I. Hate. Him,” Reed whispered through gritted teeth.

From across the aisle of desks, Shelly blew long dark bangs from her forehead, glanced at the back of Julius’s head, and then rolled her eyes at Reed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Reed looked at her sideways. “Just sayin’.”

Julius, as usual, had been bragging about his talents, and then he’d started complaining. Typical Julius. He was either telling everyone how he was better than they were, or he was trying to blame his problem on someone else. Too often, Reed had been on the receiving end of that blame, along with the physical bullying that came with it.

“You need to ignore him,” Shelly said.

“As if,” Reed hissed. “He’s the world’s biggest—”

“Did you have something to add to Julius’s observations?” Ms. Billings asked Reed.

Ms. Billings was the perfect teacher for this class: small and compact, a plain face generally devoid of emotion. The head of their robotics class moved in jerky, precise movements that had sparked more than one conversation about whether she was an advanced robot herself.

The first week of class, Shelly’s twin brother (and Reed’s other best friend), Pickle, had posited, “Who better to teach robotics than AI?” Pickle was convinced Ms. Billings was an android. For weeks, he’d been devising a plan to prove his hypothesis. Because, so far, the plan involved cutting into Ms. Billings, Shelly wouldn’t let Pickle go forward with it.

So, what was under the teacher’s pale skin was still a mystery.

Reed tipped his chair forward and sat up straight at his desk. In response to Ms. Billing’s question, he said, “Um, no?”

Reed couldn’t add to Julius’s observations because he hadn’t heard them. All he heard when Julius talked was the jerk’s loud, nasally twang.

Julius never said anything you wanted to hear anyway. He only spoke in insults, complaints, or brags.

Ms. Billings left her cool blue–eyed gaze on Reed long enough for him to start squirming before she shifted her attention back to the class as a whole. She flipped her long, wavy blonde hair off her shoulder as she spoke. “So let’s talk about Julius’s concern. What could Dilbert do to prevent his remote from affecting Julius’s exosuit?”

Reed knew the class discussion was going to be a rehash of IR versus RF remotes, and since it had bored him the first time, he decided not to listen a second time. Besides, it wouldn’t matter how much he listened. At this point in the semester, he knew he was going to crash and burn on his project in spite of whatever he learned or didn’t learn.

Reed looked at the midsize, partially constructed exoskeleton sitting on his desk. He’d been working on it since Ms. Billings assigned their spring semester project, but it looked like he’d just started because he seemed to have missed too much pertinent information in the class lectures. He’d tried to use the textbook to help him fill in the blanks, but he didn’t completely understand it.

When Ms. Billings had first introduced the concept of exoskeletons, she’d defined them as “crude frames that could be attached to other things for added mobility.” She’d then explained how that could be expanded upon if the frames’ power sources could add enough functionality to control the wearer. That’s what had given him his great project idea. He’d intended to make something to fit over his little sister Alexa’s extremely annoying baby doll. He thought it would be cool to make the little doll scare his sister—a classic brotherly prank. But his vision, at this point, wasn’t likely to become a reality.

Shelly and Pickle had their projects over halfway done before Reed had gotten even a tenth of the way through his. And now they were both finished, a couple weeks before the project was due.

Admittedly, Pickle’s robot was puny, about the size of a small remote-controlled car—just a vaguely man-shaped small metal skeleton with not a lot of personality. Pickle’s robot wasn’t much to look at, but his robot had mad abilities. With his tricked-out custom remote, he could practically make the thing break-dance. Shelly’s robot was similar, but dog-shaped instead of man-shaped. It was about the size of her Labrador, Thales, who was named after some man Shelly said was the first scientist. Living between 624 BC and 545 BC, “Thales of Miletus” was an ancient Greek dude who did a lot of science and mathematics stuff. Reed could remember the guy’s name and when he lived, but for some reason he couldn’t remember anything Shelly had said the guy did. Not that any of it mattered. What mattered was that Shelly’s robot was supposed to mimic a well-behaved dog, and from what Reed could tell, she could probably win a dog show with the thing. She was going to get an A, like she always did.

Why did he let the twins talk him into taking this class anyway? Sure, they were his best friends, but that didn’t make him a science nerd like them. Reed was into computers, but not as they related to robotics. He wanted to combine his love for fiction with his aptitude for programming to become a game designer. He wasn’t an engineer, and he sucked at building things. Shelly and Pickle knew this. After all, Shelly was the one who couldn’t let a year go by without reminding him of his complete ineptitude going all the way back to the building blocks they’d played with when they were five years old. They were freshmen now, and yet Shelly got the giggles at every science model and historical event diorama assigned to them. Every one of Reed’s construction efforts reminded her of the “log cabin” five-year-old Reed had built, a cabin that looked less like a cabin and more like the aftermath of an explosion. But in spite of that good-natured ribbing, he knew Shelly hadn’t talked him into this class just so she could laugh at him. And as for Pickle, he was too uninterested in others’ shortcomings to orchestrate Reed’s humiliation.

“It’s fun when we take classes together,” Shelly had said to Reed when he signed up.

Pickle had grunted what could have been agreement or noncommittal disinterest.

The truth was that Reed would do pretty much anything Shelly wanted him to do. They were friends, and they’d been friends for too long for her to think of him as anything but a friend. But he spent more time than he’d ever admit thinking about what it would be like if he and Shelly were more than friends. But after almost ten years, the idea was still what his dad would call a “castle in the sky.”

But maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes, when he talked to Shelly, she’d look at him with something like admiration, as if she was considering him in a different light.

Take the cliché castle in the sky, for instance. One day, when Reed, Pickle, and Shelly were getting off the bus, Shelly was talking about wanting something that was “impossible.” Reed had spotted clouds that looked exactly like a castle. He’d pointed at the castle-shaped clouds and said to Shelly, “Look, a castle in the sky. That means impossible dreams can happen, even if it’s in another dimension.” He was just messing around. But Shelly said, “Actually, you’re right.” And she’d squinted at him like he’d suddenly gotten interesting.

Reed looked over at Shelly now. Her attention on Ms. Billings, Shelly was chewing on the ends of her thick black hair. She wore it in a meticulous chin-length style, which put the ends right at mouth level. She always chewed on her hair when she was concentrating. It was one of the few little imperfections he noticed about her, and just like all her other imperfections, it was hopelessly charming.

Nah, he didn’t think Shelly and Pickle wanted him to humiliate himself for their amusement. That was mean, and they weren’t mean. Maybe they were a little thoughtless sometimes, because they’d get wrapped up in their books and their projects and forget to act like normal kids, but they weren’t mean.

Now, Julius, he was mean.

Reed shot a dirty look at the artful blond waves cascading down the back of Julius’s head. Shelly once told Reed that Julius’s hair was “dreamy” even though she admitted his personality was somewhere between detestable and execrable. The latter word, among others, taught Reed to never again buy her a word-of-the-day calendar for her birthday.

“Why does he have to use an RF remote?” Julius whined to Ms. Billings. “I don’t want his stupid remote to be telling my exoskeleton what to do.”

My ears, Reed thought. When Julius whined, his voice climbed an octave, and he sounded like a frightened weasel with a head cold. Who cared about the dreamy hair? Makes me gag, Reed thought. And who cared that Julius was tall and muscular, and shallow girls who rated boys on looks and/or money instead of character thought he was a stud? Julius’s voice told listeners everything they needed to know about him—he was a sniveling weasel who acted like an ass so people wouldn’t notice all that sniveling weasel-ness.

All the expensive clothes Julius wore didn’t cover his essential weasel identity, either. No amount of skinny black jeans, gazillion-dollar basketball shoes, designer shirts, or cashmere scarves could disguise a true weasel.

Reed looked at the dangling metal foot of Julius’s gangly exoskeleton, which hung off the right side of Julius’s desk. Julius’s project was a skeletal “suit” he intended to wear. A collection of metal frameworks attached to mechanical “joints” at the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, Julius’s exosuit had leather straps and metal clamps that would hold the contraption in place on Julius’s body. He’d been bragging that it would make him even faster and stronger than he already was. Whatever.

Reed thought exosuits looked a little like scaffolding—what a race of tiny people might create and attach to a human body so they could climb up and repair it. Reed wished Julius’s suit was scaffolding and there was a race of tiny people who could fix Julius, who was certainly in need of repair.

“Dilbert?” Ms. Billings said. Pickle looked up—his real name was Dilbert, but his family and close friends called him Pickle, a play on Dill.

“Can you explain to the class your reasoning for using an RF remote?”

“Sure. But I’m not just using an RF remote. I’m using the RF as an IR extender. I want my remote to be effective through walls.” Pickle sniffed. “I don’t think the problem is my remote anyway. I’ve achieved my goal with my remote. If he hasn’t achieved his goal, isn’t it up to him to make adjustments? Why doesn’t he”—Pickle pointed at Julius—“install an RFI filter in his signal path? Or he could change his frequency. Or he could check his macros. He may have them programmed too close to mine.”

Pickle sniffed again. He didn’t have a cold; he was just a perpetual sniffer. Short and dark like his twin sister, Pickle unfortunately didn’t get his sister’s looks. Shelly was really pretty. It was just that no one, other than Reed, seemed to notice it because she was so intense. Or maybe it had to do with the baggy button-down shirts she always wore with her jeans.

Pickle, on the other hand, would never be called pretty. With unusually deep-set eyes and a nearly black unibrow, a long nose, and a strangely small mouth filled with crooked teeth, Pickle’s looks weren’t going to open doors for him. He was going to have to rely on his smarts to get him through life. Thankfully, he had plenty of those.

Pickle narrowed his eyes at Julius to deliver the killing blow. “He might have even stolen my macros.”

“I did not!” Julius erupted. The sound came out as a cross between a honk and a screech.

Ms. Billings pushed a button on her own remote, a remote that controlled at least a dozen robotic creations in the room. Robotic arms attached to a monkey holding cymbals flung the cymbals out and smashed them back together. The metallic clang created a hush in the classroom.

Julius crossed his arms and sulked, but he didn’t whine anymore.

Everyone else was still.

After five seconds, Ms. Billings said calmly in her flat, even tone, “Dilbert makes excellent points, Julius. I suggest you attempt to implement some modification strategies of your own. Successful robotics aren’t about getting others to make changes so your creation functions properly. We live in a world filled with RF signals. You’re going to have to problem-solve the issue using the techniques and knowledge you’ve learned in this class.”

Reed grinned at Julius’s red ears. Smackdown! Ha!

Reed looked around the room to see if anyone else was enjoying Julius’s embarrassment as much as he was. His gaze landed on Leah, a curvy girl with round glasses whom Reed had admired for much of the year. No one ever wanted to talk to her, but her happy demeanor and self-confidence were unshakable. Leah noticed Reed’s gaze, and she winked at him. Whether or not the wink was shared enjoyment of Julius’s discomfort was unclear. But Reed smiled at her anyway.

The rest of the fifteen kids in the class didn’t look toward either Julius or Reed. They were all either fiddling with their projects or looking at Ms. Billings. Figures. This class wasn’t exactly a cross-section of the normal freshman. Except for Julius, who was an odd combination of jock, brain, and bully, everyone else in the room could have been in the running for Geek of the Year, if there was such a contest. There were more glasses, bad haircuts, and mismatched clothes in this room than in the rest of the school combined. Robotics class might as well be called “Misfits class.”

“Now,” Ms. Billings said, “if there are no other questions or complaints?”

No one said a word. No one moved.

“Good.” Ms. Billings stood and stepped over to the blackboard. “Let’s move on to a deeper discussion of actuators. I understand some of you are having problems there. So what are the four common types we talked about last week?”

Shelly’s hand shot up. Reed suppressed a grin. Shelly had never met a question she didn’t want to answer, and for some reason, he always enjoyed seeing her small square hand with its bitten-to-the-nub fingernails stuck up in the air, vibrating with eagerness. Her excitement was audible through the beaded bracelets she liked to wear; they clacked together while she waited for Ms. Billings to call on her.

“Yes, Shelly?”

“Electric motors, solenoids, hydraulic systems, and pneumatic systems.”

“Excellent.” While she wrote Shelly’s answer on the blackboard with her right hand, Ms. Billings pressed another button on the remote in her left hand. A small spider-shaped skeleton crawled up the inside wall of the classroom and stuck a light-bulb-shaped sticker on the row next to Shelly’s name, which was on a huge chart that included all the class’s names. Shelly had more stickers than anyone else. Reed had none.

Reed turned away from the stupid chart and looked out the window at the tiny pale green buds on the oak trees outside the school. He wondered if he could see the buds get bigger if he stared at them long enough. Watching trees grow had to be more interesting than this stuff.

One of Ms. Billing’s robotic characters started marching up and down each row between the desks. The exoskeleton was vaguely shaped like a horse. Its hoof-like feet clapped against the gray linoleum floor as it pranced past Reed’s dirty athletic shoes. Reed was pretty sure the robot was modeling an example of a hydraulic actuator. But maybe it was pneumatic. He probably should’ve been paying more attention.

How did Ms. Billing expect anyone to pay attention in this room full of animated characters, exoskeletons, and robotic parts? It was sensory overload, like having class in a circus. On top of that, even though Ms. Billings wore conservative pantsuits, she obviously loved the color red, which was splashed all over the school’s institutional pale yellow walls in the form of huge posters and a myriad of charts. It was distracting.

A wadded-up piece of paper landed on Reed’s desk, next to his pathetic exoskeleton. He blinked and glanced at Ms. Billings. She had her back to the class, so he spread out the paper. It was a note from Shelly: Coming home with us? Long homework session! followed by a smiley face. Shelly thought long homework sessions were fun.

He looked at Shelly. She was watching Ms. Billings, but she nodded when Reed gave her a thumbs-up. Not that he wanted to do homework. But he did want to go home with his friends. And besides, he had to do homework. At least when he studied with Shelly and Pickle, he got better grades.

---

As soon as Ms. Billings dismissed the class, Pickle grabbed his robot and jumped up. He did this every day because this was the last class before lunch. Pickle loved to eat. That was the only other thing he had going for him: Pickle ate more than Shelly and Reed combined, and he didn’t have much more meat on him than his metal skeletal robot did. The boy had the metabolism of a hummingbird.

Today, Pickle was in an even bigger hurry. Today was a half day because all the teachers had some conference to go to. After-school activities had been canceled. There would be no late buses. The principal had announced that morning that the school would be closed up and locked at noon. This meant Pickle and of course Shelly and Reed were in for an afternoon of the great snacks Mrs. Girard put out for the twins and their little brother, Ory, on special days like this. Even on normal days, stuff like homemade pizzas, veggie egg rolls, and grilled sandwiches were typical after-school eats at the Girard house. But on “special days,” Mrs. Girard went over the top.

Pickle, Shelly, and their little brother, Ory, were beyond lucky. Their mom was home to make them hot food in the afternoon and then another great meal later on in the evening. Reed was lucky if he could scrounge up a few pretzels when he had to go home to his empty house. Luckily, he usually got to go home with the twins. If he didn’t, he’d have been even skinnier than he was.

Pickle started trotting up the aisle toward the door as Reed picked up his project and tried to figure out how to shove it into his backpack. He didn’t take his eyes off of Pickle as he folded and refolded the project’s robotic arms, so he saw when Julius stuck out his foot and tripped Pickle.

Pickle, who wasn’t the most coordinated kid anyway, lost his balance and flew forward into the desk in front of Julius. Pickle’s big nose led the way wherever his face went, so his nose took the brunt of the impact when it hit the corner of the desk. Blood spurted from Pickle’s nostrils as Julius snorted out a high-pitched laugh.

Ms. Billings, who had been gathering a stack of books and preparing to leave the room, didn’t see a thing. Neither did anyone else. Everyone was too focused on where they were going. Even Shelly had her head down as she collapsed her dog-size exoskeleton into a puppy-size one. This was a particularly clever part of her project, Reed thought. She’d told him if she could figure out how to downsize Thales, too, without hurting him of course, she’d patent “collapsible dogs” and become a billionaire.

Reed’s muscles bunched as he watched his friend try to stop the spurting blood with one hand. Reed wanted to help Pickle, and he wanted to confront Julius, but he knew where it would lead if he put himself in the middle. As if reading Reed’s mind, Julius turned and smiled.

Julius’s unusually pointed canine teeth seemed to gleam under the classroom’s fluorescent lighting. Not for the first time, Reed fantasized that Julius was a vampire who could be vaporized by a stake through the heart.

If Julius had a heart.

Reed clenched his fists as Pickle ran from the room, clutching his robot with one hand and his bloody nose with the other. Before Reed could tell Shelly what had just happened, she got her act together and hurried after Pickle, calling, “Pickle, wait up.”

Julius gave Reed the evil eye for another few seconds. Then he turned to gather up his floppy exoskeleton. All the other kids filed out of the room. Reed lingered. He wanted to say something to Julius. What was it Shelly had called Julius the other day, when they were talking about him? Oh yeah. She’d said he was an ignominious, odious reprobate. Reed mentally repeated the words. They sounded ridiculous. Only Shelly could get away with saying something like that.

“What’re you staring at?” Julius asked Reed.

Reed looked around. He realized he and Julius were alone in the room. He hated that his palms had started sweating and his breathing was coming faster. Why did he let Julius get to him?

Julius stopped trying to gather up his suit. Instead, he carefully laid it out. He grinned at Reed. “Bet you wish you could build something like this, huh, moron?”

Reed didn’t answer. He wanted to pick up his backpack and leave, but something kept him in the room. What? He didn’t know. It sure wasn’t the company, which sucked. It wasn’t the decor, which he found intimidating. And it wasn’t the smell, which was a cross between chalk and soldering.

“I don’t even know what you’re doing in this class,” Julius sneered. “I mean, your runty little friend may be a mini-freak, but at least he has a few brain cells. And your other friend, that weird hair-chewing chick, is an uppity cow, but with a little makeup, she wouldn’t be bad to look at. And she has brain cells, too. You’ve got nothing going for you. You’re a freak and nothing can make you worth looking at. And on top of that, you’re all air up there, aren’t you?” Julius leaned forward and flicked a finger between Reed’s eyes.

Reed tightened his fists, and Julius noticed.

“What’re you going to do? Hit me? Didn’t you see what I did to your pickled friend?” Julius laughed his beyond-annoying laugh. “I didn’t even have to lift a finger. I just moved my foot, and now he has a bloody nose. Just think of what I could do to you without giving it much effort.”

Reed swallowed. Julius had just called Reed an ugly, stupid freak. And yet, Reed was still standing there as if he couldn’t talk.

Reed hated being called a freak, and he hated being called ugly.

Yeah, Reed was a bit of an outcast. When his mom had died, he hadn’t seen the point in trying to get along with anyone. He’d separated himself from his friends, using his overwhelming grief as the fence to erect a barrier between himself and the world. Only Pickle and Shelly had bothered to climb the fence.

And no, Reed wasn’t much to look at. The truth was, he was not unlike Pickle in the looks department. Skinny, with unusually long arms, his pronounced brow ridge and jutting jaw gave him more of an apelike appearance than he wanted to admit. More than once, Julius called him “monkey face” when he was younger. Now that his dad let him grow his curly brown hair long, he was able to disguise his primate features a little.

If only he had an ape’s strength.

He still wanted to say something to Julius. No, forget saying something. He wanted to do something. But he couldn’t.

Why did he think things would be any different in high school than they had been in grade school?

Julius lifted his exoskeleton. “See this here? I was going to use it to be stronger and faster, but I don’t need to be stronger and faster. I’m already strong and fast. I’ve figured out a better use. I’m going to get this thing working perfectly, and I’m going to hold you down and put you into it. Then I’ll control the exoskeleton, and it will make you do whatever I command it to do. You’ll have to be my servant. I’m going to make you wait on me all day long. You’ll carry my books. Tie my shoes. Get me my food. Clean up after me. I’m even going to make you dance for me. What do you think about that, loser? Would you like to dance like a monkey for me?”

Reed still didn’t speak. It was like he’d been turned to stone. All he could do was stand there and watch Julius lean over and tinker with his exoskeleton. Julius looked up and laughed at Reed. “Cat got your tongue?”

Julius lifted up his exoskeleton suit. “Wanna see it in action? It’s pretty amazing, if I do say so myself.”

Julius began fitting the suit to his long limbs and V-shaped torso. The metal shell lay over Julius’s limbs. A shoulder strap, chest strap, and hip strap, along with clamps at the wrists and ankles, kept everything in place. Reed, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood, remained rooted to the spot, watching.

Outside the classroom, students laughed and called to each other as they headed to the buses lined up outside the school. Inside the classroom, it was nearly silent, except for the clicks and snaps of Julius fitting himself into his robotic skeleton.

“See here?” Julius held up his arms. He indicated his wrists, then pointed to his ankles. “I’ve equipped the exoskeleton with locking mechanisms so once I get you in it, I can keep you in it.”

Reed watched Julius struggle with some of the joints of his exoskeleton. Julius shifted the framework on his body, then adjusted the suit’s piston cylinders.

Outside, a couple buses started their engines, and a baritone rumbling vibrated the walls of the school. If Reed didn’t leave soon, he’d have to walk to the Girards’ house. He’d have to walk over seven miles … all because he’d stood here like a paralyzed mute for the last several minutes. He shook his head to try and get his brain rebooted.

Julius, heavy with the exoskeleton riding his body, leaned down and fiddled with the wires leading to the skeleton’s circuits. Reed wished he had the guts to reach out and shove Julius across the room, him and his stupid exoskeleton.

But it was a good thing he didn’t.

A second later, Reed was glad he wasn’t touching Julius.

A radiant flash burst up like fireworks as a power surge sparked in the exoskeleton. Julius’s body twitched. His eyes widened, and he went rigid for several seconds.

In those seconds, Reed’s mind bizarrely thought of the previous day’s word of the day. Shelly shared every one of them with him. He forgot most of them, but he remembered fulgurant, which meant “flashing like lightning.” That power surge was fulgurant, he thought.

With curiosity for what was going to happen next, Reed watched the stiffness leave Julius’s body. Julius wavered on his feet, lost his balance, and fell back on his desk. Shaking his head, he groped for his chair and slid into it. He put his head down, and for what felt like a long twenty seconds, Julius was perfectly still.

Was he alive?

Reed blinked and studied Julius’s inert form. Then Reed’s gaze landed on the wrist and ankle joints of the suit.

Finally, Reed moved. Stepping over to Julius, Reed quickly locked the wrist and ankle joints. They fitted together with a satisfying snick. As soon as they did, Reed stepped back and grinned.

That would teach the ignominious odious reprobate.

Reed picked up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. He watched as Julius opened his eyes. It took a second for him to get oriented, but when he did, he attempted to strip off the exoskeleton.

“Oops,” Reed said. He backed toward the classroom door. He finally found his voice. “I must have locked you in. My bad.”

Julius jerked his arms, yanking to free them from the restraints of his skeletal suit. He kicked his legs. With his right hand, he grabbed at the exoskeleton hugging his left hand. He grunted and strained. The skeleton wouldn’t budge.

“What the hell did you do, punk?” Julius yelled. “Unlock me!”

“I don’t think so,” Reed said.

“Do what I tell you! Unlock me!” Julius’s face was a mottled mix of red and purple, and his eyes looked like they were bulging out of his head. Spittle clung to the corners of his mouth.

Reed shrugged and grinned. He couldn’t remember the last time he was this pleased with himself.

Not that he’d thought through what he was doing. What was the point of what he’d just done? Was he just messing with Julius or was he going to leave Julius in the suit overnight? Could he do that?

Why not?

He’d get in trouble was why not. Julius would tell the teachers what Reed did.

But all Reed would have to do was deny it. If he made sure Julius was unlocked by morning, why would anyone suspect Reed of anything? Everyone knew he was pretty much a wuss. No one would believe he’d had the courage to do this.

“Unlock me!” Julius commanded again. The muscles in his neck stood out like cords. His jaw jutted, and he kept opening and closing his fists.

At this point, Reed really had no choice but to leave Julius here all night. If he let Julius out now, Julius was going to beat the crap out of him. Even if he unlocked Julius and ran, Reed probably wouldn’t outrun the guy. Julius was crazy fast, and Reed was an athletic spaz. If he waited until morning, there would be enough people around that Julius wouldn’t touch him.

The decision basically made itself. Julius was going to be locked in overnight. The idea buoyed Reed so much, he felt like he was floating.

“I’m going to do you a favor,” Reed said, happy that he had something clever to say. “I’m going to leave you here in your suit overnight so you can get an idea of what it feels like to have someone treat you the way you treat everyone else. Maybe your robot can teach you a thing or two.”

“Hey!” Julius tried to get up, but his exoskeleton was contracted and stiff. It was acting like a full body cast, keeping Julius’s body locked in a seated position.

“Have fun,” Reed called as he sprinted from the room. Before he left the classroom, he shut off the lights.

“Get back here, you stupid ape!” Julius screamed. “Do you know what you’ve done? I’m going to kill you!” The last few words came out as a nearly unintelligible screech as Reed pulled the door closed.

Julius began bellowing. “I’m going to rip your head off and flush it down the toilet. I’m going to tear you apart, limb from limb. Get back in here and unlock this!”

Reed laughed. For some reason, Julius’s threats, which normally would have reduced Reed to quivering jelly, sounded funny. For once, Julius had no power. Reed had it all.

Reed looked around the empty hallway. He was alone. Good. This whole wing was probably empty by now. As an auxiliary hall near the back of the school, it wasn’t used outside of class hours. No one would find Julius even if he yelled his head off.

“Come back here and let me out of this thing!” Julius screamed. “You can’t leave me in here like this!”

Reed grinned. Then he turned and ran through the school, hoping he wasn’t too late to catch his bus.

---

Because Mr. Janson, the bus driver, was always looking out for him, Reed didn’t miss his bus. He made a total fool of himself waving his arms around and shouting as Mr. Janson started to pull away from the curb, but he got the driver’s attention.

Mr. Janson stopped the bus a few feet from the curb and opened the bus’s doors. The driver of one of the buses farther down the row behind Reed’s bus honked. Stumbling up the stairs into the bus, Reed gasped, “Thanks,” to Mr. Janson, who shook his gray-haired head and winked at Reed. “Cutting it close, my boy. Cutting it close.”

Reed sucked in some air. “Sorry.”

“Life happens,” Mr. Janson said. “We adjust.” He smiled at Reed. “Take your seat.”

Reed scanned the interior of the bus. One of the cheerleaders gave him a disgusted look. Reed ignored her and looked for Shelly and Pickle. He knew they’d be at the back of the bus, and he knew they’d saved him a seat. Keeping his gaze on his feet and the aisle’s scuffed rubber flooring, Reed hurried to his friends. He slid in next to Pickle.

As soon as Reed’s butt hit the hard maroon vinyl seat, Mr. Janson released the brakes. The bus hissed, lurched, and rumbled away from the school.

Reed looked at Pickle’s nose. It was hard not to. Red and swollen, smeared with blood, Pickle’s nose was more prominent than ever, and now he had little white tissue rolls sticking out of each nostril. Given that his nose was beaky, Pickle looked like a big bird sucking up white worms.

“Does it hurt?” Reed asked.

Pickle, as usual, was doing some kind of numbers puzzle. He glanced up at Reed. “Huh?”

Reed pointed at his nose.

Pickle made a funny cross-eyed face in an attempt to look at his injured beak. Reed suppressed a smile.

Pickle shrugged. “Yeah. Not the first time, though. I can ignore it.”

“Sorry.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Pickle returned to his puzzle.

Reed glanced at Shelly. She was reading, also as usual.

The bus smelled like diesel exhaust, sweat, peanuts, and bubble gum. Its engine sounded like the contented snore of a sleeping dragon. The sound helped tension and adrenaline drain from Reed’s system.

The bus gained speed as it turned out of the school’s driveway onto the road. Reed looked out the window.

The high school was tucked into the back of an older neighborhood, so the first few blocks after they left the school were full of big trees and pretty green lawns. Reed usually liked looking at all that greenery. He would stare at the lawns with envy. His front yard was mostly dirt.

Today, Reed wasn’t really seeing anything he was looking at. He was back in the robotics classroom with Julius. His mind was focused on Julius locked into his exoskeleton, Julius’s face nearly purple with rage.

“ ‘In the dark ages,’ ” Shelly said, “ ‘harsh torture was commonly used to punish those who broke the law.’ ”

Reed flinched. “What?”

He turned to stare at Shelly. As always, she sat in the seat behind Pickle and Reed. Her massive backpack and extra book bag took up the rest of the seat.

Did she know what he’d done?

Her attention on her book, Shelly continued, “ ‘When someone violated civil law, torture would be done in the town square. Public display of the consequences for lawlessness was thought to be a deterrent.’ ”

Oh. She was reading. Of course she was. She loved to share what she was learning, and she often read aloud on the bus … and at home … and at lunch … and in the hallways at school—she read pretty much everywhere. Today, she was reading her history homework. Shelly was in AP World History because she’d read so many history books outside of school that she was beyond the normal history curriculum. She wasn’t just a science geek. She was an information geek.

Reed relaxed his shoulders and returned his attention to the window. When it left behind the neighborhood, the bus route ran along a main drag lined with strip malls and car dealerships. Reed liked this stretch, too, because he enjoyed looking at the cars. He liked to imagine himself driving them, and he picked a different make and model every day. Concentrating, he put himself at the wheel of a new bright yellow Mustang.

Shelly’s voice, however, ruined his fantasy.

“ ‘Torturers were very creative in the middle ages,’ ” Shelly read. “ ‘They came up with truly morbid ways of inflicting excruciating pain. The Judas Cradle, for example, impaled a seated victim for several days. With bloodcurdling names like the Breast Ripper and the Pear of Anguish, medieval torture devices were a testament to human ingenuity.’ ”

Torture. Was what I did to Julius torture?

Reed’s chest tightened. Yeah, it probably was. Being stuck was at least a mild form of torture, especially in an exoskeleton with no way to move or eat or drink or get to the bathroom. It wasn’t the Judas Cradle, but it wasn’t nice, either.

After the malls and car lots, their bus route wound through an industrial park, and then it passed a farm before turning into a newer subdivision. Most of the bus’s stops were in this subdivision, which was stuffed full of houses that, though good-size, mostly looked alike. Reed didn’t care about the houses, so he stopped registering individual things. Now he saw just blurs of color … and Julius stuck in that metal framework.

Reed’s dad, who did the best he could to be a single dad to Reed and his sister, Alexa, was fond of saying that you couldn’t solve a problem at the level of the problem. Reed wasn’t a genius like his friends, but he was smart enough to know that meant that lowering himself to the level of Julius’s meanness wasn’t the way to handle the jerk.

But still, after what Julius did to Pickle? Wasn’t that justification enough to lock Julius into the exoskeleton he was so proud of? And what about what Julius said to Reed, about locking Reed into the exoskeleton? Didn’t Julius deserve to get a taste of his own medicine?

Reed started to unwind his muscles again.

Yeah. What he did wasn’t so bad. It was justice.

The bus went through a pothole, and everyone popped up off their seats for a nanosecond. When they all landed again, Shelly poked Reed’s shoulder. He turned to look at her.

“Listen to this,” she said. “You won’t believe it.”

“What?” Reed asked.

Pickle said nothing. He kept inking in the answers to his puzzle.

“ ‘One of the most commonly used forms of torture was called the Wheel,’ ” Shelly read from her thick, musty-smelling book. “ ‘Those condemned to being constrained in this way had prolonged torture ahead of them. They were held in place, unable to free themselves.’ ”

Reed stared at Shelly. What was she doing? Was she messing with him? Held in place, unable to free themselves. It sounded like she was talking about Julius. Maybe she knew what he’d done after all. But how?

“ ‘It was sometimes called the Breaking Wheel,’ ” Shelly read on.

Reed blew out air. No, she didn’t know what he’d done. It was just a coincidence that she was reading about torture devices.

“ ‘They called it that,’ ” she continued, “ ‘because it was used to crush the bones of the condemned.’ Ew, huh?” Shelly looked at Reed with wide eyes. Then she returned her gaze to the book and read on. “ ‘The device was designed for torture lasting over multiple days. The Wheel was made up of many radial spokes, and the person subjected to it was tied to the whole wheel before a club or cudgel was used to beat their limbs. This process reduced the human being into a mutilated bag of bones, what one onlooker described as a writhing, moaning monster with bloody tentacles.’ ”

“That’s gross,” Pickle said without looking up from his puzzle.

“Totally,” Reed agreed. He tried not to think about what Julius was experiencing now.

But hey, at least Julius wasn’t tied to a medieval torture device, right?

Julius was restrained, and as time passed, he’d be uncomfortable. But he wasn’t in any pain. No one was standing over him beating him with a cudgel, whatever that was. He was just trapped.

Shelly continued to read about medieval torture, but Reed tuned her out. He turned back toward the window. The bus was stopped at a corner, and he watched a mom holding hands with a little kid who held a red balloon. The balloon bobbed in the air, following the little kid’s movements because it was tied to the kid’s wrist.

Reed thought about Julius’s big wrists. Maybe he should go back to the school and unlock the exoskeleton after their study session this evening. A few hours would be enough to punish Julius for his nastiness. That way, Julius would learn his lesson, but Reed wouldn’t stoop to the level of torture.

Yeah, that’s what Reed would do.

Except, how would he get away from Julius before Julius tried to kill him?

Reed chewed on his lower lip.

He sat up straight and smiled. He knew what he could do. He’d unlock just one of Julius’s hands, then jump back and run before Julius could grab him. Julius, stiff from his confinement, would take at least half a minute to unlock his other wrist and his ankles, and in that time, Reed could get far enough away to hide. Once Julius was gone, Reed could go home.

And after that?

Well, he’d deal with that when the time came.

But until then, he was going to have some good food at the Girards’ house and hang out with his friends. He was going to put Julius out of his mind and enjoy the rest of his free time that day. He deserved it.

Just like Julius deserved what was happening to him.

---

Reed loved his dad, and he knew his dad did everything he could to give Reed and Alexa a good home, but his dad was, well, his dad. He knew nothing about what a good home was. He couldn’t cook. He couldn’t clean. He thought “decoration” was a calendar with fish photos on it and a few sport teams’ schedules. When Reed was home, he never really felt at home, not like he did here at the Girard house.

Reed sprawled on a thick, soft gray rug in front of a stone hearth. A low-burning fire sputtered on the grate. Thales, exhausted from a rousing game of chase-the-tennis-ball, was now stretched out on the cool tiles of the nearby entryway, adding his satisfied snores to the flames’ staccato popping. The sounds were both rhythmic and soothing.

Reed’s belly was full of spicy chicken wings, jalapeno poppers, potato skins, homemade potpie, and chocolate cookies. He was so relaxed he wished he could take a nap.

“You kids have everything you need before I head to my class?” Mrs. Girard asked. She stood in the archway between the family room and the entryway, tugging on a floppy yellow rain hat.

Reed turned and looked over his shoulder, out through the French doors to the Girards’ heavily treed backyard. Yep. It was raining, a steady but light spring rain. The drops looked shiny and pink in the twilight. Reed craned his neck to see the Western horizon. He liked looking at the sun when it was getting ready to slide into nighttime. Tonight, the sun was a fuzzy bright orange tinged with purple.

He looked back at Mrs. Girard. “Thanks for the snacks and for dinner, too.”

Mrs. Girard smiled and tucked her shoulder-length dark hair under the rain hat. She shrugged her short, plump body into her slicker, and said, “You’re welcome, as always, Reed. We love having you here.” She snapped her slicker closed and looked at her own kids, who were all oblivious of her impending departure.

Shelly, reclining on an overstuffed navy-blue sofa, had her nose buried in the same thick history book she’d been reading on the bus. Pickle sat cross-legged in his dad’s blue tweed recliner, bending so low over his own book it looked like he was trying to dive into it. Reed couldn’t see what Pickle was reading. The third Girard kid, six-year-old Ory, had been playing a video game, but now he was picking up the remote for Pickle’s robot skeleton.

“Kids!” Mrs. Girard yelled.

All three of her children looked up.

Mrs. Girard shook her head and smiled. “I’m leaving. You kids behave. And, Pickle, ice that nose again in an hour or so.”

“Huh?” Pickle said.

Mrs. Girard shook her head.

“I’ll remind him,” Reed said.

Pickle’s nose was looking much better. Predictably, Mrs. Girard had matter-of-factly treated Pickle’s nose the second they got home. Examining it, she’d declared it “bruised, not broken,” and she’d cleaned it up, applied some kind of herbal cream, and then given Pickle an ice pack to balance on his face. Pickle resisted that because he couldn’t eat or read with the pack on his nose. But he didn’t have to leave it on for long. Soon, he was eating snacks along with everyone else. And he declared the double chocolate cookies Mrs. Girard brought out after dinner “healing cookies” because his nose stopped hurting after he ate them.

Now, after studying her beaky son for a second, Mrs. Girard looked at Reed. “What would we do without you, Reed?” Mrs. Girard smiled at him and then turned her back to her kids. “Bye, kids.”

“Love you, Mom,” Shelly said.

“Bye,” Pickle and Ory said in unison.

“Thanks again, Mrs. Girard. Bye,” Reed said.

“Bye, all,” Mrs. Girard said. “Come on, Thales.”

Thales was already on his feet, standing next to Mrs. Girard’s legs. His tail whipped so fast it was slapping her in the thigh. Mrs. Girard’s class was his class, too. He was learning to be a therapy dog.

Mrs. Girard, though not the source of her children’s brilliance, was no brain slouch. She went to all sorts of classes. She seemed to have a lot of interests, and she always joined in the conversations when her kids were babbling on about their homework or projects. But the Girard brains came mostly from Mr. Girard. He was a retired electrical engineer who now did consulting for big companies. He traveled a lot, and he was gone now, but when he was here, he was a hands-on dad. He was cool.

Shelly and Pickle had returned to their books before the front door shut behind Mrs. Girard. Ory pressed a button on the remote control, and Pickle’s robot skeleton stood up and slid forward a few inches. Ory’s eyes lit up.

Ory was a conglomeration of his siblings, which made him not as cute as Shelly but much cuter than Pickle. His face still round and a little pudgy, Ory had Shelly’s large eyes and long lashes and full mouth. And he had his brother’s nose. On Ory, the big nose was more amusing than ugly. He looked a little like a baby bird. Six-year-olds could rock a look like that. Ory wouldn’t have to worry about looks for a while.

Ory bent over the remote, so intent on it, he nearly touched it with his long nose. The little robot skeleton scooted forward some more. Ory laughed.

Reed glanced at Pickle. Pickle either didn’t know his brother was playing with his project or he didn’t care. Probably if Ory damaged the thing in any way, Pickle could easily fix it.

Reed looked at his own pathetic project. He was supposed to be working on it. And he had been, sort of, off and on all afternoon. He hadn’t made much progress, though.

Reed had chosen an electric motor as his actuator because his dad knew how to build a motor and was excited to help him. That part of the project, along with connecting the battery-powered motor to the exoskeleton’s circuitry, had gone okay. The problem Reed had now was with the skeleton’s structure. As always, he couldn’t visualize how to construct the form. Every time he attached a new metal component to the skeleton, he ended up with something that stuck out at an unnatural angle. And when he turned it to make it fit, the joint didn’t work properly. Right now, his exoskeleton looked mangled and backward. This wasn’t good.

Reed sighed and gazed around the cozy room. Even though the Girard family room was big and had high ceilings, it was warm and inviting, kind of like a cocoon. Filled with comfortable soft furniture, a couple tables, multiple shelves stuffed with books and games, colorful art, a tidy play area for Ory, a big microfiber-covered bed for Thales, the fireplace, and a huge TV for movie night and video games, the room was perfect for hanging out. It wasn’t so bad for doing homework, either. You might as well be comfortable while you were doing something you didn’t want to do.

The week before, the family room got an addition that intrigued Reed. It was a miniature house, a replica of the Girard home. Standing about three feet tall and stretching four feet wide, the house required the removal of one ottoman from the room. But otherwise, it fit in just fine. Mr. Girard built the house for Shelly, and she was decorating it to look exactly like the family’s real house.

“Do you want me to help you with that?” Pickle asked.

“Huh?” Reed looked over at his friend.

Pickle marked his book, which Reed could now see was on advanced engineering mathematics. “You sighed,” Pickle said, “and your exoskeleton looks like it’s being built by a blind man without opposable thumbs. I wondered if you wanted some help.”

Reed threw a gear at Pickle. Pickle didn’t mean to be mean … he was just brilliant in his own, matter-of-fact kind of way. That was why he was okay to hang out with even though he was super smart. Pickle never made Reed feel dumb, even when he made a comment like that one. Reed knew Pickle wasn’t making fun of him. Pickle was just making an observation. “I’ll muddle through, thank you.”

“You might try angling the joints so the left and right limbs move in the same, or at least similar, ways … unless you’re building an alien exoskeleton.”

“Thank you, Mr. Obvious,” Reed said. He made a face. “Maybe I am building an alien exoskeleton.”

“Cool.” Pickle shrugged and returned to his book.

Shelly looked up from hers. “What?”

Reed laughed. “My exoskeleton is an alien.”

Shelly rolled her eyes and returned to reading.

Ory laughed. Reed turned to see if the kid was laughing at Reed. He wasn’t. He was fully focused on the robot’s remote.

Pickle’s robotic skeleton plowed into the hearth with a loud crunch. Pickle didn’t look up from his book. Ory backed up the seven-inch skeleton and started spinning it in a circle.

Reed began to reconsider Pickle’s offer. He was pretty sure Pickle had built his little robotic skeleton in a day. Maybe he could help Reed salvage his project.

Seriously, look at the thing move, Reed thought. He shook his head at the little robotic skeleton as it whipped in tight circles.

He sucked in his breath and sat up. How could he have forgotten what happened in class today?

Well, to be fair, a lot had happened since class. The confrontation with Julius, along with Reed’s resulting uncharacteristic burst of nerve, had pretty much acted like a brain wipe of the rest of the day. All Reed could think about was Julius locked in his exoskeleton.

But now he remembered! Julius had been complaining that Pickle’s remote was affecting Julius’s exoskeleton.

And Julius was now locked into that metal frame, his body inextricably linked with its structure and therefore inextricably linked with its movement. What if it had crashed into something the way Pickle’s robot had just crashed into the hearth? What if it was spinning in circles right now?

“Hey, Pickle?” Reed kept his gaze on the gyrating mini metal skeleton.

“Huh?” Pickle looked up at Reed.

“That thing”—Reed pointed at the remote in Ory’s small hands—“doesn’t have much of a range, right?”

Pickle sniffed. “It’s a pretty great range, actually. I designed the remote to function through walls. That’s why I combined IR and RF.”

“So, if it was controlling, um, something, outside the house, how far would its range be?” Reed asked.

Pickle frowned. “You mean if the skeleton was outside and Ory was inside?”

Reed nodded. “Yeah.”

Sure, that’s what he meant. He didn’t mean if the remote was controlling Julius’s exoskeleton? No, he didn’t mean that at all.

Pickle tilted his head and thought about it. “It might reach to a few feet outside the house. Maybe. Honestly, I’ve never checked. It probably doesn’t reach beyond the house. The outer walls would be thicker than the inside walls. More interference.”

“Oh,” Reed said, attempting to sound uninterested, even though he had asked the question. “Okay.”

Reed tugged at his T-shirt, which was sticking to his suddenly sweaty skin. He suppressed a sigh of relief.

Pickle leaned forward. “Why’d you ask?”

Ory now had the robotic skeleton racing through the room in dizzying serpentine routes around furniture. Reed tried not to imagine Julius zipping around the robotics classroom in a similar fashion. If he was doing in his suit what Pickle’s robot was doing here, Julius would be bashed into walls and furniture. He’d be, at the least, badly bruised. More likely, he’d have broken bones.

Oh man, Reed thought, I might be truly torturing Julius!

“Reed?”

Reed looked at Pickle. He was suddenly elated that his friend’s genius didn’t extend to reading minds. And he was also glad that Pickle also sucked at deciphering facial expressions, body language, and other social cues. Reed was sure his deliberately blank face wasn’t as effective as he wanted it to be. He was trying for innocent, but he had a feeling he looked like Thales did when the dog stole a cookie and was trying to pretend he didn’t.

“Oh, I was just curious,” Reed said. “It’s impressive. That’s all.”

Pickle raised a thick black eyebrow. “Okay.”

Pickle might not have been able to read interpersonal visual cues, but his brain was like an audio recorder. He remembered everything he’d ever read or heard. He was now going through that database and contrasting everything Reed had ever said to him before today with what Reed had just said.

Reed had never before told Pickle that something he’d done was impressive. He was so used to Pickle outperforming everyone around him that praising Pickle for doing something well was sort of like praising him for breathing. Pickle definitely found Reed’s last comment strange.

Pickle opened his mouth as if he was going to ask a question, but Ory saved Reed. He plowed Pickle’s exoskeleton into the side of Shelly’s miniature house.

The metal hit the wood siding with a thud, and Shelly sat up on the sofa. She stuck a bookmark in her book, clearly ready to confront her little brother. Before she could do or say anything, though, Ory backed up the robotic skeleton and ran it forward again. He giggled and repeated the action, bumping the little robot into the miniature house over and over.

Shelly jumped up. “Hey! Ory, stop it!”

“He’s not going to hurt it,” Pickle said. “Let him play with it.”

“I’m not worried about your robot,” Shelly said. “He’s going to hurt my house. He’s going to mess up my project.” Shelly started toward Ory, who giggled and darted away from her. Shelly chased Ory, but he easily stayed ahead of her. He continued to play with the remote at the same time, so the little robot kept butting at the house.

“Ory, you little twerp,” Shelly said, “I’m going to break our sibling vinculum if you don’t cut that out.”

Vinculum was one of the daily words from the previous week. It meant “bond.” That one stuck in Reed’s head because he thought, when Shelly defined the word, that he’d like a deeper vinculum with her.

“Ory! If you ruin my project …”

“What project?” Reed asked. He didn’t care. He was trying to distract himself from thoughts about Julius, who, if he was being controlled by Pickle’s remote, was probably being slammed into a wall in the classroom right now.

Or what if he was being slammed into something sharp, like one of Ms. Billings’s robotic arms? Could Julius get impaled?

“It’s a project for psychology class, about family dynamics,” Shelly said, panting and lunging for her little brother.

“Seriously, Shel, it’s okay,” Pickle said. “The robot isn’t going to hurt the house. It doesn’t have any sharp edges.” Pickle set aside his book and scrambled out of his dad’s chair. He went over to where his robot was attacking the house over and over. Leaning forward and pointing at the tiny rough pieces of overlapping wood that looked like the gray shingled siding on the real house, he said, “See? Not a scratch.”

Shelly stopped pursuing Ory. She came back to the miniature house, knelt down, and examined it. “Oh.” She shrugged and returned to the sofa. “Okay.” She picked up her book and presumably returned to medieval torture.

Torture.

What if Julius was being tortured right now? He had to be battered pretty badly if he’d been forced to do everything Pickle’s robot was doing.

Pickle sat down on the floor in front of Shelly’s house. He reached out and snatched up his robot. “Ory, desist for a second.”

Ory shoved out his lower lip. “But, I wanna … ,” he began to whine.

“I’m not going to take it away from you,” Pickle assured his brother. “I’m going to make it more fun.” Pickle held up his metal skeleton, which was still whirring in an effort to respond to the remote’s commands.

Ory’s lower lip returned to its normal position. He stopped playing with the remote, and his face brightened. “Yeah? What’re you going to do?” He came over and sat down next to Pickle.

“I’ve got something cool to show you,” Pickle said. “It’s something else you can do with this.”

Pickle put down the robot. He nudged Ory. “So, watch this,” Pickle whispered. Pickle flipped a switch on the little robot.

“Now, try it,” Pickle said to Ory.

Ory grinned and pushed a button on the remote. The robot stood on its blockish head.

“What’d you just do?” Reed asked Pickle.

“Oh, I just turned off the joint constraints. So now, my robot can go against logical joint directions, too. Like yours, only on purpose.”

Ory gleefully pushed buttons and toggled the joystick on the remote, and the little robot flipped off its head and turned into a metal contortionist. It started crawling across the floor like an octopus, its joints warping into impossible pretzel-like shapes. Looking at once like it was turning itself inside out and like it was expanding and contracting the way a beating heart did, the robot became so fluid it resembled a snake.

Ory directed the robot into the entry area, and it clicked and clacked over the slate as it undulated across the floor. Reed stared at it, his throat constricting.

In his head, instead of the sound of the robot’s metal limbs contacting the hard floor, Reed could hear the snaps and pops of breaking bones … Julius’s breaking bones. The sounds were in his head, weren’t they? He was imagining it and not hearing it, right?

No, of course he wasn’t hearing it. How could he hear it? Pickle said the remote’s range wouldn’t reach much beyond the Girards’ house, and even if it was happening, Reed wouldn’t be able to hear it. His ears weren’t superhuman. They were miles from the school. If his mind was telling him he could hear Julius’s bones break, his mind was lying.

Reed’s fears were so stupid. He couldn’t believe his mind was coming up with this stuff. It was asinine. There was no way Pickle’s remote could have any impact on Julius’s framework. Therefore, it was having no impact on Julius.

So why did Reed feel so rotten? Why was his stomach in his throat? Why did he feel like he might throw up all the great food he’d eaten?

Did he intuitively know something? Was his intuition right and his logic wrong?

Reed took a deep breath and looked at his exoskeleton. Focus, he told himself. Stop imagining all that stupid stuff.

Reed leaned over his project. He tried to concentrate on his exoskeleton’s joints.

But he couldn’t. Ory was having just too much fun with Pickle’s robot. Now that the boy could make the thing writhe all over the place, he was practically dancing with glee.

Pickle returned to his dad’s easy chair and picked up his book. Shelly was still lost in her own reading.

Ory started making the robot assault Shelly’s house again. Shelly glanced up, but apparently comforted by Pickle’s assurances, she placidly returned to her book.

Reed scrambled off the floor. He’d had enough.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “I have to do something.”

Ory ignored him, continuing to aim the flopping robot at the side of Shelly’s house. Pickle looked up from his book. “Where are you going?”

“I have to do something,” Reed repeated.

“What?” Pickle asked.

What could Reed say?

He couldn’t say, “I have to go to the school and free Julius,” even though that was exactly what he had to do. He had to run the three blocks to his house, get his bike, and pedal back to the school. Then he had to get in the locked school without setting off an alarm … thankfully he’d overheard a senior talking about a basement door that wasn’t wired into the school’s security system, and a key ring the janitor kept in a fake rock. Then he had to go through the darkened school without wetting his pants like a scared little kid, and then he had to unlock Julius and run for his life.

No, wait. Should he check on Julius before running?

What if his worst fears were true?

If Julius was badly injured, wouldn’t Reed have to call an ambulance?

He almost groaned out loud, but he stopped himself.

And what if Julius was dead?

“Reed?”

Reed blinked when he realized Pickle had said his name.

“What?” he said.

“You said you had to do something,” Pickle reminded him. “I asked what you had to do. Then your brain took a vacation and you turned into a weird statue.”

“Statue?” Reed was stalling.

He tried to think of a reasonable story. What would he have to do right now? Other than go save Julius from a modern-day version of the Wheel?

“Shelly?” Pickle said. “I think something’s wrong with Reed.”

Shelly looked up from her book. “Of course something’s wrong with Reed,” she said. “He doesn’t engage in enough intellection, and he lacks the appropriate nisus when it comes to schoolwork.”

Oh snap, Reed thought. Even in his agitated state, he recognized that Shelly had just used two words of the day. However, he was far too distracted to care about what they meant.

“I’m not talking about Reed’s commonplace imperfections,” Pickle said. “I’m referring to the fact that he’s currently making no sense and his body keeps forgetting how to remain animated.”

“Well, see, that’s what I like about Reed,” Shelly said.

Reed perked up, momentarily forgetting everything but finding out what Shelly liked about him.

“What’s that?” Pickle asked.

Reed was relieved he didn’t have to be the one who asked.

“He rarely makes sense. I like that. It gives me a challenge and keeps me interested.”

Reed couldn’t stop himself. He grinned like a maniac.

Thankfully, no one was looking at him. Pickle and Shelly were looking at each other. Ory’s gaze was on the little robot, whose metal limbs were now so distorted they looked elastic.

“I can see your point,” Pickle said to Shelly. “But my original question remains.” Pickle returned his attention to Reed. “What do you have to do?”

Before Reed could come up with something lame, the little robot hit the side of the miniature house again. And when it did, something large hit the outside of the Girards’ house.

Shelly looked at the French doors, then put her attention back on her book. “Wind must have come up.”

“We probably lost another branch off the big fir tree,” Pickle said.

Reed looked at the window.

In the short time since Mrs. Girard had left, night had slipped in around the house. Now blackness clung to the windows like a fungus. Reed couldn’t see anything in the framed glass of the French doors except the reflection of the room he was in. In that reflection, he watched Ory aim the robot at the house again. He watched it hit the miniature house.

In the same instant, something hit the side of the house again with a reverberating thump. Reed tensed. He looked at his friends.

Neither Pickle nor Shelly reacted to the latest sound. They were apparently satisfied with the wind-and-fallen-branch explanation for the second thump. Or, since they were reading again, they may not have even heard it.

Well, Reed heard it, and the wind explanation didn’t cut it.

He was listening intently now, and even though he’d heard those impacts against the house, what he didn’t hear was wind strong enough to blow a branch at the house that could make noise. He should’ve been hearing a whistling, whooshing sound if the wind was blowing that hard. And except for the continued crackle in the fireplace, and the sound of the robot hitting Shelly’s little house, the only other things Reed could hear were the impacts on the side of the house … every time the robotic skeleton hit the model house.

What if it was Julius out there?

What if he truly had been manipulated by Pickle’s remote all this time? By now, what condition would Julius be in?

What Reed lacked in “intellection” he made up for in imagination. He could easily envision a body covered in swelling, blackened contusions. He could see limbs as limp as rubber with bone fragments poking through the skin. He could see a battered face, a bleeding skull, and a spine warped into something sickeningly abnormal.

If, in his exoskeleton, Julius had been spun, then bashed into things over and over, and if he’d been twisted and contorted the way Pickle’s robot had been, would Julius even be human anymore? He’d be a mutilated mass of broken bones and torn flesh. What was it Shelly’s history book had said about the victims of the Wheel?

A victim of the wheel ended up looking like a moaning monster with bloody tentacles.

Yep. That’s what Julius would have become if everything Ory had done to Pickle’s robot had also been done to Julius’s exoskeleton.

Ory rammed the churning robot into the miniature house again. And again, outside, something hit the real house with similar force.

Reed couldn’t believe Shelly and her brothers were ignoring the sounds. How could they not hear them?

“You never said where you’re going,” Pickle said.

Another robot impact on the model house. Another whump outside.

Pickle didn’t mention the mimicking sound.

Reed’s legs gave out, and he dropped to the ground. He wasn’t so eager to go outside anymore. No. He now wanted more than anything to stay inside … maybe forever.

He looked around. Were all the windows and doors locked?

What if they weren’t?

No, of course they were. Mrs. Girard wouldn’t forget to lock up. She was as fanatical about safety as she was about keeping her children well fed.

“Reed?”

Reed looked at Pickle. “Oh, I forgot what I was thinking of.”

“You forgot you wanted to leave a few seconds ago?” Pickle asked.

Reed nodded. “I think I ate too much. My brain is drowning in buffalo sauce.”

Pickle came up with a partial smile. “Mom does make great chicken wings.” He leaned forward. “Hey, I wonder if there are more. Or more of those popper things.” He looked at his sister. “Hey, Shel, do you know if Mom put away any extra chicken wings or those popper things?”

Shelly looked up from her book. “Huh?”

“Chicken wings. Poppers.”

“Oh, no. They’re all gone,” Shelly said. “And you can’t be hungry already! How is it fair you get to eat so much and stay so skinny? My life would be paradisiacal if I could eat like you with no consequences.”

Like paradise, Reed thought, in spite of himself.

Ory had stopped plowing the robot into the miniature house. Now he was circling the robot around the house at a dizzying speed.

“I can’t help it if I’m hungry,” Pickle told his sister.

“Well, you can’t be hungry. Maybe you’re just thirsty.”

“I want a soda,” Ory called out. It was the first thing he’d said since he’d returned to playing with Pickle’s robot.

“Hey, that sounds good,” Pickle said.

“We don’t have any,” Shelly said.

“Why?” Pickle asked.

“Remember? Mom read some article about the combination of carbonation and sugar? She discovered that our bodies process the mixture as if it was a poison in the system.”

“Right. I do remember that.” Pickle sighed. “We shouldn’t let her read. All she seems to read are things that make our lives suck.”

Reed, who by now had wound himself tighter than Pickle’s grasp of basic math, blurted, “Your lives don’t suck!”

Pickle, with an open mouth, turned to look at Reed.

“Sorry,” Reed said. “Sorry.”

Pickle said nothing, but Shelly put down her book and looked at Reed with one eyebrow raised.

Reed shrugged. “It’s just that you’re so lucky to live in this nice house and have a mother who always makes good food for you and loves you and …” He stopped because he felt like he was going to cry. And he did not want to do that.

It was the stress. He was making himself crazy with his panic.

The little robot started climbing up the side of Shelly’s miniature house. It looked like it had somehow grown suction cups on its legs. It scaled the side of the toy house as if it was a spider.

For a moment, Reed was mesmerized by the robot’s functionality, but then he realized he was hearing something outside the Girards’ house. Something new. Something majorly disturbing.

Something was crawling up the outside wall of the family room.

No, that couldn’t be. Could it?

Reed tried to block out the sound of the little robot’s clicks and drone. He listened hard beyond that. Wasn’t that distant shuffling sound something on the house?

Yes. There. He could hear a sort of scrabbling, similar to what it sounded like when he once saw a raccoon climb up the side of his own house.

Maybe it was a raccoon out there now.

Maybe he was literally going insane and he was imagining all of this.

He had to be going insane. What he was hearing wasn’t possible.

But then, why would he suddenly be going loopy? Was it guilt?

Was he such an unadulterated wuss that the second he did something a little gutsy, his brain lost its grip on reality? Was he going crazy just because he’d locked Julius into the exoskeleton?

“You’re right,” Pickle said.

Reed almost jumped out of his skin. “What?!”

Pickle cocked his head at Reed’s peculiar behavior. “I said, you’re right. We are lucky. It was illogical of me to have allowed that to escape my awareness. Perhaps my blood sugar is low. If I had a soda—”

“We don’t have any,” Shelly repeated.

“I want a soda,” Ory said again.

He must not have wanted one badly because he was still playing with the robotic skeleton. He’d gotten it to climb up to the second-floor of the small house.

Reed jumped up and headed toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Pickle asked.

Reed stopped.

Good question. He didn’t normally wander around the Girards’ house as if he lived there. He’d been upstairs, of course, to both of the twins’ bedrooms, and even in Ory’s bedroom. But he’d only been in their rooms when they were in the rooms. What reason did he have to go upstairs now? What reason … besides his uncontrollable need to know if something was clutching onto the exterior walls of the house by the second-floor windows?

“Uh, sorry. I just thought of a book I need to borrow. I was going to go get it. I should have asked first.”

Pickle studied Reed for a few seconds, and then he shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead. You don’t need to ask. You’re family.”

This, for some reason, made Reed choke and cough, as if the words created an emotional hairball in his throat. But he knew it wasn’t the words that were choking him. It was his guilt. No one in the Girard family would have done what he did to Julius, even if Julius was still just locked into his metal skeleton in the robotics classroom. They sure wouldn’t have let Julius get tortured, possibly to death, by Pickle’s remote. The second they even had an inkling that it might be happening, they would have gone to check.

What Reed lacked was initiative. Motivation. Impetus.

Aha! Nisus. An effort to attain a goal.

Reed shook his head. His brain was weird. Here he was in a total freak-out because he was pretty sure he’d tortured someone who was now climbing up the outside of the Girards’ house in a giant robotic exoskeleton, and his brain was defining words of the day.

Maybe if Reed had had more nisus this evening, he could have saved Julius before Julius started crawling up the side of the house.

Stop it! Reed screamed in his head. Julius is not on the side of the house!

Oh, how Reed hoped he was out of his mind. He had a very, very, very bad feeling, though, that he was as sane as anyone. For some reason, he’d just become clairvoyant. Or was it omniscient?

Or maybe it was just observant and sensory-aware. Because he could still hear something that was definitely not tree limbs crawling against the house.

Reed realized that Pickle had given him permission to go upstairs, and Reed was still standing here. What was wrong with him?

He shook himself and strode to the stairs. Then he ran up the stairs two at a time.

On the landing, Reed stopped and looked around. Now that he was here, what was he going to do?

If he looked out a window and actually saw what he was afraid he’d see, what was he going to do about it?

How could he get rid of Julius and his exosuit without his friends knowing? Heck, for that matter, how could he get rid of Julius, period?

Reed looked up and down the hall in complete indecision. What now?

Shelly’s tidy white-and-green room was to the right. Shelly loved white and green. “The colors of purity and life,” she once told Reed.

Pickle’s cluttered, black-walled room was to the left. Ory’s race-car motif bedroom was across from Pickle’s room. A small pale yellow half bath was straight ahead of Reed.

Light suddenly shined through a window in the bathroom … from outside. Reed gulped.

He remembered that the Girards had motion-sensor lights in the backyard. One of them had just come on.

Reed stared at the window intently. But nothing else happened. Except for the light, he didn’t see anything. Nothing appeared in the window—no shadows, no movement.

He couldn’t hear anything moving anymore, either. He strained to listen. Nothing.

Remembering he was supposed to be up here looking for a book, he figured he should head to Pickle’s room and find something that he could come up with some plausible explanation for wanting. He ignored the prickly sensation on the back of his neck as he took a step in the dark hallway.

Images of Julius’s bloody, maimed body jumped into the forefront of Reed’s mind, and he had to swallow down a scream. It’s just my out-of-control imagination, he thought.

Flipping a switch just inside the doorway of Pickle’s room, Reed gratefully left the dark hall and entered his friend’s domain. Stuffed with books, CDs, and scientific equipment, Pickle’s room more resembled a laboratory than a bedroom. Only the twin bed with its constellations bedspread suggested the room belonged to a boy just into his teens. The rest of the space screamed, “Genius.”

Reed crossed to Pickle’s wall-to-wall bookshelf. He went to the section where he knew Pickle kept fiction. Pickle read more nonfiction than fiction, but he did have a selection of sci-fi books he claimed were as educational as many of his science books. Reed plucked one of those books from the shelf without looking at it. After he had the book, he stepped over to the window and looked out past Pickle’s gray curtains. Unfortunately, the light in the room gave him a view of little more than his own reflection. He hadn’t thought that through, obviously. You don’t try to see outside at night from a well-lit room.

But even with the reflection of the room in the way, Reed could see enough to tell that nothing was outside the window. Clutching the book he’d taken from the shelf, he turned toward the door. He spotted bloody tissues on Pickle’s nightstand. Pickle’s nose. Reed was supposed to remind him to ice his nose. He’d do that when he went back downstairs.

If he got to go back downstairs.

What if Julius, in his probably ruined state, was lurking outside one of the windows up here just waiting for Reed to appear so he could crash through the glass and get revenge? Why was Reed even up here? He should’ve been hiding far away from where he thought Julius and his exoskeleton was. Who went toward danger instead of away from it?

Someone who wasn’t a hundred percent sure the danger was real.

Reed had to know whether his thoughts were right or crazy.

He made himself return to the hallway so he could continue his search for whatever was—or wasn’t—out there.

It was still dark throughout the upstairs. And it was still silent.

Reed crept across the hall into Ory’s bedroom. At the threshold, he tripped over something and caught himself by the doorjamb. His heart rate sped up. He’d heard a metallic clink when his foot made contact with whatever it was. What if it was an exoskeleton? He quickly turned on the light, almost afraid to see what was on the floor.

It was just a toy firetruck.

Reed exhaled.

He looked around Ory’s chaotic mess. He couldn’t remember seeing so many toy cars in one place, not even in a toy store.

Ory had one of those rugs with a race track on it. Toy cars were scattered all over the track, and beyond the race track rug onto the wall-to-wall carpet, too. Nothing unusual here. A bright red shade with a cartoon race car on it was pulled over Ory’s single window. Reed couldn’t bring himself to open that shade to look outside.

As he flipped the light switch and stood once again in the hall, it occurred to Reed that turning on lights hadn’t been that smart. Not only did the interior lights impair his night vision, but the lights telegraphed where he was. If something was outside, it could be hiding when he turned on the lights.

Well, that was just dumb. Why would Julius be hiding?

If it was Julius outside.

If anything was outside.

Reed wasn’t sure at this point that either possibility would bring him relief: either there was a broken and gory monster clinging onto the side of the house, or Reed was having a complete mental breakdown. Either way, he couldn’t just stand here forever.

“Reed?” Shelly called from the bottom of the stairs.

Reed froze as if he’d been caught reading her diary or something. “Yeah?” His voice broke.

“We’re going down to the corner to get sodas. Do you want to come with?”

“No, that’s okay. You go ahead. I’ll stay here if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure. Just don’t go in Ory’s room. You’ll probably break a foot on one of his cars. I’m pretty sure he has some kind of vehicle assembly line in his room.”

Shelly snorted when Ory protested in the background, “I do not! Wait. What’s an assembly line?”

Reed smiled. For a second, he felt almost normal as he listened to Pickle, Shelly, and Ory head to the door.

“Oh, Reed?” Pickle called.

Reed went rigid again. He cleared his throat. “What?”

“Don’t tell Mom where we went if she comes home early,” Pickle yelled up the stairs.

“You’re an idiot,” Shelly told her brother. “You think she doesn’t know everything we do?”

“She does?” Ory asked in an awed tone. “Everything?”

“Everything,” Shelly said emphatically as the front door opened.

Reed listened to the stomps and shuffles of his friends leaving the house. The door slammed. He waited. He heard the lock slide into place, and he said a silent thank-you for the way Shelly had adopted her mother’s safety consciousness.

At the same time, he became ultra aware that he was completely, one hundred percent alone in the Girards’ house. If what he thought was outside was indeed outside, this could be bad for him. Really bad.

What if Julius had been waiting for an opportunity just like this?

But why? Why would Julius wait if he was a lacerated monster? Wouldn’t he just want to kill anything in sight?

Wait. Now Reed’s brain was really getting way out there. Just because Julius might have been mangled by the exoskeleton Reed had locked him into and Ory had inadvertently made it do things that tortured Julius with mind-crumbling pain didn’t mean Julius had suddenly turned into a killer. He was still just a kid, maybe a horrible kid and maybe now even a badly injured kid, but just a kid.

But was he just a kid? Not really. Julius was a really mean kid.

Reed would never forget the day Julius first showed up in his school, in third grade. He wouldn’t forget it because that’s when his own torture started. Julius had been tormenting Reed for six years.

Julius seemed to thrive on humiliating other kids, and he seemed to get downright euphoric when he hurt them. For all Reed knew, Julius was already a killer. At the very least, he’d probably been murdering and dissecting squirrels for years.

So if Julius was now in unspeakable pain because of what Reed did, it made sense that he’d be even more homicidal now. Reed didn’t know for sure, but he figured agony brought out the worst in a person.

The house creaked, and Reed leaped out of his pointless thoughts and back into the dark hall.

That sound was just the house creaking, wasn’t it?

He listened for several minutes. When he didn’t hear anything else, he crept down the hall to Shelly’s room. He knew he wouldn’t step on anything in here. She was obsessed with order. Going slowly, he felt his way through her room until he reached her window, which he knew overlooked the front of the house. Standing back from the edge of the window, he lifted the edge of her heavy green curtains and peeked outside.

Nothing was out there that shouldn’t have been. Below the window, the porch roof stretched along the front of the house. By the street, the mailbox leaned a little to the left.

Two large cedar trees stretched their branches toward Shelly’s window. One of the branches brushed against the side of the house. Although, as Reed had thought, it wasn’t windy, there was a slight breeze, and the branch moved against the siding. Was this the sound Reed had heard earlier? Had he gotten himself all worked up for nothing?

He hoped so, but he didn’t think he was worried about nothing. Scanning the night, he searched for any sign of movement. He saw none.

Stepping away from the window, Reed picked his way out of Shelly’s room. In the hallway, he hesitated. Should he go into Mr. and Mrs. Girard’s room?

He looked around.

As long as he didn’t touch anything, why not? It wasn’t like he was going to turn on the light and snoop around. He just wanted to look out their big window, which overlooked the backyard.

Reed crossed the hall and stepped into the master bedroom. A night-light near the master bath cast a dim glow throughout the room. It created creepy shadows, but at least it made maneuvering to the window easy. All he had to do was swivel a rocking chair away from the window and nudge aside the curtain. Then he was able to see …

Nothing unusual. Again, the yard looked the way it should. All was quiet.

Enough of this!

Reed dropped the curtain and strode from the room. He looked over the hall, then ran down the steps and returned to the family room.

The family room looked the way it had when he’d left it, minus the Girard siblings. Apparently, Pickle had a put a small log on the fire after Reed went upstairs, because the fire was flaring up behind the metal screen that protected the room from stray sparks. Pickle’s book was on the end table next to his dad’s easy chair. Shelly’s book was lying on the sofa.

Reed sank to the cushy carpet.

He looked around. Where was the little robot?

He didn’t see it. Did Ory take it with him?

Reed spotted the remote on the floor next to the sofa, but the robot wasn’t in sight. Maybe Ory got it stuck under a piece of furniture.

Reed turned and looked at Shelly’s miniature house. It really was an amazing thing. It seemed to be accurate in every little detail. All the furniture he could see on the front porch and inside the house through the open windows was exactly like the real furniture in the normal-size house. What about the art and stuff? he wondered.

He scooted over to examine the house more closely.

As he figured she would have, Shelly had re-created all the art and knickknacks inside the house. Anything in this real house was in the toy house. She’d even put pencil marks with dates on the wall just inside the kitchen doorway, the marks and dates that chronicled the Girard kids’ growth over the years. And outside, one of the downspouts was bent just like the real one out front was. It got bent when Reed and Pickle were trying to learn how to throw a football. One of their errant tosses, though forceful, went badly askew and left a permanent indentation in the metal.

Reed shifted again so he could look at the miniature version of the room he sat in.

“Wow,” he breathed.

There was a super-miniature house inside the miniature house! Talk about realism!

It shouldn’t have surprised him that Shelly was that thorough with her model house. Shelly never did anything halfway. And if she couldn’t do it well, she stopped doing it.

Reed remembered finger painting with Pickle and Shelly in kindergarten. The teacher had been wandering around telling everyone they were doing great, but when she got to Shelly, she didn’t say anything.

“Aren’t I doing great too?” Shelly asked.

“Of course, kiddo,” the teacher said.

“You’re lying,” Shelly accused. “I can tell by your tone of voice.” She stood up and put her hands on her hips, careful to avoid getting paint on her red pants.

Reed remembered watching the teacher think it over. She finally decided on truth. “Well, you aren’t really getting the point of finger painting. It’s to be free with the color and have fun. You’re trying too hard, making everything too perfect.”

“Fine,” Shelly said. She reached up, grabbed her paper, and marched over to put her finger painting in the trash.

Reed grinned at the memory. Then he saw something silver and shiny glinting through the window at the back of the mini-model house’s family room. He leaned forward and canted his head so he could see behind the mini-model house.

Aha. That’s where the little robot went. It was inside the miniature house, behind the mini-miniature house.

Reed started to reach into the miniature house to rescue the robot. Before he could get a hand in through the front door, though, the little robotic skeleton raised up off the floor of the house.

Reed jumped, then started to shake his head at his edginess.

And that’s when Julius sprang up from behind the model house.

Reed scrambled backward, screaming.

In his mind, he called what he was seeing Julius because his vivid imagination had prepared him to see the boy the way he looked now. But Julius didn’t look a thing like Julius.

He was, in fact, exactly what Reed’s mind had known Julius would be. Now nothing more than a fleshy octopus-like mass of pulpy limbs attached to a metal frame, Julius could no longer be called a boy. He couldn’t be called human.

Reed wasn’t even sure Julius was alive.

Yes, Julius moved, but Reed didn’t know if that was Julius initiating the movement or if his corpse was just being controlled by the metal framework latched onto Julius like a loathsome external parasite.

Julius’s face was slack, so there was no life there. It was slack because it looked like the bone structure of his forehead, cheeks, and jaw had been pulverized. His features were so distorted he resembled some kind of crudely sewn cloth version of himself. No longer framed by wavy blond hair because that hair was now sticky and stringy with congealed blood, Julius’s face was like a repulsive doll’s face, a doll much worse than Alexa’s baby doll with the staring black eyes.

Julius’s eyes were a thousand times more disconcerting than empty black ones. His eyes had rolled back in his head so all that was showing was the whites—the murky, cloudy whites. Those ghostly whites made him look like a sightless zombie.

But, like a zombie, Julius, alive or not, was moving. He was moving determinedly toward Reed.

Reed willed his legs to work, and he struggled to find his feet. Looking wildly around the room, he tried to decide on the best escape route.

The windows?

They had a complicated latching system. He wouldn’t be able to get them open in time.

The doors?

Duh.

Reed ran toward the French doors. He knew they had a special lock, the kind that required keys on the outside or the inside, but the key was kept near the door, wasn’t it? He scanned the area near the door. No key.

He realized he had no idea where the Girards kept the key. And he had no time to look for it.

Turning, Reed ran toward the entryway. The Julius-thing scuttled out from behind the miniature house and tumbled across the floor after him. Reed tore through the archway, rounding the corner and heading to the front door. Before he could get there, though, Julius sprang to the ceiling and skittered past Reed to block his way to the front door.

Reed didn’t pause to consider his options. He just raced up the stairs.

Glancing over his shoulder, Reed watched in horror as Julius and his metal frame flailed crushed limbs grotesquely to catapult from the entry ceiling to the stairway wall. The Julius-thing scaled the stairway wall as Reed ran. Reed was barely able to stay ahead of his pursuer.

At the landing, Reed got a glimpse of Julius leaping to the ceiling again. Reed turned, aiming for Pickle’s room. His plan, if he could call it that, was to use Pickle’s scientific equipment as weapons to keep Julius at bay while Reed escaped out of Pickle’s front-facing window. Like Shelly’s, it was over the front porch roof, so Reed wouldn’t have to drop two stories to the ground. Although at this point, he’d have dropped multiple stories if it meant getting away from Julius … or what was left of him.

Feeling something at the same time rubbery and sharp nick his shoulder as he tore into Pickle’s room, Reed managed to get the light on as he entered. He grabbed the first piece of equipment he saw, a big and heavy microscope, almost too big and heavy for him to lift. But he managed.

Once he had the microscope in his firm grip, Reed turned and swung blindly out in front him. He was sure he’d connect with Julius because Julius was right on his heels.

But Julius wasn’t there.

Reed looked around desperately. Where’d Julius go?

Reed looked up.

The Julius abomination dropped off the ceiling and landed on Reed before Reed could swing the microscope again. The impact knocked the microscope from Reed’s hand. It tumbled across the room as Reed screamed and tried to squirm out from under the horrendous combination of hard and sharp metal and squishy, clammy destroyed body parts. At the same time, he tried to hold his breath because the Julius thing smelled dreadful. It smelled like blood, putrid flesh, and stale sweat. It was dripping on Reed, too. Julius’s flesh and his no-longer-stylish clothing, perforated by puncture wounds caused by jutting cracked bones, was smeared with dried blood, and his body still seeped fresh blood, too.

Galvanized by his revulsion, Reed struck out at the metal and flesh that attempted to engulf him. He fought with all the strength he had and some he’d obviously gotten from someplace else.

At first, Reed thought he was going to be able to get away. Julius’s hands didn’t work right, and they couldn’t grip Reed firmly. Reed managed to slither out from under Julius, and he stood, preparing to race around the bed to escape out the window.

But what Julius lacked in coordination and grip he made up for in speed. Reed made it halfway to the window, but then something caught his foot.

No, not something. Julius or his frame or both.

Reed looked back at the combination of metal and tissue that coiled around his ankle.

“Let me go!” Reed yelled.

Why did he waste his breath? Did he really think a shouted command would stop whatever Julius had become? It wouldn’t have stopped human Julius. It sure wasn’t going to stop this version of Julius.

Reed kicked out, and his foot slipped away just a little. But then Julius clamped down harder. How? How was Julius able to grip anything without working bones?

It didn’t matter. Reed was just distracting himself with all these irrelevant thoughts. He was trying to put off the inevitable.

Reed wasn’t going to get away from Julius, not even if he made it to the window. Julius was now powered by a robotic framework a mere human couldn’t defeat, especially if that mere human was Reed. Plus, Julius now seemed to be supercharged by the monstrosity that he’d become. And that monstrosity had been born of the kind of emotions that propelled humans past their usual limitations. Emotions like pain and fear.

Emotions like rage.

Julius’s rage was more powerful than Reed’s guilt.

Reed didn’t stand a chance.

But still, he tried. Kicking his feet as if power-swimming against the tide, Reed army-crawled across the rug. He willed himself away from what held on to him. He imagined himself going through Pickle’s window and jumping to freedom.

Reed let out a banshee-like cry and yanked his foot from Julius’s grasp. He staggered to his feet and turned toward the window.

Before Reed could take a step, though, Julius was on him again. This time, Julius fell fully onto Reed, and they both went down on Pickle’s bed. Reed was pinned under Julius’s hideous remains and the metal frame strapped to them.

Reed inhaled Julius’s stench and gagged. Even as he gagged, he cried out, “Help!”

Whose help was he calling for? No one else was in the house.

Would the neighbors hear?

Reed’s face was just inches from Julius’s lifeless eyes and sagging mouth. Gagging again and whimpering, Reed turned his face away from the horror above him. He shut his eyes as if he could make his macabre attacker disappear by pretending it wasn’t there.

His heart pounding so loud he could hear little else, Reed bucked and lurched, trying to free himself from the thing. But he wasn’t strong enough. Even though Julius didn’t seem to be gripping Reed in any way, his weight alone, along with that of the metal framework, was enough to pin Reed in place.

Reed was trapped.

Practically hyperventilating in shock and fright, Reed forced himself to open his eyes and look at Julius. When he did, he was sorry. He immediately closed his eyes again. He couldn’t stand looking at the milky white, iris-less eyes staring down at him.

Or were they staring?

Reed didn’t even know if Julius was conscious. How could he be with his bones crushed into smithereens? It was more likely Julius was dead and the movement of the thing he was strapped into was caused by some kind of short in the system. Maybe the interference of Pickle’s remote had so badly fried the exoskeleton’s systems that it was wildly functioning on its own now.

Something dripped into Reed’s face. He had to open his eyes. It was worse not knowing what was happening above him.

Reed opened his eyes.

Okay, maybe not knowing wasn’t worse.

Blood was pooling in the spongy mass of what used to be Julius’s face. It looked like a misshapen sponge that had been used to clean up a massacre. And now it was dropping its warm, wet contents onto Reed’s cheeks. The previously cream-colored scarf looped around Julius’s neck was saturated, too. It hung down toward Reed like a dead animal in a slaughterhouse.

Mesmerized now by the whites of Julius’s eyes bulging out from between long blond lashes, Reed couldn’t turn away from the malformed thing above him. But he still struggled. Grunting, he shoved upward with all his might.

It did no good. It was like the weight of a hundred cars pinned him down.

“Please, please,” Reed whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know this was going to happen to you. I just wanted you to be locked in overnight. I didn’t want this to happen.”

He knew there was no use in begging, but he couldn’t help himself. He opened his mouth to say something else, but that’s when the question of whether Julius had consciousness was answered. Julius shifted downward to press his heavy, seeping mass against Reed’s mouth. Reed could no longer speak.

But he could hear.

In the distance, downstairs, the other kids were returning from their soda run. Reed could hear Pickle suggesting to Shelly that he could construct a better torture device than anything medieval people had come up with.

“I’m not sure that would be an accomplishment, Pickle,” Shelly said.

Reed strained, grunting, desperate to get their attention.

Trying to yell, Reed could only make unintelligible groans.

Downstairs, Ory piped up. “Can I play with the remote again, Pickle?”

Julius shifted, and Reed allowed himself a moment of hope. Maybe he could get away.

Pouring every bit of life force he had into his muscles, he surged upward. He hoped to erupt like a volcano and get ejected away from Julius, toward freedom.

But he didn’t erupt. Or rather, he did, but before he could get ejected away from the Julius cage that imprisoned him, Julius’s mashed hands somehow grabbed hold of Reed’s outstretched hands. Julius’s formless legs somehow managed to wrap tightly around Reed’s ankles.

Reed was now as linked to Julius as Julius was to his exoskeleton. And Reed knew what was going to happen next.

With the pressure of Julius’s face wedged against Reed’s throat, Reed couldn’t make a sound that could be heard downstairs. He was facing his worst nightmare, and he couldn’t scream.

Downstairs, Pickle responded to his brother’s question. “Sure, Ory. Go nuts. We have all night!”

---

Ory grinned and knelt on the floor next to the miniature house. Usually interested only in cars and racing, Ory was surprised by how much fun this robot was. Maybe he could get his brother to build him other things. He’d never been able to get a robot to move this way before. It was super cool!

Pressing a button, Ory got the little robot to crawl out from behind the mini-miniature house. He carefully maneuvered the robot out of the miniature house, not wanting to get on his sister’s bad side. One time, he ran the little skeleton into a wall. When he did, he heard something bump on the floor above his head.

He looked up, but he didn’t hear anything else, so he continued carefully guiding the robot out of the house and onto the miniature porch. When he got it out, he did a little fist pump.

Happy with himself, Ory grinned wider and decided to see if he could get the robot to do even weirder things than it was doing before he got his soda. He began manipulating the remote so fast his fingers were just a big blur.

In response, the little robot shot off the toy house’s porch and began spinning and thrashing. While Ory shouted in triumph, the little robotic skeleton began popping and snapping its metal limbs in all kinds of unnaturally delightful ways.