ReMade: Book 2

By Matthew Cody and E. C. Myers

In one moment the lives of twenty-three teenagers are forever changed, and it's not just because they all happen to die. ReMade in a world they barely recognize--one with robots, space elevators, and unchecked jungle--they must work together to survive. They came from different places, backgrounds, and families, and now they might be the last people on earth. Lost meets The Maze Runner in this exciting adventure from Serial Box Publishing.

The remade teens forge forward in their future world?Çöa smaller group, wiser but tougher. Just as they begin to think they understand their new circumstances, though, a reminder of past trauma makes them question everything they know, and sets them on a new course.

Team-written by some of today?ÇÖs most exciting authors, ReMade is brought to you by Matthew Cody (Super), Andrea Phillips (Revision), Gwenda Bond (Girl on a Wire), Amy Rose Capetta (Entangled), and E. C. Myers (The Silence of Six).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Realm
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682102725

Book preview

ReMade

Season Two

Matthew Cody, Andrea Phillips, Gwenda Bond, E. C. Meyers & Amy Rose Capetta

ReMade Season 2 Omnibus Copyright © 2023 text by Realm of Possibility, Inc.

All Rights Reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part, in any audio, electronic, mechanical, physical, or recording format. Originally published in the United States of America: 2017.

For additional information and permission requests, write to the publisher at Realm, 115 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10006.

ISBN: 978-1-68210-272-5

This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design: Liz Casal

Writers: Matthew Cody, Andrea Phillips, Gwenda Bond, E. C. Meyers, and Amy Rose Capetta

Editor: Noa Wheeler

Executive Producer: Julian Yap

Executive Producer: Molly Barton

ReMade original concept by Matthew Cody

Table of Contents

ReMade Season Two

1. Patch Job

2. Signal to Noise

3. Fear of Falling

4. Save Point

5. Man’s Best Friend

6. Daredevil

7. Chosen One

8: The Bones of Sanctuary

9. Power Struggles

10. Siege Mentality

11. Different Boats

12. Toward the Light

13. Actus Reus

14. Brave New Girl

ReMade Writing Team

1. Patch Job

Andrea Phillips

Things had been weird for Jing-Wei for a real long time now. Robots, space stations, mutant animals? Fine. It was a head trip for sure, but she was unexpectedly alive, and that was worth something. You can get used to anything, if you have to. Humans adapt.

After all that adapting, she would have bet cash money you couldn’t surprise her anymore. She hadn’t dreamed that things could get even more weird in a whole new direction.

Like finally running into actual factual people, when she’d all but given up on the idea that there were any. And to put the freaky cherry on the weird-ass sundae, they acted like they already knew Jing-Wei. But she’d never seen them before in her life. Either one.

The pair of strange girls sighted her through the trees a split second before Jing-Wei spotted them back. Hello? the long-haired girl called. She came running toward Jing-Wei flat out. The other chased close behind.

They slowed as they got closer, stopping a little farther than an arm’s reach away. The first girl just stared at Jing-Wei’s face. Oh my god, it really is you. How are you—

You know her? the other girl asked. This one was Latina, with short hair and a set to her jaw like she could show you stubborn if you were wondering about it. She gripped a keeper arm in her hands, and she edged around Jing-Wei like she thought she might be dangerous.

That’s Jing-Wei, said the first girl. Pretty thing, shiny hair. Didn’t look like she got much sleep, though. She’s one of the ones we told you about on the train. Jing-Wei … The girl swallowed. They killed you.

Jing-Wei stepped back, just a half step, enough to give some space between herself and the idea of any they killing her. How do you know my name?

• • •

Jing-Wei’s makerspace was a glorious jumble of stuff, all lit by naked fluorescent tubes that cast splintered shadows onto every surface. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling sheet-metal shelving. Those shelves were stuffed with cardboard boxes of hastily wrapped bundles of cords and wires, and cheap plastic organizers full of screws and bolts sorted haphazardly by size and shape. Various pieces of gear were crammed into every spare nook, and even teetered on the very top shelves. Broken quadcopters, broken vacuum cleaners. Bolts of plastic sheeting and Bubble Wrap. Glitter paint.

The total effect was like somebody had taken everything they could find from ten years of garage sales, disassembled all of it, then put the pieces in a box and shaken it up. To Jing-Wei, it was the coziest, happiest place in the universe. It was a teeming and glorious ecosystem of possibilities.

And it had everything she needed to take those possibilities and yank them into reality, too. There were wide workbenches, the thick wooden work surfaces scratched, stained, even burned. A few of them were bare, waiting for a new maker with a new ambition, but others were permanently occupied with 3-D printers, laser cutters, or piles of more low-tech gear like soldering irons, hot glue guns, and screwdrivers. A server rack hummed in the back corner, its lights a steady green.

The cement floor was painted gray, and sloped toward a drain somewhere in the center of the wide-open room. The makers liked to make cracks about how that made it easy to hose the place down after they got blood all over it. They were careful not to say it whenever the landlord stopped by, though. Not everyone could take a joke.

Jing-Wei preferred to be alone in the space, like she was now; it was a couple of hours before school, and not many of the other makers were early risers. She bent over her workbench, examining the toy that twitched there. It was a gift for her little sister, Chang-Rou; Jing-Wei had made a spindle-legged thing meant to walk on its own and hop a few inches straight up from time to time. It was cute and funny, and her sister was going to love it to pieces. Or she would, if only Jing-Wei could get the thing to work right.

It had been fine for about fifteen seconds, but then one of the legs had jammed in a lifted-up position and wouldn’t move anymore. Now the poor thing wobbled and tipped over when it tried to walk, and when it tried to hop, it just looked like it really needed to pee.

Jing-Wei pulled the leg out of its jammed state and flexed it a few times. If there was a rough spot somewhere in the joint, maybe she could smooth it out.

Jing-Wei set the toy down and switched it on. Try again, little guy.

The robot walked five steps, hopped three times, and then its leg got stuck up again, as if it were trying to imitate one of those tap-dancing peacock spiders. The poor thing fell over and twitched until Jing-Wei switched it off again.

Well, that isn’t going to work, is it? She sighed and flipped the toy over so she could take its leg off. The thing had been put together from scraps she’d scrounged up around the space anyway, so the legs didn’t all match in the first place. But she wasn’t sure if there was anything left that could work with what she had.

She stuck the broken leg in the pocket of her lab coat—a gift from her mother, who was always cracking jokes about the mad science Jing-Wei got up to. The box she needed would be on one of the high shelves, unless somebody had taken it into their head to reorganize in the last few days. You could never be sure. She grabbed one of the stepladders and rolled it toward a likely looking shelf. There was a box helpfully labeled ROBOT PARTS.

Once she got up there, she blew away a thick fur of dust. This wasn’t the box she’d found the first time, but maybe she’d dig up something even better now. She rummaged through it.

It really wasn’t what she needed, though. The box held an array of motors, brackets for holding sensors, treads, and wheels. She thought for a moment about reworking the toy to replace one or two of its spidery legs with wheels, but decided it wouldn’t be funny enough to make Chang-Rou happy.

Jing-Wei stretched past the edge of the stepladder to reach for the next box. Her center of balance hung somewhere in the air between the ladder and the shelves, but she could steady herself with three fingertips. She pulled out the first thing she could reach to see what was in the next box, and recognized the part at once: it was a pincer claw that somebody had coated with rubber cement in a fit of misguided experimentation, trying to make it more grippy or something. She tugged the box a little closer to her along the shelf to see what else it held.

No dice. Just as she’d expected, there wasn’t another leg precisely the same size as the one that had broken. Well, maybe this was a chance to make the little toy even funnier, with mismatched parts that balanced one another out. She weighed a likely candidate in her hand, then stuck it into her pocket while she tried to find another one.

The box tipped forward. The ladder wobbled under Jing-Wei as she reached a little too far to keep the box from falling. A shower of small parts spilled out of the box, bouncing off Jing-Wei’s arm and shoulder. Her forearm banged hard against the metal shelf, and she stopped, hanging perilously in the air. Her heart started pounding, too late for the adrenaline to help; it just made her knees and hands shaky. She took a deep breath, settled her heels back on the ladder, and pulled the box down to rest on her thigh so she could look through it more safely.

Once everything was steady, she sifted through the robot parts some more. Most of them were junk, but there were a few maybes in there, and she stuck those into her pockets. Finally, she found enough potential replacements worth testing out. She pushed the box back into its spot and climbed down.

Once safely on solid footing, Jing-Wei took the new set of robot legs out of her pockets to compare them more closely. The legs weren’t all the same length, but she could probably adjust the angle of the knee bend so that they operated the same. And the brackets that held them in place were the same size as the old ones. It would work out great, maybe even better than she’d planned. Here we go, little guy! she called toward her workbench. I’m gonna fix you right up.

Her elbow struck the ladder as she turned. The ladder rattled against the metal shelving unit. Above Jing-Wei, the box of robot parts tipped again, then fell.

She didn’t see it, and she didn’t feel it for very long either. One moment she was smiling at the future of Chang-Rou’s gift in deep satisfaction, and the next everything turned white and full of stars.

• • •

Eventually the whiteness receded, but the stars remained the same. Jing-Wei floated in nothingness, suspended over an infinite field of sparkling emptiness. No, not just emptiness; there, just to the left, was the blue-and-white marble she’d seen hundreds of times before.

She tried to turn her head to see it better, but either her muscles were too weak to move her, or she was immobilized in some other way. And now she noticed the pain, gushing from the back of her skull, flooding the nerves to her neck, her shoulders, her back. She made a noise of distress, something small and choking.

A robotic arm passed into her field of view. It spun her, and Jing-Wei saw what had been behind her: a cold, utilitarian room. Metal walls, glow lights embedded at the corners. The robot arm shifted again. She could see the glint of the needles before they came down. They filled her veins with fire as they pierced her.

The flames inside her burned her consciousness away, and she returned to blessed darkness.

When Jing-Wei woke up again, she felt better. Mostly. A little … electric, as if there were a radio in her brain tuned to a dead channel. Not static, not any noise at all. Just a strange, buzzy sensation. There was a sharp feeling under her ear, but when she reached to touch it, there was nothing there but smooth skin.

At least the shooting pain from her head was gone, and the fire in her veins, and the needles. She was still in that room, though. Still floating. Half the room was stars. She was … in space?

Whoa. That was pretty awesome.

However awesome space was to look at, though, it did raise a few questions that wanted answers real bad. She began to take stock of her situation. The room was completely empty. Not even a Frankenstein slab for her to lie on, and that spidery robot arm she half remembered was gone too. She’d thought the walls were metal, but when she touched them, they weren’t as cold as metal. Some kind of plastic, maybe, or a plastic coating.

That beautiful window full of stars, though … She ran her fingertips across it. Was it just a screen? That seemed most likely, except for the part where the law of gravity wasn’t being strictly enforced all of a sudden.

Maybe it really was stars. Dang. How did she get here? And—she noticed for the first time—why was she wearing a red jumpsuit? Was it, like, a NASA uniform kind of thing? Or was she some kind of prisoner? She had a momentary flash of fear.

Well, maybe she should do some exploring and get a few answers about what was what around here. Except … problem. The whole room was maybe three meters across, and there was no door.

Wait. She looked up, and experienced a moment of wild vertigo as she completely reoriented herself in space. The hatch she saw in the ceiling became a door in front of her, and the stars became a ceiling, not a window.

She pressed at her uneasy stomach. This is bonkers, she said out loud. Her voice reverberated off those plastic-coated walls.

That hatch hissed and opened, and a robot came in. It was bigger than she was, crowding her into a corner of the starry room. It looked something like a spider sticking its butt high in the air. Its black carapace was scuffed up, even melted in places, so she could see into its mechanicals. One of its joints was welded together with something bubbly and silver.

It reached out a pincer arm to give her something: a little package wrapped in waxy paper. She took it from the robot, hesitant. It withdrew its arm and stayed motionless, watching her with an array of red lenses: one big eye and a lot of little ones, almost like freckles. Infrared sensors, maybe?

Well. It was becoming clear what was going on here, at least. This was one heck of a weird-ass dream, and her parents were going to die laughing once she told them about it.

The robot shifted its weight downward, apparently settling in to wait for something.

Jing-Wei looked at the packet it had given her. May as well open it, then. As she did, a delicious, faintly spicy smell wafted toward her, and her stomach grew uneasy in the opposite way. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

She took a bite of the protein bar inside. It was amazing: a little sweet, a little chewy. Not quite like anything she’d had before. This was a surprisingly vivid dream.

She sized up the robot. So what are you supposed to be? she asked it. My anxiety about that social studies paper?

Inside the robot’s body, something sparked. The robot scuttled away from the doorway and lowered itself closer to the floor, as if apologetic. After a few minutes, a new robot entered. Jing-Wei could tell from its gloss, its elegant motion, its lines that this was a higher-end model, newer and better treated. Its carapace was etched with elaborate designs. Pretty.

Its red eye peered at Jing-Wei and flared bright. And inside Jing-Wei’s brain, she saw … things.

The images came quick, just flashes that were there and gone again almost before she could process them. They were as clear as a movie projected on the inside of her forehead.

She saw an army of thousands of robots like these two, working equipment, cleaning, building. She saw a sky turn from yellow to blue, then a pile of detritus sifted from the ocean. The robots’ job was to keep things clean and safe. Keep things from falling apart. These keepers were made to help people, and Jing-Wei was a person, so they meant to help her.

Gradually Jing-Wei became aware that the mouthful of protein bar was still sitting on her tongue. She’d stopped chewing during the onslaught of images.

Yeah, this was a weird-ass vivid dream, all right. She swallowed. Or. Unthinkable, but she had to think it. What if it wasn’t a dream at all? How did I get here? she asked the keeper. Where … where is this?

Again Jing-Wei’s brain filled with incomprehensible images. She saw herself, streamers of blood running toward the middle of her face from her scalp. She saw a broken skull, a shattered vertebra. She saw a stream of digits counting down to zero, then blackness.

So that was upsetting. The food bar slipped from her fingers and floated by her hand, unable to fall without gravity.

The keeper continued speaking, if you could call what it did speaking. Jing-Wei saw herself coalescing into existence, blue-lipped and still. She saw the keeper working over her with a dozen tools that flashed away before she could understand them. It was bringing her back to life, or perhaps preserving the tiny flicker of life that remained in her.

So I was dead and you … remade me? Like from a blueprint?

The avalanche of images ceased. The first keeper, the scuffed-up one, shifted its weight forward, plucked the protein bar from where it hovered by Jing-Wei’s side, and pressed it into her hand again.

She took the bar. Thank you, she told the keeper. I … guess. She rubbed the back of her head. It seemed fine, not even tender. Things sure had taken a turn for the interesting. But none of it was real. Was it?

• • •

Seyah stared at Jing-Wei. "I watched you die. You were dead. Again."

Jing-Wei eyeballed these strangers—very strange—and held her hand out to shake. Uh, do you think we could start over? I’m Jing-Wei, and you’re …?

I’m Seyah, and this is Inez. Neither one of them reached out to shake, though.

Jing-Wei let her hand drop, but still ventured a smile. I can’t even tell you how good it is to hear another human voice. It’s been a real long time. It’s great to meet you.

Inez didn’t let her guard down for a second. We’ll see about that, she said.

These were the first faces she’d seen in … How long had it been, anyway? Two months? Three? These were the first people she’d so much as sniffed since she’d woken up. But she hadn’t thought for a hot second it would go this badly once she met somebody. Tough luck.

How do you all know I died, anyway? Jing-Wei asked, puzzled.

Some of us saw it happen. Seyah looked at her feet. Don’t ask for details.

Some of us? Some of who? But I was alone. Jing-Wei looked around, her puzzlement growing. I was alone in the makerspace, and—

No, we mean the second time you died. Once to get you here, and the second time after you met us. Seyah’s eyes widened. Wait. If you’re alive, then is Wesley with you?

Or Teddy? Inez asked quickly. With you, or back at the TV studio?

TV studio? Jing-Wei puzzled over that, but it was a small weird in the face of a huge brick wall made of various weirds and she didn’t think it was worth asking more. I’m sorry? I don’t know you or Teddy or … What was the other name? Then she was struck by a new thought. Wait, did … did you die too? To get here?

Yes. We all died. Seyah sounded more matter-of-fact about it than you might expect. That’s how we got here in the first place, right? We died and they remade us.

Oh … Jing-Wei focused on her feet and those ultra-comfy slip-on sneakers. Right.

So you’re alone? Inez asked. You’re lucky we found you before any caretakers did.

Caretakers?

Big robots, lots of arms? Not much for talking? Inez raised an eyebrow. Didn’t they remake you, too?

Jing-Wei grinned and shook her head. This was a way less uncomfortable topic than death; she could talk about robots for ages. "You must mean the keepers? Nah, you’ve got the wrong idea about them. My keepers—my caretakers—have been great. I don’t know what I’d have done without them."

Seyah and Jing-Wei both turned gray, like Jing-Wei had outed herself as an enormous, tentacled sea monster. "Your caretakers?" Seyah said slowly.

• • •

There were no other people on the space station, that much was clear.

There were plenty of keepers, but Jing-Wei could never quite work out how many. The one that had come to her first, the one with the damaged carapace: that one was Sparky, for the little arcs of electricity she could see inside his shell from time to time. Sparky seemed to be in charge of the care and feeding of Jing-Wei; he stayed with her basically every second of the … however much time was passing. Sparky was the bottom of the food chain, apparently.

At the top was Pretty, the speaker for the robots. The others could also communicate with Jing-Wei, flashing pictures straight into her brain, but aside from Pretty, they were only about as informative as a foreign country’s subway pictograms.

There was another that seemed to be the same model as Pretty, with a similar ornate pattern of lines and circles stenciled onto his chassis, or maybe cut into the surface with a laser. He was skittish; whenever Jing-Wei came close to him, he would flee. She called that one Bashful.

There was one with twice the limbs of her companions, and Jing-Wei named her Grabby. There were at least three or four more that came in and out of Jing-Wei’s presence like a whirlwind, never staying long enough for her to work out identifying features and names.

She wondered where the other keepers went when she couldn’t find them. It wasn’t like the place was so full of hiding spots.

In fact, the vessel they were on was only maybe a couple hundred feet long in total. There was a curved central hallway with rooms coming off of it like spokes in a bicycle wheel. But only a small part of the wheel. Jing-Wei had looked outside and the rest of the wheel was gone, if it had ever existed in the first place. There were hatches at the ends of the long hallway, sealed up tight, and when she stayed close to them too long, Sparky would pull her gently back to the center of the craft.

But the rest of the place was her domain, for all the good that did her. There was a bathroom, thankfully, and that was the closest thing she had found to human furniture. Some of the doors wouldn’t open for her; others were jammed so they wouldn’t close anymore. There were rooms full of broken equipment: cracked glass panels, huge metal housings jutting from the walls, crumpled piles of gold foil. She could only guess at what it had all been meant for. And not very good guesses either; there were plain chunks of metal and crystal where she would have expected circuit boards. Nothing that looked like a screen, either, much less a keyboard.

When she was feeling introspective, she’d stare at space, or at Earth. She’d died, apparently, over a robot toy for her little sister. She thought she’d have had a lot longer. Years, decades, maybe a whole century. She took comfort where she could find it, though. She was grateful that she’d been doing something kind with her last breath; she’d been making something. And though everything else was strange and lonesome, she got to play with robots here all she liked. That was something, even if it wasn’t how she’d have arranged for that to happen.

Eventually, she ran out of places to explore and mysteries to contemplate, and then the boredom set in. Sparky gave her bulbs full of dusty-tasting water to drink and a seemingly endless supply of those protein bars. She tried to sleep, floating in empty rooms, but the lack of weight made it difficult. She’d never realized how much she needed the pressure of a pillow under her head to be comfortable, or how impossible it was to rest without the weight of a blanket resting on her.

She tried to ask Pretty questions. What the keepers were for, why she was here in space, what was going on. She slowly learned that each keeper was a different model; some were custom-built for specific purposes, some of them (like Sparky) were general laborers, and others had adapted or been retrofitted for specialty work.

But whenever Jing-Wei started asking for specifics about why, Pretty shut her down. Images of Jing-Wei sleeping, staring out a window, floating motionless. Their meaning was clear to her: Not yet. Wait.

So Jing-Wei tried to make things out of the junk instead—at least she’d be making things here, too. Leaving her mark on the world. Nothing mechanical; she didn’t have the right parts for it. But she made an armada of floating ships out of glass tied together with strips of gold foil. She gave them shining gold sails, too, and raced them down the hall.

That was what she was doing when everything lurched. Jing-Wei slammed against the wall. From somewhere out of sight, Sparky sent her a stream of semicoherent messages: a keeper dressed in … bones? Another with blades in place of its arms. She saw a keeper plunging a claw through the chest of an old woman, like something from a horror film.

The image flickered and changed, and suddenly the old woman had Jing-Wei’s face.

What’s wrong with you? she said out loud. Was Sparky threatening her? She shivered. Or was he trying to warn her about something?

One last image: a picture of a door she recognized. It was close to the far end of the hallway; she’d never been able to open it, and Sparky hadn’t let her linger there for long either. She knew it from the red symbol etched on it.

The station rang like a bell, as if something enormous had struck it. Pretty rushed by her, going the other way. As she passed, she shoved Jing-Wei so she tumbled through the air and toward the door.

Adrenaline filled her veins. Something was really not okay, and she knew how to take an order when she had to. She kicked her way down the hall.

Jing-Wei passed a window, but the empty sweep of stars had changed. There was a keeper on the other side, in space. It had a drill attachment on one limb. It set the drill to the window, where it made a high, shivering whine that hurt Jing-Wei’s teeth.

Red lights began to flash up and down the hall. Klaxons blared. Jing-Wei half expected a robot voice saying, Emergency, emergency. Except the robots didn’t have voices around here.

She pounded on the door Sparky had sent her to. It hissed open. She pulled herself into this new room, and the door closed behind her. The room had a recliner, the first real furniture she’d seen in this place, and an enormous vista of stars. She tried to settle into the seat, though it was no easy task without gravity. She felt a gentle push, and through the window she finally saw the outside of the space station that was her home in this strange new life.

It was an arc, like a piece of leftover pie crust. Ducts and cables trailed into nothingness at either end, and she could now see that one of the doors she hadn’t been allowed near opened into empty space. This place had once been part of something much larger. She wondered what catastrophe had happened to the rest of it.

Or maybe it wasn’t so mysterious. There were keepers swarming the outside. She didn’t think they were the ones she knew. As she watched, one of them pulled off a section of the space station’s hull. The section exploded outward, pushed by the force of air racing into a vacuum. The attacking keeper was blown into space along with it.

Dang, she whispered.

She looked around, half expecting a robot to jump out and start disassembling the puny shell of metal and ceramic that protected her from the vacuum of space. She put two and two together: Sparky had sent her here to be safe. This must be an escape pod, then.

She went back to trying to figure out the buckles on her seat. In the end she wasn’t completely sure she’d done them the right way, but figured it would work well enough. Getting things to more or less work right was her specialty.

The escape pod plummeted toward the Earth. After a time, the window filled with light, so bright that she couldn’t look at it. Gravity returned too, sweet, beloved gravity. First she was pressed lightly into her seat, and then she felt heavy. Finally, it seemed as if the air around her had turned to stone, crushing her. The edges of her vision turned red, and then black.

• • •

When Jing-Wei woke up again, she was still strapped into her seat, and the view outside was of nothing but brick-colored dirt. She might have been out for minutes or for hours; she had no way to know. She unstrapped herself gingerly and slipped to the ground. Standing upright on her own two feet was a delicious luxury.

Time to get out of here, she supposed, and see where she was and what was going on. There might even be people around who would explain things to her better than the robots could.

There was a glass pad next to the door with the outline of a handprint on it. Jing-Wei smiled at it. Finally, a user interface she understood. She pressed her hand to the plate, and the door to her escape pod slid open.

A blast of dry air struck her, carrying a swirl of sand. She climbed out of the pod and found herself surrounded by waves of red dunes. Blue mountains rose in the distance, and lines of pale green scrub traced the hills between.

She felt dizzy. The sky was so big here, and she was all alone in the middle of it. She turned to look back at her escape pod.

And found she wasn’t so alone after all. There were keepers clinging to the outside of the pod, maybe half a dozen in total. One by one they detached from the pod and settled onto solid ground. That was some robust engineering if the things could fall from space and still be fine. Jing-Wei couldn’t help but be impressed.

Except … she took a few unsteady steps back. Maybe these were the bad keepers, the ones who took apart space stations and people. No, not keepers. Unbuilders.

Maybe she shouldn’t wait around to find out for sure. She turned to flee, but before she could go more than a few steps, one of the keepers chased her down and scooped her up. She twisted to get away and fell to the ground.

The keeper loomed over her, and she cringed away from its reaching arms. Then she recognized the keeper’s scuffed-up carapace, the holes. It was Sparky.

Sparky picked her up and cradled her under his body. He used three limbs to hold her in place, like one of those absurdly uncomfortable minimalist-design chairs. Then Sparky scrambled toward the mountains with a rapid, jerky gait. Apparently they weren’t done running yet.

Jing-Wei pounded on his shell. Stop! What’s going on?

Sparky sent her the same images he had on the space station: the funny-looking keepers, the old woman being killed. Jing-Wei thought about it. If they were still on the run, that meant she was still in danger. She did wonder, though, why she would be in danger in the first place.

But maybe the keepers were bringing her to people. That would be a nice change of pace. Not that the robots were bad company, but they weren’t exactly great conversationalists.

• • •

Jing-Wei stared at the faces of the teenagers bunched around her, like they were bees and she was the only flower for a hundred miles. Seyah had brought them all here to pass judgment on how to handle this emerging situation.

The wait had been brutal: Inez glaring at her from a dozen feet away. Jing-Wei trying to make conversation but getting shut down left and right the same way her mom had shut down requests to stay out after curfew. She even started to miss that thing where she hadn’t seen another human being in ages, because at least then she didn’t have anyone projecting hate out of their eyeballs at her.

When the squad arrived to look her over, it turned out that there were eight kids in all, evenly split between boys and girls, and racially diverse like a Disney show about kids running a circus or some shit. Every one of them looked like they’d seen a ghost. Except Inez, who still might as well have been on her guard against an ax murderer.

The youngest one chimed in first, the white boy with the round cheeks and the soulful blue eyes. You really don’t remember us? I’m Hyrum.

And I’m May. We were friends, Jing-Wei, said the Asian girl. She seemed shaken. Remember? You were an amazing builder and you came up with a neat way to make hammocks in the jungle.

Jungle? Jing-Wei looked around the scrubby hillside. Were all of these kids off their rockers, then?

The swole black boy stepped next to May and put a comforting arm around her shoulders. And I’m Gabe. I helped you carry all that plasti-steel stuff from the ruins. He searched Jing-Wei’s face. You really don’t remember any of it, do you?

How do you even know this is Jing-Wei? Inez demanded. She drew herself to her feet. This could be a … a clone, or a caretaker in disguise.

Can they do that? Hyrum asked, horrified.

I suppose we can’t prove they can’t, said May. I wonder what Holden would—

Holden left, Inez cut her off. We don’t need his superpower of knowing-better-than-the-rest-of-us to see what’s going on here. She’s definitely in league with the caretakers. Inez finally turned her back on Jing-Wei to address her friends. "Did Seyah tell you she called them ‘my caretakers’? Like she thinks they’re friends."

I told them, Seyah said.

They are my friends, Jing-Wei said. And I think they wanted me to find you. Well, somebody, anyway. Her brow furrowed as she tried to remember anything related that Pretty had told her back on the space station. They made me because something went wrong? Or re-remade me, it sounds like, but they didn’t tell me about that part.

Jing-Wei shook herself; she was going off the rails. They needed me because they didn’t know how to talk to people. She hesitated. Pretty always said I’m supposed to talk to other people for them, but they never had anyone besides me. Until now.

How can you talk to them? Gabe asked. He stared at Jing-Wei with a mix of revulsion and fascination. They’ve never talked to us, and not for lack of opportunity.

Jing-Wei shrugged. They put something in my head when they made me, she said, ignoring the dirty glare from Inez. The words flowed out of Jing-Wei’s mouth so casually now: They made me. But it’s not like a radio or anything. It’s just … pictures, and lots of numbers.

What, like video? May asked.

Jing-Wei shook her head. There’s no audio, except static, she said. She put her hands out, palms facing up. Listen, I’m sure if you got to know the keepers like I do, you’d see that some of them are really helpful. They’re meant to be helpers.

Fat chance, muttered a pale boy. Jing-Wei hadn’t caught his name. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Jing-Wei grinned, triumphant. Okay then, I’ll prove it. She whistled. Hey, Sparky? Come on out.

A flicker of motion came from the trees. A flash of red light. Her keeper emerged with an awkward, disjointed gait. Seyah shrieked; Inez froze in place, but only for a split second.

Inez pushed Seyah away. Run, she said.

Gabe pushed May behind him, then bent his knees and raised his spear, ready to fight by Inez’s side. The slim boy, Alex, put his thick walking stick up too. Looked like those were the scrappy ones.

The others started to back away, clearly torn between running at top speed to make a faster escape versus slipping away slowly, hoping to not catch the machine’s attention with any sudden motion.

Inez brandished her keeper arm as if it were a weapon. She looked crazed, hopeless. I’ll hold it off as long as I can, she said, her voice vibrating with urgency. "Now run!"

• • •

The view of Sparky’s undercarriage was really dull after a while. Jing-Wei twisted around and saw that the other keepers had followed along, single file, like marching ants. They demolished the miles far more quickly than Jing-Wei would have predicted, and she spent some time studying how they moved and balanced to try to figure out how they worked. They really were beautifully engineered.

They raced onward like that for what seemed like forever. Hours, maybe. The sun had started high in the sky; it sank until it cast long shadows from those distant mountains. And after a while, the running itself became unbearable. Each step jolted Jing-Wei to her bones. Sparky’s metal limbs pressed into her, and no matter how she shifted, there was no comfort to find. And eventually she had to pee.

She thumped on Sparky’s shell. Hey, we really have to stop soon, she said. She squirmed a little to try to take some pressure off her bladder. I mean it.

Sparky ignored her, or perhaps didn’t hear her at all. She pounded again. I’m serious.

The keepers just kept running. Pretty hadn’t even made it down to Earth; Jing-Wei wondered if she’d be able to get her message through to the other keepers anyway.

Jing-Wei kicked up, this time, to make a hollow ringing sound. Let’s see Sparky ignore that. I need a break, she pleaded. I’m cold and tired, and I need something to eat, and a bathroom, and—

Sparky stopped short then froze in place. Something inside of him clicked and whirred. Jing-Wei tried to wriggle her way out of the keeper’s grasp, but his limbs were immobile and she couldn’t get free.

The keepers stayed there, still like monuments, for about forty heartbeats. Then they turned in unison and began racing in a new direction. Now they were headed for the trees.

Maybe that was promising. But maybe not. Jing-Wei renewed her complaints, her Sparky-thumping, her fruitless efforts to slip out of Sparky’s arms. She’d just about given up when she saw lights through the trees.

Jing-Wei experienced a sudden flare of hope. Signs of civilization. Signs of life?

The lights streamed out from the windows of a rambling country house. It looked well kept, from the neatly pruned hedges to the sparkling clean diamond-paned windows. Except for the trees growing up and out through the roof.

Sparky finally set her down, and nudged her through the door.

Inside, the house was a curious mix of perfectly maintained and perfectly abandoned. There was no dust, the paint looked fresh, the wood floors gleamed. But the furniture was oddly sized and arranged. A chin-high table dominated one room, with chairs tucked under it that would have suited toddlers. Another room had a whole row of normal-sized dining room chairs carved from glass. And the whole echoing place turned out to be empty of people.

She found a bathroom that looked about right, except that none of the plumbing operated. After some debate with herself, she used the facilities anyway, wiped as best she could with an embroidered hand towel, and shut the door behind her.

There was a bedroom, too, with a low canopy bed the size of a swimming pool, studded with waist-high mounds of pillows and blankets. Now this she could get used to.

Once she sat down on the edge of the bed, Sparky gave her a protein bar and another bulb of dusty water to drink. The bars had been delicious enough the first time she’d eaten them, but now she could tolerate only a few bites before sheer boredom overwhelmed her. You don’t have any Cheetos stashed anywhere, do you? she asked the robot.

Sparky didn’t say much. No surprise there.

Eventually Jing-Wei climbed under the blankets. She fell asleep fast and completely, a sweet relief after the unsettled sleep she’d had in space. But she woke up a few times in the night. She had bad dreams, dreams about suffocating in an infinite space. Dreams about running forever. Dreams where she was the only person left in the world.

Every time she woke, though, Sparky was there, standing over her, keeping her safe.

• • •

The next morning, Jing-Wei hardly had time to wake up, use the facilities, and take the protein bar Sparky offered her before the keeper grabbed her and set off again.

Jing-Wei wondered where the keepers were taking her, or if they were taking her anywhere in particular. Maybe they were just running away. But from what? Wondering was all she could do. Sparky wasn’t much for small talk, and he didn’t always answer her even when the talk wasn’t small.

The day passed in inches and drops. Barely. Jing-Wei felt frozen in time, with no way to tell whether minutes had gone by, or only seconds, or maybe hours.

Twice she pounded on Sparky’s hull and asked for a rest break. Both times Sparky complied, handing her another bar and another bulb of water and giving her maybe fifteen minutes to stretch her legs. By late afternoon Jing-Wei found herself eyeing the scrubby little cacti nearby, wondering if it would kill her to eat them. She