Cracking the Sky Read Online Free Page B

here, but there were three fat squirrels jumping about in the trees. “She wasn’t very nice,” I said.
    “It’s just the age—I know—my sisters both went through it.”
    I was an only child, and didn’t remember being very surly at all. “Did you?”
    “Probably.” She sipped her coffee. “But I don’t think you remember your own stupid years as much as the ones you get to watch. I thought my sisters had lost their minds. My mom used to say we needed her the most when we were teenagers. I think she was right.”
    “I don’t see what we can do about it,” I muttered.
    “Caroline didn’t say anything about parents. She must have some.”
    I walked up to the fridge, waited for the door to slide open, and rummaged for some bread to toast. “I have an idea.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
    “Do you care what I do with the rest of the old robos?” Half had worked when we packed them, up, and most of the rest needed simple things like batteries or new wheel casings or new brain chips, some of which I’d planned on scavenging from the oldest and most broken. “I mean, now we really need to save for a real house-bot, right?”
    She threw her napkin at me. It didn’t even come close, just fluttered to the floor. She frowned.
    “Does that mean I can use them all for parts?”
    “You can throw them all in the river, for all I care.”
    “The queen of eco wants to pollute the pristine waters of East King County?”
    It took less than an hour for her to come down and start helping me. We opened the garage doors to let in a slight breeze and the pale light of a cloudy afternoon. We used the two bots I’d rejected this morning—one industrial red and one silver. I stuck a post in between them, and we picked off arms from garden-bots to attach for robo-arms and legs. The head was easy; I had a round bot with colored lights that was born to be part of a martial arts game, and already had a chain attached to the top. Aliss wound the chain around to be hair. As I looked on and winced, she glued the chain down. I hadn’t played the game since I’d met her anyway. But I had liked it.
    Just before supper, we heaved the bones of our screwed-together bot up two flights of stairs and positioned it on the end of the deck, in one of the Adirondack chairs. I crossed one leg over the other and balanced a colored plastic glass on the garden shear that served at the bot’s right hand. Aliss positioned some old augmented reality glasses on its head and played with the cameras until she had them tilted just the right way. Aliss tapped it softly on its game-ball head and spoke solemnly. “I dub thee Frankenbot.”
    “Good choice.”
    She cocked her hip like a pleased teenaged girl and looked down at our ungainly multi-colored creation. “Do you think we need two?”
    I winced. It had been my idea in the first place, but that hadn’t made it easy. “Let’s watch for a week or two. If we need another one, we can go to the junkyard then and get more parts. Let’s see how she reacts.”
    We went down to the kitchen and switched the kitchen computer to show Frankenbot’s view of the robot house while we played a word game at the kitchen table.
    The next two days life went on like it always had, except we went to the kitchen instead of the deck, and drank our coffee in companionable silence, flipping between the news, the weather, and the neighbor’s kitchen. Which would have creeped me out, except I’d seen the flash of fear in Caroline’s eyes, and I had to do something about that. Stopping a little kid from being scared wasn’t creepy, even if part of what they were scared of was you.
    On day three, we took our usual lunchtime walk past the robo-house. A soaking drizzle had come to town, so I wore blue wet-weather gear, and Aliss was togged in a red cap and yellow rain poncho made of new nano-stuff so slick the water collected in beads and rolled off, dripping off the end and landing on the toes of Aliss’s