Chapter Text
Dani's first thought when she saw the body was ‘great, now I'll have to call the cops’.
That wasn't good. At all. For one thing, her parents would kill her, and for another, she didn't look forward to answering invasive questions like “what were you doing in a junkyard illegally at 5 AM?” She supposed she could turn around and walk away, pretend she never saw it, but then if a camera caught a whiff of her that could turn into real trouble real quick.
It was as she considered her options that her eyes wandered up the body, from the boots to the face to the arms...
...and the light glinted and caught on something shiny and metallic.
Dani pointed her flashlight into the darkness. The body’s left arm was made of silver metal, strips and gears visible beneath a shattered white carapace. Dani immediately rushed forward to get a better look.
The body’s face was pale, so pale it reflected the light, and eerily still. She supposed that was typical of corpses. It was male, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a t-shirt layered over a long-sleeve. Its face was round and dotted with freckles. There was no blood, no visible injury, nothing to indicate how it had died.
It looked… young. Her age, maybe a few years older.
Dani forced her eyes away from its face. There was nothing she could do to help it now. But that arm—she moved closer—it was a prosthetic, a myoelectric one from the looks of it, the kind that could go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She gingerly rolled up the sleeve and examined the prosthetic. It was clear that it used to be covered by some kind of shell which had since broken and revealed the mechanics beneath. She touched the jagged edges, picked up a piece and held it up to her flashlight. It felt like plastic, white, and it had grooves carved into it. She couldn’t discern any kind of pattern to them.
She slipped a piece into her pocket and moved on to the prosthetic itself. She could see tendon-like wires connected to some kind of pump near the elbow. She hesitantly picked it up, turned it this way and that, but she couldn’t see much more. Near the elbow, the prosthetic disappeared under the ‘skin’. Was the entire arm fake, then?
Dani eyed the body apprehensively. If she wanted the full prosthetic, she had to get it now, and she had to get it quickly. People would show up soon, and when they did they’d find the body. Someone who could afford a prosthetic like this was probably important; cops would be swarming the place by noon.
Dani sighed. It was a shame. She’d really liked this place. She held her flashlight between her teeth while she got out her knife and shifted closer, preparing to cut the shirt sleeves—
The arm shot out and grabbed her.
For a second Dani just stared at the silver fingers wrapped around her wrist, too stunned to even scream. Then her lungs caught up with her brain and she shrieked, yanking her arm away and scrambling backward on her hands and knees.
The body which apparently wasn’t a body sat up, sending the trash that had half-covered it flying in every direction, and attempted to crawl backward as well. Dani stopped screaming and then they both stared at each other with wide eyes.
Dani spoke first. “Uh,” she started, then swallowed and tried again. “Are you… okay?”
The body—the person?—tilted its head. It opened its mouth to speak.
Its cheek fell off.
Dani stared, mouth wide open, once again too stunned to speak. The flap of skin just stayed there, dangling, and there was no blood—beneath the skin Dani saw more silver, more metal—
Wait.
She surged forward. The person didn’t speak, didn’t even move as Dani snatched up her flashlight to examine its face. She could clearly see its teeth, stark white, but above them it looked as if the gums had rubbed off, revealing shiny silver metal. No blood.
Dani sat back on her haunches and looked into the person’s(?) eyes. They were an almost frighteningly bright shade of green. “What… are you?” She asked.
They finally moved. Dani flinched when they raised their hand, the flesh-y one, but they just held their cheek together. They made a sound, a low, warbling screech of feedback that shook their whole chest. It stopped abruptly and they tilted their head again.
They spoke. Their mouth didn’t move, held firmly shut by their hand, but they spoke. Without the aid of lip-reading, Dani strained to hear them; she had to turn so they could speak into her good ear. “I’m…”
Their head snapped around so quickly that Dani flinched backward. They froze, eyes fixed on some far-off point near the junkyard’s entrance. “Someone’s here,” they hissed.
Dani watched them struggle to stand, trembling and leaning against their surroundings. If they were human, she’d say they were either drunk or brain damaged. Either way, they seemed like they were in no state to be moving around. “Should you really be moving?” She asked.
The person(?) looked at her. Their eyes cast a green glow over their silver skeleton like some metallic Dr. Phosphorus. “I can’t let them find me,” they said. And maybe it was their wide eyes, or ripped-off cheek, or the mechanical warbling of their voice, but they sounded urgent and desperate in a way that Dani recognized.
So she stuck out her hand.
“I know a place you can go,” she whispered, then cocked her head. “I’m Dani, by the way. Danielle,” she added hastily.
A thrill went through her. Did I say it right? Was it believable? The person(?) stared at Dani’s outstretched hand for long enough that she began to worry. Just when it occurred to her that maybe this thing had never heard of a handshake, they took her hand and shook it once, loosely. “Marcus,” they said.
Dani laughed. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected them to say, some long string of numbers or government codename or even “kneel, feeble human”, but it sure wasn’t Marcus. That was such a… normal name.
She led Marcus through the hole she’d cut in the fence and all the way to her bike, where she paused and pulled the bandana off of her neck. “Put this over your face,” Dani ordered. “Roll down your sleeves, and take these—” She handed Marcus her gloves. “I think I can sneak you into my parents’ shop before it opens,” she said, watching Marcus struggle to pull on her too-small gloves with shaking hands.
Marcus balanced on her wheel spokes. Dani sweat bullets the whole ride through town; at this hour, not many people were awake, but news traveled quickly here. When she finally got to the auto shop, she all but rushed Marcus inside and into her “room”.
Well, she said “room”; really, it was the storage closet where she kept her supplies and also where she slept sometimes. “Sorry about the mess,” Dani said, sweeping miscellaneous objects off of her desk so Marcus had somewhere to sit.
She’d spent an increasing amount of nights here since she was nine, which was just fine by her. It meant she didn’t have to spend as much time at home, didn’t have to wake up as early to take care of the shop, and most importantly, it gave her nigh-unlimited access to all of her tools.
That was especially important right now. Dani turned to Marcus and said, “So you are an android, right?”
Because you’d be about 99% less interesting if you weren’t, she thought but didn’t say.
Marcus nodded. There was hardly enough room in here for Dani, and Marcus was about a foot taller, so even sitting down they had to hunch over. “I’m—”
“Then who built you?” She interrupted. “And how? There’s no AI in the world this advanced, and no androids so… realistic looking.”
Dani started pacing, which was impossible in such a small space, so she ended up just turning in circles while waving her hands wildly. “What happened to you? How were you damaged? How’d you end up in a dump? How are you even still functioning? What’s your power source? How—”
She froze and spun on her heel to meet Marcus’ eyes. “Right,” she said in a business-like tone. “How do we fix you?”
Marcus gestured to their cheek with their skinless arm. “I was caught in a building collapse,” they explained. “Near as I can tell, the damage is mostly superficial. My CPU, my microprocessors, they’re all in here.” They hit their chest with a thump. “It’s bulletproof. They’re fine. But my casing and my voice box, they’re… damaged. And I’m running out of power.”
Dani nodded. “Okay, okay. Power, skin, and a voice box. I can work with that. I’ll need to examine your wiring, too, just in case, and clean everything out, so I’ll need…” She paused. “Are you rechargeable or battery powered?”
“Rechargeable,” Marcus said. “And I have maybe a few days left if I stay in standby mode.”
There were jumper cables in the shop somewhere, and if she could get a car battery then it might work in the long-term. “You stay here, then—” She turned on the single, crappy fan that stood between her and heatstroke on most nights, and opened the door. She said over her shoulder, “And I’ll figure something out.”
She closed the door behind her and turned away.
And came nose-to-nose with someone else.
Dani jumped nearly three full feet into the air. “Ryan!” She half-shrieked. “You’re—how long have you been—did you hear—” She clamped her mouth shut before she gave herself away.
Ryan was the latest in a long line of foster kids that the Hendersons, Dani’s adoptive family, had taken in. He was especially good with cars, and that combined with his quiet, cause-no-trouble attitude was probably why he’d lasted so long.
Ryan looked down at her, face obscured by darkness and the baseball cap he wore at all times. “Were you talking to someone?” He asked.
“Whattt? No,” she denied a bit too hastily. She liked Ryan. Most of her previous foster siblings had hated her guts for unknown reasons, but he was nice to her. He didn’t go out of his way for her or anything, but he aged out of the system in a year; he probably just wanted to keep his head down until then. “Just me, myself, and I in here,” she joked.
Ryan stared at her for another moment, eyes squinted in suspicion. “Mr. Henderson is on his way,” he warned.
He left Dani standing there dumbly. She went back into her room and hissed, “New plan. You hide in here until tonight.”
Marcus’ head snapped up; they’d been looking at the various objects on her shelves. “But my power—”
“I have a plan,” she promised. “But my dad is on his way here, so it’ll have to wait until tonight.”
In the end, Marcus crawled under the desk and Dani threw a blanket over them. It wasn’t perfect, but Dave almost never went in here, so it’d have to work. On her way out Marcus called, “Wa-ait.” Their voice stuttered and skipped like a broken recording.
Dani waited.
“Leave the light on.”
She blinked. Right. The room didn’t have a window, and without the one sad, overworked lightbulb it was utterly dark. She left it on.
Dave Henderson arrived ten minutes later. Dani’s adoptive father was a heavyset man in his late forties with tanned skin and fast emotions—quick to anger, quick to joy. But he’d been in a bad mood all summer, and now the whole household had to walk on eggshells around him; a skill that Dani had never quite mastered. She was loud, clumsy, and in Dave’s own words “as likely to break something as to fix it”.
This about summed up her relationship with the Hendersons and the world at large. Dani had always felt the need to rip things apart: cars, computers, microwaves, a fridge on one memorable occasion. Half the time, it turned out alright, because she could put them back together.
The other half was, she suspected, the real reason the Hendersons let her sleep in the shop.
Dave Henderson was also the proud owner and manager of Henderson Auto, a relatively small auto-mechanic shop. Courtesy of Dani, it doubled as a tech repair shop. The townspeople could swing by with their broken computers and damaged smartphones and, nine times out of ten, Dani could fix them in no time flat. It wasn’t her favorite part of the job—she was a mechanic first, always—but Dave let her keep most of the money.
And Dani loved working in the shop. It was the one thing her and Dave had in common. She liked busy days the best.
So of course it just so happened that today, the day that Dani had an entire android in her bedroom, was the slowest, most agonizingly boring day of her entire life.
A few regulars came in with their rustbuckets that, in Dani’s humble opinion, would probably be more useful as scrap metal than as ‘vehicles’. The seconds ticked by. Dave yelled at her and Ryan for the crimes of: sitting around, standing around, working, not working, and just generally existing. Dani stared wistfully at her room, mind buzzing with questions and plans, and when she looked away she caught Ryan staring at her.
The seconds ticked by.
One.
By.
One.
Until, finally, the clock struck five. Dave could and often did work later, but on a day like this, he’d have no excuse. Dani rushed about the shop to get it clean and ready to close, waving goodbye to the other workers as they left for the afternoon, until one yelled over his shoulder, “See you at church, Dave!”
Dani’s heart dropped. It couldn’t be Wednesday. Today, of all days, could not be Wednesday. But unless the whole town had spontaneously decided to go to church on a Tuesday night, it was, in fact, Wednesday.
“Where are you going?” Dave asked as she rushed past him to her room.
“I’ve just, uh, gotta grab… something,” she said. Not her best work, but it would have to do.
The android was right where she left them. “Marcus,” she hissed. They didn’t stir. Dani was seized with sudden panic (what if they’re broken I didn’t check them fully oh no it’s my fault) and she grabbed them by the shoulders and gave them a hard shake. “Marcus!” She hissed again.
Marcus made a sound like the Hendersons’ twenty year old desktop booting up. Their eyes fluttered open, and she saw them slowly turn from warm brown to fluorescent green. “Wh-what?” They snapped, annoyance clear in their robotic tone.
Dani made a shushing gesture. “Change of plans,” she whispered. “We’re going to church, and then we’re going home. So I won’t be back until tomorrow morning.”
Marcus shook their head in jerky, spasmodic movements. “No, no, that won’t work, my battery w-won’t lassst,” they stuttered.
Dani looked at Marcus, then at the door, then back at Marcus, and thought: screw it. “Okay, I’ll be back tonight,” she promised. “Just… sit tight.” It wouldn’t be the first time she’d snuck out.
Dani heard Dave’s voice. She couldn’t pick up any words, but she had a sixth sense for his angry tone, and even just the sub-vocal vibrations of it set her teeth on edge. “Sorry, gotta go,” she said apologetically, scrambling backward on her hands and knees.
Marcus tilted their head, apparently listening to Dave’s shouting. “Wow,” they said. “Is he always like that?”
Dani laughed. “You have no idea,” she said darkly. Dave’s voice shook the walls again, and she rushed out to face him.
Church was boring. Like always.
Even as a kid, she’d thought there were better ways to spend her Sunday and Wednesday evenings. But Dave and Sharon were ultra-religious even by rural standards, and Dani knew better than to voice those thoughts. It would be downright humiliating for the Hendersons’ adopted kid to not attend church.
The kids her age didn’t want to talk to her, so she stayed with the adults. Ryan got fostered at the start of summer, and the Hendersons had him on a 24/7 watch; he didn’t go anywhere except work and home. All that to say that like her, he had no friends, so they both stood awkwardly at the edge of the circle behind Dave and Sharon.
“—tired, Dani?” She caught the tail-end of a question.
Dani, visibly swaying on her feet after many early mornings at the junkyard and late nights at the shop, nodded. But before she could say anything, Sharon cut in, “Oh, he’s a fourteen-year-old boy, I’m sure he doesn’t want to be called Danny anymore.”
Dani’s stomach dropped straight through her feet and burrowed deep into the core of the Earth. The room may as well have fallen dead silent except for the ringing in her ears. Carefully, as neutrally as she could manage, she shrugged. “I don’t mind,” she said.
No one heard her. Or at least, no one listened.
Dave and Sharon were early to sleep, early to rise, so they retired to the bedroom pretty much as soon as they got home. Dani did, too, but only to grab as many tools as she could fit into her bag. She kept her hood up as she rode through town; it was still light out, and she didn’t doubt word would get back to the Hendersons about her escapade.
Dani entered the shop through the back door and rushed toward the jumper cables. If she could get Marcus hooked up to a battery, she’d have them charged up in no time—
A flash of green caught her eye and moved.
Dani didn’t even scream. She jumped a full five feet into the air, crashing into a shelf and scattering tools across the floor. The room was dead silent until Dani finally pointed her flashlight upward.
Marcus tilted their head down at her with a decidedly unimpressed expression. “Are you ok–crh–ay?”
“Fine,” Dani gasped. “Just… give me a moment. What are you doing?”
“Charging,” Marcus said, gesturing to their… chest…? Which was open and full of wires. She saw a jumper cable leading to a car battery. Marcus’ voice was less robotic now; in fact, it could pass as human if it weren’t for the occasional static crackle.
Dani darted forward to get a closer look. She’d known, of course, that Marcus was an android, but it was one thing to know it and another to see their chest swing open like a fridge door. Her slight discomfort was far outweighed by excitement. She had a sentient android. How cool was that?
Marcus answered a few questions about their construction as she worked, though they didn’t seem very knowledgeable. When Dani asked Marcus how they couldn’t know something as simple as their own programming, they shrugged and asked if she knew her own blood type. Fair enough.
“So who built you?” Dani asked, realizing she’d never gotten a straight answer. “Are you, like, a government project? Are they gonna come take you away?” The Hendersons were… less than pleased the last time cops knocked on their door with Dani in tow. She couldn’t imagine how they’d react to her harboring a fugitive.
“No,” Marcus said. Their mouth didn’t move; Dani could actually hear their voice echo in their chest cavity. Freaky. “I was… privately built.” They paused; Dani added more thermal paste to their CPU. “No one’s looking for me,” they admitted.
“So how’d you end up in a junkyard?” She asked, mumbling around a mouthful of screwdriver.
Marcus stayed silent long enough that she looked up to make sure they hadn’t, like, shut down or something. They were staring at her with wide, glowing eyes; combined with their dangling cheek and silver skeleton, it made an eerie sight. “I don’t kn-know,” they admitted quietly. “I was in an… accident. I don’t remember what happened.”
“Ominous,” Dani entoned. “Well, whoever dumped you’s an idiot.” She sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead. Summer in SoCal; even in the dead of night it sweltered. “Nothing here’s unfixable.”
That was true. In the end, Marcus was remarkably similar to the laptops Dani fixed—except larger, more complicated, and actively annoyed at her for touching them. She cleaned them out, fixed a few dents, carefully re-soldered a few wires, replaced some thermal paste, and then bam, they were good as new. Almost.
“I think your battery’s degraded,” Dani told them. “How old is it?”
“Six,” their voice crackled. “Six years. I think.”
“Yeah, that’ll need replacing soon,” Dani said. “You must use crazy amounts of power. How long does a full charge last you?”
“A few days, depending on how much power I use.” Marcus closed their chest panel, carefully folding their skin back into itself, and began to stand up.
“Woah, woah, hold on!” Dani pushed at their shoulders. Marcus was pure metal, duh, so they didn’t move an inch. She pointed at their face. “Forgetting something?”
Marcus blinked and touched their cheek with their robotic hand, as if they’d completely forgotten about the flap of synthetic skin dangling from it. “What’s it made of?” She asked. “Plastic? Silicon?” Marcus nodded. “Perfect. We can probably melt it together.”
It wasn’t perfect. It left an ugly raised line along the weld, and she had to sew the inner cheek together—talk about awkward—but it worked. Marcus stared into the side view mirror on one of their cars and ran their robotic hand over it, head tilted in consideration.
“Not too bad, eh?” Dani asked.
Marcus straightened their head and nodded. “Not too bad,” they echoed. They looked at Dani and grinned, the first real expression Dani had seen from them.
Dani was too tired to even smile back. It was late enough to be technically early, and she’d been awake since four in the morning. Her eyes burned; every blink felt like it had the potential to turn into a long nap. The shop opened in three hours. She was not looking forward to tomorrow.
Dani blinked, slowly and painfully. Marcus poked around the shop, looking at various tools. She blinked again. They were gone. One more blink… they were back, and now they were shoving various tools into a bag. Her bag.
Wait.
“What are you doing?” She demanded.
Marcus froze midway to cramming a whole welding torch into her backpack, like a comically on-the-nose parody of a burglar. “Uh,” they said. “Taking all your stuff and leaving?”
Dani blinked. “You’re leaving?”
Marcus nodded, slowly placing the torch in the bag. “Well… yeah,” they said. “What else would I be doing?”
“But—wh–” Dani sputtered. Stay, she thought. You were supposed to stay! Her face burned horribly. She had to admit that in her wild imagination she’d expected to have an android sidekick. As if the world’s most advanced AI would want to stay in her garage. “Where are you going?” She asked desperately.
Marcus froze briefly, then shrugged. “I know a guy who has the, ah, money and supplies to repair me,” they said. As if Dani’s hard work and not-insignificant amount of stolen supplies were nothing.
“But where are you going?” She demanded.
“He lives in… Pennsylvania, I think.” Marcus moved around the shop as if it were, well, a shop, peering at items and deciding which would go with them.
Pennsylvania. It literally couldn’t be farther away. “How are you going to get there?”
Marcus picked up Dave’s heavy leather coat and dusted it off before shrugging it on. “I’ll walk,” they said. “Or run. I’m pretty fast.” They pulled Dave’s work gloves out of the pocket and put those on, too.
“You don’t think people will notice a kid sprinting down the highway?” She asked sardonically. “Or your arm—or your eyes, dude, they’re glowing. And, and,” she continued, grasping at straws, “You’re still really damaged and, no offense, you can’t really repair yourself. What are you gonna do if someone spots that,” she nodded at their skinless arm, “Or you break down somewhere?”
Marcus kept moving, but she could see that she was getting to them. Dani’s mind spun as she latched onto that one loose thread and pulled. “And this guy you’re meeting, what if he can’t help you? What if you get there and it was all for nothing? Then you’re stranded. Do you even have a phone? Or money? Or a plan?”
Marcus still said nothing. Dani summoned all the confidence she could and declared: “I’ll go with you.”
She expected Marcus to argue. At least a little. She expected them to laugh, or ask how a little kid could help them, or any number of firm rejections. She didn’t expect them to blink at her and ask with genuine confusion: “What about your family?”
“Wh…” That stopped her dead in her tracks, mouth still open with further arguments on her tongue. She looked away at the empty shop while she gathered her thoughts.
They wouldn’t miss her. That was the cold, honest truth. Oh, sure, they might miss having her help around the shop. They might miss having an adopted kid to make the town think they’re saints. But they’d move on, they’d get a replacement, they’d get pity and flowers.
And as for Dani…
Her eyes drifted toward the cross mounted over Dave’s office door, and she made up her mind.
“What about them?” Dani asked Marcus more dismissively than she felt. “Dave and Sharon will be fine. They’ve got Ryan, and the shop, and—and they’ll be fine.”
No one will miss me.
Marcus frowned. “You call your parents by their names?”
Dani blinked, a bit thrown off. “I’m adopted,” she said by way of explanation. Not that it really explained anything. The Hendersons adopted her as an infant; they were the only parents she’d ever known. Her biological parents had never even attempted to contact her.
Once, a lady at the church got mad at Dani for calling Sharon by her name. “That woman took you into your home and raised you, fed you, clothed you for nine years,” she’d said sternly. “She’s your mother.” Dani didn’t know what to say to that, so she’d just nodded politely and scuttled away.
Inside, she’d thought: but Sharon isn’t my mom.
It wasn’t hard to tell. Dave and Sharon were both blue-eyed, Dani had brown eyes; Sharon was blond-haired, Dani had black hair; Sharon was pale-skined, Dani tanned so darkly that sometimes strangers spoke to her in Spanish.
In a small town like this, everyone looked like their parents. The first words out of everyone’s mouth, once they saw her next to Sharon, were: are you adopted?
Dani did try to call Sharon mom. Once. Just to see how it felt, this word that was supposedly so important to everyone but her. Sharon didn’t notice the first time, and the second time she gave Dani a look—
So she stopped trying.
“By the way,” Dani said, changing the topic to something more comfortable, “I have something that, uh, might be helpful if you’re trying to cross the country.”
“And what’s that?” Marcus asked. She could’ve sworn they sounded amused.
Dani whipped out the keys to her newest project. “A car,” she said triumphantly.
Marcus tilted their head. Dani was beginning to call it their thinking position. “Okay,” they said finally. “You can come.”
Dani gaped. She honestly did not expect that to work. “Um, okay,” she said. “Let me, uh, get my stuff and we can be out of here by morning.”
Dani had thought about running away almost every day for her entire life, but she’d never actually done it. Just packing her bag—an extra, since Marcus so rudely took her own—filled her with nervous excitement. She had clothes, food, and tools here, which covered the really important stuff.
“What about money?” She asked Marcus nervously. “I have some at home, but—”
Marcus rolled their eyes. “Don’t worry about that,” they said. “Seriously. There’s a thousand ways to make cash on the road.”
That made Dani indescribably nervous, but they had no time left to argue. The shop opened in two hours and the rest of the town would soon follow. Dani showed Marcus to her current project in the yard of the shop.
“It’s a ‘67 Impala,” she explained, wiping dust off the hood. “Dave thought it’d cost more than it’s worth to fix, so he gave it to me. But it was actually pretty easy. I mean, this door doesn’t really open—” She yanked the handle to demonstrate. “And that door doesn’t really close, and it takes forever to start, and there’s no roof, and you have to blast the heater or else the engine’ll overheat, and the gear shift pops off sometimes, but she runs!”
Marcus wrinkled their nose distastefully. “Why don’t we just take a different car?” They asked, gesturing to the shop.
“Woah. First of all, those aren’t even Dave’s,” Dani said. “He needs those for work. It’s bad enough we took all the gas—if I ever come back, I’d prefer he didn’t murder me.”
Marcus frowned, but in the end they climbed into the Impala. The driver’s side. As she began to hand them the keys, a question occurred to her. “Wait,” she said, yanking the keys back at the last second. “Do you know how to drive?”
Marcus rolled their eyes. “Yes, Danielle, I know how to drive.”
Danielle, she thought. That was the first time anyone had ever said her name out loud. Dani was so thrilled that she almost didn’t snatch the keys back in time when Marcus reached for them again. “Okayyyy,” she said. “Are you sure? Because, again, no offense, but you look around my age and—”
The keys flew out of her hand.
Dani gaped, open-mouthed, as Marcus cranked the ignition without so much as glancing at her. Finally, her vocal chords came back online and she blurted, “When were you gonna tell me you had telekinesis?”
“Molecular kinesis,” Marcus corrected as the car finally purred to life. “And that’s not the only thing I can do.”
“So you’re, like, the Terminator?” She asked. “Are you sure you weren’t built by the military?”
“Positive,” Marcus said. They slammed the gas and began to pull out of the yard.
“Then who made you?” Dani screamed over the wind and the engine. A sentient, superpowered android—that would make headlines. People would pay millions, maybe even billions, for something like that. Yet she found Marcus rotting away in a junkyard.
Marcus tapped their fingers on the steering wheel. Finally, they answered. “A man named Douglas Da–crhh–Davenport,” they stuttered. “He was a little… odd.”
As they pulled out of the yard, Dani couldn’t help but think that the name sounded distantly familiar.