“I bet I could,” Kenzie muttered. “I’d scare away a dog, and even if I didn’t, I’d fall in love with him, and then he’d go back to your farm and I’d have to say goodbye, and I’d get my heart broken again.”

“Maybe a puppy shouldn’t go back with Aunt Rachel,” Candy ventured. Her head turned Rachel’s way.

Rachel didn’t look impressed.

“I couldn’t,” Kenzie said. “I don’t know how.”

“You can build cameras that see the past,” Chicken Little called out.

“They’re so young, though.”

“It would take a lot of work,” Rachel said, with a tone that was more than a warning, or it was a warning compounded on several levels.

“Aw, shoot,” Candy said. “Work ethic and Kenzie? I don’t know how you can put those things in the same sentence.”

“Ha ha,” Kenzie muttered, keeping her voice quiet so as not to disturb the sleeping puppies. It didn’t seem to matter that the pups with Chicken Little and Darlene were yipping, and the two youngest Heartbroken were stampeding around the place, banging into wooden stable doors. “Oh, crap, actually—”

She stopped hissing the words when she noticed my presence at the entrance. More plainly, she said, “—the time. I haven’t been checking my computer. I have a shift at the workshop. Data to collate. Hi Antares.”

I checked my phone. “Five twenty.”

“Not for another half hour then,” Kenzie said, relaxing back into the chair. “Sorry I haven’t been in touch.”

“It’s fine. So long as you’re okay.”

“Forgot to check your tech,” Candy said. “You might be in love. Or the world’s ending.”

Kenzie looked down at the puppies.

“Everything good?” I asked.

Kenzie nodded, not raising her eyes.

“You said Dragon had a message for me.”

“She’s having tech delivered. She asked me to get some measurements on stress, distribution. Stuff. Call her later?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Can you leave your eye thing? I’m doing updates when I get to the lab.”

“Okay,” I said. “I have no idea how to remove it.”

She waved me over. I floated up to her.

She pulled the tech free, and I could feel the metal tines running along the insides of my eyelids, and the bone of my eye sockets. It took a second for my vision to adjust afterward.

“I wish I had workshop time right now,” Kenzie said.

“Enjoy the moment,” I said. “Friends, puppies.”

Candy wiggled her foot, the heel resting on the seat by Kenzie’s hip. The toe of Candy’s boot rubbed against Kenzie’s side.

“It’s because I’m enjoying the moment that I should run,” Kenzie said, not lifting her eyes from the animals. “Get out while I’m ahead. Let things… settle down.”