“My, but you’re keeping us busy these days,” Cindy exclaims as we board.

“Got to make up for the last few months, right?” Evan laughs.

“Well, that’s fair,” Cindy says. “I did miss you boys something terrible.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, taking my seat. “I have a feeling that you’ll be sick of us soon.”

“Tired of Tom’s kids? Never!” She gives my shoulder a pat. “Any food for you this evening?”

“We had dinner already, but if you have some desserts I wouldn’t say no to that,” Evan says. “Whatever you have handy is fine.”

I nod in agreement.

“Well then you get my specialty. Two brownie sundaes, coming up,” she says, disappearing into the back of the plane.

Once we finish our sundaes, which are fantastic, Evan and I spend the rest of the flight trying to figure out where Jeff might have gone or what he might be planning. Despite a whole mess of reports from the small army of PIs that Alan hired, nothing seems even remotely useful. Our last call with Alan and Lin also came up with no leads. Lin expanded her camera network all over the greater St. Louis area and still didn’t spot him anywhere. My guess is that Jeff has probably figured out by now how we tracked him down and won’t make the same mistakes again.

I wish we could find something on him now. If we wait until he gets the implant working, it’ll be even harder to track him. He won’t even need to take the roads anymore. He’ll be able to just suit up and fly at freeway speeds to wherever he wants to go.

So back home we go. There’s no point sticking around here anymore. We hadn’t heard from the Geologists when we took off. Hopefully they’ll have something good to tell us about the corpses in Topeka when we pick them up. Well, as good as news about dead bodies can be.

Evan and I have just about finished describing all the ways we failed to each other when the plane lands. Stan, Phil, Steph, and Lisa hop on.

“Good news, big brothers,” Steph declares, her two big puffs of hair bouncing as she flops into her seat.

“Lay it on us,” Evan says.

“There was a trap in one of the bodies, but we got it,” Phil says.

“Nice,” Evan says, giving him a fist bump.

“So what did it look like? What kind of trigger did it have?” I ask.

“Take a look,” Stan says, placing a small box on the narrow table. “It was stuffed deep down the trachea of one of the bodies.”

“How’d you get it?” I ask. “Or do I want to know.”

“Probably better if you don’t know,” Steph laughs in a way that makes me really want the whole story.

“Just tell me no one got hurt and there was no property damage you didn’t fix.”

“No one got hurt,” Lisa says. “And I fixed the hole in the morgue wall. No one will know we were there.”

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I give her a quizzical look.

“It was a small hole.” She puts up her hands defensively. “Hardly noticeable.”

“Well, good work,” Evan says.

I pick up the box and open the lid. There’s a mesh container surrounding the contents, a faraday cage to block electronic signals. Smart precaution. I sync back up with some of my sleeping bots and form a similar but much larger conductive cage around both myself and the box. Safely encapsulated, I tear down the small cage in the box and take a look at Jeff’s creation.

It’s tiny, smaller than a grain of rice, with an antenna wire that’s around the thickness of a human hair and several centimeters long. I think it’s dormant. At least, it’s not emitting any signals on any frequency I can see. No wonder we missed it, especially since Evan was focused on the brains when we saw the corpses. There are a pair of worker bots connected by very fine wires to a miniscule microcontroller and a tiny battery for power. After carefully documenting the setup in my index, I disconnect all the parts from each other and drop the cage.

“Thanks for keeping it intact for me,” I tell them. “It’s safe now. I’m going to send the controller to the dev team to see if they can pull any code off of it. We’ll check out the bots at the lab at home.”

I repurpose the box that Stan had packed it in, putting the antenna, battery, and controller back inside and rebuilding the cage, just in case. I seal up the top and etch the address of the SynTech office onto the side. I make another box from materials I cannibalize from my cloud and pack up the pair of Jeff’s nanobots for when we can examine them back at the lab on campus.

“Hey Cindy,” I call out.

“Yes, Noah?” she says, emerging from the cockpit. “We’ll be just a few minutes waiting on an available runway before we can go again.”

“Thanks,” I tell her, “but can you get this delivered to Chuck at the SynTech office as soon as you can?”

“Sure thing,” she says with a smile as she accepts the box. “There’s a courier service with a drop-off here at the airport. Let me get this to them and I’ll be back in time for takeoff.”

She bustles off out the boarding door with the package.

“So, any problems getting it?” Evan asks our younger sibs.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Phil says.

“Yeah,” Lisa adds. “We just parked near the morgue and reached in with our clouds. Phil kept watch while we each took a body. Steph found the thing in one of them, the other two didn’t have anything.”

“Well good work, all of you,” I tell them. “You might have saved the world today.”

“Yeah, we’re doing that on the regular these days,” Evan says. He gives them a quick version of the events in St. Louis.

“Wow,” Steph says. “I guess no more of you two going off on your own then. You’re going to need more backup.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “I feel like an idiot. If we’d brought more people with us we could have caught him and we’d be done with this nightmare.”

“I still can’t believe Jeff would do all of this,” Stan says. “I mean, I know he did, but he was always nice to me. He was weird, but he was never bad until he went crazy and killed Father.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say, instinctively bracing myself for a wave of guilt that doesn’t come. It should be hard, knowing that Jeff’s current state is all my fault, but I just don’t feel anything where the shame used to be. “He and I got along alright too, but he’s not the guy you remember. He’s out there killing innocent people. And he’s a danger to the world.”

I fill them in on the details of Jeff’s bot swarm and how Evan and I stopped it. They all nod soberly. The room gets quiet. Cindy returns and takes a look around.

“Did somebody die while I was out?” she asks. “You all look lower than a bunch of bow-legged caterpillars.”

It’s funny how little we tell her. As far as she knows, we’ve been running around for fun or routine business these days.

“We’re all right,” I reassure her. “Just talking about some family business. How long until takeoff?”

“Should be just a minute now. I saw the last plane before us on our runway taking off when I got back,” she says. “As soon as Bob goes through the system checks, we should be ready to go.”

We’re in the air soon. We spend the flight talking about the automine tech the Geologists have been working on. They should revolutionize mineral extraction, allowing near-perfect collection of every useful thing a mining site can provide with no pollution or unusable byproducts. I knew they were all smart generally, but as the conversation gets into their domain of expertise, I realize how brilliant they really are. Say what else you will about Father’s methods, they sure get some amazing results.