I nodded, finished a text to Adrian, and stretched my legs, still coming to terms with the return to my old body. Beside me in the seat sat the wooden box Ms. Terwilliger had brought, and I picked it up for a closer look. Free of its sealing enchantment, there was nothing extraordinary about it now. In the month since Jill’s disappearance, there’d been a lot of speculation about who would’ve taken her. Almost always, we’d laid the blame on some Moroi dissident who didn’t support Lissa. Yet, this clearly showed evidence of human magic, which kind of turned everything we’d believed upside down. Aside from me, we knew of no magic-using humans working with Moroi.

I could only hope this museum offered some answers, as unlikely as it seemed. Inside the box, the words on that flyer glared up at me: COME PLAY, SYDNEY.

Once we had our coffee, the drive passed uneventfully, with our only slowdown being summertime construction scattered along the highway. Honestly, it would have been a pleasant road trip, if not for the fact we were all still keyed up with worry and tension. I was worried Adrian might do something reckless back at Court. And, of course, I was worried about Jill. Eddie clearly was too, and rather than make him feel better, this new lead had only increased his agitation. He barely said two words to us the whole drive. We still made good time overall, rolling up to the Pittsburgh Robot Museum in late afternoon. A hand-painted sign declared that it was “world famous,” but none of us had ever heard of it. Judging from the empty parking lot, not many people had.

“We’re usually busier on weekends,” explained the attendant at the admission window. We bought three tickets and stepped inside.

“Please come in, please come in,” boomed a robot standing near the entrance. It didn’t move and had been patched with duct tape in a number of places. In its arms, it held a long, rectangular welcome sign.

The bulk of the museum was contained inside one large gallery that displayed a motley assortment of robots used in both entertainment and practical business applications. Most of the displays were static, but a few were animated, like a mini assembly line showing a robot that checked for manufacturing quality control. A conveyor belt on an endless loop sent ceramic mugs around and around past a boxy-looking device that paused and scanned each one, flashing either red or green lights, depending on whether it found a defect.

An adjacent room displayed “A History of Robotics” along its walls. It included mythological origins, like automatons that served the Greek god Hephaestus, which I thought was a nice touch. The bulk of the timeline focused on developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and then ended with THE FUTURE: ???