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“What is it, CATT?” asked Angus.
The cat-dog robot was buzzing at him. It waggled its PVC tail and rotated its mismatched metal ears in lopsided arcs.
“Do you hear something?”
CATT yipped at him and jumped awkwardly at the wall beneath the bedroom window.
Angus poked his head into the window. It stretched outward around his neck and shoulders. He watched a tall figure with short blue hair jog along the street. The person kept looking over his shoulder back at the street, and for good reason, too. Like him, this person had committed the serious offense of neglecting to don a biohazard suit before stepping outside. It was only a matter of time before he was discovered and hauled off to the hospital for testing.
“I think he’s headed this way,” said Angus. “Look. He’s coming up the driveway. We should have a closer look, don’t you think?”
CATT purred in approval. Angus quickly placed his hand on the desk screen to hide the laboratory before opening the wall of the bedroom and running downstairs. AC’s mom and dad were nowhere to be seen. Angus deduced that the low hum coming from one of the open doorways meant that like his parents at home, they were watching TV together. He poked his head around the doorway, trying not to cringe as the metallic father turned his skin face around and smiled.
“Hi, AC. Want to watch this program with us? It’s a documentary about nanotechnology.”
“Oh, no thanks. Spending some time alone in my room,” answered Angus.
“Don’t spend all your time reading history,” said AC’s mother without turning her head away from the TV. Her eyes poked around both sides of her face to regard him. “You’ll rot your brain.”
“Nope. No history,” said Angus.
“Okay, then.” The eyes retracted back to the front of her head.
CATT meowed from the hallway. Angus went looking for the robot. It was scratching at the outside wall.
“You need to go outside?”
The robot purred.
“Door,” said Angus. The knob plopped out.
“Window,” he said.
Before he could look out the pane that had appeared in the top of the door, the flexible window pressed inward. It was molded around a face, the face of the boy with the blue hair. But as it peered through the window at him and blinked its long-lashed eyes, Angus realized with a jolt that it wasn’t a boy.
He pulled open the door, and a tall, thin girl with short, spiky, bright blue hair sprang back and grinned a mouthful of wire at him.
“Who are you?” asked Angus.
“Duh,” said the girl pushing past him. “Who do you think I am?”
“Ummm, excuse me,” Angus said in surprise.
The girl ignored him and started up the stairs toward AC’s room.
“Hello!” he called. “What do you think you’re doing? Where are you going?”
“To the lab. We’ve got work to do.”
Something about this girl was familiar. The self-assurance, the bossiness.
“Is that you, Ivy?”
“You sent Billy to get me, didn’t you? Of course it’s me. Now, hurry.”
Angus had known that Ivy would be a human in this world, but he’d been so used to her in animal form that her sudden appearance as a girl with bizarre hair stunned him. In his confusion he stumbled over the cat-dog and lost his balance. With a yell and a thump, he landed on the floor, bouncing lightly.
“Is everything okay out there?” called the mother’s voice. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No, I’m fine!” Angus said quickly. The last thing he needed was for a parent to come and investigate. Ivy was supposed to be in the hospital. What would they say if they knew she was here, the girl who everyone thought had caused an epidemic?
CATT yipped at him and then opened its mouth, vomiting thin rope. Angus picked up the rope and tugged. The moment he touched it, he realized it wasn’t a rope but rather a very long, very thin chain. Angus squinted at it; made of at least fifty individual nanochains braided together, it was remarkably strong.
“What is this for?” asked Angus.
“I think your robot’s trying to help you get up,” said Ivy watching him from the top of the stairs.
Angus blushed deeply. Of course, Ivy had to see him trip and fall. How embarrassing. He ducked his head so she wouldn’t see his face turn red, too.
“Is that right, CATT?” asked Angus. “Am I supposed to grab this?”
CATT made a whirring noise, and the chain slowly retracted, pulling Angus upright. Feeling very self-conscious all of a sudden, he strutted to the stairs. But when he looked up, Ivy was already gone.
He hurried to his room. “Umm, which Ivy are you? Is this your world? Or are you the Ivy I travel with ... umm ... who was a cat the last time I saw her?”
“Yup, both. They’re both me.” She closed the door behind him. “Top secret. No parents,” she said.
“So, you’re my Ivy, but this is your world and that is your real body?”
“Yup,” she said.
Angus snuck looks at the strange girl in the room with him. She wore red jeans, a tiger-print t-shirt under a leopard-print lab coat, and silver sneakers. Her short blue hair and braces had confused him, but now that he really looked at her, she had the same intelligent brown eyes, the same delicately curved eyebrows, the same full pink lips as his Ivy at home.
“I can see you looking at me, Angus. Just stare and get it over with.”
Angus felt his face go hot again. “You don’t look a lot like the Ivy from my world.”
“Sure I do. But I made a few improvements.” Ivy spiked her short blue hair up higher. “Months of lying on my back flattened my hair though.”
“So, this is your world? This is where you started? Where you lost your body?” asked Angus.
“That’s what I said.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know. Just like I don’t know what happened to those other kids.”
“Didn’t Billy tell you?”
“Billy!” Ivy’s face went pale. “I forgot about Billy! Where is he?”
She patted the pockets of her lab coat.
“Luckily, I’m not in there, or you’d squish me.” The voice came from the top of Ivy’s head.
“AAAAH! GET IT OFF!” Ivy shrieked, jumped around the room, and scrubbed her head with frantic fingers.
Billy fluttered calmly to Angus’s shoulder and chirp-laughed. The joy that he’d found Ivy alive and human mixed with strange butterflies in his stomach and the silliness of her bug dance, and he laughed with a weird hilarity. Ivy glared at him.
“Both of you are jerks,” she said crossing her arms, jutting her chin out, and stomping one foot. Now she was beginning to resemble the Ivy back home. Angus stopped laughing, but somehow he couldn’t get the smile to leave his face. It felt good to be with her again.
“I like your hair,” he said. She narrowed her eyes at him, wondering whether he was being serious. “Cool color,” he said, trying to sound convincing.
“Thanks. Maybe we can do something with yours. I’ve been wanting to give you some color ever since I met you.”
Angus brushed his hair back with a hand and simpered, “I’ve always thought I’d look good in green.”
Billy snorted, “How about pink? With glitter?”
Angus looked out of the corner of his eye at the cockroach on his shoulder. He menaced it with a finger. “You know, it wouldn’t take much effort to flick you across the room.”
“Ha, dude. Very funny. Maybe you can run experiments on me, too.”
“Oh yeah, experiments! Billy, did you tell Ivy what we found out? About AC’s experiments?” asked Angus.
“No, we didn’t get to it,” said Billy.
Ivy placed her palm on the screen and the laboratory rolled out.
“What? You have access?” asked Angus.
“I wasn’t sure I could still get in, but it looks like AC hasn’t changed his security. We used to be lab partners.”
“You mean, you helped him with his bug experiments?” asked Billy.
“No, nothing like that. He told me about them, but that wasn’t my kind of thing. We were lab partners at school.”
“Did you know he kept records? They’re all stored in there.” Angus waved at the screen.
“That sounds like him. He’s very organized. Annoyingly so,” said Ivy.
“Another example of the differences between alters,” said Angus. His mother was always telling him to clean up his room, organize his backpack, and remember to do his homework. She probably preferred the organized AC. “You need to read about his last experiment. You were in the hospital then. I mean, your body was in the hospital. You were probably with me.”
Ivy touched the screen and found the location of the experiment files. She thumbed through them until she came to the one labeled Ivy.
“This one?” she asked. Angus nodded.
Ivy began to read.