It was located in one of the seediest parts of New York City, at the end of a long row of buildings with graffiti-encrusted walls and broken, barred, and/or boarded windows. Winston’s shop stood slightly apart from the others, leaving a small gap between it and the next building, and Alexa squeezed herself through it, cursing under her breath as her shoe landed in something squishy. Mud, hopefully. She had to remind herself to be quiet.
Damian had shown her a roughly drawn map of the exterior layout, and he assured her that this area between the two buildings was the only place with a blind spot from the cameras, and even that was only on one end. He had gone ahead of her, leading from a distance, but in the darkness with his dark clothes, she could only see him when he moved. She tried to feel soothed by that.
They had made a quick stop along the way at a used clothes store, and Alexa was now dressed in an oversized black hoodie that stretched down to her knees. It was an attempt to avoid detection, but somehow, Alexa had never felt more exposed in her life. The thought of what they were about to do—something even Damian admitted he hadn’t dared to try—made fear crawl up her back.
It was hard to picture Winston spending time in a place like this, but Damian told her there was no doubt about it: this was his lair, though he hadn’t been there in a while. Damian had been following in his footsteps, keeping tabs on his activities and whereabouts. It was why Damian had been at Papa’s auction. There was more to the story, something dark and deeply personal, but Alexa hadn’t asked for more information, partly because she was too worried about Libby and partly because it was hard to talk much over the roar of the motorcycle engine with rain and her own hair flying into her mouth.
Damian hadn’t moved in a while and Alexa took a step to draw closer to him, when her toe caught on something. She stumbled and looked down. In the ground, half buried in mud and grass, was a metal grate. Damian hadn’t mentioned that. Could it have been exposed by the rain earlier tonight?
Excited, Alexa opened her mouth to tell Damian before she remembered the need for absolute silence. She crouched down, instead, digging at the dirt with her fingernails. It would help if she could find a screw. Though it was anyone’s guess why, Damian was carrying a small vial of nitrocorrodide, a highly corrosive chemical, and she knew it would work best if applied over a small area.
She found the screw on one corner of the grate and raised her head to try to signal to Damian. And the next thing she knew, she was falling. She didn’t even have time to scream before she was clawing at empty air and a shower of earth. The world tilted wildly, the last vestiges of moonlight were swallowed up over her head, and she landed on her knees with a clang.
Alexa groaned. If she had been flesh and bone, she may have been injured, but as things were, it just hurt.
She looked up desperately toward the sky and the gap between the buildings and Damian, but the pit that had swallowed her was ten feet up and calling for help might blow their cover.
She was in complete darkness, so she stretched her arms out, trying to get a feel for the space she found herself in. It was narrow. Her fingers touched on both sides. Nowhere to go in that direction. She stretched her legs out in front of her and was met with another wall—but there was something else there, too.
Alexa pounced on it. It was a small handle, and when she turned it, the wall became a small door. She eased it open an inch and peeked out into a dimly lit room. The door seemed to be built low into a wall, so that anyone inside would have to crawl out on their hands and knees. It emptied out onto a concrete floor.
Alexa was about to push it open to explore further when a shadow crossed in front of her, momentarily blocking the light. But it wasn’t just a shadow. There was a pair of feet attached, and she recognized the brown leather shoes. Her hands clenched. The shadow passed along with the shoes.
Alexa couldn’t wait any longer. She pushed her way out of the tunnel and stood up enough to peer over the edge of a rolling table that stood in her way. It was a mistake. The room wasn’t as big as she had expected, and she found Winston standing just feet away with his back to her. He was leaning over an identical rolling table with a bare bulb swinging overhead. And lying on the table, her dark hair fanning out around her, was a familiar, motionless figure. Alexa’s lips silently formed her name: “Libby.”
“Hello, Damian.”
Alexa jumped so hard she sent the table she’d been hiding behind smashing into the wall.
Winston didn’t turn around. He was tinkering with something on the table. “I thought you might be, uh, dropping in. There used to be a ladder there, but I took it out. You’re welcome.”
Alexa wanted to grab the nearest blunt object and fly at him with it, but there was nothing within her reach. She looked around for something, anyway, and felt the electricity freeze inside her body. This wasn’t a basement. It was a slaughterhouse.
Metal scraps hung from the walls. They were large and small and everything in-between: human-sized chunks and gears and unrecognizable slabs cut in weird shapes. But it wasn’t all stripped metal. Some of the parts retained their outer, lifelike skin. She saw a bot woman’s dismembered torso, an array of loose arms and legs hung in twisted and tortured positions, and an entire shelf of severed heads. Some heads were cut in half, some had undergone disgusting alterations like being given horns or wings, clown wigs or fangs, and others had been lit from inside like jack-o-lanterns where the eyes had been removed. The thing they all had in common was a look of profound terror.
A noise must have gurgled out of her throat because Winston dropped whatever it was he was fingering and whipped around. “Alexa?” He covered his shock with a smile only slightly colder than the friendly one she had trusted too quickly. “Funny you should show up. I was just thinking that dear Libby here is built well, but she’s not the excellent prize I was after. And now here you are. Kismet, right?”
Alexa took a step toward him, emboldened by her rage. “You’re sick! You’re a monster!”
Winston shrugged. “I’m a businessman. I understand how it must seem to you, but think about it logically. All of this—” He gestured around the room. “It’s not flesh and blood. They’re machines, and working on them is no different than disassembling a car. I admit, though, that you were special. So smart! So human! The best bot I’d met!—Well, almost, anyway. It broke my heart when you stopped answering my calls. Oh, well. It looks like I’ll be compensated for all my efforts now.” He lunged at her with a pair of metal cutters.
Alexa dove out of the way. She managed to grab the edge of the table she’d sent smashing into the wall and shoved it in front of her. Winston tripped but quickly caught himself and recovered. He knocked the table out of the way and advanced on her.
She held her fists out in front of her. With her solid metal core, she knew she was stronger than Winston, but she didn’t trust him with those cutters. She would either have to dodge him, find an opening to fend off or otherwise incapacitate him, or get the cutters away somehow.
She didn’t have long to evaluate her options. Winston flew at her. Alexa jumped out of the way twice before she decided to surprise him with a defensive move, sliding down onto the ground and sweeping her legs out to cut him down at the knees.
She was really starting to appreciate those self-defense classes Papa had insisted on.
Winston stumbled and fell. Alexa sprang back to her feet—a fatal mistake. As usual, Winston had been only pretending. The cutters sprouted from the wall on either side of her neck, and Alexa found herself trapped in a metal noose. She couldn’t help it when she screamed.
Winston smiled, almost sadly this time. “Poor Alexa. So afraid. So beautiful. Too bad you were only a bot.”
His arms tensed to tighten the pincers, and all Alexa could think of was Papa in his reading glasses and Jemma’s hollow cheeks. And Damian.
“Drop them!”
The voice was so unexpected that Winston’s grip on the cutters faltered. That was good enough for Alexa. She brought her knee up into Winston’s stomach and grabbed the cutters, shoving them away from her and running to Damian. He stood framed against a door that was lying on the ground off its hinges. In one hand, he held a familiar vial raised like a weapon.
“Don’t move, Winston. I’ve got nitrocorrodide, and I wouldn’t be sorry if it ate your face.”
Winston was still bent over double from the kick in the stomach, and a trickle of blood ran down from the corner of his mouth. Being kicked by Alexa was the equivalent of being rammed by a small golfcart. But even then, he managed to sneer. “Oh, I see. It’s you and her. That’s rich. And here I was thinking she only liked real men.”
“Shut up, George.”
Winston ignored him. “How’s Gigi, by the way? I’ve missed her. She’s such a joy to know. So fascinating, too. I mean, the ability for cell division and actual growth? I would have liked to have known the scientist behind it; he must have been brilliant. Now that you’re here, though, I guess I won’t need to rely on Gigi anymore for my research.”
Damian’s hand tightened on the vial. “I said, don’t move.”
Alexa looked back and forth between them, not understanding. “What is he saying?” She asked the question to Damian quietly, but Winston heard it, anyway. He laughed in disbelief. “You mean, she doesn’t know? You have been keeping secrets.” He turned his mocking smile on Alexa. “You see, Alexa dear, my family has known the Pemberley’s well for a long time—long enough and well enough to have got wind of their little science experiments one and two decades ago. They paid out the nose for it, but they got what they wanted: two lovely, freakish, and scientifically fascinating children. Most people didn’t know the truth, of course. They aged up so seamlessly that it would have been hard to be suspicious for long. In the eyes of the world, they were two perfectly normal, adopted children. Secrets are lonely, though, and I was one of the only friends Damian here had, up until our senior year of high school. Too bad he was so ungrateful.”
Damian snorted. “Ungrateful? If that means ‘I managed to escape from you when you brought me here for your sick science experiments,’ then I guess I was ungrateful! Then, when you knew I’d found you out and you couldn’t target me anymore, you went after my sister. I stopped you just in time.”
Winston was unmoved by the recounting of his wrongs. “Can I help it if I’m charming?”
Damian looked like he wanted to throw the nitrocorrodide in Winston’s face like he’d threatened to do, but he just jerked his head to order him aside. “We didn’t come here to talk to you. All we want is Libby.”
Alexa didn’t think anything could surprise her anymore. Her head was still reeling as everything she’d known about Damian was turned upside down. Him, a bot? Little Gigi, a bot? She almost couldn’t believe it, until she remembered her kiss with Damian. Hadn’t there been something different about him then?—something cold and strange, yet completely familiar.
But Winston surprised her again by bobbing his head like he was weighing two options and neither one was very important. “I guess I could part with her.” He moved casually toward Libby and the table, whistling as he went. “I haven’t done much work on her yet. If you’ll just let me reattach a few things and get her powered up again, I can have you out of here in ten minutes, tops.”
He reached for something on a tray by Libby’s head. Alexa saw it a half a second before it was in his hand: a small laser gun, effective on humans and bots. She reacted without thinking. Alexa snatched the nitrocorrodide away from Damian and when Winston turned around—SPLASH!
His scream was so full of agony that it would stay with Alexa for a long time. In that moment, though, all that mattered was Libby. With Winston writhing on the floor clutching his face, Alexa and Damian rushed the table.
Winston was right that some parts had already been removed. She tried to gather them up as quickly and disinterestedly as she could, only cringing in horror when she found both Libby’s eyes out in a tray. Alexa pocketed them and tried not to think about it.
Damian grabbed what he could, too, and working silently together, Alexa lifted her sister’s head while Damian took her feet. They steered her out the side door Damian had take off its hinges while Winston had been distracted with Alexa.
“There won’t be room for all three of us on the motorcycle,” Alexa observed.
Damian started to say something, but a sudden explosion and spray of glass made them duck down and look back toward Winston’s lab of horrors. A window had blown out, heated from inside by flames, and smoke billowed out.
“The nitrocorrodide!” Alexa said. “It must have mixed with another chemical! Winston…”
She took a step toward the burning building, but Damian’s hand on her arm stopped her. “Alexa.” He looked into her eyes. “You can’t save him.”
Alexa bowed her head. In one way or another, she knew it was true.
Damian nodded down the street, toward where he had parked in an obscure location. “I’ll help you carry Libby to the motorcycle, and you can take her from there. I’ll meet up with you later.”
Alexa nodded.
They hefted the unconscious girl between them and carried her off into the early morning darkness, even as the roof of her former prison fell in.
