The bot who sounded like my father continued, “We were in the Hall of Serpents and it was crowded with tourists—all trying to get a glimpse of the Yersithian Wyrm. Remember?”
The memory came back to me. It was just like the bot described. The Hall of Serpents was a curved hyaline tunnel which ran under the sea. As a little kid I couldn’t believe I could walk underwater. It blew my five-year-old mind. As did the prospect of seeing a hundred-meter-long sea dragon on the other side of the hyaline.
“I got into a discussion with your mother,” the bot said.
Yeah, more likely another huge fight. There was a lot of that going on when she was still alive.
“And somehow we lost sight of you,” the bot said. “Your mother started to panic. I was running around trying to find you, and was this close to demanding that the park docents seal off the hall and let me access their security cams.”
“I remember…” I hadn’t thought about that since I was a little kid.
“You had gone up to another woman, a total stranger who didn’t really even look like your mother. You apparently took her hand, and asked if you could go home with her. You were ready to just trade in your own mom and take up with another family. Can you believe that, Z?” The bot laughed.
Well, the bot had certainly got most of that story right. The one thing it left out was a little fact that I uncovered only after several years of therapy.
It turned out that the reason I had latched on to that other woman—who was shorter and blonder than my mom—was because she looked like Beatria, a woman who worked in my dad’s office. It also turned out that my father happened to be having an affair with Beatria, and little five-year-old me visited the office a lot and must have picked up on their closeness. At least that’s what Dr. Edevaine thought.
“What else do you know?” I asked the bot. “Tell me about Conniel Lear.”
“Lear…” The bot trailed off as if it was thinking. After a moment it said, “Are you talking about the Lears on Cantessa?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know how you remember things from when you were so young, but we lived next to a family named Lear back in Cantessa. Donn and Fella. And they had a son who was your age, right? Conniel.”
“Yeah.”
“So you don’t think I remember what you did to that poor kid, do you?” The bot sounded like it was amused.
“Do you?”
“This happened right before we moved to New Torino, so it must have been in ’30. We were having a barbecue or something. Probably a going away party. You were playing with the Lear kid and a few other neighborhood kids in that little fort I built for you out back. When all of a sudden we hear someone screaming their head off. All the adults came running. As I recall, I was the first one there and saw Conniel Lear with a river of blood running down his head and you standing over him with a bloody chunk of rock in your hand.”
I couldn’t believe it. The bot knew every detail of that incident.
“You brained that kid good.”
“He stole Ursula Sokkel’s Wobblufett.”
“Wobblufett? What’s that, a toy?”
“Yeah. A Zaugummy.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still obsessed with those little monsters?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Yet you remember the exact toy you were fighting over.”
“I wasn’t fighting over it. Conniel stole the Wobblufett from Ursula.” I felt a flush of anger.
“And you wanted it for yourself.”
“No,” I said pointedly. “It was wrong for that little schmuff to take something that didn’t belong to him.”
“I get it,” the bot said. “You were sweet on little Ursula. You were her knight in shining armor, weren’t you?”
“It was wrong.”
Ana-Zhi cleared her throat. “As much as I hate to interrupt this extremely wacko family reunion, we need to get out of here.”
I glanced at my Aura. She was right. We had less than twelve hours before the official end of the mission, and—at best—another few hours after that until the Fountain closed for good, trapping us here.
“Where’s the comm station?” I demanded.
“The comm station?” the Sean bot asked. “Why do you want that?”
I quickly explained what had happened to cause our current predicament, including how Yates had stolen the Kryrk and betrayed us to the Mayir. I also reiterated the fact that we were all a few hours away from being trapped here for the foreseeable future.
“Our plan is to see if we could hail the Rhya,” I said. “We’d issue a mayday and say that our ship was destroyed by the Mayir. They’d come and get us.”
“Maybe,” the Sean bot said. “Or maybe not.”
“What do you mean?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Yates is a very careful man. When he left me to die here seven years ago, he didn’t take any chances. He knew that there might have been a slim chance that I survived the security bots. So he jammed the comm systems until it was too late.”
“You had the same idea?” I asked. “Back when you were trapped, you were going to try to signal the Rhya?”
“Great minds think alike,” the Sean bot said. “Now if I was Yates, I’d suspect that at least Ana-Zhi was still alive, and I’d jam the hell out of Bandala. At least until the Fountain closed.”
“That sounds about right,” Ana-Zhi admitted.
“Yeah, but we have to try,” I said. “What other options do we have?”
“Actually,” the Sean bot said. “We do have another option. We could fly out of here.”
19
As the Sean bot led us through the maze of access tunnels and corridors back to the core, he explained that there were a handful of shuttles that had escaped destruction by the Ptomeans. Most were in pretty bad shape after 700 years, but there was one that he was
