She gave Peter a pleasant smile.
“Here’s an idea,” she said. “Take that hand cannon out, nice and slow, and toss it off the cliff.”
53
JUNE
She hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, but she’d loved him and feared him for most of her life.
Laptop under her arm, she followed the Yeti into the black barn.
No, she told herself. Not the Yeti. The Yeti is a monster, or maybe a myth.
He’s my dad. Let’s try that for a while.
He led her through the big open work bay where the golden drone had parked itself. Two more drones could have fit comfortably in there, even with all the other stuff. Large boxy equipment filled two walls, plastic and stainless steel with hatches that opened. Wheeled tables occupied most of the rest of the space, holding sections of an articulated assembly that looked like the partial skeleton of a giant bird, either extinct or not yet in existence. The room smelled like her new computer had when she’d taken it out of the box, the pleasing chemical tang of new technology.
“I make the parts for the airframes on 3-D printers,” he said, waving his hand at the machines. “Some plastic, some titanium. That extra-wide one prints the skin, it’s only a few molecules thick.”
“I thought I didn’t have the clearance for this,” she said, only partly joking.
“No more secrets,” he said gently, his craggy face sad. “I kept too many, for too long. Now I can’t remember half of them.” He pushed buttons on a security panel, then opened the door to a stairwell and held it for her. “My office is up here.”
The second floor was a warren of high industrial shelving loaded with outdated equipment and seeping car batteries and crumpled golden drone skin and cracked propeller blades and plastic crates holding fractured shards of failed parts. Maybe there was a system of organization, but if so, she couldn’t discern it. The smell here was of burned electrical insulation and dust, the whole place a fire just waiting for a point of ignition. While she stared at the accumulated detritus of years of experiments, her dad walked into the maze ahead of her. She hurried to catch up.
Rounding a corner, she saw an open space at the end of the barn. Her dad stood at the wide windows, looking out at the pocket valley spread out before him. He turned at her footsteps, his expression that of a man whose thoughts were elsewhere, his piercing blue eyes looking inward.
June knew that look. It was the look of her childhood.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What were we doing?”
“We were trying to get control of the drone,” she said gently.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes.” He sat at a makeshift plywood desk, something intended to be temporary that looked like it had been there for years. It held a barricade of computer monitors and a tangled scatter of hard drives and cables. “Give me a minute.” His hands clattered on the keyboard. The central monitor lit up, new windows appearing.
She looked above the monitors and saw, held to the wall with pushpins, the watercolor of a frog she’d made when she was eight.
She remembered thinking it was the best thing she’d ever made, and knocking on the door of his old lab to show it to him. He’d opened the door and taken the paper from her hand, frowning down at it, saying, “Now isn’t a good time, Juniper.” She’d never seen it again.
Her other watercolors were there, too, trees and frogs, a few landscapes, her attempts at capturing the ridges that contained the valley. Pencil drawings of the house they’d lived in, the old shed that was his first lab. Scribbles in crayon and bright Magic Marker, construction paper, notebook paper, legal paper, scraps. They covered the wall completely. June was not a gifted artist. But here they were.
She turned to look at the rest of the room. Photos of June and her mother, a row of Father’s Day cards she’d made, a half-dozen computer renderings of the evolving drone, and on the other side of the room, on a small wooden table, a thirty-gallon terrarium. It held a few sticks and rocks, some bark, and a plastic pan in which lay a snapping turtle.
Absurdly, June recognized the turtle. Her name was Mrs. Turtle. She had a distinctive marking on the center of her shell, three lighter green triangles in a dark green circle. The terrarium was one of June’s home-school projects when she was eleven, after her mom had left. June had put all kinds of things in there, frogs and insects and worms, and Mrs. Turtle had eaten them all. She blinked up at June, deadly perfection after 300 million years of evolution. She’d gotten bigger since June had left, maybe too big for the terrarium.
June walked back to her father sitting at the computer and put her hands lightly on his enormous shoulders. Somehow it felt okay to touch him now. She wasn’t scared of him anymore. Maybe it was Mrs. Turtle, still alive. “How’s it going?”
He shook his head, still focused on the monitors. “The new security protocols are pretty robust. I can’t get a toehold.”