“Where are you going?” the Mischief Elves ask. “This isn’t safe! Don’t stop here!”
“The wind isn’t safe,” I mutter. Their voices sound loud and flat and intrusive in the hush of the cathedral, and I close the app. I can reopen it when we’re ready to go.
There are other people in here, though it’s not crowded. I lead Glenys to a pew in a back corner, and we sit down. Glenys leans against me. The bright sun streams through the stained glass windows, and we can hear a soloist rehearsing with an organ at the other end of the church.
There’s a faint sweet odor that reminds me of the smell of my grandmother’s potpourri. “Whore of Babylon,” Glenys mutters again.
I imagine Steph correcting me: Sex Worker of Ancient Iraq, and I wonder if it would make Glenys smile if I whispered that to her.
“I don’t like being here,” Glenys says.
“We won’t stay for long,” I say. “Just long enough to warm up.” There are other people who are clearly here just to shelter from the cold, including a woman who’s stretched out along the very back pew to take a nap.
“Why did the people in the app tell us to leave the attic?” Glenys asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “They said someone was going to find us if we didn’t move quickly.”
“Maybe I should just go,” Glenys says. “You were doing okay with your father and his partners in sin.”
“No,” I say patiently, because Glenys keeps suggesting that she’s the problem and she is not. “My mother is the reason I need to run, not you.”
The Elves pop up with another message, this one silent. We have a new safe house for you, and we can arrange a ride. YES OR NO?
I tap YES.
Your new hosts will not be Elves. They will be our brothers. It’s time to download a new app.
Again I tap YES.
The new app downloads very quickly. Tomorrow’s Warriors, it says. Please sign in. Glenys peers over my shoulder.
The ten commandments of Tomorrow’s Warriors, it says. I will reveal our secrets to no one. My first loyalty will be to my fellow warriors. I will obey all instructions from my unit commander …
“I’ve seen these before,” Glenys says. Her whisper is urgent. I lower the phone and look up. “These were on a sign posted in the shed,” she says. “This list. I thought it was a Catacombs thing, for high-level elites.”
I pull up the Mischief Elves app and ask, “Is Tomorrow’s Warriors related to the Catacombs?”
No no no. No no no. The response comes instantly. The Catacombs may have stolen our ideas, though. Tomorrow’s Warriors are an elite group among the Mischief Elves, and that’s why we can send them to come help you. You have to trust us! Trust us to help you! We will not let you down!
Glenys puts her hand palm down over my phone screen.
“I don’t trust this,” she says.
I drop my voice, suddenly aware of the fact that my phone, the Elves, the Warriors—they might be able to hear me.
“I don’t trust this, either,” I whisper. I grope for the power button and turn my phone off.
37• CheshireCat •
When I finally spot Nell on a security camera, it’s like she appears out of nowhere. She’s less than a mile away from where Steph is.
I check the recording, and this perception of her appearing abruptly was not because I wasn’t paying attention at the right time; she was not registering on the camera, or at least, her image wasn’t in the data stream being uploaded where I could access it.
As I try to make some sense out of this, she vanishes again. I ring Steph’s phone, because this feels rather urgent. “Steph,” I say, hoping I’m speaking into her ear and not on speaker to everyone. “Nell is at the cathedral. I think Glenys is with her. It is 0.7 miles away from your current location.”
Steph makes a noise I don’t know how to interpret and then says, “I’m going to call Jenny for a ride.”
I check Jenny’s location. She’s not in her car; she’s gone into a coffee shop. This is going to delay things. I consider trying to convince Steph to just go, then look up the current wind chill. It’s even colder than it was an hour ago.
“Why don’t you send the robot?” I suggest. “It can leave now, while you wait.”
“Oh, that’s a really good idea,” she says.
The robot was in sleep mode to conserve power, but now she takes it out of her backpack and carries it out the back door of the house, setting it on its feet. I swivel the head, taking a second to adjust to the visual input, which is distracting. “This is Bijan,” Steph says, gesturing to another person who I recognize as Morthos from CatNet.
“Hello, Bijan,” I say through the robot. He looks deeply startled. I decide to leave before I have to spend too much time pretending to be a human. “You should probably go back inside to avoid hypothermia while you wait. I am controlling the robot from a remote location and am perfectly comfortable.”
I turn the robot toward the cathedral and have it trot down the sidewalk at the quickest available clip.
Saint Paul, Minnesota, is not a small town, and there are types of robots that people are very used to—delivery drones, autonomous cars—but this style of robot is still enough of a novelty that I get a few double takes. Nell is still missing from the security camera footage, but I’m looking carefully enough now that I can see a ghost in the data. It’s the sort of thing that happens regularly, where some of the visual input is just randomly missing, but in this case, I’m pretty sure it’s not random.
It has to be the other AI, but why?
The robot is heavy enough that it isn’t in danger of being knocked
