Leo took in what was left of Nine. The wires with their blackened tips. The hydraulic fluid leaking from twisted joints. There was the compartment with the rocket launcher, all dented in. And there was his central processor, torn free from his thorax and shattered to pieces, taking with it all of his memory. Nothing left to salvage.

“Skits, I’m sorry,” Leo said softly. “He was . . .” He searched for the right words, then remembered there were no right words. None that anybody had ever shared with him, anyway.

“He was a robot,” Skits said. “It’s fine. You can say it. I know that’s what everybody’s thinking. He was just a machine. Just fuses and gears, microchips and metal plates welded together. So why get all worked up about it?” Skits couldn’t cry. She was incapable of it. That was something else they had in common, he guessed.

Leo bowed his head. “I was actually going to say that I thought he was really brave. He saved us back there, you know? Even though he was hurt, he kept fighting. He was awesome.”

“He was awesome,” Skits agreed. She let out a mechanical groan. “I didn’t know anything could feel like this.”

We’re all entitled to our adaptable emotional algorithms, Leo thought. He reached over and placed a hand on the robot’s chassis. “It hurts a lot at first, but then a little bit less as it goes.”

He didn’t tell her the other part—that it never completely goes away, no matter how much time passes. He guessed she’d figure that out on her own.

At last Skits straightened herself up, the music stopping abruptly. She swiveled around to smile at Gareth. “So this is your brother? The one you kept whining about? He’s cuter than you.”

Leo ignored the compliment/insult and held his watch out to her. “Do you think you could hook this up to the facility’s com systems? I’d ask Crayt to do it, but . . . you know . . .”

“He was shot and left for dead by a silver-plated, steel-hearted, double-crossing robotic scum-sucking backstabber?” Skits glanced at the mashed metal carcass that used to be Number One, then used her extendable claw to pluck the watch out of Leo’s hand. “Yeah, let me see what I can do.”

He and Gareth followed her to a console on the back wall. One appendage popped from her torso and locked into the computer interface receptacle while another plugged into the watch’s port.

“We were going to watch the sunset together, you know. He said the scattering of the ultraviolet wavelengths sometimes overheated his photoreceptors. He was sensitive like that,” Skits mused. “All right. Connection established.” Random code ran faintly across the console’s screen. “It’s using the old Aykari servers as a relay for widespread data retrieval, though it’s also using encryption to make sure it’s not intercepted. Does this thing have a virus?”

Leo looked at his watch face, which was really freaking out now, flashing different colors and strings of unrecognizable symbols. He thought back to Cerebro, picturing Mac stretched out in his chair, shaking uncontrollably while a digital spider drove its fangs into his avatar. He was about to tell Skits to disconnect, afraid that somehow his watch had been corrupted, when the robot said, “Hold up, I think it found something.”