That night Lacy lay hollow-eyed, staring at the ceiling, and there were no conversations about anything at all, just the constellation lamp lighting their bodies in its cool glow. But when everyone was asleep, Lacy found where their parents had hidden the keys and stole the car, leaving it crashed in an abandoned neighborhood among burned-down houses. The police tracked her GPS, brought her back, and she escaped again. Their parents began to shut her down every evening at dusk, and she lay in bed silent and pale, as though she were broken. But during the day, when she was powered back on, she escaped while their parents were at work, taking their mother’s jewelry with her. Their parents tracked her location, brought her home, placed another sterilized chip in her, but when she went missing again, Joey heard his parents through the wall.

“We don’t have a choice, she’s malfunctioning,” his father said. “I don’t want to do it either, but we have to think about Joey now.”

“And leave her out there?”

His dad sighed heavily. “What else can we do? Shut her down every moment she’s at home? Spend every night finding her, only to have her run away again?”

“It just feels heartless,” his mother said.

“We can’t help Lacy anymore. She’s becoming dangerous to us all. And it’s better than recycling her. Maybe out there she’ll find some kind of help we can’t provide.”

And yet, Lacy’s light sat blinking only a couple towns away, her GPS unmoving on Joey’s inner map. It would be so easy to bring her home. He lay there watching Orion’s constellation pass across the ceiling, return a third and fourth time, until his father was snoring. Then he pulled off his Avengers blanket, changed out of his pajamas, opened his window, and slipped down the oak tree and into the cab that was waiting at the end of the block.

Though it was late November, the front door of the ranch house was wide open. The lawn was strewn with plastic bags of garbage, pizza boxes, and a child’s tricycle. Joey saw a man sitting at the kitchen table inside, working on something. What little light there was came from a lava lamp that filled the room with a mottled blue, sending shadows across the walls and momentarily illuminating a second man who was also sitting at the table, drinking a beer. Joey knocked on the screen door, and the man with the beer turned toward him.

“I’m looking for my sister.”

It felt like forever before the man answered. “Come on in,” he replied, and Joey stepped into the blue, underwater glow of the house, the screen door closing on its springs behind him. The other man had stopped working on whatever it was he had in front of him and turned to look at Joey.