"Have you ever noticed," Elio asked me, "that when Evelina gets really angry her eyes bug out like a fish?"
"Yeah, you should tell her. I'm sure she would find that incredibly attractive. Not offensive at all."
"I thought the same thing!"
"That's sarcasm, Elio." We turned the corner on the fourth floor and headed up the ramp to level five. The house was a converted apartment complex, each level separated by spiraling ramps of glowing white moonstone. But despite its grandeur, calling the house a home was a stretch. Even though my family filled its halls, we all agreed that the house was just a place to stash our stuff.
"I understand sarcasm quite well, thank you very much," Elio said as we reached the top floor. "You programmed it into my hard drive when you were twelve. I'm a pro now."
"Thank the skies for that. Could you imagine how bored I would be otherwise?"
We entered my bedroom, the only room up here. Elio and I had christened it "The Nest" years ago, considering we were as far above ground as anyone could get in this house. Three of the four walls were made of glass, showcasing the jagged Condor skyline and the winking lights of the manufacturing district that stretched out around us.
My bedroom was about as tidy as the rest of the house. Wires and gears littered the workbench wedged beside my bed. The lamp on my desk illuminated a stack of blueprints for potential gadgets that I'd yet to find time to make, along with a half-built X-ray sensor for Elio that shocked me every time I tried to touch it.
I chucked the broken phaser and the visual enhancer onto the workbench, where they landed on top of the remnants of last night's dinner—fried jellyfish from Condor's central marketplace. Only then did I notice the cuts dotting my hands from falling at the treasury. I'd have to clean them, and then they could join the dozens of scars on my palms and fingertips. An unfortunate side effect of playing with so much metal and wires. Every once in a while, things decided they wanted to catch fire.
"I think the phaser needs a new molecular generator," I said, digging a screwdriver into the control panel and prying it open. "I definitely don't have enough money to buy one. Do you think we could steal—?" I looked over my shoulder. "Elio?"
Saturn's rings, not again.
Roo had called Elio's beeping at the treasury a malfunction. But the twitching he was doing now—frozen mid-step in the doorway—was the real problem. If the universe was a fair place, then I could say that this was the first time Elio had glitched. But it wasn't. And he had glitched too many times over the last few months for me to count.
"Hang on. I got you, I got you." I maneuvered his body, which felt as heavy as a sack of bricks, across the room and deposited him on my bed. While he lay motionless, I stumbled over to my desk and ripped open one of the drawers, dumping out a tangled pile of wires. A few screws and a stray bolt rolled across my path, but I kicked them under the bed, diving for a thick purple cord, frayed at the edges from years of use.
One end of the cord plugged into the side of my computer, while the other popped into the charging port at the base of Elio's neck.
I picked at an old scar on my palm while the computer ran a diagnostic test, feeling the contents of my stomach swirl up into the back of my throat as I watched a hologram of Elio's body spin above the screen. A red light pulsed over his head. Same as always. The source of his glitching—and the reason for my current money problems—was hidden deep inside Elio's robotic brain.
I hated thinking about it, because thinking about it made me nauseous, but his memory core was depleting even faster than usual. The computer pinged with his test results. Only 79 percent functioning. Last week it was functioning at 87 percent. The week before: 91 percent.
I dropped my head into my hands.
Elio had always been a bit . . . off. A bit more human than the other bots that my parents had owned throughout my childhood. Even for a bot he was small. When we stood side by side, his dented head only reached my hip, but that wasn't the only reason he was different.
Elio was originally built to be a servant bot, until something in his programming chip warped. He was supposed to be able to cook gourmet meals, but everything he made ended up burnt beyond recognition—except for his cookies, strangely enough. He was also supposed to be able to clean an entire house at top speed. But whenever he tried, the rooms ended up messier than before. My parents had attempted to fix him numerous times, but no repairs ever worked. If anything, he got messier. More human. Eventually they got tired of trying and gave him to me to play with when I was six or so. Eleven years later and he was still my best friend.
I wasn't going to lose him.
I knew exactly what would fix him—he needed a new body. His was too old, too small, and his memory core had grown too advanced to be compatible. I wiped my hands on my pants before turning to my computer and flipping through pages of data, re-reading everything that I already knew.
Elio's brain was too human, and now his body was rejecting him for it.
Heaving a sigh, I tapped a few times on my keyboard, sending a pulse of electricity down the cord straight into the back of his neck. Elio jolted, slamming my bed against the wall. The fan near his front-end processor whirred angrily, but still he didn't wake.
"Come on, you stupid piece of junk, come on!" I pounded the keyboard again, sending more electricity into his charging port. When in doubt, a good insult always roused him. It was like he refused to die out of pure spite.
A third pulse of electricity. Another jolt on my bed.
And then . . .
"Ouch!" He pulled the cord out of his port, mouth agape with horror. "I am not a stupid piece of junk."
"Welcome back, Elio."
He grimaced and balled up the cord before dropping it back on my desk. "How long was I out this time?"
"A few minutes. Not too terrible," I lied. Right before he disconnected himself from my computer the capacity in his memory core had jumped back up to 83 percent, but it was likely falling again. He had too much knowledge and not enough space to contain it.
"Can I see?" He scooted next to me, flipping through the data from his diagnostic test. I couldn't read his aura—being mechanical, he didn't have one—but during times like this I really wished that weren't the case.
After a minute, he shut off the computer and busied himself with picking up the wires I'd dropped on the floor. Somehow, he managed to twist them into a ball of knots in five seconds flat.
"My name is Elio," he recited slowly. "My favorite thing to eat is cookies—"
"You can't eat," I reminded him.
"Not yet. Just wait until someone builds me a body that can." He screwed up his eyes and continued. "My favorite thing to eat is cookies. There are one hundred and ten species of bullfish in the lake on west Condor—"
"One hundred and eleven."
"What? No, there's one hundred and . . ." A pause. "Eleven. Cora, how did I forget that there are one hundred and eleven bullfish?"
"Relax. That's such a minor fact that it's basically insignificant."
Every time Elio glitched, he temporarily lost a piece of information from his memory core. It could be anything. Something trivial (like the common lillybird migration patterns or which of the one hundred and eleven species of bullfish was most vicious during mating season), or even something critical, like the friendaversary party I'd thrown him every year since I was eight. Or his favorite cookie to bake. Or the worst glitch yet—when he forgot his name for five whole minutes.
I promised myself—and him—that last instance would never occur again. I was no seamstress, but I'd sloppily sewn his name into every article of clothing he owned—because in his quest to be human he'd purchased two closets full of Condor's most fashionable outfits—so he wouldn't forget. I'd even sewn it into his underwear.
Especially his underwear.
"If we don't get me a new body, then I'm toast," he said quietly.
"Elio, we'll get you a new body."
If only it were that easy. Stealing a fresh android body was out of the question. I'd never accomplish a heist of that magnitude by myself.
I dug through one of the larger drawers at the bottom of my desk, removing a steel box weighed down by a lock as thick as my fist. I punched in the combination and started counting the money, even though I knew exactly how much there would be: Ten thousand gold ritles. My life savings from working for my parents. It was nowhere near the kind of money I would need to buy Elio a new body. And my mother wasn't exactly big on giving me loans.
"I have enough to fix up some of your patches," I told him as he abandoned his attempt to tidy my room and sat back down on the bed.
"I appreciate you trying to make me feel pretty, but they aren't what I'm worried about." He rubbed a hand over the paneling covering the side of his neck. Most of it appeared normal, a bright silver that never once hinted that something was amiss. But a large square along his throat was wearing away more and more each day, a hole forming to expose the translucent coating that covered a mess of wires and gears along his man-made spinal column. He had similar patches on his face and arms, and while he found them unsightly, they wouldn't harm him the way his memory core would.
"How much more money do we need?" he asked.
I didn't bother sugarcoating it. "Fifty thousand."
He flinched. "I'm sorry. I know this is hard for you."
"You mean hard for you." He always put others before himself. That was the only part of his programming that wasn't faulty. "We'll get the money. Maybe I can find work somewhere else."
But really, where would I go? My marketable skills consisted of lying, stealing, and building things that went boom. Not exactly clean-cut qualities.
Elio resumed reciting facts about himself ("My name is Elio. My favorite thing to eat is cookies . . .") while I cleaned off my desk, organizing a stack of blueprints and sorting a cup of screws according to size and color. When I reached the bottom of the cup, my fingers hit something smooth.
I almost threw the object in the trash. It was a round piece of moonstone no larger than my thumb, a supposed good luck charm that Evelina gave me when I was a child—before she spent her time reciting all the ways in which I was a disappointment. But oddly enough, I couldn't bear to throw it away.
Next to me, Elio was busy listing all one hundred and eleven species of bullfish, his deep blue eyes glowing, looking far more earnest and far more human than anyone else in this house.
I studied the piece of moonstone again. I didn't know if I could ever get back to the time when Evelina gifted it to me—when I wasn't just her employee but her daughter—but I knew what I could do to satisfy her now. I could give her something very valuable, and in turn she would reinstate my paychecks. Maybe then she really would look at me like I was her child.
Like I was more than just a distraction.
"Hey . . . Cora?" Elio pulled at my sleeve, his voice very small and close to breaking. "If we don't find me another body, it'll be okay."
I shook my head. He didn't understand. He wouldn't be the one who would have to live in this house without their best friend.
"Absolutely not. I'm not letting you disappear. I'll stick your memory core in Evelina's pod ship if I have to."
The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. "I've always thought it would be cool to have wings."
"Well, don't start practicing your liftoff techniques yet. We're going to get that money, I'm going to stop being the family disappointment, and we're going to fix everything."
"But how are we going to do that?"
"By beating them to their next mark. We're going to do their work for them." I flashed him my wristband, then started scrolling through my recent comms. I knew there was a message about my family's next job in here somewhere . . .
I jumped up when I finally found it. "Cruz's pod ship heads back to Vaotis in two days. So we're leaving tomorrow."
Elio jumped up too, but he had to stand on his toes to get a good look at my comm link. "Back to the treasury? Are you crazy? Beep!"
"No. We're not going anywhere near that place." I lowered my wrist to show him the message, complete with a map of the planet. "There's a cemetery in the backcountry that's home to a very royal, very rich family."
"Ohhh . . . wait." It took a moment, but then my plan seemed to click in his head. "You don't mean . . ."
"I sure do." I tossed an arm around his shoulders. "Elio, how do you feel about grave robbing?"
*******
"Enlighten me, dearest Cora, star of my life, best friend forever, et cetera, et cetera: Why am I the one who has to pilfer the dead lady's tomb?"
"Because, dear Elio, my handsome friend, I'll be the one running surveillance."
"That is such a rip-off."
I eased our pod ship into the gravitational pull of Vaotis, shielding my eyes against the frozen white expanse stretching out before us. I often complained about Condor's constant dark, but being in a constant state of cold was, in my opinion, far worse.
I zipped up my heavy jacket as we landed in a deserted country field, and pulled a hat low over my ears while Elio released the air lock on the hatch. Already I could feel tendrils of ice creeping into the cockpit. What I wouldn't give for a wool blanket right now.
"You're also the only one out of the two of us who can't feel changes in temperature," I said. "Plus, you're stealthier because you don't throw off auras for people to read."
"Flatter me a bit more, why don't you?" He pulled on a coat and wrapped a scarf around his mouth, covering most of his patches. "I wanted to run surveillance."
"The last time anyone let you run surveillance, the computer started smoking and then you roasted sugar snaps over the flames."
Elio smacked his jaws together. "They were delicious. Way better than Earthan marshmallows."
"You can't eat!"
"Yet."
He was impossible. And yet, if I failed to save him . . . well, I couldn't think about it. But I knew that I would miss him. Terribly.
Shaking myself back into action, I tossed Elio a comm for his wrist while I monitored the progression of the sun over the hills. I could just pick out the angular shapes of tombstones and vaults beyond the snowdrifts. The cemetery would be closed now, and once the sun disappeared and I hacked into the security monitors placed outside the gates, we would have no witnesses.
Elio exited the pod—almost tumbling into a pile of snow in the process—and waded through the field and up the hill to the cemetery. He made slow progress, the snow up to his belly, giving me more than enough time to disable the cameras and replace the footage in the servers with a recorded loop from the prior evening.
My fingers flew across the many monitors in the pod ship, never stalling, like a choreographed dance. I was at home in the silence of the ship, with only the lights of my control panel and the soft blue glow of the screens for company.
This was what I should have been doing during the job at the Grand Treasury. This was where I excelled. Once Elio and I pulled this robbery off, we would never have to be distractions again.
"I'm guessing all the rich, dead Vaotins and their heaps of gold are buried in the largest crypt?" Elio asked, appearing on the monitor closest to me. Graves filled the space behind him, poking out of the ground like teeth.
I consulted Cruz's notes on my own comm link. "Second-largest crypt. Apparently they were trying to throw off all the peasants like us. Oh, and once you get in, do me a big favor and take one of the queen's bones. Cruz has written here that conspiracy theorists claim the bones are full of magic that can open a black hole into another universe or something equally ridiculous."
Elio burst out laughing. "That isn't possible."
"As long as we can sell them to one of the suckers, then I don't really care. I doubt Cruz and Evelina will either."
"All right, then. Bone. Heaps of gold. Priceless gems. Is there anything else you would like me to retrieve for you? The moon, perhaps?"
"I've always wanted someone to get me a comet for my birthday."
"Will do." He gave me a quick salute, then turned his comm so I could see the door of the crypt, which was made of white moonstone, blending in perfectly with the surrounding hills and valleys. A twisting black lock cut across the width of the door like a river. "Can you crack this?"
"Can I?" I scooted forward in my chair to get a closer look, fingertips tingling. "That's approximately six inches of plutonium. Cobalt handle. Magnum D-57 locking mechanism." I grinned. "Might as well have asked me to break open an egg."
Two quick taps on the keypad in front of me and . . . "Done. Give that a try."
He jiggled the handle. The door didn't budge.
"Should I say a magic word? Open-please-says-a-me!"
"Try kicking it," I suggested. He did, and the door opened with a creak. "See? Evelina should give me a raise. In you go."
Elio took a few steps into the crypt, the screen on his comm darkening until he was just a shapeless blob on my monitor. "Hey, do you think my new body can have a mustache? I've always wanted a mustache."
"You can have whatever your little synthetic heart desires." I checked the live feeds from the cameras in the cemetery, searching for any possible intruders, but I found none. Well, I might as well get some work done while I waited.
Swiveling in my pilot's chair, I dug through my bag for the faulty pieces of my visual enhancement device. If I fixed it and we managed to bring back a good haul . . . then Evelina might actually smile at me today and mean it.
"I think I want a goatee to go with my mustache," Elio prattled on. "And I'd prefer a body that's really tall. Oh—okay, I'm going down a few steps here." His figure bobbed on-screen. "Oh, yikes, a lot of steps. This place is really dark." He flicked on a flashlight built into the palm of his hand. "That's better."
A crackle of static shot through the screen, and Elio's voice and image cut out for a second before reappearing.
"—oor?" was all I heard him say.
"What?"
"I said, 'Can you get the next door?' It looks the same as the last one."
He was deep in the crypt now—or at least that was how it looked. White walls streaked with something black that I really hoped was just dirt bracketed a wide archway. No signs of royal dead people, but maybe they would be in the next room.
I unlocked the door with a few quick keystrokes, and Elio headed inside.
The video feed from his comm flickered again. A spark shot out the top of my own comm as the screen went black.
"Elio?"
I could still hear his voice, far off, like he was shouting across a valley. "I found them. They're encased in glass. They look like they're sleeping." He beeped. "Cora . . . they still look alive. They're not alive, right?"
"Formaldehyde," I said, distracted by the black screen on my comm. Was my connection bad, or was his? More importantly, why did it seem like everything I touched lately was malfunctioning at the worst moments?
"Formaldehyde," Elio repeated. "Right. Sorry, I'm nervous. It's creepy down here. Can I come back now?"
"You can as long as you don't come back empty-handed."
"No worries there. This place is full of gold. I think I can open the glass and get one of those bones you wanted too."
"Excellent. Just make sure you . . ." My words died as quickly as the comm link in my hands. As quickly as the monitors on my control panel, which blinked out one . . . by one . . . by one . . .
An icy feeling crept over my shoulders, one that I was positive had nothing to do with the unfortunate weather patterns on this awful planet.
"Elio?" I gripped my comm tight enough to break it. The power button was still lit. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe everything on his end was fine. "Are you still there?"
"Cora?"
I sighed in relief. "Yeah. Hurry up. I want to get home before someone spots us." I stopped any nerves from leaking into my voice. I didn't want to scare him even more.
But he didn't hear me. "Cora? Cora, are you there?"
"I'm here. I—"
"Something down here doesn't feel right. I don't think I'm glitching. It feels like—"
The line went dead.
"Elio!" I shook the comm, resisting the urge to throw it at the wall. "Elio!"
My heart slid into my throat as the power in the pod ship went out with a groan, leaving me in the dark.
Elio.
The dark I could handle. Cold I could not, but I didn't stop to think about it. I pulled down on the emergency release to open the hatch and then I was racing through the snow, up the hill to the cemetery, my hat blowing off in the harsh winds. Damn my surveillance to the edges of the universe, I shouldn't have let Elio go in there alone.
The crypt had even more stairs than he said, and I stumbled down them in the pitch black, cursing myself for not bringing a flashlight as I shouted Elio's name. When there was no response I had to pinch myself so I wouldn't panic. Were there guards down here? Something I had so easily overlooked? Evelina was right: I wasn't ready to lead a job like this.
I hit the bottom of the stairs, almost slipping in a puddle. The arch that I'd seen on Elio's comm loomed in shadows cast by a soft light in the room beyond, which glowed inside the glass prism containing the Vaotin queen. The lid of her tomb was pushed open a crack where Elio had attempted to get inside.
I found him collapsed on the dais beneath the tomb.
"Elio!" This didn't appear to be a glitch. He wasn't rigid, frozen in time. He was limp, as if he'd just had enough for the day and powered down. It was exactly what I always imagined would happen if his memory core really did die.
"You're okay. I'll fix you." I refused to let myself panic as I hauled him up. Shifting him underneath my arm, I reached out to the tomb to brace myself.
My fingers dipped through the crack Elio had made, hooking around the ice-cold arm of the dead queen inside.
It happened all at once.
The door to the room slammed, shaking the walls, rattling the heaps of gold and jewels piled in the corners. There was no handle that I could see from the inside. No way out. The temperature plunged well below freezing, so cold that the breath stopped in my lungs.
Water began snaking out of cracks near the ceiling. The air should have been cold enough to freeze it instantly, but it barreled onward, gushing hard enough to cover the floor and creep up the steps to the dais in a matter of seconds.
I took a step back, bumping into the queen's tomb and consequently sending another wave down the walls and across the floor. Elio's body sagged against me. I couldn't keep a hold on him. I couldn't even keep a hold on myself.
My mind went silent as the water climbed higher. Soul-crushing, world-darkening silence. For all that Cruz and Evelina had taught me—how to pick a pocket, how to build a bomb that would destroy half a city—they never thought it was pertinent to teach me how to swim.
I was going to die.
Today. Here. Now.
I pulled Elio closer as the water hit the edge of the dais, washing over the toes of my boots. Only then did I feel the lump against his side—the shape of a blaster and a pocket full of some of my most powerful explosives.
Either I could risk the crypt collapsing on top of us, or I could drown in this room. An explosion, at least, seemed like the quicker way to go.
The water rose—faster, faster, faster. It covered my ankles, surpassed my knees, my thighs, my hips. A sweet smell filled the room, similar to Blair's moon dust but far stronger. My skin rippled with tingles, my limbs so weak that I could hardly stand. Pulling the trigger on the blaster seemed impossible. A grenade it would be, then.
My vision went black around the edges as I pawed around in Elio's jacket. Just as the water reached my chest, I ripped out the pin of a fat yellow explosive with my teeth and lobbed it at the door.
Before I could hear the bang, my mind darkened completely and the water rushed over us both.
*******
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