Cinder shuddered and wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Please stand back from the letumosis victim,” said one of the androids, positioning itself between Adri and the hover as Garan was lifted into its belly.
“Garan, no! NO!”
Pearl and Peony latched back on to their mother’s sides, both screaming for their father, but perhaps they were too afraid of the androids to go any closer. The androids rolled themselves back up into the hover. The doors shut. The sirens and the lights filled up the quiet suburb before fading slowly away. Adri and her daughters stayed clumped together in the snow, sobbing and clutching each other while the neighbors watched. While Cinder watched, wondering why her eyes stayed so dry—stinging dry—when dread was encompassing her like slush freezing over.
“What’s happened?”
Cinder glanced down. The android had woken up and disconnected herself from the charging station and now stood before her with her sensor faintly glowing.
She’d done it. She’d fixed the android. She’d proven her worth.
But her success was drowned out by their sobs and the memory of the sirens. She couldn’t quite grasp the unfairness of it.
“They took Garan away,” she said, licking her lips. “They called him a letumosis victim.”
A series of clicks echoed inside the android’s body. “Oh, dear…not Garan.”
Cinder barely heard her. In saying the words, she realized that her brain had been downloading information for some time, but she’d been too caught up in everything to realize it. Now dozens of useless bits of information were scrolling across her vision. Letumosis, also called the Blue Fever or the Plague, has claimed thousands of lives since the first known victims of the disease died in northern Africa in May of 114 T.E…. Cinder read faster, scanning until she found the words that she feared, but had somehow known she would find. To date, there have been no known survivors.
Iko was speaking again and Cinder shook her head to clear it. “—can’t stand to see them cry, especially lovely Peony. Nothing makes an android feel more useless than when a human is crying.”
Finding it suddenly hard to breathe, Cinder deserted the doorway and slumped back against the inside wall, unable to listen to the sobs any longer. “You won’t have to worry about me, then. I don’t think I can cry anymore.” She hesitated. “Maybe I never could.”
“Is that so? How peculiar. Perhaps it’s a programming glitch.”
She stared down into Iko’s single sensor. “A programming glitch.”
“Sure. You have programming, don’t you?” She lifted a spindly arm and gestured toward Cinder’s steel prosthetic. “I have a glitch, too. Sometimes I forget that I’m not human. I don’t think that happens to most androids.”
Cinder gaped down at Iko’s smooth body, beat-up treads, three-fingered prongs, and wondered what it would be like to be stuck in such a body and not know if you were human or robot.
She raised the pad of her finger to the corner of her right eye, searching for wetness that wasn’t there.
“Right. A glitch.” She feigned a nonchalant smile, hoping the android couldn’t detect the grimace that came with it. “Maybe that’s all it is.”