Something hard was around her wrist, like a manacle. It was the Metatron’s hand. It began walking toward the glass doors. Since it was still gripping Sophia’s wrist this meant it was now dragging her. She had gone almost completely flaccid and couldn’t see well, but as her free hand trailed along the carpet it felt something familiar, and reflexively closed over it: the thin nylon strap of Daisy. Daisy now began dragging along in her wake. She heard glass shattering.

When she woke up it seemed much later. But it wasn’t. Her sense of time had gone out of whack. She was gulping in cold air—real air. Her legs hurt. She opened her eyes and looked up at the robot’s running lights above her against the foggy night sky as it dragged her. It was dragging her down the wooden staircase and her legs hurt because they’d been pulled through broken glass and scraped across stone and wood and were now banging down steps. The sound of the chopper was very close; they were almost to the helipad. Something was involved in the fingers of her free hand: the nylon strap of Daisy. She torqued her head around and saw, from near ground level, the aluminum feet of the Metatron, shod in black neoprene, hitting the pavement of the helipad in an even stride.

She swung her free arm around in a big arc. Daisy followed at the end of its nylon strap and wrapped all the way around the Metatron’s ankles. Its measured tread was spoiled. It teetered for a few moments as immense computations tried to compensate for this unexpected turn of events. Then it simply fell over, banging its head on the skid of the chopper hard enough to nudge the whole aircraft sideways a bit. The rotor was spinning up almost to takeoff speed, carrying most of the helicopter’s weight, the skids barely touching the pad.

Sophia got her feet under her and scrambled up as best as she could with the Metatron still clamping her wrist and the rotors’ downwash battering her. As she did, the fallen robot scraped toward her some distance and she understood that it didn’t actually weigh that much; it was very strong, but its mass was that of a child. It pulled back but couldn’t actually do much until it got its feet replanted. She knew it wanted to drag her into the helicopter’s side door.

She moved away from the side door, which meant she was going toward the tail of the chopper. A warning voice in her head reminded her of the spinning tail rotor, which would chop her to bits if she contacted it.