Amy thought back to Rick's reader. "I thought you had bluescreened, before."
"Me?" Javier snorted. "Please. That only happens to babies, and it's never happened to one of mine. We're very wellwritten, our clade, no gaps." He nodded at her with his chin. "So don't go biting anybody else, OK? You might lose those nice new legs of yours if you do."
But Amy's focus was not on her legs. "People just throw out bluescreens?"
"Well, yeah." Javier shrugged. "What's the big deal? They're frozen, and they're tough to fix, and we can always make more."
"They're babies!"
"Ay, you sound like such a breeder." Javier turned her around so she faced the pile of lifeless vN. "Look. They're non-functional. They can't eat, they can't grow, they're totally four-oh-fucked."
"Nobody throws out human babies when something like this happens to them!"
"Of course not! That's sick. Did your grandma come up with that?" Javier shuddered.
No. You thought up that brilliant little idea all on your own.
Reaching behind his head, he untied the sling and set Junior on the ground with the other iterations. He pulled the shirt back on. "Don't move," he said to his son. He nodded at Amy. "Let's go get that feedstock."
Amy pointed. "You're just leaving him there?"
"Relax. I'm camouflaging him. I don't want him getting in the way while we do the hard part." He gestured. "Come on. I'm starving."
Amy gave Junior a long look as they walked away. Finally Javier just grabbed her wrist and tugged her along behind him. They skirted the sleeping camelbots carefully, occasionally leaping over them and waiting for them to wake. Javier counted off the seconds on his fingers, to show her. He jumped a little ahead of her each time, and he waited for her to land before springing forward. But there wasn't so much garbage close to the guardhouse – maybe the humans wanted to avoid the smell – and soon only an empty stretch of foam and fence lay between them and their goal.
"Shit." Javier nodded at the guardhouse, where the one light glimmered and danced in a bottom-floor window. Beyond, the compiler sent steam wafting into the night air. "That building and the fence around it are too big for one jump."
"Do you think the roof is charged?"
Javier reached inside his pocket, and plucked out Rick and Melissa's keys. He undid a keychain from the ring, leapt high and hurled it at the roof. It sparked there like a mosquito caught in a lantern. He landed and sucked his teeth. "There goes that idea." He turned to her. "The moment your toes touch the ground, you jump. OK? And no squealing. You make this little noise when you're in the air, and you sound like a kid on a rollercoaster."
"You've taken your kids on rollercoasters?"
Javier took off into the air. Amy followed. She landed inside the narrow strip of sponge between the guardhouse and the fence. Inside, a guard was watching a display.
Amy's dad was on it.
"Jack Patterson, human father of vN fugitive Amy Patterson and domestic partner of murder suspect Charlotte Patterson, was arrested Wednesday for assaulting a police officer during a pro-vN protest."
The display cycled through various shots of her father: flipping grey slabs of vN meat on the barbecue; holding Amy on his shoulders with the Malibu Pier stretching behind them and into the Pacific on a sunny day; kissing her mom under the red paper lantern of a vN kaiseki house in Oakland – the place he'd proposed to her after hearing about the Cascadia quake, that Amy recognized from his almost nightly retelling of the story. Then the display cycled to footage of her father in an orange jumpsuit. The guard watching began idly squeezing something on his chin.
"Amy!" Hissing, Javier yanked down on her hand, hard. Her knees gave.
"Patterson's father, insurance magnate Jonathan Patterson, issued a public statement today saying that he had no plans to offer legal assistance to his son, whom he disowned seven years ago."
Amy stared out into the field of garbage. Somewhere, someone had her father in chains. Somewhere, someone could be interrogating him about her and her mother. He was alone somewhere dark and frightening, and she had no idea where or how to get there.
Don't even think about helping him. Look what happened the last time you tried helping. If you had just left me alone, none of this would have happened.
"My dad isn't a mean guy," she said. "He doesn't even yell."
"In a press conference today, FBI vN specialists said that experiments on Charlotte Patterson have yet to conclusively determine whether her failsafe…"
"They're experimenting on my mother?"
Javier rolled his eyes. "What did you think was going to happen?" he asked. "Did you think they wouldn't start investigating your mom once they figured out what Portia could do? Did you think your old man would sit by and let that happen? He's meat, Amy. They're possessive."