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“Are you sure this is the right place?” Alice asked, interrupting Kara’s analysis of the graffiti.
“It’s the path that android showed me,” Kara said, turning toward the girl, who was shivering again.
She sighed as she thought about their predicament. After climbing up the dumpster to the low roof of the adjacent building, they were supposed to continue across the roof, where the next piece of graffiti would become visible. But the roof had collapsed in. There might have been a way for Kara to get across, if she’d been by herself – but with Alice in tow, her options became more limited. She could leave Alice here while she went to Jericho by herself, and get an alternate path for Alice from one of the androids there, but it had been raining on and off all day, and there was no shelter around – at least, not in a place where a little girl could be left alone without people asking questions.
“Kara, there’s someone coming!”
She looked where Alice was pointing. A man paused by the fence where they’d crawled through, as if looking for something – then, when he noticed the symbol, he crawled through. “Another android,” Kara said to herself, before turning to Alice. “Maybe he’ll be able to help us.”
As he approached the roof, Kara noticed something odd about him: he didn’t look like any model of android she’d ever seen. Maybe he just did a good job of disguising himself, she thought, keeping her doubts to herself.
“Are you two on your way to Jericho as well?” the android asked once he’d joined them on the roof.
“We are,” Kara said. “My name is Kara, and this is Alice.”
“My name is Markus,” the other android said before taking a look at the caved-in roof. He bit his lip as he glanced back and forth between it and Alice. “None of this rubble could take our weight… some of it might take hers, but that would still leave a large gap.” Then he looked up. Following his gaze, Kara noticed a bar sticking out from the wall of a neighboring building. “If I had a running start, I could swing myself across on that,” Markus said. “That still doesn’t get her across…”
“If you could get to Jericho by yourself, you might be able to figure out an alternate path,” Kara said. “That’s what I’d been considering, except I couldn’t leave her alone. But if you went, and I stayed her with her…”
Markus nodded. “That would work.” He took a few steps back from the edge of the abyss. “I’ll come back for you, okay? I promise.”
“Okay,” Kara said, feeling her heart flutter a little. Maybe this Markus could be more than just a helpful stranger…