CHAPTER THREE

Jaya Rao

In real life she was tall, as tall as me, and skinny, with long arms and legs. She wasn’t exactly beautiful—at least, she wasn’t what I would have called “beautiful” a month ago. (I must have been an idiot a month ago.) She was wearing ordinary clothes, jeans and a cotton sweater, instead of the long dress she’d worn the first time I saw her. She had big black eyes and smooth, light tan skin. Her wavy black hair looked like a lion’s mane. It made you want to touch it with your fingers.

For some reason I found it painfully embarrassing to be standing in front of her, seeing her life-size and real enough to touch. I realized I hadn’t completely believed she existed outside of my brain. It was like I’d invented her. Somehow, that felt like something I had no right to do, like spying on her.

“Do I have mustard on my nose?” she asked.

“What? No. Did you just eat lunch?”

“No. You’re staring.”

“Oh! I’m sorry.” Even more embarrassing! “I just—I think we’ve met before.”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “You don’t look familiar.”

“You’re Jaya, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.” She sounded surprised. “Why don’t I remember you?”

“Do you usually remember people?”

“No, not everybody, but . . . I would definitely remember you. Where did we meet? Was it here at the repository?”

“No, in—” What was I going to say? In my bedroom, the other evening. We were riding on a time machine. You were six inches tall. “I’m not sure. Maybe in . . .” I shrugged. Go, Leo! Way to make a first impression.

On the other hand, she had said she would definitely remember me. That was flattering, right?

Unless she meant she would definitely remember a weirdo like me.

Someone cleared his throat behind me, and I saw a short line had formed. “Sorry,” I said. I gave Jaya two slips from the top of my pile.

“You forgot to put your name,” she said, handing me a pencil.

“Oh, sorry.” Sorry, sorry, sorry. Stop saying sorry, Leo! “You must think I’m a total boson.”

“A total what?”

“A boson. It’s a subatomic particle.”

“I know what a boson is. But why are you calling yourself a subatomic particle?”

“Oh, right—I keep forgetting other people don’t call each other bosons. It’s what my family says when someone’s being, like, a jerk or an idiot. Because my brother studies physics.”

“That is a good word,” she said. “Thanks! I’ll definitely start using it. Here, sign your slips in the corner.”

I scribbled my name and gave her back the call slips. She jotted something on them, rolled them up, and stuffed them into a little plastic tube like a skinny, transparent soda can. Then she opened a little trapdoor in a pipe that wound around the booth and disappeared down the floor. The whooshing sound got louder—so this was where it was coming from.

She stuck the tube into the pipe and let the door snap shut. I could hear it thumping as it was sucked into the pipe and traveled through it.

The part of my brain that gets caught up in how stuff works started doing its thing. I wondered where the tube was going and how it was sucked in. Did the pipe branch, or was it a straight shot to wherever the tube was going? If it did branch, was there any way to route the tube to one branch or another? How did the tube come out the other end? I started building a whole network of tubes in my head.

“Here you go, Leo Novikov,” Jaya said, breaking my train of thought. She handed me a wooden disk with the number 17 stenciled on it.

“Thanks. Um . . . what do I do with this?”

“Watch the board.” She pointed overhead to an array of glass numbers. Some of them were glowing. “When your number lights up, come back and get your items.” She flashed me a smile. She had straight white teeth, with one crooked canine. I had never seen anything as perfect as that one crooked tooth.

Get a grip, Leo, I told myself again. I thanked her and sat down at a nearby library table where I would have a good view of the board—and of Jaya.

I tried not to stare as she moved around the booth talking to the other patrons, putting plastic tubes into the pipes, and taking things out of a small elevator in the wall. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Her quickness. Her big, dark eyes.

She was real! The girl in my impossible dream wasn’t a dream after all. And I’d found her without even looking!

How could that have happened? It was the kind of coincidence that drove my sister crazy. Sofia hated what she called “crucial coincidences.” When they happened on a TV show, she would throw pillows at the screen, yelling, “Bosons! Bosons!”

Of course, if you thought about it, my finding Jaya wasn’t really a coincidence. It just looked like one because I didn’t know the future yet—but Future Leo did. My meeting her today was always going to happen. You could call it fate.

Did Jaya know about the time machine? Should I tell her? No, she probably didn’t know yet. She hadn’t recognized me. If I told her, maybe she would freak out and think I was scary nuts.

But Future Jaya seemed perfectly comfortable with flying around on a tiny time machine. So if she didn’t know already, sometime between now and whenever that was, she would find out about it. If it freaked her out, she would get over it.

A light flashed above the wall elevator. Jaya took two robots out of it and carried them to the counter. She flicked a switch and the number 17 lit up on the board.

I went up to the window.

“Here you go,” said Jaya.

• • •

I sat down at a table with my two robots: Leonardo da Vinci’s knight and the wooden beetle from sixteenth-century England.

The knight was about the size of a desk lamp. It moved when you wound a crank. It was wearing armor, but you could open it up to see the insides and adjust the movement, which worked by pulleys and cables. Da Vinci had done an especially impressive job designing the neck mechanism—the knight could move its head just like a real person. I could see why everybody thought the guy was a genius.

As I put the knight through its paces, my mechanical-vision thing kicked in. I saw the knight’s patterns of motion traced like glowing lines in the air. I looked back and forth between my own arms and the knight’s arms. I could see how my own muscles worked like cables stretching and pulleys tightening too. For a moment I wondered if I were just an automaton myself. Had some genius built me?

I got out my notebook and started to draw the knight.

• • •

“Leo Novikov?” I looked up, startled. It was Jaya. “Are you almost done with those items?” she asked. “We’re closing soon.”

The room had an orange glow. The sun was setting in the stained glass above me. I must have been working for ages. “Schist! How did it get so late?”

Jaya laughed. “Schist?” she said. “Is that another of your family expressions?”

I nodded. “It was on our science vocabulary list last year. It’s a kind of rock. It’s what happens to hot sandstone when it gets squished really hard for a few million years.”

“I know,” said Jaya. “But I’ve never heard anybody use it as a curse before. It sounds really bad—in a good way.”

“Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. Even strict teachers can’t object to a word from a vocabulary list, right?”

“Quark, no!” said Jaya.

“Good one!” I grinned at her.

“I’m a quick study,” she said, grinning back. “So, are you done with these robots?”

I’d barely even looked at the wooden beetle. “Not yet. Is there any way I could reserve them for later?”

“Sure. Or I could sign them out to you. Then you can take them home.”

“Really? You’d let me check them out?”

“Sure! We’re a circulating repository—you can borrow pretty much any of our holdings. Just give me your member number.”

“But I’m not a member,” I said.

“You should join, then. Here, bring those robots up to the desk and I’ll give you an application.”

She slipped behind the counter and handed me a form. “Fill this out.”

“Thanks.” I ran my eye down it. It asked some pretty strange questions: my kindergarten teacher’s hair color, my favorite kind of mushroom, the year I first saw snow.

I started writing. “What do I put here, where it says ‘submitted by’?”

“Oh, that’s me,” she said.

“I don’t think I know your last name,” I said.

“Rao. And it’s Jaya, not Jaia.” She spelled it for me.

I finished filling out the form and handed it to her.

“Good. I’ll give this to Dr. Rust, the head repositorian. You should get your card in the mail soon.”

“Thanks.”

Jaya scribbled her signature on the line above where I’d written her name. “Your robots will be on the reserve shelf over here, under N for Novikov. Just ask the page at the window.”

“Thanks again, Jaya,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Oh, I don’t work tomorrow.”

“Really? When do you work?”

“Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays,” said Jaya.

“Okay, then I’ll see you Saturday.” It wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my Saturday, but playing Gravity Force III with Jake no longer sounded nearly as fun.