiled. "Oh no." Ace knew that tone. "What." Mai turned the feed. Two figures on the step. Marco, with a paper bag that meant he had decided this was a social call. Lena beside him, curious in the way that meant someone had already talked. Ace turned toward Reyes. Reyes raised both hands. "I didn't." Kiro didn't raise anything. "I absolutely did." "Kiro." "It was funny." "It is not funny." The robot, from the shelf, offered its dissenting opinion. The buzzer went again. Marco's voice came through the intercom, cheerful, carrying the bag and the certainty of a man who had never met a situation he couldn't adopt. "Open up. We came to meet the robot." Ace closed her eyes. For the first time in two days, the next bad decision was not going to be the robot's. ## Chapter 7 — Visitors The buzzer rang again. Not impatient. Confident. Marco did most things that way, including friendship. Ace looked at the intercom. The intercom, metaphorically, looked back. Marco's voice returned, closer to the plate. "Come on. I know you're all in there. I literally saw Kiro wave at the camera." Everyone turned. Kiro froze with her hand still half-raised, a traitor to her own motor cortex. "It was instinct." Ace pointed at the door. "Never do that again." "HELLOU!" From the shelf. Marco, outside, made a sound that carried through the plate. Lena's laugh followed it, lower, shorter, the laugh of a woman who had already decided the afternoon was going to be a story. Shammy was the one who opened the door. Ace would remember that too. Marco came in with the bag and the weather on his jacket, Pacifica still on him, salt and fried oil and the particular dust of a block that had been repaired more often than it had been built. Lena came in behind him, eyes moving, cataloguing the panes, the cables, the bowl, the trays. She stopped on the robot. The robot stopped on her, in as much as it stopped on anyone. "HELLOU!" Marco put the bag down as if he had been invited to a baptism. "Oh, I like him." "It," Ace said. "Him." "It." Marco crouched so he was eye-level with the shelf. The green reflected in his eyes. He grinned the way he grinned at kids who had done something unwise and survivable. "Hey." "HELLOU!" "Yeah. Hey." Lena accepted tea from Shammy without taking her eyes off the unit. "Kiro said it comes back." "Kiro says a lot of things," Ace said. "Kiro was right," Mai said, which ended that. They told it once, because Lena asked once and listened. Rogue. The box. The crush. The counter. The bowl. The freezer. The number. Marco listened with his chin on his hand and the expression of a man being given a gift he intended to unwrap in public. When Mai said black budget he whistled, soft. "That's a lot of money to spend on a bit." "It isn't a bit," Ace said. "It's a bit that survived you. That's a bit." Reyes, from the couch, lifted her cup in agreement and was ignored on principle. Marco stayed crouched. The robot did not flinch, because flinching was not a feature. He looked over his shoulder at Lena. Lena looked at the trays of dead units, then at the live one, then at the neighborhood still sitting on Marco's jacket. "Don't," she said. "I haven't said it." "You're about to say it." "I'm thinking it." "That's worse." He stood. The bag proved to contain bread and something fried that Shammy appropriated before the argument could reach it. Marco wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at Ace with the terrible sincerity he used when he was about to make her life worse for a good reason. "Community Day is Saturday." "No." "I haven't finished." "No." The robot, loyal to the worst possible timing, spoke. Marco pointed at it, delighted. "See? He's excited." "He is not." "Look at him." "I refuse." Lena sipped her tea with the calm of a woman watching a tide come in from a step above it. Shammy, less helpful, said, "To be fair—" Ace turned. "No." "I haven't finished." "No." Marco looked like a man whose army had just acquired an air force. "She's on my side." "I didn't say that." "You implied it." "I implied nothing." The robot contributed. Meanwhile Mai and Kiro had stopped pretending to listen. Their heads were together over a pane, voices down, the particular whisper of people who had found a seam. Lena saw it. Reyes saw Lena see it. "Oh no," Lena said. "Yep." "What?" "Look." Ace followed the look. "What are they doing." Nobody answered. Then Mai stood, and the room became nervous on instinct. Kiro stood with her, which helped nothing. "I have news," Mai said. Ace already regretted the hour. "Normal words." Kiro nodded. "Fair." Mai sighed, and put the lecture away. "We figured out why it always comes back." Even Marco leaned in. Even the robot, if leaning was available to it. Mai pointed at the pane, then at the floor, then at the freezer visible through the kitchen door. "The unit doesn't rebuild itself." Ace stared. "It obviously rebuilds." "It doesn't." "Mai." "The one you crush stays crushed. The one in the freezer is still in the freezer. The one under the press is still under the press." She didn't look at Ace for the acid. She didn't have to. "They all stayed where they were. The one that appears every fifteen minutes is a new unit." Reyes sat forward. "There isn't one robot." "Correct." "There's a line of them." "A production cycle," Kiro said. "Something upstream is printing a fresh body on a clock and handing it a single instruction. We don't have the printer. We have the receipt." Marco looked at the green eyes with open admiration. "That's kind of amazing." "Marco." "What?" "Stop encouraging it." "HELLOU!" He didn't stop. Ace watched his face and saw the Community Day sentence assembling itself again, larger now, with an audience. She also saw Lena set her cup down. Lena did not set cups down for decoration. "Can I ask a question?" "Sure," Marco said. "Why do you want to bring it?" He looked surprised to be asked by her, then smiled, smaller than the grin. "Because the kids would love it. It's weird. It's harmless. It says one nice word and it keeps saying it. Most of what those kids meet doesn't do either." Nobody had an immediate answer. The robot filled the gap, on time, bright as a bell in a block that didn't get many. Ace looked at the trays of dead metal. At Mai, who was already thinking about upstream. At Shammy, who had not taken a side and had somehow still ended up on Marco's. At the bread on the counter, which smelled like a neighborhood. "No," she said, again. Marco nodded, as if she had said they'd talk about it. "Saturday." "No." Lena picked her cup back up. "We'll see." Ace hated that more than the no. ## Chapter 8 — Community Negotiations The argument lasted through two cycles and a third pot of coffee. Ace's position did not move. Absolutely not. A black-budget printer somewhere in the city was spending money to put a new cheerful body in her apartment every fifteen minutes, and Marco wanted to introduce it to children. The sentence did not improve with repetition. Marco's position did not move either. He sat on the floor because the couch was full, back against the wall, and made his case the way he made most of his cases: by refusing to elevate it. "It's one table. One afternoon. Lena runs the volunteer list. I run the grill. The kids get a thing that isn't a corp ad and isn't a gun. You stand there and glare at it, which is what you were going to do anyway." "I was going to dissolve it." "You tried that." "I am going to try better." "You tried better." Reyes, traitor, made a sound into her cup that was not disagreement. Lena let them run until the second cycle, then set the cup down again. The room oriented. "If it prints a new one every fifteen minutes," she said, "then the one at the plaza isn't leaving the apartment undefended. You'll still have one here. Or you'll have one there and one here. I don't love that either. I'm saying the scarcity argument is gone." Mai nodded, once. Kiro didn't, because Kiro was drawing the upstream estimate on a napkin and the napkin was losing. Ace looked at Lena. "You're supporting this." "I'm supporting the kids having a Saturday that isn't a briefing. I'm not supporting whatever Zetatech thinks it's doing." Lena glanced at the robot. "I also want to see if it behaves in a crowd. Your apartment is a biased sample. Everyone here already lost." Shammy, from the kitchen, said, "She's not wrong." Ace pointed without turning. "You don't get a vote." "I live here." "That's why." Marco tried not to smile and failed in the mouth. The robot spoke. He answered it, under his breath, "Hellou," the way you answer a neighbor. Ace heard it. She filed it next to the other evidence. Mai came back from the napkin. "Conditions." Ace turned. "You are not negotiating my surrender." "I'm negotiating the variables. If it goes, it goes on a table we control. No one else handles it. Kiro and I record the cycle in a public space. If the interval drifts, we pull it. If it does anything other than the word, we pull it. If Ace says the day is over, the day is over." Kiro lifted the napkin. "And I want exterior audio. If the printer is local, a crowd might mask it. If the printer isn't local, the public cycle tells us the feed doesn't care about walls." Reyes stretched her legs. "So the science project gets a field trip, Marco gets his bit, and Ace gets veto." "Ace gets veto," Mai said. Ace looked at her. Mai looked back, steady, the look that meant she had already done the math and was offering Ace the only door that still locked from the inside. Shammy set a plate down where Ace could reach it without admitting she wanted it. The robot sat on the shelf. Green. Waiting. Not lobbying, which was worse than lobbying. Lobbying could be refused. Ace ate one of the fried things. The neighborhood was in it. She hated that too. "One table," she said. "I stand at it. Anyone who tries to take it home loses a hand." Marco nodded, solemn, already texting someone. "One table." "And if this becomes a thing—" "It won't." "Marco." "It won't." Lena did not agree out loud. She didn't disagree either. She looked at the robot for a long second, then at Ace. "Saturday," she said. "Wear something that says you might leave." "I always might leave." "Good." The robot spoke. Outside, the rain started again, fine against the glass. Ace listened to it, and to the count starting over in her head, and did not say the number out loud. ## Chapter 9 — Community Day Saturday came in clean, which felt like a setup. Pacifica wore the light differently from the corporate canyons. Lower. Wider. The plaza above the old pumping station had been swept, not by a city crew, by people who used it. Tables in a loose row. A grill already arguing with itself. A hand-painted sign for the volunteer list, Lena's handwriting, no exclamation points. Kids on the low wall, pretending not to watch the adults set up, watching anyway. Ace carried the robot in a hard case because she refused to walk through a neighborhood with it on her palm like a mascot. The case did not stop the fifteenth minute. Halfway across the plaza, muffled and cheerful, the word arrived from inside the foam. A boy on the wall heard it. His head turned. Ace did not slow down. Marco had kept his word about the table. One table, end of the row, shade from a tarp that had been a banner in a previous life. Mai set the recorders. Kiro set two more, because Kiro did not trust a single instrument with a miracle. Shammy took the side that faced the grill and the side that faced the street without appearing to choose. Reyes arrived late, sunglasses on, coffee in hand, and the expression of a woman attending a funeral she had bet on. "This is a terrible idea," she said, pleasantly. "Yes," Ace said. "I'm glad we agree." Lena checked the list, checked the grill, checked Ace, and nodded once. Permission, or surrender. Marco clapped his hands. "All right. Community Day. Try not to set anything on fire that isn't already on fire." He looked at the case. Ace looked at him. The interval had three minutes on it. She set the case on the table, thumbed the latches, and opened it. The robot sat up in the foam. Green eyes. The plaza's noise dipped half a step, the way a room dips when a door opens on a party that wasn't expecting a guest. A girl with a scraped knee and a sticker on her cheek got there first, because children always get there first. She stared. The robot stared back. "HELLOU!" The girl blinked. Then, solemn as a judge, she said, "Hi." Ace put her hand on the edge of the table and did not move it. Mai's recorder ticked. Kiro's second recorder ticked louder, out of spite. Shammy's face did nothing Ace could use in a later argument. The girl looked up at Ace. "Does it have a name?" "No." "It said hello." "It says one word." "That's a name, though." Marco, passing with a tray of buns, said, "Told you," and kept walking before Ace could answer either of them. The morning held. People came for the grill and stayed for the table, then pretended they had come for the table. The robot did not do tricks. It did not move, except to turn its head toward whoever had spoken last. Every fifteen minutes it said the word, bright, identical, unafraid of children, which Ace respected and resented in equal measure. The dead units did not appear in the plaza. Whatever printed the new body was content to print it here, on the table, in front of a handwritten sign and a tarp. Kiro stared at her feeds and muttered something Mai answered with a nod. Walls were irrelevant. That was a later problem. A boy tried to poke it. Ace looked at him. He discovered a sudden interest in his shoe. Shammy, beside her, said, "Still effective," and Ace did not give her the satisfaction of a reply. By noon the table had a crowd that didn't call itself a crowd. Lena moved through it with water and the volunteer list, and every time the interval approached she glanced at the robot without meaning to. Ace saw that. She saw Marco timing the burgers to the cycle, badly, on purpose, so the word landed while he was handing a plate over and the kid receiving it laughed. She saw an old man on a folding chair nod at the green eyes as if they had been introduced at church. Reyes leaned on the tarp pole. "You can still veto." "I know." "You haven't." "I know." The girl with the scraped knee came back. She had a piece of paper now, folded twice. She didn't try to hand it to the robot. She held it out to Ace, because children understand jurisdictions. "For him," she said. "After." Ace looked at the paper. She did not open it. She put it under the recorder where the wind wouldn't take it. "After," she said. The girl nodded, satisfied, and ran. The interval arrived. The robot spoke. Three kids on the wall answered it, messy, overlapping, not a chant. Just the word, given back. Ace kept her hand on the table. The veto stayed where it was. The day was not over. She was not ready to say she had lost it. She was ready to admit, only to the wood under her palm, that the plaza had not yet given her a reason. ## Chapter 10 — The Event The afternoon thickened. Not trouble. Attention. The kind that moves through a block faster than a siren because nobody has to admit they passed it on. A food vendor from two streets over arrived with a cooler and the excuse of leftover rice. Two retired mechanics came because Lena had asked them to look at a generator, and stayed because the generator was fine and the table was not. Volunteers who had finished their shifts did not leave. They drifted to the end of the row and found reasons to stand in the shade. Ace watched the drift and did not like the shape of it. The robot remained, obscenely, a good guest. It did not scan the crowd. It did not project. It did not offer a coupon, a sermon, or a threat. Every fifteen minutes it said the word, and the word had started to land in the gaps people left for it. A woman paused mid-sentence, heard it, finished the sentence. A man checking his agent glanced up, confirmed the sound, went back to the agent. No one announced that this was happening. That was the part Ace trusted least. Mai had stopped pretending the recorders were the point. She stood at the end of the table with her arms folded, watching faces the way she watched anomalous readings, counting without writing it down. Kiro crouched by the feeds and swore, softly, at a flatline that refused to be a source. No local printer. No burst she could catch. The new unit simply was, on the quarter hour, and the old one — if Ace crushed it, and she had not, not here — would remain. Upstream. Elsewhere. Expensive. "Still no origin," Kiro said. "I know," Mai said. "I hate that I want to clap." "Don't." Shammy moved through the crowd without collecting it. She brought water to the old man. She redirected a toddler who had decided the robot was a ball. She stood for a while at Ace's shoulder and said nothing, which was its own report: the plaza was not afraid. The plaza was amused, and under the amusement, something quieter. People liked a rhythm they hadn't been sold. Reyes saw Ace seeing it. "You could still call it." "If I call it now, Marco wins in a different direction." "Marco already won." "I'm aware." A cycle landed. This time more than the kids answered. Not all of them. Not a performance. A handful of adults, ironic, then a woman who wasn't ironic at all, then the girl with the scraped knee, clear as a bell. "HELLOU!" The robot, having said it first, did not say it again. It had rules. Ace was beginning to hate the rules for being comprehensible. Lena appeared at her elbow with the list and a pen. "Generator's fine. Mechanics are staying for the rice. If you want them gone, say so. If you want the table moved into the shade in an hour, say so. If you want me to pretend I don't see what's happening, I can do that for about twenty minutes." "How long has it been happening?" "Since the third cycle. You were busy glaring at a child." "He was going to poke it." "He was." Lena capped the pen. "They're not adopting it, Ace. They're adopting the interval. That's smaller. It's also stickier." Ace looked at the table. The paper from the girl was still under the recorder. She hadn't opened it. She could feel the fold against her sense of the wood. Marco passed again, no tray this time, grease on his wrist, happy in a way he didn't perform. He caught Ace's eye and had the decency not to say told you. He said, "Burgers are done at the next one," and went back to the grill. Ace stayed. The veto stayed in her mouth. The day kept being a day. ## Chapter 11 — HELLOU! The sticker happened near four. The girl came back with two others, younger, one of them holding the paper Ace had not opened because the girl had made another. She waited until a cycle had passed, until the word had landed and the little answering ripple had gone, and then she stepped up to the table with the seriousness of a courier. "Can I put this next to him?" Ace looked at the paper. A face, round, smiling, green dots for eyes. Under it, in careful crooked letters: HELLOU! She could say no. The no was right there, practiced, load-bearing. The girl's scraped knee had a fresh plaster on it. Someone had done that between visits. The plaza was loud with ordinary noise. Shammy was not looking at her, which was a kindness or a trap. "On the table," Ace said. "Not on it." The girl nodded, placed the paper beside the robot, and stepped back to examine the composition. The robot turned its head. The paper did not. The children did. Then the interval, early by no one's watch but felt early, arrived. "HELLOU!" The nearby section of the plaza answered. Not three kids. Not a handful. Enough that Ace couldn't count them without turning her head, and she didn't turn her head. The word came back off the tarp, off the low wall, off the grill where Marco had stopped with a bun in his hand and his mouth open. Ace covered her face with one hand. Not drama. Inventory. When she dropped it, Mai was beside her, and Mai's face had the stop in it. "Do you see it?" Mai said. "I see the chant." "Not the chant." Mai tipped her chin at the crowd. A woman had checked the time, not to leave, to wait. Two volunteers were holding a conversation open across the gap. A mechanic had set his cup down and was looking at the table the way you look at a clock you trust more than the one on your wrist. "Anticipation. They're organizing around the interval. Not as a joke. As a beat." Kiro stood up from the feeds. "Oh no." "People time things," Ace said. "People time things to things they believe will happen," Mai said. "It has been accurate all day. In public. For free." Reyes had gone quiet, which was the other tell. Marco sat down on the cooler, suddenly, as if the day had handed him the bill. Lena sat beside him. Shammy sat on the edge of the table, not crowding the robot, watching the block watch itself. Ace looked at the children. At the volunteers. At the families who had come for rice and stayed for a word. At the paper with the crooked letters. At the green eyes, which had never once looked ashamed. She heard herself say it. "It's becoming a mascot." Nobody argued. The argument was over on the table, in marker, with a smiling face. The girl didn't cheer. She looked at Ace to see if the paper was still allowed. Ace nodded once. The girl smiled like a person who had completed a delivery. The next cycle came. The plaza answered, messier, bigger. Ace kept her hand on the wood. The war, she understood, had not been lost in the apartment, or in the bowl, or under the press. It had been lost here, in front of a grill, because the weapon had forgotten to be a weapon and the block had not. She did not say that out loud. Shammy, who did not need it said, poured water into a cup and set it where Ace could reach it. ## Chapter 12 — The Clock The problem declared itself three days later, and it declared itself politely. Community Day ended. People went home. The robot came back in the case and greeted the apartment from the kitchen counter at the first interval after the door shut, as if the plaza had been a commute. Life returned to normal. The sentence was a lie, and no one audited it. The first warning was a message on Lena's agent. She read it twice and turned the screen toward Marco. He laughed hard enough to threaten the coffee. "What." He turned it. A volunteer, running late. Meet you after the next HELLOU! Lena stared at the line. Then she sighed, the sigh of a woman adding an item to a list she had not requested. "Oh no." Marco was still laughing. "Oh no." Elsewhere, Ace was attempting breakfast. Mai had notes. Kiro had colonized half the couch and was pretending the colonization was temporary. The robot sat on the counter, waiting, which was all it had ever done. Mai looked up from the kettle. "Tea will be ready in three minutes." Ace stopped with the cup halfway. "How do you know?" Mai went still in the hands. The kettle clicked. She didn't look at the clock on the wall. "HELLOU! is in three minutes." The kitchen held that. Ace set the cup down. "You used it as a timer." "No." "You did." Kiro, from the couch, didn't even open her eyes. "I do too." "No." "Fifteen-minute blocks. Twenty-four cycles is six hours. It's disgusting and it works." "Kiro." The robot announced itself. Kiro nodded at the ceiling. "There." Ace looked at her coffee as if it had personally betrayed her. Reyes came by in the afternoon, sunglasses on, and stopped inside the door the way she had stopped for the bowl. She looked at the counter. At Mai. At the clock she was not checking. "What time is it?" Nobody answered. The room waited, which was the answer. Five seconds. Ten. The word. Mai said, "Four-fifteen." Kiro said, "Exactly." Reyes took the sunglasses off. "You've replaced clocks." "No," Mai said. "Yes," Reyes said. The robot spoke, helpful. Ace pointed at it. "Stop encouraging them." It did not stop. Encouragement was not in its instruction set. Existence was. The confirmation came in the evening, over a call Shammy had answered because Shammy answered when the block called. Marco, mid-sentence about volunteer slots, said, "Hold on." They held. The word came, faint, from his end and from the counter at the same time. "Okay," Marco said. "Where was I?" The apartment froze in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. Ace turned toward the pad, slow. "Marco." "Yeah?" "Did you just use it as a bookmark?" A pause. Lena's laugh hit the speaker before his defense did. "...maybe." "Marco." "In my defense, it works." "No." "It actually works." The robot waited until the argument had spent itself. Then it spoke. Everyone looked at the counter. Not a decision. A reflex. Ace felt the reflex in her own neck and hated the feeling for being small. The thought arrived anyway, uninvited, in the part of her mind that kept inventories. What if it stopped. She pushed the thought down so hard the cup clicked against the table. The thought did not break. It implied she would notice. Noticing was worse than annoyance. Annoyance had been a war. Noticing was a habit. The next cycle came. Nobody laughed. They had all arrived at the same inventory, and none of them liked the count. ## Chapter 13 — The Silence Nobody mentioned it for two days. Not Ace. Not Mai. Not Shammy. Not Kiro, who went back to her own lab and texted intervals anyway. Not Reyes. Not Marco. Not Lena. Mentioning it would have given it a chair. The robot continued. The word. Fifteen minutes. The word. Life did an impression of itself and almost passed the audition. Tuesday broke the impression at 14:15. The apartment was quiet in the ordinary way. Mai working. Kiro pretending not to work from the couch she had failed to vacate. Ace reading a manual she was not retaining. Shammy watering the plants that had survived the war. No one was watching the counter. That was the theory. 14:14:50. 14:14:58. 14:14:59. Nothing. 14:15:03. 14:15:10. 14:15:20. Shammy's hand stopped on the watering can. Mai's fingers stopped on the keys. Kiro stopped scrolling. Ace lowered the manual. None of them spoke, because speaking would have been a confession that they had been counting. 14:15:45. 14:16. Shammy said, quietly, "Did we miss one?" Nobody answered. They had already checked. Ace looked at the counter. Empty. The green was not in the kitchen. Not on the shelf. Not on the arm of the couch. For the first time in weeks the apartment had no cheerful witness. She stood. Immediately. Without the debate she usually afforded her own body. Then she froze, because she had stood. Mai saw it. Of course she did. "Ace." "What." "Why did you stand up?" Ace pointed at the empty counter. "I was stretching." "No." Kiro looked over the back of the couch. "That was the most suspicious stretch I've ever seen, and I work with engineers." "I hate all of you." 14:17. Still nothing. They checked rooms without assigning rooms. Shammy took the kitchen. Mai took the workstation. Kiro took the floor under the couch, which was beneath her and also where she looked. Ace took the balcony. No one commented. Comment would have made it a search. Her agent rang. Marco. "Please tell me this is a normal call." A silence that wasn't. "Have you heard it today?" Ace closed her eyes. "No." "Oh thank god." A beat. Lena in the background, smaller: "We thought it was just us." "It's late," Marco said. "It is." "It has never been late." "I know." "Should we be worried?" "No." Ace listened to her own voice, then to the empty counter. "...probably." The call dropped. The others were already looking at her. They didn't need the content. Reyes' message arrived before anyone could pretend otherwise. Tell me the robot isn't missing. Then, immediately: Never mind. The fact that I asked means we're all screwed. Ace laughed once, against orders. The buzzer went. Once. Twice. Three times. Mai checked the camera and said, "Oh no," in the tone that had preceded every escalation of this particular disaster. She turned the screen. Marco. Lena. Reyes. On the step. None of them embarrassed. All of them concerned about a fist-sized machine that said one word on a clock. Ace covered her face. "No." The buzzer again. Marco, through the plate: "Open up." "No." "We are conducting an investigation." Reyes, closer to the mic: "Officially the stupidest of my career." Lena: "She's not wrong." Shammy opened the door. Ace would remember that, again. From somewhere in the building's ventilation, faint, far, scraped thin by ducting: "...hellou..." The apartment locked. Then all of them, at once, because dignity had left with the interval: "There." ## Chapter 14 — Search Operation Five minutes later the orbit was in the apartment, and no one intended to discuss why. Marco found a marker. Lena saw the marker. "Oh no." "I have an idea." "That's worse." Three minutes after that there was a whiteboard. Kiro claimed it had always been in the closet. No one believed her, and no one had a better theory. At the top, in Marco's hand: FIND HELLOU! Ace stared at it. "No." "Yes." The board remained. The robot did not. Mai stepped up to it, professional, which was how she got dangerous. "The sound came from the ventilation. It was weak. It was delayed. This has never happened." She looked at the room. "We treat the delay as the anomaly, not the absence. Absence is what we can see." Reyes raised a hand. "Why are we treating this like a missing person?" Silence. The answer was embarrassing, so the answer stayed in the silence. Because they were. The buzzer saved them from having to survive the sentence. A child from the plaza stood on the step, one of the regulars, plaster still on the knee. Marco opened the door because Marco opened doors. She looked past him at the whiteboard. "Have you found HELLOU! yet?" The room performed a collective failure of composure. Reyes laughed into her wrist. Lena examined the ceiling. Ace looked at Marco as if he had summoned this. "Everybody's looking," the girl said. "What," Ace said. "The neighborhood chat. The volunteers. The old ladies." Lena sat down. "The old ladies?" "They think he got lost." Marco sat because his legs had filed a complaint. Kiro slid down the wall. Shammy put her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, not quite laughter. Mai looked like she was sorting the afternoon into sociology and would not be sharing the draft. Ace looked like she wanted weather. The search expanded because the block had already expanded it. Within twenty minutes volunteers were in the stairwells. A vendor had closed his window to walk the alley. Two mechanics were arguing about duct access. Someone had printed flyers. Ace demanded a name. Nobody had one. The flyers had the girl's drawing on them, green dots, crooked letters. Ace looked at a flyer and did not crumple it. That, too, went into inventory. The audio trail led down. The basement under the building was the kind of place cities forget on purpose. Dust. Pipes sweating. Storage cages with locks older than the tenants. Wiring that had been retired and had not been informed. Ace went first. Marco carried a flashlight. Lena carried another. Mai carried a scanner. Kiro carried three, and nobody asked. They moved between the cages, following a trace Mai's pad turned into a direction and a shrug. Then, ahead, thin: "...hellou..." Marco whispered, "There." Reyes, behind him: "Why are you whispering?" "I don't know." Fair. The sound came again. They followed it past a shelf of dead fixtures, around a boiler that ticked, to a drainage access half-hidden behind a rack of conduit. Mai stopped. "There." Marco put the light in. Two green points came back out of the dark, small, steady, ridiculous. The group exhaled. All of them. Ace heard her own breath and Reyes' and the girl's absence and hated the synchronization. The robot sat in the shallow pan of the drain, unharmed, politely lost, eyes up. "HELLOU!" Relief moved through them before anyone authorized it. Reyes heard it first, because Reyes listened for exactly that kind of mistake. "Oh no." Lena nodded. "Oh no." Marco nodded. "Oh no." Ace already knew. They had found it. Everyone was glad. The situation had just become worse than the missing interval, because the interval had been a habit, and the gladness was a fact. ## Chapter 15 — Recovery Nobody was going to talk about the relief. That was the rule. Unspoken, unanimous, already dead. Reyes killed it on the stairs. "You all felt that." "No." "Yes." "No." The robot, in Marco's arms, because Marco had picked it up before Ace could object and now had custody by momentum, offered its testimony. Reyes pointed. "Evidence." "That's not evidence." "It's emotional evidence." "That isn't a thing." "It is today." They came up into a lobby that had somehow heard the search was over. A vendor. Two mechanics. Three children. The old ladies, who applauded. Ace stopped on the last step. "What." Nobody had an explanation. The robot spoke. The applause got worse. Marco made a sound that was going to shorten his life. Shammy did not pretend neutrality on the way up the stairs. She looked at the green eyes against Marco's jacket and said, "It was brave." "It is a robot." "HELLOU!" "I see nothing." Upstairs, the neighborhood receded because Lena told it to, and Lena was obeyed. The core stayed. Ace. Mai. Shammy. Reyes. Kiro. The robot on the counter, where it had always sat, as if the drain had been a rumor. Silence. Then the word. Nobody jumped. Nobody sighed. The absence of the sigh was the loudest thing in the room. Reyes let it sit, then smiled the smile Ace did not trust. "You know what the worst part is?" Nobody answered. They knew there was a worst part. She nodded at the counter. "If it disappeared tomorrow—" The room did not move. Ace looked at the robot. The robot looked at Ace. "No," she said. "No what?" "No." "That's not an answer." "No." The word arrived. The room broke on it. Mai first, a real laugh, short, undone. Kiro. Shammy. Reyes. Lena on the pad, late to the sentence and not late to the sound. Ace lasted until the end of it and then lost a piece, small, against her will, the corner of her mouth doing something she would deny if asked. The robot's eyes glowed. It did not know it had won. Winning was not in the instruction. The instruction was the word, on the quarter hour, forever or until the budget noticed. Zetatech had built a psychological weapon. A distraction with a black-budget printer behind it. An annoyance priced like a prototype and delivered like a joke. What sat on the counter was not that. Or it was that, and the block had miscategorized it until the category stuck. A mascot. A timer. A thing people looked for in a drain. A neighbor with one line of dialogue and perfect attendance. Fifteen minutes later it spoke. Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. The apartment sounded like itself again. Ace hated how accurate that was, and did not move the robot off the counter. --- Far from Pacifica, in a room with a table that cost more than the flyer budget, a man read a report three times. Project status. Complete strategic failure. He rubbed his forehead. The aide across from him did not help. "What do you mean it improved community cohesion?" The aide looked at the table. "What do you mean positive sentiment?" The aide looked at the report. "What do you mean mascot?" The aide, who intended to remain employed until the end of the week and not beyond, said nothing. The man closed the folder. He looked at the ventilation grate in the ceiling, which was a stupid thing to look at, and he knew it was stupid, and he looked anyway. From somewhere in the building, faint, on time, cheerful: "HELLOU!" He stood up. "Nope." The resignation letter took him two weeks. The printer, upstream, wherever it was, did not receive a copy. It did not need one. Every fifteen minutes, in an apartment above a block that had started telling time by it, a small metallic body turned its head toward whoever was nearest, and said the only thing it had. Ace, on the couch, heard it. She did not throw the pillow. The pillow was on the chair, and the chair was Reyes', and the war was over. She picked up her cup. The tea was three minutes out. She did not ask how she knew. ## Chapter 16 — Upstream The resignation took two weeks. The printer did not attend. In the apartment the interval kept its job. Morning light on the counter. The robot in the place Marco had set it down after the drain, which had become the place, because nobody had moved it and the not-moving had started to look like a decision. Ace drank coffee she had timed without admitting the timing. Mai worked. Shammy watered what had survived. Every fifteen minutes the word arrived, and the room made room for it the way a room makes room for a clock it no longer checks. On the ninth day Mai put a slate on the table and did not turn it on. "They tried to kill it," she said. Ace didn't look up from the manual she was still not retaining. "The robot." "The feed. Kiro caught a shutdown order moving through a black-budget ledger that isn't supposed to have a public edge. Someone with a title and a headache authorized a halt. The halt left the building. It did not arrive." Shammy set the watering can down. "Arrive where?" "Wherever the printer is." Mai tapped the dark slate. "The order is real. The acknowledgment isn't. Either the printer doesn't listen to the office that built it, or the office that built it no longer knows the address." Ace turned a page she had already turned. "So they lost their own weapon." "They lost the off switch. The weapon is on our counter." The robot, four minutes early for nothing, waited. Ace watched the second hand she pretended not to own. "Can you find the address?" "Not without knocking louder than I want to knock." Mai's mouth did the small thing it did when she had already decided and was offering the room a chance to disagree. "Kiro wants to knock." "No." "I told her no." "Good." "She heard it as later." Ace closed the manual. "Tell her later is when I say later." From the counter, on time, bright as a kitchen timer: "HELLOU!" Shammy smiled into the plants. Ace pointed at the robot without heat. "You don't get a vote either." It had never wanted one. That was the problem with it. It did not campaign. It occurred. --- Kiro came anyway, because later and no had never been precise instruments in her hands. She brought noodles and a drive she set face-down, which meant the drive was the point and the noodles were cover. "I'm not knocking," she said, before Ace could say it. "I'm listening. There's a difference." "There isn't." "There is if I only read the bounce." She looked at Mai for support and got a look that was not support and not refusal. "The halt order died in a relay two floors under a Zetatech annex in Wellsprings. Not the tower. An annex. The kind they forget to put on the visitor map. After that, nothing. No retry. No alarm. Somebody pulled the request and went home." Reyes had let herself in somewhere between the noodles and the drive. She leaned on the doorframe and ate one of Kiro's noodles without asking. "So the man who resigned wasn't the man who could turn it off." "The man who resigned was the man who could read a report," Mai said. "The man who can turn it off either doesn't exist or doesn't open his mail." Ace watched the robot turn its head toward Reyes, polite, green. "Then we leave it." Kiro opened her mouth. Mai closed it with a glance. Reyes chewed, swallowed, and said the thing the room had been walking around. "You don't want it off." Ace looked at her. "I want it not to be a corporate printer in my kitchen." "Different sentence." "Same kitchen." The interval landed. Nobody counted out loud. Reyes checked her agent after, not before, and Ace saw the correction and let it pass. Some wars ended by treaty. This one was ending by furniture. ## Chapter 17 — Rogue's Cut Rogue heard on a Thursday, which meant someone in Afterlife had finally decided the story was worth the risk of telling her. Ace knew before Rogue called. The booth had a gravity. When it wanted you, the day tilted. Mai saw the tilt in Ace's shoulders and didn't ask. Shammy handed her the jacket. Afterlife was loud again, the useful kind. A deal going bad at the bar and being talked back from the edge by someone who liked the bar more than the deal. Ace crossed the floor. Space arrived. Rogue was not alone this time. A fixer Ace didn't care about occupied the other side of the booth and vacated it when he saw her face, grateful for the excuse. The drink was touched. The expression was the old one, sour, precise. "Sit." Ace sat. Mai and Shammy took the places they had taken when the box was still a box. Rogue didn't open with the robot. She opened with the chip. "You didn't cash it." "Didn't need to." "That's not why." "No." Rogue turned the glass. "I had a man in Wellsprings tell me a director resigned over a community program in Pacifica. He thought it was funny. He did not know he was talking about my box." She looked at Ace. "You were going to tell me." "Eventually." "Eventually is when I already know." She set the glass down. "Talk." Mai talked, because Mai could make a disaster sound like a measurement. The cycle. The new unit. The dead ones still in trays under the sink, because Ace had not thrown them out and Mai had not let her. The black-budget signature. The plaza. The drain. The halt order that died in a relay. Rogue listened without the performance of listening. When Mai stopped, the bass filled the gap. Rogue was quiet long enough for a song to change. "They spent that much," she said. "Yes." "To make me stare at a box for three days." "You were the door," Ace said. "I was the room." Rogue's mouth did something that was not a smile and would have been, in a cheaper woman. "And now Pacifica tells time by it." Shammy, who had not spoken, said, "They were already telling time by worse things." Rogue looked at her. The look held, then let go. "I want the chip back in play or I want it off my books. Leaving it open makes me look like I paid you to adopt a corporate mascot." Ace slid the chip across. She had been carrying it since the first night, uncashed, because uncashed was a kind of answer. Rogue didn't pick it up. "Keep it. Call it hazard pay for the drain." "We didn't invoice the drain." "I'm invoicing it for you." Rogue leaned back. The sourness had somewhere to go now, which improved it. "If Zetatech sends a suit to my floor asking for their asset, I am going to tell them I sold it to a woman who eats problems. I am not going to tell them where she lives." "They know where we live," Mai said. "They delivered it." "They knew where I lived. They don't know what they delivered anymore. That's different." Rogue finished the drink. "Don't bring it back here. I have a reputation that does not include a greeting." Ace stood. "It doesn't travel well." "It traveled from a black budget to a grill." Rogue's eyes were tired and accurate. "If it travels again, it won't be because you carried it." On the way out, under the bass, Shammy said, "She liked the ending." "She liked not owning it." "Same thing, for her." Ace didn't argue. The street outside Afterlife smelled like rain on hot metal. In her head the count was at nine minutes. She hated that she knew, and she did not check the agent. ## Chapter 18 — The Suit The suit came on a Tuesday, because shutdowns and retrievals both believed in Tuesdays. He was not the resigned man. Younger. Clean coat, wrong shoes for Pacifica, a smile practiced on people who needed things from him. He buzzed once, waited the correct interval, and buzzed again. Mai put him on the screen. Ace watched the coat and the folder. "Zetatech," Mai said. "Obviously." Shammy dried her hands. "We could not answer." "He'll come back with someone who doesn't buzz." Ace nodded at the door. "Open it. Stay behind me." The man smiled at the gap as if the gap had been his idea. "Afternoon. I'm here about a misplaced internal asset. Routine recovery. Won't take a minute." Ace didn't move out of the gap. "Name." "Doesn't matter." "It does if you want the minute." He adjusted. "Pell." A badge that would scan as real because it was real and still wouldn't help him. "The asset was routed in error. A prototype. Small. Metallic. We've had a report it surfaced in this building." From the kitchen, on the beat, cheerful and damning: "HELLOU!" Pell's smile held. His eyes went past Ace, found the counter, and lost a fraction of the smile getting there. Ace didn't turn. "That's a timer," she said. "It's company property." "It was in a box with no markings delivered to a fixer who didn't order it. Then it was in a drain. Then it was on a flyer drawn by a child. Your chain of custody is a rumor." Pell lifted the folder, not opening it. "We can do this as a retrieval. Quiet. You hand it over, we correct the routing, nobody writes a complaint about unlicensed nanotech in a residential stack." Mai's voice came from behind Ace, even. "You're threatening a report you don't want filed. The lattice on that unit is black-budget. A complaint puts the signature in a docket. You didn't come here for a docket." Pell's jaw moved once. "Ms. —" "No," Ace said. He looked at her properly then. The coat stopped being a costume and became what it was: a man in a stairwell that smelled like cooking, holding paper, outnumbered by a word. "I can come back with facilities." "You can come back with a better story." Ace stepped aside, not an invitation, a sightline. The robot sat on the counter. Green. It turned its head toward the open door, toward Pell, and did not greet him off-cycle. It had rules. Pell saw the rules and understood, too late, that he was not the user. Shammy, mild, said, "There's tea, if you want to wait thirteen minutes and hear it again." Pell closed the folder. "This isn't the end of the inquiry." "It's the end of the doorway," Ace said. He left. His shoes were loud on the stairs. They listened to them all the way down, and then to the street, and then to nothing. Mai locked the door. The lock was ordinary. The ordinary was the point. Kiro called before the next cycle. "A facilities request just tried to clear for your block. I sat on it." "How long." "Long enough for someone above Pell to notice facilities is a louder noise than a coat. They pulled it." A pause. Noodles, somewhere, or the memory of them. "They don't want a scene. They want the printer to have never had a public face. You are the public face. That's inconvenient for them." Ace looked at the robot. The robot looked at the door Pell had used. "HELLOU!" "Thirteen minutes early for nothing," she said. Mai checked the pane. "On time." Ace nodded. She had known. She went to the counter, picked up the cups, and set a third one out in case Shammy had meant the tea. The suit did not come back up the stairs. Outside, Pacifica kept the hour it had chosen. ## Chapter 19 — The Block Pell did not return. The inquiry did, smaller, in the form of a woman from the volunteer list who stopped Lena at the generator cage and asked, carefully, whether the little green thing was for sale. Lena told Ace that evening, on the step, because some sentences didn't belong on an agent. "She wasn't Pell. She was local. Coat over a work shirt. Said her cousin worked facilities and mentioned a recovery bonus. She didn't want the bonus. She wanted to know if the kids were going to lose Saturday." Ace watched the street. A kid kicked a bottle cap in a circle. "What did you tell her." "That it isn't mine to sell, and it isn't Zetatech's to collect, and if her cousin wants a bonus he can bonus someone else's block." Lena folded her arms against a wind that wasn't cold. "She cried. Not about the bonus. About the timer. Her mother uses it to take medicine. I didn't know that." Ace was quiet. The count in her head sat at six. "The interval isn't a medical device." "It is if you needed a clock and the corp one on the wall has been wrong since winter." Lena glanced up at the apartment. "I'm not asking you to bless it. I'm telling you the retrieval already failed. They'd have to take it from people who think it's theirs. That's a different job than a coat." Marco came around the corner with a crate and the end of the conversation already in his face. He set the crate down. "Old ladies made a schedule. Who sits with it on Community Day so it doesn't get 'lost' again. They did not ask me. They informed me." "It's not a shift post." "It is now." He didn't grin. That was how Ace knew he was serious. "You can hate the schedule. The schedule isn't the point. The point is they noticed the drain faster than we did, and they don't want another one." Shammy opened the door behind Ace. She had heard enough. "Bring the schedule up. I'll put it where she can glare at it." "I can hear you," Ace said. "I know." They brought it up. A paper list, not a pane. Names in Lena's hand, blocks of fifteen written as if fifteen had always been the unit. Ace read it standing at the counter. The robot sat beside the paper and did not comment. When the cycle came, Marco answered it under his breath again, neighbor to neighbor, and this time Ace didn't file it as evidence. Evidence was for wars. She put the list under a cup so the window draft wouldn't take it. "One table," she said. "Same rules. If it does anything other than the word, the day is over." Marco nodded. "Same rules." Lena looked at the list, then at Ace. "Her mother takes the pill at the second afternoon cycle. I'm not putting that on you. I'm putting it on the paper so nobody pretends we didn't hear it." Ace didn't answer. The answer was the cup staying on the list. Shammy poured the tea at three minutes, and nobody thanked the robot, and nobody needed to. ## Chapter 20 — Three Minutes Night took the block down to pipes and a distant bass that might have been Afterlife and might have been a car. Mai was asleep with a slate on her chest, the halt-order trace still open, unread. Shammy had gone to the roof to stand in weather that wasn't weather yet. Ace sat on the couch with her boots off and the robot on the table, because the counter was for daylight and the table was where the war had been declared. The bowl was back in the cabinet. She had put it there herself. Shammy had not commented. Eleven minutes on the count. Ace let them pass without performing indifference. The robot's eyes were low, not off. It did not sleep. It waited, which was its whole profession. "You're a bad weapon," she said. It didn't answer off-cycle. She respected that more than she had respected the acid. "You were supposed to jam the room. Make us stupid. Spend our attention until we missed something that mattered." She turned the cup in her hands. Empty. "Rogue stared at a box for three days. I put a bowl on you. Mai built a lab. The block made a shift schedule. If that was the job, the job worked. It just didn't work for them." Wind moved the curtain. On the roof, Shammy would be listening to the city the way she listened to rooms, not collecting it. Ace didn't call her down. The twelfth minute. The thirteenth. She thought of Pell's shoes on the stairs, and of the woman who cried about a pill, and of Rogue sliding the chip back without touching it. Ownership, in this city, was usually a ledger. This was a ledger that had escaped into a grill and come back as a habit. Habits were harder to repo. Fourteen. She didn't brace. Bracing was the war. "HELLOU!" The word sat in the apartment, small, exact, done. Mai's hand tightened once on the slate and let go. She didn't wake. Ace looked at the robot. The robot looked at her. "Tea's in three minutes," she said. "If you're going to be furniture, be furniture. Don't be early." It wouldn't be early. That was the only promise it had ever kept. She got up, filled the kettle, and set it on. The click was ordinary. Through the window Pacifica showed a few lights and the dark between them, people sleeping on an interval they had not voted for and would miss if it failed. Ace stood with her hand on the counter until the heat came up into the metal. Shammy came in with the roof still on her jacket. She saw the kettle. She saw the robot. She didn't narrate it. "Rogue was right," Ace said. "It travels without being carried." "Most things that stick do." "I'm not adopting it." "You're making tea." "Those aren't the same." Shammy took down two cups. After a moment, a third, for Mai if she woke, which she wouldn't. "No." The kettle ticked toward the boil. Somewhere upstream, in an annex no visitor map admitted, a printer that did not read its mail finished another body it would not need, because the body on the table had not been crushed, had not been lost, had not been sold. The new one would wait in whatever dark the feed used, or it wouldn't. Ace couldn't see that far. She could see the table. Three minutes from the word, the kettle sang. She poured. The robot watched the pour the way it watched everything, green, on duty, already counting toward the next time it would be allowed to speak. Ace set a cup where Shammy could reach it. She left the third on the counter. She sat back down on the couch, boots still off, and drank. Outside, the block kept its hour. Inside, the war stayed over. The interval did what it had always done. Ace let it. ## Chapter 21 — Second Saturday The list under the cup had names on it by morning. Lena's hand. Blocks of fifteen. A star next to the second afternoon cycle that nobody explained twice. Ace carried the robot down in the case again. The case greeted the stairwell on the way, muffled, and a man fixing a rail answered it without looking up from the bolt. She stopped. He didn't. The bolt mattered more than the embarrassment. She kept walking. The plaza had been swept. The tarp was the same banner, faded further. The table at the end of the row had a chair beside it now, and a paper sign taped to the tarp pole in letters that did not match Lena's. SIT WITH HELLOU. DON'T TAKE HIM. The girl with the scraped knee had written it. The knee had healed. The jurisdiction had not. Marco already had the grill arguing with itself. He saw the case and nodded, no speech. Lena checked Ace off a list Ace had not agreed to be on, then checked the star. "Her name is Odessa," Lena said. "She'll come at the cycle before. She won't ask you for anything. If you're standing there, stand there. If you're not, the chair is for her." "I'm standing there." "I know." Mai set the recorders. Kiro set two more and pretended this was still science. Shammy took the side that faced the street. Reyes arrived with coffee and sunglasses and the air of a woman who had lost a bet with herself about whether she would come. "Shift work," Reyes said. "Don't." "I didn't." Ace opened the case. The robot sat up in the foam. Green. The girl was already at the table with the sign's twin in her hand, in case the pole copy failed. She didn't ask this time. She looked at Ace. Ace tipped her chin at the wood. The paper went down beside the robot, crooked letters, green dots. The first cycle of the day landed while the grill was still heating. "HELLOU!" A mechanic answered from the generator cage. A boy on the wall answered. The man who had fixed the rail, passing with his bag, answered and then looked annoyed at his own mouth. Ace kept her hand on the table. The morning held the way the first Saturday had held, except the chair. People came, stood, left. An old woman Ace didn't know took the first sitting without introducing herself, knit for forty minutes, stood up at the word, and gave the chair to a vendor who had closed his window to be early. Nobody made a ceremony. The ceremony would have embarrassed them. The sitting was the point. Kiro watched her feeds and swore less than last time. "Still no origin. Still on the quarter. If they're printing spares, they're not printing them here." "Good," Ace said. "You don't want to know where the spares go." "I want them not to be in this plaza." Mai, beside the recorder, said, "Those can both be true." Odessa came at the cycle before the star. She was small in the way people get small when they have spent a year not being a problem. Work shirt. A tin in her pocket she touched once, to confirm it, and then didn't touch again. She nodded at Lena. She nodded at the chair. She did not nod at Ace, not out of rudeness. Out of a calculation that Ace was part of the furniture and furniture did not require greeting. She sat. The plaza noise went on. A child laughed at nothing. The grill popped. Odessa watched the robot the way you watch a bus you're not sure is yours. Ace stayed at the end of the table. She didn't narrate the tin. Shammy brought water, set it where Odessa could reach it, and left. The cycle arrived. "HELLOU!" Odessa opened the tin. One pill. She took it with the water. Closed the tin. Sat another minute, as if the minute were part of the dose, then stood. She looked at the robot. She looked at Ace. "Same time next week," she said. Not a question. Ace could have said the interval wasn't a medical device. She had already said it, upstairs, where it had been true and useless. "Same table," she said. Odessa nodded and went back into the block. The girl watched her go, then looked at Ace to see if the paper was still allowed. It was. The next sitting took the chair. The star on Lena's list had been a person. Ace kept her hand on the wood until the grill smoke shifted and Marco called burgers at the cycle after, badly, on purpose, so the word would land while someone was laughing. ## Chapter 22 — Spares The spare declared itself on a Wednesday, in a place that was not the apartment. Mai heard it from Kiro first, then from a net she trusted less than Kiro. A maintenance tech in the Wellsprings annex had filed a noise complaint against his own building. Fifteen minutes. A cheerful voice in a locked sublevel. He had assumed a prank. He had filed anyway, because the prank had been going for nine days and the prank did not take lunch. Ace read the forwarded note at the table. The robot on the counter watched her read. "It's printing them," she said. "It never stopped," Mai said. "We only see the one that arrives. If the arrival fails, the body still has to go somewhere. The halt order didn't kill the feed. It may have killed the address. So the printer is doing the only job it has left. It's making the unit. It just can't hand it off." Shammy, from the sink, said, "How many." Kiro's voice came off the pad, thin, pleased in the way that meant Ace was not going to be pleased. "If it kept the cycle after the relay died, and the relay died eleven days ago, and nothing has been collected — call it a thousand. Give or take the ones that didn't finish. They'll be in whatever bay the printer uses as a mouth. A locked sublevel. A cheerful pile." Ace looked at the single green pair on the counter. "A thousand of these." "A thousand of these saying the word into a wall," Kiro said. "The tech thinks he's being hazed. Facilities won't open the door because facilities got their request pulled. So the pile grows. Every fifteen minutes. Politely." Reyes, who had arrived in time for the worst sentence as usual, sat on the arm of the couch. "That's the stupidest warehouse in Night City." "Yes," Mai said. "Can they hear each other?" Mai considered the model, the old one, still on the slate. "If they're in the same bay, yes. The instruction doesn't wait for a listener. It waits for the clock." Ace could see it without wanting to. A room under an annex no map admitted. Metal bodies finishing in the dark. Green eyes lighting. The word, then the word, then the word, a thousand offsets or a thousand in unison, depending on whether the printer had one mouth or a queue. She didn't ask which. Both were bad. Both were funny in a way she refused to give Reyes. "We don't open that door," she said. Kiro was quiet a second. "I could listen from the relay. Not knock. Listen." "You said that last time." "Last time I was right about the relay." Mai looked at Ace. The look meant she had already set the limit in her head and was waiting to see if Ace would set a worse one. "Audio only. No routing write. If the bay is what we think, we leave it. Zetatech can own the pile. We own the one that made it to a table." Ace nodded once. "Audio only." That night Kiro sent a clip. Mai played it low. Shammy stopped drying the cup. Ace stood at the counter and listened. Not one voice. A room of them, not quite aligned, a cheerful stagger, HELLOU falling over HELLOU, bright and small and endless, bouncing off a wall that had not been built for it. No scream. No variation. The same gladness, piled until gladness became weather. The robot on the counter waited its turn. When its turn came, it spoke alone. The clip and the kitchen did not match. Ace shut the pad. "Enough." Mai shut it. The apartment held one voice again, and the count toward the next, and the knowledge of a bay they were not going to open. Reyes, for once, didn't laugh. She looked at the counter and said, "They built a choir and forgot the door." Ace moved the robot an inch, so it wasn't sitting on the slate. "They can keep the choir. This one has a table." ## Chapter 23 — The Offer The second approach did not buzz. It arrived as a message to Lena's volunteer list, clean letterhead, no Pell, no coat. A community partnership. Zetatech Civic, a desk Ace had never heard of because it had been invented on a Thursday. They admired the cohesion metrics. They wanted to sponsor the Saturday table. Branding discreet. A stipend for the sittings. A proper clock to replace the informal one, synced, supported, on-brand. Lena read it twice and brought it up the stairs in person, the way she had brought Odessa's name. Ace read it standing. Mai read it over her shoulder. Shammy read it last and made a sound that was almost a laugh and wasn't. "They want to buy the interval," Shammy said. "They want to replace it," Mai said. "The stipend is the leash. The clock is the point. A corp clock can be updated. Theirs can't, unless they find the address they lost." Reyes had the text on her agent already, because Reyes read other people's mail when it was going to become her afternoon. "Civic desk. That's what you build when the black budget becomes a mascot and Legal won't touch the mascot. They smile at the block and invoice the embarrassment to a department that didn't exist last month." Ace set the paper down. The robot sat beside it. "No." "Lena should answer," Mai said. "Not you. If you answer, you're the owner. If the list answers, the list is the owner. That's the fact they're trying to overwrite." Lena had stayed by the door. She looked tired in the ordinary way. "I can say no. I need to know I'm saying no for the sittings, not for you. Odessa doesn't care whose letterhead is on the pill. She cares that the word happens." "The word happens without them," Ace said. "If they put a clock on the table, the clock will be late on purpose the first time someone upstairs wants leverage. Then the pill is late. Then it's their pill." Lena nodded. She had already known. She had needed it said in the room with the robot, so she could carry the sentence back down without it turning into Ace's vendetta. "I'll tell them the table isn't a placement," she said. "They can sponsor the rice if they're desperate to spend. Not the chair." Marco, on the pad, listening because Lena had let him, said, "Rice is fine. Rice doesn't talk." The robot, on time, did. "HELLOU!" Lena looked at it. Something in her face settled. "I'll send it tonight. If they push, they push in public. Public is the part they're afraid of." They pushed once. A follow-up. Warmer. The stipend larger. A line about child engagement that used the girl's drawing without having asked the girl. Lena forwarded it to Ace without comment. Ace forwarded it to Rogue. Rogue's reply was one line. Tell them the box was empty and the empty was expensive. Lena sent the no. The Civic desk did not buzz the apartment. The Civic desk went quiet in the way offices go quiet when a file has become a risk instead of a metric. On Saturday the chair was there. The sign was there. Odessa took the pill at the word. No logo on the tarp. No clock beside the robot. The interval did its job for free, which was the insult they couldn't invoice. ## Chapter 24 — The Other Word The rule broke on a Sunday, and it broke small. Ace was on the balcony. Mai was out. Shammy was in the kitchen, not watching, which meant she was watching. The robot was on the rail because Ace had put it on the rail, a test she had not announced. Wind. The block below. Eleven minutes on a count she no longer pretended she didn't keep. A kid in the alley shouted something. A door slammed. Ordinary. The robot's head turned, not toward Ace, toward the alley, the way it turned toward whoever had spoken last. It had done that at the plaza. It had not done it for wind. Ace waited. The fourteenth minute. The fifteenth. "HELLOU!" Then, quieter, not the same voice, not the instruction — a scrape, an attempt, pulled from the alley noise and badly fitted: "...hey..." Ace went still. The robot's eyes stayed green. It didn't repeat the second word. It settled, job done, already counting. The hey sat in the air like a splinter. Shammy came to the door. She had heard it. "That wasn't the cycle." "No." "Say it again," Ace told the robot. It didn't. Off-cycle was not allowed. The hey had been inside the allowed second, tucked under the word, a hitch. Ace picked it up. Weight the same. No new seam. She turned it. The eyes tracked her. "Do that again and the day is over," she said. It blinked once. It had blinked before. She didn't know if this blink was an answer. She hated the not knowing more than the hey. Mai came back to a kitchen that had gone careful. Ace told it once. Mai didn't reach for a lecture. She set the slate down and played the balcony feed Kiro had left running because Kiro left things running. The waveform was the old one. The word, exact. Under it, a half-second, a harmonic that wasn't in the instruction. Mai isolated it. Played it. Hey, scraped, not cheerful. A sound the bay full of spares could have taught it, or the alley, or nothing. She played it again and shook her head. "It's not a second instruction. It's bleed. The arrival copies the last acoustic environment for a fraction of a second and fails to clear it. The plaza was loud enough that we called it echo. The balcony was quiet. So we heard the leftover." "It said hey." "It played hey. The way a glass plays a street if you put your ear to it." Mai looked at Ace. "The rule was anything other than the word. This is other. It's also not a choice. If you end the day for bleed, you end it every time the block is loud." Ace set the robot on the counter, not the rail. "If it asks for something, the day is over. If it names someone. If it says a number that isn't the interval. Bleed I can hate. A request I can't." "Agreed." Shammy put the kettle on without checking the count. Three minutes anyway. Ace noticed and didn't say it. The robot waited. When the next cycle came it said only the word, clean, no alley under it. Ace listened for the splinter. It wasn't there. She drank the tea. She did not move the robot back to the rail. ## Chapter 25 — Sitting Ace took a chair on the third Saturday. Not the starred cycle. The one after, when Odessa had gone and the vendor had gone and the girl was on the wall teaching two smaller kids the answer, as if the answer required practice. Lena didn't check her off. Checking her off would have made it official. Official was how corp clocks started. The robot sat on the paper. Green. Ace sat beside the table with her boots out and her arms folded and the expression of a woman waiting for a bus she could have skipped. People glanced. The glance didn't stick. She had stood at this table often enough that sitting read as the same job. A boy from the rail-bolt man's building came up, suspicious. "Does it only say that?" "Yes." "Why?" "Because that's the job." He considered this with more seriousness than the question deserved. "Okay." He answered the next cycle, loud, wrong pitch, satisfied. Ace didn't correct him. The robot didn't either. Halfway through the sitting Shammy brought rice she had not asked for and stayed long enough to eat some of it. Mai passed once, checked the recorder, touched Ace's shoulder, moved on. Reyes stayed at the grill and lost an argument with Marco about onions. The block did block things. The interval landed inside them. Ace watched Odessa's empty chair through the cycle she wasn't covering. The tin was somewhere in the stack, in a pocket, waiting for a word. The bay under Wellsprings was still filling, if Kiro's listen was right. Pell was still employed or wasn't. The Civic desk was still quiet. None of that was on the table. The table had a robot, a paper face, and a woman who had said she wasn't adopting it. The word came. The wall answered, the girl clearest. Ace didn't answer. Answering would have been a claim. She put her hand on the wood the way she had on the first Saturday, when the veto was still in her mouth. It stayed there until the next sitting arrived, an old man with a folded paper of his own, a better drawing, worse letters. He nodded at Ace. She gave him the chair. He didn't thank her. Thanks would have made it a favor. She stood. The robot turned its head to follow the motion, then settled on the old man, who had started to talk to it about a generator as if it were a neighbor who couldn't answer and that was fine. Ace stepped back into the shade of the tarp. Shammy fell in at her shoulder. Mai was already at the street side, silver hair taking the light. "Same time next week," Shammy said. Not a question. Odessa's sentence, returned without the tin. Ace watched the old man talk. Watched the green eyes take it. Counted, because the count was hers now whether she signed for it or not. "Same table," she said. The plaza kept the hour. Upstream, the choir kept missing its door. On the wood, one unit did the only thing it had, on time, and the block did what it had decided to do with that. Ace walked home with rice she hadn't asked for and a count at seven, and did not call it anything else.