“That,” Igby says, sighing, “is Apple-Moth.”

“And … why?” I ask.

“We plan on using it for missions beyond the scrambler,” Igby says, as if I’m supposed to understand what that means.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve set up a surveillance scrambler with a three-mile radius. It pretty much makes us invisible to Mosquitoes and any other tech that Happy is scanning the city with,” he says, using the slang term for surveillance drones. They got the name Mosquitoes due to their size and the sound of their high-pitched solar engines. “But eventually we’ll need to go out farther than the three-mile radius, and when we do, we’ll need to take a mobile scrambler with us—Apple-Moth. We modified it to include a cloak, a jammer, and—if all else fails—a simple laser light to blind cameras.”

“All right,” I say, “and what’s with the personality?”

“It was a kid’s toy back before, you know, the world ended. It actually runs on Happy tech, but we managed to disconnect it from the network. Pod has tried to erase its personality but, I swear, it just gets more and more annoying each time we try to delete it.”

“You two?” I say. “The guys who hot-wire cars and make ancient trains run as if by magic; you can’t erase a toy’s personality?”

“Shut up!” Igby replies, shoving me. “It’s impossible!”

“Yeah, sure,” I say, laughing.

“Fuck off,” Igby says, picking up the tiny drone and placing it on a table. He smiles. “Come over here, I want to show you something.”

Igby leads the way to what must have been a checkout desk at some point in the distant past. He jumps and slides over the varnished wooden desktop. I walk around and watch him remove a thin rug from the floor and place it on a chair. He begins to remove floorboards until a trapdoor is revealed.

“Check this out,” Igby says, grabbing the same laptop he’d used to start the subway train and descending a set of wooden stairs into the darkness.

I follow him down and find myself in a narrow corridor that leads to something up ahead that I can’t quite make out.

“What is this?” I ask.

“This is where we go if the Mosquito scrambler fails and Happy comes looking for us,” Igby says, his face lit by the screen of the laptop.

He types in a command and the circular metal door up ahead of us begins to unwind, like a complex puzzle, until it is fully open.

“What … what is it?” I ask.

“A panic room,” Igby says, stepping inside.