Chapter Text
Yuna and Shane left the kitchen together, which meant Ilya was suddenly alone with Shane’s father. This should not have been frightening. David Hollander was a nice man. Possibly the nicest man Ilya had ever met. He wore soft sweaters. He asked Ilya whether he wanted more potatoes. He had once apologized to a table after bumping his knee against it. Still, being left alone with your boyfriend’s father was never an ideal situation. Especially when the boyfriend in question had spent several years pretending not to be your boyfriend. David looked at him across the table. Then he smiled.
“Would you like to try the best vodka you’ve ever tasted, son?”
Ilya snorted before he could stop himself.
David raised an eyebrow.
“As if,” Ilya said.
There was a pause.
“I mean—yes. Please, sir. I would be delighted to try your Canadian vodka. But I am Russian. You cannot give me the best vodka I have ever tasted. This is simply not possible.”
David’s smile widened.
“Oh, I think I can.”
He stood.
“Come on.”
Ilya frowned. “Where?”
“Shane and Yuna need a few minutes alone anyway.” David gestured for him to follow. “And I want to show you something.”
That was considerably more ominous. Ilya followed him through the kitchen. At the back of the house were two doors. One opened onto the snow-covered yard. The other revealed a narrow staircase descending beneath the cottage. David opened the second.
“This is our cellar.”
“Ah,” Ilya said. “Very good. This is how horror movies begin.”
David laughed and pulled a little cord hanging from the ceiling.
A bare bulb flickered on.
The cellar was disappointingly ordinary: concrete floor, wooden shelves, preserves, several dusty bottles of wine. It was small enough that Ilya wondered why David had bothered bringing him down there at all.
“We don’t drink very much,” David said.
“I can see this. Very Canadian.”
David walked to the far wall. Then he pressed one of the bricks. There was a soft mechanical click. An entire section of wine shelving moved sideways.
Ilya stared. Behind it was another room.
“Oh,” he said.
David stepped inside.
There was a leather sofa, a small table, an old lamp, a refrigerator, and what looked suspiciously like an industrial ventilation system disappearing into the ceiling.
“Sit.”
Ilya did not sit. He looked at David. Then at the secret room. Then back at David.
“I should tell you,” Ilya said carefully, “it is a little strange when your boyfriend’s father brings you into a hidden room underground and tells you to sit.”
For one second David simply stared at him. Then he laughed.
“Fair.”
He opened a drawer in the little table.
“Don’t worry. Yuna had this room built because I smoke occasionally, and she refused to let me smoke anywhere Shane might see me doing it.”
Ilya blinked.
Then he laughed too. That, actually, he could believe. He could picture Shane discovering his father smoking one cigarette at age six and immediately preparing a PowerPoint presentation called WHY MY FATHER IS TRYING TO DIE.
“As if reading his mind, David took out a dark blue packet of Gauloises.
Ilya pointed at it.
“French?”
“My one vice.”
“You have secret French cigarettes in underground bunker.”
“Room.”
“Bunker.”
David opened the refrigerator and removed a frosted blue bottle and two small glasses.
Now Ilya sat.
“This,” David said, pouring, “is vodka.”
“It had better be.”
David handed him the glass. Ilya smelled it first. David noticed.
“Suspicious?”
“I play professional hockey. People have tried to poison me in several American cities.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Mostly Philadelphia.”
David laughed again and lifted his glass.
“To you and Shane.”
Something in the simplicity of it caught Ilya off guard.
He clinked his glass against David’s.
“To Shane.”
He drank.
Then froze.
David watched him.
Ilya looked down at the empty glass.
“No.”
David looked extremely pleased with himself.
“No,” Ilya repeated. “Absolutely not.”
“Good?”
“You cannot have this.”
“And yet.”
“This is better than Russian vodka.”
“I didn’t say it.”
“I will deny saying this.”
“Of course.”
“You tell Shane, I say you are liar.”
David pushed the cigarettes toward him.
“Try one.”
Ilya took one suspiciously. David leaned across the table and lit it for him.
He inhaled.
His eyes widened.
“Oh, fuck you.”
David laughed so hard he had to put down his glass.
“This is ridiculous,” Ilya said. “What else do you have hidden here? Russian ballet dancers? Original Tolstoy manuscript?”
“Nothing quite that exciting.”
There was something odd about David’s expression now. Not frightened nor exactly serious: resolved.
Ilya noticed because he had spent his entire adult life studying men across ice, learning the tiny shift in posture that happened before someone tried to put him through the boards.
David Hollander had just made such a shift. Ilya slowly lowered the cigarette. David glanced at him. And when he spoke again, he spoke in Russian.
Perfect Russian.
Not textbook Russian. Not the awkward Russian of someone who had studied at university twenty years earlier.
Russian.
Native Russian.
“My dear boy,” David said, “I’m sorry to surprise you like this.”
Ilya stared at him.
David continued.
“There are some things we need to tell you.”
Ilya said nothing.
“Some things Shane cannot tell you.”
Still nothing.
David sighed.
“My name was Mikhail before it was David.”
Ilya’s cigarette burned unnoticed between his fingers.
David pointed at it.
“Ash.”
Ilya mechanically tapped it into the tray.
Then he said, in Russian, “What the fuck?”
“Yes. That seems reasonable.”
“What the fuck?”
“I was born outside Leningrad.”
“What the fuck?”
“And for a very short period I worked for Soviet intelligence.”
Ilya stood. Or tried to. The room tilted. He grabbed the edge of the table.
David immediately moved toward him. Ilya jerked away.
“What did you give me?”
“Sit down.”
“What did you give me?”
“A mild sedative and a neural stabilizer.”
Ilya stared at him.
“You drugged me?”
“Yes.”
“You fucking drugged me?”
“I did.”
Ilya tried to get up again.
His legs disagreed with him.
“This is kidnapping.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is definitely kidnapping.”
“You came here voluntarily.”
“You put drugs in vodka!”
“I know.”
“This is very important part of kidnapping!”
David crouched several feet away from him, deliberately keeping his hands visible.
“Ilya. Look at me.”
“No.”
“Please.”
Perhaps because his body had become pleasantly useless, Ilya did.
David looked genuinely miserable.
“I am sorry. Truly. But what I’m going to tell you is difficult to process, and the compound prevents the neurological response from becoming dangerous.”
Ilya narrowed his eyes.
“Dangerous to who?”
“To you.”
This did not improve matters.
David sat opposite him again.
“The sedative will make you feel detached. The other compound helps your brain accept contradictory information without rejecting it immediately. You are completely conscious. You will remember everything. You can disagree with me. You can be angry. You probably should be.”
“I am already angry.”
“Yes.”
“I might kill you later.”
“I suspected that.”
David poured another glass.
Ilya stared at it.
“This one is vodka?”
“Only vodka.”
“You understand I do not trust you anymore.”
“Yes.”
Ilya took the glass anyway.
“Good.”
David waited until he drank.
Then he said, very gently, “Yuna worked for the CIA.”
Ilya closed his eyes.
“Of course.”
“And that isn’t one of the three strangest things I have to tell you tonight.”
Ilya opened them again.
“You are terrible family.”
“That is fair.”
David leaned back.
“I defected during my first foreign assignment. Technically, calling me a KGB agent makes it sound much more exciting than it was. I was a data analyst. Computers, encryption, classified systems. The Soviet Union was collapsing, I was barely twenty, and I had absolutely no desire to sacrifice my life for a government that was disappearing in front of me.”
“So you defected.”
“Yes.”
“To America.”
“Yes.”
“And became Canadian.”
“Eventually.”
“This is already stupid story.”
“It gets much worse.”
“I knew this.”
David smiled faintly.
“I met Yuna at a research facility in the United States. She was a scientist attached to a classified program. I was useful because I understood some Soviet systems they were studying. We worked together.”
“You fell in love.”
“Eventually.”
“Disgusting.”
“Very.”
Despite himself, Ilya smiled.
Then David’s expression changed again.
“After we married, we tried for years to have a child.”
Ilya became still.
“You know Shane was difficult for us to conceive.”
Ilya nodded.
“Many treatments. Several miscarriages. And then finally—Shane.”
David smiled, but not the polite smile Ilya knew, but something older.
“He was perfect.”
The word trembled.
“The happiest little boy. Serious about everything. He used to organize his toy cars by aerodynamic efficiency.”
Ilya laughed softly.
“Yes. This sounds like him.”
“He was four when he died.”
The cigarette stopped halfway to Ilya’s mouth.
David looked down.
“His heart stopped in the night.”
For several seconds the only sound was the ventilation fan humming quietly in the wall.
Ilya said, “But…”
“I know.”
“Shane is alive.”
“Yes.”
“You said he died.”
“He did.”
Ilya stared at him.
David continued.
“Yuna had been preparing for the possibility for years. Shane had a congenital cardiac condition. We knew something could happen. She had equipment in her laboratory. Experimental equipment. Some of it legal. Some of it very much not.”
David swallowed.
“The alarm went off at 2:13 in the morning. I remember the time because I have never stopped remembering it. Yuna was awake before I understood what the sound meant. She had Shane in her arms within seconds.”
His voice became distant.
“I followed her downstairs. She put him into a medical unit she had built herself. His heart had been stopped for almost three minutes.”
Ilya forgot about his anger.
“What did she do?”
“She replaced it.”
“With what?”
“A synthetic organ.”
Ilya blinked.
“A mechanical heart?”
“Yes.”
He stared at David.
Then suddenly laughed once, helplessly.
David smiled despite himself.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“All those jokes.”
“I know.”
“People call him robot.”
“I know.”
“He hates this.”
“I know.”
“And he actually—”
“No.” David pointed at him. “Absolutely not. Do not ever tell him people were accidentally correct.”
Ilya covered his mouth, laughing now.
“This is unbelievable.”
“You haven’t heard the unbelievable part.”
The laughter slowly stopped.
David continued.
“The artificial heart saved him. But it was never meant to be permanent. Children grow. Machines don’t. So Yuna created something else.”
“What?”
“Nanomachines.”
Ilya stared.
“Of course she did.”
“Microscopic machines capable of interacting with living tissue. Their original purpose was simple: gradually replace synthetic structures with biological ones. Cell by cell. Protein by protein.”
“And it worked?”
“Perfectly.”
David hesitated.
“Too perfectly.”
Ilya put the cigarette down.
“The machines didn’t merely repair his heart. They learned from his cells. And his cells learned from them.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It shouldn’t.”
“Good.”
“Over several years, the nanomachines became integrated into Shane’s body at a cellular level. They replicated when his cells replicated. Corrected damaged DNA. Repaired tissue. Optimized neural pathways.”
Ilya stared at him.
“You made him into cyborg.”
“Not intentionally.”
“This is important distinction to you?”
“Very.”
Ilya poured himself another vodka.
David let him.
“For years,” David continued, “we thought everything was fine. Shane was healthy. Completely healthy. Yuna monitored him constantly.”
“Of course.”
“He almost never got sick. Cuts healed unusually quickly. He learned things… faster than children should.”
Ilya snorted.
“He is Shane.”
“Yes. That was precisely the problem. We were his parents. We thought he was brilliant because naturally our child was brilliant.”
David smiled sadly.
“We didn’t realize quite how brilliant.”
“What happened?”
“He created DeeDee.”
“Who is DeeDee?”
“Not who.”
David looked toward the hidden door.
“What.”
Ilya waited.
“Shane was seven.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No seven-year-old creates something called DeeDee.”
“You haven't met seven-year-old Shane.”
“I have met twenty-eight-year-old Shane. Unfortunately I can imagine him at seven.”
“He wanted someone to play with.”
Something about that made Ilya stop smiling.
“He didn’t have many friends. We had already begun limiting his contact with other children. He was starting to do things we couldn’t explain.”
“Like?”
“He once caught a falling knife before Yuna saw it leave the counter.”
“Good reflexes.”
“He was facing the other direction.”
“Oh.”
“At eight he lifted one side of my car because his hockey puck had rolled underneath it.”
Ilya slowly lowered his glass.
“How much of car?”
“Enough.”
“Oh.”
“We stopped letting him play organized sports soon after that.”
Now Ilya understood something.
Not logically.
Emotionally.
He thought about Shane talking about childhood hockey. About the strange gaps. The vague stories. The years where he had apparently practiced endlessly but played very little.
David continued.
“DeeDee began as software. Shane named her after Dexter’s sister.”
Ilya stared.
“Dexter’s Laboratory?”
“You know it?”
“I was child once.”
“Sometimes I forget.”
“Fuck you.”
David smiled.
“He built her using parts from Yuna’s computers. At first we thought she was just a clever program.”
“She was AI.”
“She became one.”
“At seven?”
“Yes.”
Ilya drank.
“Continue.”
“DeeDee could communicate directly with the nanomachines inside Shane. He had created a system through which his own body could interact with computers.”
“His brain?”
“Eventually.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“We said something similar.”
The room was beginning to feel unreal.
Perhaps that was the drug.
Perhaps it was the sentence *Shane created an artificial intelligence when he was SEVEN*.
Probably both.
“By ten,” David said, “Shane could run faster than any adult athlete we tested him against. He could lift several times his body weight. He healed fractures in days. His reaction time was…” David shrugged. “Ridiculous.”
Ilya thought of a thousand moments on the ice.
Shane avoiding hits nobody should have seen coming.
Shane making impossible adjustments.
Shane skating—
“No,” David said.
Ilya looked at him.
“No what?”
“You’re thinking about hockey.”
“Yes.”
“He does not use any of this when he plays.”
Ilya said nothing. David leaned forward.
“This is the most important thing you need to understand.”
And suddenly his voice was not amused at all.
“When Shane was eleven, he became depressed.”
Ilya’s stomach tightened.
“He wanted to play hockey. Real hockey. With other children. He wanted friends. Tournaments. Teammates. He wanted to leave the house without Yuna or me monitoring every second of his life.”
David rubbed his hands together.
“We kept telling him it was impossible. That he could hurt someone. That he would have an unfair advantage.”
“So he fixed it,” Ilya said.
David looked at him.
“Yes.”
Of course he had.
“Shane and DeeDee designed what he called the Partition.”
Ilya waited.
“It separated his enhanced functions from his conscious mind.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Shane locked himself out.”
David tapped his temple.
“Strength. Speed. Enhanced reflexes. Accelerated healing. Direct access to DeeDee. Most of his computational abilities. He moved control of all of it beneath conscious awareness.”
Ilya frowned.
“But subconscious still controls?”
“Only for survival. If Shane were hit by a truck, the Partition would break before he died. If someone shot him, his body would repair itself. But during ordinary life, it maintains him within human parameters.”
“Hockey parameters.”
“Exactly.”
Ilya stared at the floor.
“He made himself normal.”
“He made himself capable of being normal.”
That distinction hurt more than Ilya expected.
“And memories?”
David was quiet.
Then he said, “Those too.”
Ilya looked up sharply.
“Shane knows nothing?”
“Not consciously.”
“Nothing?”
“He knows he had heart surgery as a child. He knows his parents worked for the government. He knows there were periods of his childhood when he was sick and homeschooled.”
“But not this.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because the Partition worked better if he believed it.”
Ilya stood again.
This time his legs mostly cooperated.
“He did this when he was eleven?”
“Yes.”
“And you let him?”
“We helped him.”
“He was eleven!”
“I know.”
“He was child!”
“I know.”
“You erased your son's memory so he could play hockey?”
David stood too.
“No.”
For the first time that evening, there was steel in his voice.
“We gave our son the life he begged us for.”
Ilya stopped.
David looked suddenly exhausted.
“You think we didn’t fight about it? You think Yuna slept for the month before we activated it? Shane had spent almost half his childhood being told not to run too quickly, not to lift things, not to touch computers, not to make friends, not to tell anyone what he could do.”
His voice softened.
“He wanted to be a hockey player.”
Ilya said nothing.
“He wanted to lose games. Do you understand? That was one of his arguments.”
David smiled faintly.
“He said if he used what he could really do, winning would be meaningless.”
That was so painfully Shane that Ilya had to look away.
“He designed limits stricter than anything Yuna or I suggested. DeeDee monitors them constantly. On the ice, Shane Hollander has exactly the physical abilities Shane Hollander would have had if none of this had ever happened.”
Ilya swallowed.
“So when I beat him…”
David smiled.
“You beat him.”
“When he beats me?”
“He beats you.”
“Fucker.”
“Yes.”
A tiny red light began blinking on David’s wrist.
Ilya noticed it.
David looked down at his watch.
The light blinked twice.
He sighed.
“That’s Yuna.”
“What?”
“She’s ready for us.”
“Ready for what?”
David looked toward the hidden doorway.
“Shane’s annual maintenance.”
Ilya stared.
“His what?”
“Check-up.”
“You said maintenance.”
“We stopped calling it that when Shane was thirteen because he found it offensive.”
“He remembers this?”
“No.”
Ilya pointed at him.
“You people are insane.”
“Frequently.”
David pressed something on his watch.
The wine rack slid aside.
“Come on.”
Ilya did not move.
“Where?”
“To DeeDee.”
The words sent a small chill through him.
“You mean computer.”
David gave him a strange smile.
“At this point, calling DeeDee a computer is a little like calling you a collection of carbon atoms.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t intended to be.”
They climbed back into the kitchen.
But instead of turning toward the living room, David opened another door Ilya had assumed was a pantry.
Behind it was an elevator.
Ilya stopped.
“No.”
David stepped inside.
“Yes.”
“This cottage has elevator?”
“It goes down.”
“I assumed this.”
“I mean much farther down.”
Ilya looked toward the ceiling.
“Shane grew up here?”
“Partly.”
“Shane Hollander grew up above secret underground laboratory with Russian spy father and CIA scientist mother.”
“Former spy.”
“This distinction has stopped helping.”
The elevator doors closed.
David pressed his palm against a glass panel.
The elevator began descending.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Thirty.
Ilya looked at David.
“How deep?”
“Deep enough.”
“Fuck you.”
The red light on David’s watch blinked again.
David looked at it.
“We almost missed the window this year.”
“What window?”
“The Partition requires one full diagnostic every twelve months. We have approximately a forty-eight-hour margin. Today was the last practical day, which is why I went to get Shane from the cottage.”
Ilya frowned.
“You brought him here for this.”
“Yes.”
“Does he know why?”
“He thinks Yuna wants him to participate in a long-term cardiac study.”
“And he just agrees?”
“He has since he was twelve.”
“Because of his heart.”
“Yes.”
Ilya leaned against the elevator wall.
“And every year you open his brain?”
“Not exactly.”
“Turn off secret robot?”
“Definitely not exactly.”
“Service him like car.”
David winced.
“Yuna will dislike that phrasing.”
“I am going to use it repeatedly.”
“I suspected you might.”
The elevator slowed.
“One more thing,” David said.
Ilya looked at him.
“When we enter that room, Shane may look different.”
Ilya’s amusement vanished.
“How?”
“During diagnostics, the Partition is temporarily lowered.”
“So he remembers?”
“No. DeeDee keeps conscious memory isolated.”
“But powers come back.”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
David hesitated.
“Yes.”
The doors opened.
White light flooded the elevator. Beyond them was not a basement.
It was a laboratory.Not a room with a few computers. A fucking laboratory. Glass walls. White floors. Machines Ilya could not begin to identify. Transparent screens covered in flowing diagrams of organs, cells, and strings of data. Robotic equipment moved soundlessly behind partitions.
And at the center of it all was Shane. He was lying on a medical platform wearing nothing but black shorts, his eyes closed. Yuna stood beside him, studying a display suspended above his chest.
Thin silver patterns moved beneath Shane’s skin.
Not wires.
Something smaller. Something alive. Something moving.
Ilya forgot how to breathe.
Then he noticed the bear.
It was sitting on a workbench beside Shane.
A teddy bear.
Purple.
Old.
Very old, judging by the faded fur and the patches where years of being held had flattened it almost smooth. One of its ears was missing completely, leaving an uneven little seam on the side of its head. Its black button eyes were scratched. There was a crooked line of stitching across its stomach, and one paw had obviously been repaired more than once.
It looked completely absurd surrounded by millions of dollars of impossible technology.
Ilya pointed at it.
“What is this?”
David followed his gaze.
His expression softened.
“That is DeeDee.”
Ilya looked at him.
Then at the bear.
Then back at him.
“No.”
A warm female voice came from somewhere behind him.
“Yes.”
Ilya spun around.
Nobody was there.
The voice laughed.
He looked back at the purple bear.
Its remaining ear twitched.
Ilya took one step backward.
“No.”
Two tiny lights appeared behind the scratched black eyes.
“Hello, Ilya.”
Ilya stared.
David was trying very hard not to smile.
“That,” Ilya said slowly, “is teddy bear.”
“Technically,” David said, “yes.”
“And teddy bear talks.”
“Also yes.”
The bear turned its head toward him with a faint mechanical whir.
“Hello,” DeeDee repeated pleasantly.
Ilya looked at David.
“Why?”
David glanced toward Shane.
“Because Shane made her.”
Of course he had.
“He made computer inside toy?”
“At first.”
“At first?”
David walked to the workbench and gently picked up the bear.
“DeeDee was Shane’s favorite toy when he was little. He took her everywhere. Slept with her every night. She lost the ear when he was five.”
“How?”
“Shane tried to determine whether she could survive re-entry from the second-floor balcony.”
Ilya stared at him.
David shrugged.
“He was five.”
“That does not explain.”
“No, not really.”
DeeDee spoke from David’s arms.
“I survived.”
“You lost ear,” Ilya said.
“Aesthetic damage only.”
Ilya looked suspiciously at her.
“I like her.”
“I suspected you might.”
David set the bear down carefully.
“When Shane started building his first artificial intelligence, he didn’t want it to live in one of Yuna’s computers. He wanted DeeDee to be alive.”
Ilya looked at the battered purple toy again.
“So he put computer in bear.”
“More or less. The first processor was in her torso. Then he added cameras behind the eyes, microphones, speakers, motion control…”
“Of course.”
“Then wireless communication. Then access to the lab systems. Eventually she stopped needing the hardware inside the bear at all.”
Ilya frowned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the bear isn’t DeeDee.”
The purple head turned toward David.
“That is philosophically debatable.”
David sighed.
“Please don't start.”
“Ilya asked.”
“I did not ask philosophy bear.”
“I contain multitudes.”
Ilya laughed despite himself.
David continued.
“DeeDee now exists across several independent systems. The laboratory, our secure servers, Shane’s nanotechnology—”
Ilya’s smile disappeared.
“Shane?”
“Yes.”
DeeDee spoke more gently this time.
“A limited part of me exists within Shane.”
Ilya looked at the unconscious man on the platform.
“Inside his body?”
“Inside the nanomachine network,” David said. “She monitors the Partition. She prevents accidental activation of enhanced functions. She watches his neurological state.”
“She is always with him?”
“In a sense.”
Ilya looked back at the bear.
Something about that bothered him.
Or perhaps comforted him.
He wasn’t sure which.
“You watch him all time?”
DeeDee’s remaining ear lowered slightly.
“I protect him.”
There was no humor in her voice now.
Ilya studied the little purple bear.
The missing ear.
The worn fur.
The crooked stitches.
Shane had apparently created one of the most advanced artificial intelligences on Earth and decided that it should remain, forever, inside the body of the teddy bear he had loved as a child.
Yes.
That was Shane.
Completely insane.
Completely sentimental.
Completely Shane.
Then DeeDee turned her glowing eyes toward him.
“I have been waiting a very long time to meet you, Ilya.”
He froze.
David looked uncomfortable.
Ilya slowly turned toward him.
“How long?”
David frowned.
“How long what?”
“How long has she known about me?”
Neither David nor Yuna answered.
DeeDee did.
“Eight years, four months, twelve days.”
Ilya stared at her.
Then at Shane.
Then back at the bear.
“Eight years?”
“Yes.”
“I did not even like him eight years ago.”
The bear was silent for half a second.
Then:
“That is not entirely accurate.”
Ilya’s eyes narrowed.
“What does this mean?”
David immediately said, “DeeDee—”
“You asked.”
“I did not ask you.”
“You did.”
“I ask rhetorical!”
DeeDee’s remaining ear twitched again.
“Would you prefer that I lie?”
Ilya pointed at the purple bear.
“David.”
“Yes?”
“I am already fighting with stuffed animal.”
David nodded gravely.
“It happens.”
“I hate this family.”
From the medical table, without opening his eyes, Shane murmured:
“Too loud.”
Every person in the room went still.
Even DeeDee.
Ilya turned toward him.
Shane’s eyes remained closed.
Yuna looked sharply at the diagnostic display.
David whispered, “That shouldn’t happen.”
The battered purple bear turned its head toward Shane.
For the first time since Ilya had seen her, DeeDee sounded worried.
“No,” she said softly.
“It shouldn’t.”