The Mall (35 page)

“Yes,” Lara answered.
 
“That’s a good idea!”

Cora turned to face the Wheel and began to yell Owen’s name from the bridge.

Simon stood beside her and silently stared down at the center of the Mall, his stolid expression as serious as if studying a particularly complicated equation.

Cora rubbed her throat and glanced at Simon, her brow wrinkling into a frown.
 
“You can yell, too, if you want,” she stated matter-of-factly.

Simon gave her a look, nodded, then threw his head back and yelled: “Hello!”

Cora blinked at him in surprise, then finally smirked and gave her own cry.
 
“Hello out there!”

The beginning of a smile began to grow on his face as he leaned against the railing again. “We’re here!”

“Here we are!” Cora countered with a giggle, glancing over at him and nodded to herself.
 
“You’re like Grandma Charley’s dog, aren’t you?” she asked matter-of-factly.

The artificial smile displayed on Simon’s face wavered slightly.
 
Without taking his eyes off the court below, Simon replied, “I’m as similar to your grandmother’s automaton as you are to an army ant.”

Cora called her brother’s name again then asked, “Do you get sad?”

“No.”

“Do you get asceared?”

Simon studied Cora’s lips for a moment as if trying to work out the definition of the word she had uttered.
 
“No, I feel no fear.”

She nodded and called her brother again.
 
“I wish I were like you.”

Simon gave a gentle nod, then asked, “Have you ever been excited by an unexpected gift or laughed so hard your stomach ached?”

Cora turned to look at him.
 
“Yeah.”

“You know what chocolate tastes like,” he stated simply.

“Yeah.”

Simon locked eyes with her and gave a single nod.

Cora let her eyes wander away from his face as the meaning slowly sunk in.
 
She let her weight rest against the railing and exhaled loudly.
 
“Oh.
 
That’s sad,” she admitted with a cluck of her lips and a shake of her head.

Both turned back to the floor of the Mall and stared silently down.

“Sometimes when Owen and
me
used to fight, Mom would say, ‘Just pretend that you love him.’
 
So that’s what I used to do, but he still made me mad,” Cora told Simon, glancing over at him.
 
“You know what?
 
I think after all this time pretending, I actually convinced myself that I really do love him.
 
Maybe that’s what you should do, Mr. Simon.
 
Pretend until you do.”

Owen swung the large flashlight from hand to hand impatiently, staring down at his shoeless feet.
 
Watching silently as Chance tried all the doors of the Mercedes sports car on display in the center of a roped off section of the Mall, he decided that trying to get it open was a complete waste of his time.
 
Time that could be better spent looking for his family.

“Let’s just go,” he suggested, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice.

“Are you kidding?” Chance spat.
 
“If I could just get this thing open and hot wire it, we can drive it right the hell out of here.”

“Do you know how to hot wire a car?”

“I saw it in a movie once. How hard could it be? But first I need to break a window.”
 
His eyes locked onto the flashlight in Owen’s hand.
 
He started to reach for it but Owen stepped back, dropping it protectively to his side.

“Are you kidding?
 
This is the only flashlight on earth that still works.”

Chance sighed heavily and looked around.
 
He spotted one of the formidable-looking iron stanchions that held the red velvet rope.
 
Stepping over, he tested the weight of it.
 
With a clench of his teeth, he hauled it off the floor briefly then let it drop with a loud echoing clang.

“Yeah, this oughtta do the trick.”
 
He slid the heavy stanchion closer to the driver’s side window of the car, causing the rope attached to it to tighten and topple the other two stanchions adjacent to them.
 
Bracing himself in front of it, Chance bent his knees and gripped the pole like a baseball bat, one hand low down the shaft toward the base and the other one high toward the loop through which the rope had been run.

Don’t sprain your main vein there, Chancie.

Chance chuckled and shook his head helplessly at the voice.

Giving him a suspicious look, Owen took a few anxious steps back south along the corridor that they had been traveling and wondered if he should just go on without him.
 
He needed to get to the store where his family was supposed to be, but at the same time, he didn’t want to go it alone.
 
Not anymore.

Suddenly, he heard footsteps somewhere in the distance, but because of the huge expanse of space, could not determine the direction.

“Someone’s coming,” he stated in a calm even voice, glancing around them in a slow methodical circle.
 
He detected no movement.

Chance briefly looked up from his stooped position on the floor and growled, “Probably just one of those defective Bots.
 
Stand back!”
 
He strained, lifted the stanchion, and spun awkwardly toward the window.
 
The base of the stanchion bounced off the shiny metal jamb just below the glass and dropped to the tiled floor with an ear-shattering clatter.

The car’s headlights gave one weak flash and a thin sound came from beneath the hood that sounded like the death throes of an anti-theft alarm, but that was it.

Taking a labored breath, Chance ran his hand over the tiny dimple on the shiny metal.
 
“Germans,” he growled under his breath.
 
He turned and squatted to retrieve the stanchion again.
 
“Maybe you oughtta give me a hand with this.
 
Take a run at the bastard this time.”

“Stop!
You are vandalizing Mall property!”

A shadow fell over Chance.

Owen spun to see a Bot appear just behind Chance.

The Red-sector Bot reached down and seized Chance by the shoulder.
 
From his vulnerable crouching position, Chance recoiled, his eyes wide with terror.

“Description verified,” the red-striped Bot exclaimed.
 
“You are to be detained for the defacing of Mall property!”

Chance stared down at the hand on his shoulder in disbelief.
 
“What the h..?”

The Bot’s hands slipped around Chance’s neck, cutting off his voice.

It’s choking me, Chance thought incredulously, his eyes wide with shock.

He glanced around in panic, searching for anything within reach to pry it loose. He attempted to scoot away from the Bot, but the vise-like hands held him fast, his face began to redden.

I’m going to become the world’s first Bot casualty, he thought darkly.

Chance peered up through eyes growing slowly fuzzy and realized that he was passing out from lack of oxygen.
 
He clutched at the hard bar-like fingers around his throat and watched as the light began to fade around him.

Opening his eyes one last time, Chance saw that Owen was behind the Bot, looping a length of loose red rope between the fallen stanchions over its head.
 
The kid yanked backwards with all the strength in his tiny ten-year-old frame.
 
His socks slipped from under him, and he went down with all his weight behind him, the rope hooking the Bot around its throat.

The Bot tipped backwards, and when its fingers briefly loosened, Chance twisted away with all his strength, feeling the soft skin of his neck tear away with the metal hands.

The Bot’s arms flailed wildly and its unanchored feet pumped the air in search of firm ground.
 
It dropped heavily onto its back, emitting a loud squeal of electronic noise, sounding eerily like a child’s scream.

Chance scrambled to his knees, sucking in a lungful of air and lapsing into a coughing fit.

He watched as the Bot turned his attention to Owen, moving determinably forward, hands outstretched, its eyes glowing red.

Red, Chance thought.
 
Weren’t they’re eyes supposed to be blue?

His vision sharpening with every inhalation, Chance rolled from his knees to his heels.
 
He grabbed the base of a stanchion in both of his hands and rose to his feet with a grunt of effort.
 
With wide-eyes, Owen uselessly backpedaled away from the probing hands of the Bot just as Chance brought the base of the stanchion straight down, letting weight and gravity do what his small underdeveloped muscles couldn’t.

The electronic screech abruptly stopped with the crunch of metal.
 
The components beneath the base of the stanchion popped and sizzled like angry snakes then died.

Both boys sat, panting like marathon runners and gaping at each other with horror-tinged expressions.

“W-What
..
What..?” Chance sputtered with what was left of his breath.

For the last half hour, Albert had been searching through the impossibly large rusty John Deere green wall-mounted metal cabinet of keys hanging in the security offices in green sector.
 
The trick was finding the right key and he had narrowed it down to ten likely candidates.

You seek a new destination, but you have not completed running your current program yet.

Albert’s head had begun to burn and occasionally his vision went momentarily hazy.
 
Something was wrong with him.
 
He was running hot, and if he didn’t know any better and still thought he was a human being, he would have believed that he was running a fever or possibly had an infection.

Instead, he was sure he just needed routine maintenance.

He had been trying desperately to keep his intentions close to the vest and away from the Voice—convinced as he was that it must have access to his CPU--but it was nearly impossible seeing as how he was scanning the tiny labels beneath the metal hooks upon which the keys hung.
 
He had hoped for something obvious like “Residential Level” or “Apartments,” but thus far he had found nothing but several numbered locks that didn’t fall into any of the colored categories.
 
He assumed one of these must lead to his destination.

Why do you seek to run a new program? Our goals are identical.

He had never used the Mall Security entrance to the residential level before.
 
He had always just used the elevators like the rest of the tenants.
 
He’d really never even noticed the keyholes, but surely they must be there.

Remove the trespassers!

Sweat dribbled down his hairline, but he ignored the uniquely human bodily function.
 
His hands began to shake uncontrollably and he began the search from where he’d left off.
 
He tried to focus on what he was doing, but the Voice had rattled him.