Laramee's tumbler exploded as it hit the floor, littering the storeroom with shards of glass.

What the hell? I’d never seen Mom so mad in my entire life.

Laramee regarded her coolly, fingertips to his mouth, blood welling from his lower lip. “Ko, why don’t you give us a moment.” He shot me a look as if to say, And don’t forget our agreement.

Except we didn’t have one, because I’d already told Mom about my investigation—everything he’d threatened to tell her. So now I was free to blab about him transiting back to his family.

She stood over him, her shoulders heaving, a thunderstorm behind her eyes. “I’m going to need a really fucking good explanation for why you failed to watch my daughter while I was out chasing our favorite renegade robot all over town. She never would’ve left the apartment if you'd shown up like you promised.”

If Mom was taking out her anger on Laramee instead of me, I sure wasn’t going to object. But ... “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Apparently you fucking do.” She stared me down before turning her wrath back on him. “In case it wasn’t crystal clear, John, this is the part where you explain yourself.”

Laramee leaned back, spreading his arms. “You’re aware I have a day job? I can’t be watching your kid constantly. Something came up with a CI, and I made the call to detour on the way to your apartment. I was like fifteen minutes, tops. Trying to get some info that might help us—the whole reason I joined the force to begin with, right? I had no idea Ko would take the opportunity to steal a dumpster and detonate it over the bay.”

Mom shook her hands. “She’s still half a child! You were supposed to stop her from doing shit like stealing dumpsters from Otokotronics.”

I wasn’t a child. And why was everyone getting on my frigging case today? “It wasn’t from Otokotronics.”

Mom spun around, her double-barrel ire trained on me again. “It wasn’t?”

Hoo boy. She was going to freak. “I kinda stole it from the other world's feds. Talked to a nice FBI lady and then swiped her dumpster.”

Laramee’s shoulders tensed.

Mom pressed her fingertips to rosy cheeks, her eyes searching my face. “You what?”

“Rolled it right out of their parking garage.” I mimed pushing it. “I was trying to stop them from sending you back. They were threatening extradition.” I left out the bit about originally going there to meet a mysterious, incoherent texter.

She bit back her frustration. “No, the other part. You talked to the other world’s FBI?”

“She wanted me to bring her the Talisman.”

Mom shot me a look of incredulity, her hands to her head.

My face grew hot. “I wasn’t gonna do it!” That is, unless it was the only way to save Mom.

“Why don’t you two sit down,” Laramee said with a severe frown, wiping blood with his thumb. “Look, Stanton told me about the bridge. I’m sorry things went down like that. I figured my CI—”

“You figured?” Mom hissed, her eyes flashing. “We had an agreement, John. You could’ve gotten Ko killed.”

“I dunno, Janice,” he said, his cold eyes on me. “I think she did a halfway decent job of that on her own.”

Mom’s face reddened further. She stepped toward him, her arms rigid. “You think this is funny?”

Laramee swung an unflinching gaze up to her. “You see me smiling? Your daughter just popped a Kemper-Holcomb in a civilian area. The blast alone could’ve killed you—and half the people on that bridge. Don’t get me started on all the radiation out there now. Even Stanton’s mechanical bot got its optical sensors completely melted. We never should’ve brought her in—I told you then it was a bad idea, and I’ll gladly say it again now.”

I pushed a chair to the table, wilting into it. Maybe trying to direct a nuke wasn’t the hottest idea. Maybe Mom and Stanton would have reached me if I’d dumped the gun and waited for them. But at least I hadn’t killed anyone, right? It could have been way worse. “You guys know I’m sitting right here. And I’m already in, so you can quit hand-wringing. How about, instead, we talk about why I’m a fucking robot.” I waved my metal fingers. “Because, you know, that’s kinda weird?”

Mom flipped a bucket and slammed it to the floor, squatting to join us with a deep frown mirroring Laramee’s. But then her head dipped and the fight went out of her, like all the anger had burned through what little energy she had left. “We need to get our bags from the cab.”

Laramee pulled out his phone to tap on the screen, his posture softening too. “I’ll have Jim out front take care of it.” He reached into a box behind him, drawing a bottle of bronze liquid labeled with a flowing script I didn’t recognize, a language that maybe wasn't even from this world. He retrieved three glasses from a shelf and poured a good four fingers in each.

What was this? A cop serving a minor?

Mom dug in her pocket, producing one of those golden alcohol-neutralizing pills.

“Let her have the drink,” Laramee said, giving me eyes like he maybe regretted ripping into me but still believed what he said. “I know I’d want one while hearing this.”

She pocketed the pill, failing to hide her lingering resentment radiating at Laramee.

This was it, the reason I was a robot. “Start at the beginning. No more fucking secrets.”

Mom heaved a tortured sigh, her forehead damp. “It started in the Synthetic Life Lab at Otokotronics where your father and I worked. Confidential project, R&D on autonomous bots for live-action gaming. Non-player characters, so they could cut out the costly human pilots. I'm talking real AI, not the large language model garbage passing for it in this world.”

I sipped my drink, recoiling at the woody burn spidering through my chest. “A secret project? Must’ve been tough to keep quiet.” I leveled a knowing gaze at Laramee. It wasn’t like I’d spill about him transiting back to his family, but leverage could be useful. No harm in making him squirm.

He shot me eye daggers, his jaw taut again.

Mom scooted her bucket forward, oblivious. “We were used to it. Management was holding us to a tight timeline. But we had to discard the prior art anyway—human brain scans with the unfortunate quality of degrading over time.”

I nodded. That lined up with what Agent Summers said about Athleisure.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Mom continued. “So we started from scratch. Our first attempt couldn’t walk straight, had trouble telling golf balls from grenades. We fixed those issues, but we kept finding others. Soon it became clear we couldn’t preload a bot with a complete mental model of the world without the lived experience to back it up.”

I wasn’t even copied from a real person like Athleisure was. What did that make me then? It was unclear if it was the drink or my fucked-up day—or just hearing all this for the first time ever—but my head was swimming again. “So what’d you do?”

Laramee sipped from his tumbler. “They switched to growing an AI from infancy, so it’d get direct experience. Leveraged an experimental bio-based platform for the chassis, tech I promised your father I’d keep under wraps.” He shot me a look like I owed him a medal. “Flesh and blood married with a synthgrown skeleton, accretive biometal. All the better to transit portals.”

That was why the EMPs didn’t do anything to me. “So, basically … AI Wolverine.”

“Something like that.” Mom absently tapped to the beat of the rock ballad thumping through the walls. “The AIs were slow to grow, but the results astounded us. We had no idea we’d get something so … alive. We kept at it, refining and iterating and testing and …” She trailed off, lost in memory.

My voice was a whisper. “And … what?”

She refocused, regarding me with a wistful look. “And seven robots later, there you were. All curled up in a crib in the lab, making googly eyes at your stuffed dolphin.”

I swallowed, my face ablaze, fingers of frost in my chest. I was literally grown in a lab. A test subject turned child. “You and Dad designed me.”

Mom nodded solemnly, wiping her forehead and exchanging a look with Laramee. “The problem,” she continued, “was when we discovered Otokotronics’ actual plan for you. The chassis design they’d made us use? Modeled after the CEO’s daughter. They were going to transit you to this world, get you set up with an identity and a life—”

Laramee cut in. “Then when they were ready to escape the failing climate in their world, they’d blast over your brain with the CEO’s kid. He had other bio bots built for the rest of his family too. For all the executives’ families. When I discovered their plan, I brought it to the union.” He fixed me with a cool gaze. “But only once I knew it was safe to do so.”

Was Laramee threatening me?

“They were going to erase you, Ko,” Mom said softly.

I gulped, hunching in my chair. Jeez. Summers hadn’t told me the half of it. Somewhere there was another girl besides Ko Prime running around with my face—only this one was the real deal. The original. “That’s when you took me and left for this world.”

Mom’s eyes shone with the glow of distant fire. “Once I saw what we’d made, how real you were, I couldn’t let them kill you.” She tipped her tumbler, staring into its depths without drinking. “My only goal all these years was to keep you safe. I need you to understand that. Could I have done things differently? Of course. But everything I did was for you.”

Something caught behind my sternum. Guilt. Doubt. Mom had done this out of love. But noble reasons weren’t an excuse for lying to me, right? My new hand curled around my glass, the metal fingers distorted behind the liquid. “Didn’t they have backups? If I’m an AI, just data, they could’ve put a backup of my brain in another body and continued the project where you left off.”

“We destroyed the backups.” Mom pushed her fingers through her hair, the ponytail all but undone. “We destroyed a lot of things that day.”

Laramee cleared his throat. “That’s when we fled to this world to escape their retribution. Refugees, watching each other’s backs.” He gave me another loaded look. “We did the right thing, no matter the cost.”

Uh huh, sure Laramee. I should keep your secrets because you’re such a swell guy.

“What he’s not saying is, prior to his recent … lapse in judgment, he saved all of our lives. Fifteen years ago, he risked his position at the company to give us access to the portal.”

Laramee thumbed his glass, a far-off look in his eyes. “We—I—did some pretty bad things for Otokotronics. Your mother gave me an opportunity to not be that person anymore. For redemption. We destroyed it all before we left. The labs, the data, everything.” He twisted his wedding band about his finger. “You’re all that’s left.”

“What about the girl in the dumpster? Where’d she come from?” My mind flashed to that grisly video, Athleisure letting Ko Prime down as her life drained away.

Mom swirled her drink. “Otokotronics must’ve slowly rebuilt the AI division and reused the existing chassis design for her. How she came to be in this world though—with the Talisman, no less—I honestly don’t know. For years, I was terrified about them coming after you. Taking back what I stole.”

“But they weren’t, were they?” All that paranoia, the midnight road trips while Mom kept me in the dark. I rubbed my face, jerking at the metal fingertips on my cheek.

“Originally, they probably were.” Mom swayed on her bucket, her eyes closing. “But when they got wind of the Talisman here, their focus must’ve shifted—until you led the rogue bot in his stolen van to our front door. If Otokotronics was paying attention, they’re probably real interested now in what we told him about the Talisman. And they won’t stop until they find out.”

My fingers gouged the chair. Mom didn’t even know if Otokotronics was coming after us all these years. But she lied anyway. “If they catch me, will they … saw my head open to see what I know?”

Laramee scoffed. “That only works on piloted mechanical bots with digital recordings. I’m afraid they’d have to torture it out of you.”

I sure wasn’t waiting around for that. “So what’re we gonna do?” We still had no idea what Ko Prime was planning with the Talisman before she was killed.

Mom exchanged a puzzled look with Laramee. “We need to get you checked out after your dip in the bay, not to mention your wrist and that blast. You have some basic radiation hardening, but we still—”

“No, I mean how will we find out where the girl lost the Talisman, what happened to her? If Otokotronics finds it first, we’re all dead, right?” I really needed to fill them in on the whole Athleisure murdering her thing. Plenty of time to get into that later.

Mom blinked back surprise. “Ko, honey, it’s time for you to rest, recover. John is right about one thing. You could’ve died on that bridge. We’ll handle it from here.”

After everything today, it was tempting to rest. I sure as hell felt motivation for that—in my wrist, my face, my shoulder. I knew in my robot bones I should trust Mom and Laramee to take care of this. But how could I trust her ever again? Even if I tried to lay low, part of me wouldn’t rest until I discovered where Ko Prime had lost the Talisman—before Otokotronics found it themselves.

A heaviness settled into the pit of my stomach. My limbs weighed a thousand pounds. It was like the rage from earlier had collapsed down to a black hole at my center. “The girl … How did they even know how to rebuild her? Did … Dad do it?”

Laramee spun his ring around a finger like it might generate electricity. “After we transited here, your father stayed behind to destroy the portal with a massive EMP.”

“He sacrificed himself for us.” Mom frowned, one hand massaging the other. “After that …” She gave a feeble shrug. “I’m sure he wishes he could’ve been with you all these years.”

“Does he?” I scoffed. “If what you’re saying is true, I’m just a lab rat made in the image of some rich white dude’s kid. You didn’t even provide any genetic material, did you?”

Mom swallowed, her chin quivering. “No, but—”

I leaned in, my jaw fixed, a voice to fell trees. “So, you’re my mother just as much as he’s my father.”

She reeled like I’d struck her. The bucket scraped and she stood uncertainly, the crunch of glass underfoot. Laramee tutted his disapproval.

I regretted letting the words cross my lips. I’d just wanted to hurt her a fraction as much as she’d hurt me, lying all those years.

“That’s not fair,” Mom breathed. She put a hand to her mouth, her face screwing up, her eyes flicking around the room.

I shouldn’t have said it. I knew that. I was just having a really hard day. A hard life. “I’m sorry. I just … Everything feels like it’s coming apart.”

Mom lunged at the trash can in the corner, vomiting violently. Then she closed her eyes, a look of despair washing over her.

I leapt to my feet, my heart booming. “Are you okay? Are you … knocked up?” I allowed myself a nervous laugh. “That’d be pretty ironic after all the jokes.”

She turned back with a bitter smile, drawing a wrist over her mouth. Her skin was flushed, blotchy patches on her neck and arms.

Laramee rose, his head hung between sloped shoulders.

“What?” My voice climbed, my gaze bouncing between them. An icy hand clutched my heart. “What is it?”

Mom’s eyes were deep pools of sorrow, her mouth working wordlessly.

Laramee stepped into the silence, his voice hoarse, almost a whisper.

“I’ll get the Geiger counter.”