“Kenzie. Remember when I was a little kid, when I was really small. The doctors said I wasn’t growing properly—you took me and Mum on all those hospital visits for years.”

“Of course.” His grandfather grew suddenly absorbed in studying the biscuits. “Go on.”

“Yeah, well, he started picking on me then, at primary school. Then, dunno. It just became, like, his hobby. I thought, if I had the tablet . . . I just wanted to see what I could do.”

He fell silent. This was the first he’d had a chance to talk about the tablet at all, but it occurred to him there was another reason he had kept it, one he couldn’t bring himself to say. This old toy and the power it held were his sole connection to the strange other life his father had abandoned everything for. Abandoned him for.

“I wonder if there wasn’t something else,” the old man mused. “If it was entirely your decision. Maybe the tablet simply didn’t want to be destroyed. The power has been woken and doesn’t want to go back to sleep and . . .” His grandfather let the thought trail off and sat back, glancing from Alex to the robot. “And so how have you been getting on with it?”

Alex looked up. “Huh? How do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean, young man. Have you”—the old man leaned forward—“been able to use it?”

“Oh. Sort of. A little. At first. If I got in trouble, like a fight. If someone was going to hurt me, I could make them stop. Make them go away. I mean, I wasn’t doing anything bad.” His mouth was dry. He tried more tea. “But I didn’t really know what I was doing, how I was doing it. I tried to learn. But then, well. It just went away.”

“Went away?” His grandfather was following intently.

“That’s the only way I can explain it.” Alex shrugged. “When I tried to . . . contact it, I couldn’t find it. There was nothing. For weeks now. Months. Well, not until . . .”

“Until?” his grandfather prompted.

“Tonight. At David’s.” He told his grandfather about it. “The feeling, the power, it just came from nowhere. I didn’t try to use it, I didn’t want to use it. It just started, and I almost couldn’t stop it. I don’t even know what it was going to do. What I was going to do. You really didn’t see those heads back there?” Alex blinked around the café. It suddenly felt weird, sitting in a room full of strangers.