“Chauncey,” said a raspy feminine voice. Not a voice I recognized. “Wake up.”

I had mixed emotions about still being alive.

“Wake up,” she said again.

Identical blue gurneys lined the room, but aside from mine, they were all empty. A young woman sat beside me, her nose in a tablet. A mess of curly red hair sat in a knot on her head. Her jeans and pink sweatshirt looked like the kind of thing Selena and Sophia might wear. She rocked back and forth on her stool, playing the part of any ordinary girl. But the yellow smog and garlicky smell still loomed, and she wasn’t wearing a gas mask or coughing herself to death on the floor. Ordinary she was not.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“You can call me Bex,” she said. “How’s your head?”

The question brought back the memory of being shot. I reached up and touched a hole the size of a quarter in my forehead. The back of my skull couldn’t have been in better condition, but I was too much of a coward to feel it. If I had even the tiniest shred of denial about being an android left in me, it was gone now. That aside, I felt fine. The agonizing burns had reduced to a dull ache, and the bullet wounds might as well have been mild bruises.

“I dialed back your pain settings,” she said. “You should still be aware you’re hurt but on a manageable level.”

“I’d say that about describes it.”

“Good. You’re lucky, you know. That shot almost destroyed your Wi-Fi adapter. Without it, you can’t connect to the cloud, and we don’t have enough memory to exist offline.”

That explained why headshots worked so well.

“Don’t get up too fast,” she warned. “I shut off the injured half of your head. The other half will compensate for the loss, but it has to recalibrate. You might feel weird for a few minutes.”

“You shut off... You can do that?” I tried to sit, wobbled, and nearly fell out of the gurney.

“I could make you think you were a hippopotamus if I wanted to.” She turned her tablet around to show me a picture of a blue mass. It didn’t look like a human brain, but the faint outline of my face surrounding it suggested it was mine. If one could even call a hunk of machinery a brain.

Beside it, a series of coded numbers and letters formed a massive block of text, not one line of which I could read. She turned it back toward herself and read through it, out loud, as easily as plain English. “Male child replacement therapy android. Model number four-three: Chauncey Nicolas Reyes. You are in serious need of repairs.”

The intact side of my head felt significantly heavier than the side with the hole in it, although it was probably my imagination. “You can say that again.” I tried to rub the dizziness out of my eyes. “Thanks for helping me. It’s Chance, by the way.”

A sly smile pushed up her freckled cheeks. “You’re welcome, Chance. We androids have to stick together.”

It was strange. She said those words like she was proud of what she was.

“Right,” I replied. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but if you avoided the recall, you shouldn’t be here. You should be as far away from here as possible.”

“Would be, if I had anywhere else to go.”

Oh, no. Mama awakened in me. This girl was the first person I’d ever met who was like me. Not to mention, she’d helped me and, therefore, helped my sisters who may still have a security bot headed their way. I owed her one. I couldn’t leave her behind to end up like those androids in the basement.

“You can come with me, if you want,” I offered. “I’m in a hurry, though.”

Commander Lucas Von wouldn’t be happy about the addition to the team, but I’d be damned if I knew what would make Commander Lucas Von happy.

“Where are you going?” She grabbed my arm to steady me as I tried to stand up.

“There’s something I have to do, and then I’m getting out of here. Don’t worry, I’ll protect you until I can get you somewhere safe.”

“Protect me? You’re the one who needs protection if you ask me.”

“Alright, then you can protect me.” There was no point in arguing. I’d learned that from Mia.

“What do you have to do?”

I poked my head out of the door and checked the hallway for boogiemen. “First, find the guy I came in with.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“He said he’d meet me on level seventy-four.”

Her smile grew. “Perfect. Follow me. I know my way around.”

And she did. I followed her down a series of interconnected hallways to the elevator. It would have taken ages for me to find the way on my own.

As we walked, I resisted peeking into offices and labs. I couldn’t bear to see any more bodies on the ground. What I couldn’t help but notice, however, were streaks of blood on the walls and floor. Like something out of a horror film, they decorated the place in puddles and smears. And then it occurred to me—it wasn’t blood. It was too goopy and bright red despite being dry. It had to be the red gunk filling my pretend veins. Identical stains marred every inch of my clothes.

“Did you carry me this whole way?” I asked.

“I used a dolly,” she replied. “You were heavy.”

“How’d you avoid the police?”

“The poison. They can’t come in here without masks, so they couldn’t get to you before I could. They’re inside now, though, escorting a bunch of rescue teams. So, we have to be careful.”

We rode the elevator to the seventy-fourth floor and, as elevator-etiquette dictated, faced forward and kept quiet the entire way. Commander Lucas Von wasn’t waiting on the other side of the door, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d ditched me like he threatened. He might have been a dick, but I was holding out hope there was a good guy in there. Somewhere. In which case, he’d be around. After all, he’d only said which floor to meet him on, not where he’d be on that floor.

It seemed like I was breathing too loud. I could even hear my fake heartbeat. The building may have been operating at peak functionality—the lights were still on; the AC still hummed—but there were no people. Nothing moving. Nothing alive. It gave me the creeps.

“So, Bex, how’d you end up here?” I asked to break the tension but kept my voice at whisper volume.

“My dad works here,” she said.

“Is that how you know so much about my brain?”

She snapped her fingers absently. “Yeah. I know a lot about all kinds of androids.”

“Is that weird? Since, you know, you are one?”

“I don’t think it’s weird. It’s not really different from being a human doctor or something. I like knowing how everything works. I can conduct my own repairs, and I always know what’s going on with me. Plus, I can make little tweaks, and no one ever knows. One time, I downloaded an entire history textbook for a test. Aced that thing. But it interfered with my other memories, so I had to go back and delete most of it. We aren’t really meant to comprehend data that way.”

“You went to school?”

“Yeah. But I wasn’t really supposed to. No one knew I was an android, except me and Dad.”

We were more alike than I thought. Kindred spirits, she and I. I looked forward to getting to know her better.

The clacking of crutches against tile echoed down the halls, an intrusive sound in the dead quiet. It led us straight to a set of thick metal doors. Their sheer size (their bolts the girth of my arm) gave me the impression they were meant to keep people out. But that must not have been a concern of Commander Lucas Von’s. He’d left them hanging wide open.

Inside, rows of curved desks formed a circle around a table and a view screen. The table wore a silver Genesis logo; the screen displayed what I thought might be some kind of seed-shaped satellite. Blocks of encrypted code appeared beside it, like the kind I’d seen displayed next to my brain on Bex’s tablet. Commander Lucas Von circled the image like a vulture.

“You’re late,” he said and jerked when he caught sight of Bex behind me. “Who is that?”

“New friend,” I replied.

“You’re one of those people who brings home stray dogs, aren’t you? What happened to your head?”

“I thought you didn’t want to hear my life story. Aren’t you trying to get a hold of your command? This doesn’t look like comms equipment.” I rolled my hand over a keyboard, and the image of the satellite twirled.

“It isn’t. And there’s been a change of plans.” He slapped my hand away. “We have to find Richard Cussons.”

“Richard Cussons like Richard Cussons the head of Genesis? Why? Wouldn’t that literally be delivering ourselves into the hands of the enemy?”

A sharp breath reverberated in his gas mask. “It’s not just our lives that are in danger. If we don’t find him and get him to safety, a lot more people are going to die. He’s one of the few people in the world with the access codes to this pretty thing you see here.” He pointed to the satellite. “It’s called the Revelation. It’s a weapon built by Genesis for the OPG.”

“The what-what-what?”

“Orbital Protection Grid. It’s the international military branch I serve in, the one I told you about. The only one of its kind. Its purpose is to protect the planet Earth, in its entirety, from extraterrestrial threats.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Like aliens?”

“Like asteroids. But, theoretically, yes. To that end, we have the Revelation here. It has two main settings, wideband and narrowband. Wideband has enough destructive power to obliterate an asteroid the size of Mexico or knock anything bigger back into space. Narrowband has the same destructive power but can focus on a smaller target. A lot smaller. Smaller like a specific DNA sequence. It’s the ultimate genocide machine. On paper, it’s meant to defend the Earth from potential, hypothetical, alien attacks, should we ever encounter anything alien. But in the wrong hands, it could do a lot worse.”

“Let me guess, I’ve never heard of any of this before because it's all top secret.” I exchanged glances with Bex.

“You got it.”

“Top secret, as in, you shouldn’t be telling us about it?”

“Top secret, as in, we’re all in a boatload of shit because that door and this file were already open when I came in here. Which means—”

A gunshot from above rattled my eardrums, followed closely by a second. Commander Lucas Von gripped his firearm against his crutch and hobbled to the back of the room.

“Stay here,” I said to Bex and chased after him.