V's POV
As soon as I thought Sade had woken up, I ran up the stairs.
So fast that I stumbled on the last step.
"Are you alright?" she asked, concern in her voice as she closed the bathroom door behind her.
That was the question I had wanted to ask her ever since I got back from squash practice yesterday. When I called her name and received no response, I went to check her room.
She was asleep already. It was still early in the evening, though. I had been looking forward to our ritual nighttime together.
The same question came to me the next morning when I found her still sleeping.
"I am," I said, straightening, hand steady on the stair rail. "And you? Are you feeling okay?"
"Yes, I am," she answered, not meeting my eyes. Her hands smoothed folds in her skirt as she passed in front of me and headed down the stairs.
"I ordered breakfast," I said, following her as if to apologize for doing something she usually liked to do.
"Perfect. I'm starving."
She reached for a toast and took a bite. Poly crawled to her feet, whirring a welcome greeting for her.
My cleaning robot had never done that for me.
But then, I had never thought much about its existence before.
"You slept for a long time," I mentioned carefully, trying not to seem like I was monitoring her every move. "Did you need system updates or anything like that, maybe?"
Sade frowned, thinking as she poured herself some warm tea.
"I did, didn't I?" she answered, and, as I looked closer at her now, I realized she didn't look rested at all, despite the hours of sleep she must have had. "I was a bit tired yesterday. I thought I'd take a short nap before you returned home... I guess I passed out for the night," she chuckled, pouring another cup for me.
I nodded slowly.
"Are you feeling sick?" I asked, raising my hand to check her head temperature. Her processors had to be around there, right?
"No, I feel fine," she waved my hand away.
"And what about this?"
I went to fetch the green dress I'd found by the printer's shredder. It looked like it had been partially shredded before falling to the floor. The machine appeared to have struggled with the zipper part.
Sade's face fell as she looked at it.
"I didn't like it anymore," she said quickly, looking back at the breakfast table.
I remembered that was the dress she wore yesterday when I dropped her off at the library. She looked great in it, but also, I had no valuable opinion on fashion.
As I looked too long at the dress, Sade walked over and snatched it from my hands.
"I hate the color," she glared at the dress, as if trying to justify her decision. She put it back in the shredder and turned it on the higher power option this time, leaving no more chances for the zipper.
"I thought green was your favorite color?" I asked, watching small fabric shreds fly around. Poly immediately came by to swallow the dust.
"I can change my mind, can't I?" she said with a smile, her tone playful but clearly signaling this conversation was over.
Sade's POV
For the next few days, I kept pretending I was sleeping so much because of nightmares. That wasn't so far from the truth. Except it wasn't my subconscious haunting me, it was my conscious mind. I lay awake, rustling through my blanket, replaying everything that had happened.
I had expected his manager to confront V and tell him he knew what I was supposed to be, but that never came.
I had expected the City to notice a missing prisoner and come for me, but that didn't happen either.
Instead, I was the one carrying the weight of it all, deciding if these secrets should stay buried or if I should share them with the one person who trusted me enough to open their life to me.
V worried constantly. He brought me gifts he thought might cheer me up, suggested outings he knew I'd enjoy. I appreciated his attentions, but each kind gesture felt like a small cut, making me feel even more guilty for everything I was hiding from him.
Most days, I stayed home, keeping myself busy in the garden, with only Poly whirring softly at my side. I studied too, leaning on NORA and my notes, but the answers were frustratingly shallow. I missed the library. I missed Norah, the library archivist.
Then, one morning, V told me Norah was coming to visit.
I panicked a little, asking V if it wasn't strange that she knew we lived together. I was supposed to be an outside expert brought in to help with his research... Why would I be living in the same house as him? But he explained that Norah had assumed we lived together from the start. He figured she simply thought we were roommates.
Apparently, I'd left a book behind at the library, and she wanted to bring it to me personally. I didn't remember leaving anything behind on that last day I was at the library, so I was suspicious of her visit.
But the moment she opened my door, I felt just how much I had missed her. She didn't know I was a machina, or supposed to be one. Because of that, when I was at the library with her, I could breathe.
"Hi," she shyly spoke as she stepped inside.
"Hey, Norah," I replied as nonchalantly as I could, instinctively glancing past her and half-expecting V to be in the hallway, eavesdropping on us.
But Norah seemed to read my mind. She shut the door quietly.
"He's downstairs," she assured me, setting her backpack by the door. It looked heavy with the weight of books, almost convincing me she really had come for that.
But when she came to sit by my side of the bed, her expression darkened. I realized she had come for something else entirely.
"Sade, I don't know how to tell you this, but I know what happened," she said, her words tumbling out in that hurried, blurted way of hers. "When I came back from the mech-vet—Shellby's fine, by the way—I saw you running out of the library. I thought it was weird. I went inside and found V's manager, a table flipped, and that guy cursing with blood all over his nose. I asked where you'd run, and he said he pulled a prank on you that you didn't like. Everything felt off." She finally inhaled before rushing on already. "I waited for you to come back to the library, but you didn't. I asked V in the cafeteria, and he said you were sick and preferred to stay home. It felt super off. So I called my ex-boyfriend from Surveillance—trust me, it took everything in me to contact him again—and I asked him to pull the footage from that day, at the library—"
She gasped, choking on her own words, and I touched her arm to remind her to breathe.
"I saw everything," she whispered through the air she finally caught.
Her wide eyes met mine, and for a long moment, we simply held each other's gaze, both of us silently measuring what the other might be thinking.
As expected, Norah broke the silence first.
"Is that true? Are you a machina?"
I blinked and frowned. My stare fell on the ground, my throat tightening.
The past few days had already felt unbearably heavy, packed with secrets I couldn't share with anyone.
And now, here I was, on the verge of layering yet another lie onto someone I cared for, someone I considered my friend.
"Yes," I lied in a whisper, unable to even bring myself to meet her eyes.
I thought she would interpret the heaviness in my voice as guilt for lying to her all those times.
"I had a feeling," I heard her say.
My eyes shot up to hers. "What? How?"
"Well..." she pushed her glasses up on her forehead and crossed her arms. "As a botanist, you asked a lot of... beginner questions."
She chuckled, and I couldn't help but chuckle back.
"I wasn't that good at pretending, was I?" I admitted, knowing some days I was so absorbed in my studies I barely thought of my cover anymore.
"I did find it weird that a botanist wouldn't know about pollination..." she laughed, shaking her head.
I laughed too, but hid my face in my hands, too embarrassed to face her.
"Sade, I really, really don't care," she said, placing a hand on my shoulder. "You can be whatever you want. You'll always be welcome at the library... as long as you're willing to share snacks."
She laughed again, and even louder when I pulled a box of CocOatCookies from behind my pillow.
I offered her some, and we both munched on our favorite snack, lost in thought.
"Did you tell the Doctor V about...?" she hesitated, pinching her lips, searching for the right words.
But I already knew what she meant. If she had seen the manager call me a machina, she probably knew what had happened after that too.
"No," I said.
"Really?" she looked surprised. "I thought he knew, and that was why he kept you locked up in his house!"
"No, not at all," I shook my head, already defending him. "I didn't tell him. He doesn't know..."
"You should tell him, Sade. What that guy did... I mean, I don't know how the law works for machina, but if it's anything like mech-pet laws, then what he did wasn't allowed. No one can hurt someone's pets... or machina, for that matter."
I slowly nodded, trying not to dwell on the fact that my rights in the City were basically equivalent to those of robot pets.
"Ah, I almost forgot," Norah said, standing up and brushing crumbs off her fingers onto her pants. Poly would soon be whirring happily around the room to clean that up.
She opened her backpack and pulled out some of my favorite library books.
"Norah, you shouldn't have... I thought it was forbidden to take books outside the library?" I asked, while I couldn't help but hold The Green Lexicon against my chest.
She waved me off, a kind smile on her face. She seemed to understand that I probably didn't want to step again into the room where a man had tried to hurt me.
"Ah, I brought someone who wanted to meet you too."
From another pocket, she revealed her small robot turtle.
I got to meet Shellby properly, and Norah was thrilled to know we could offer some of my homegrown basil to the turtle. When I went downstairs to cut some of it in the atrium, I passed by V, lounging on the couch, reading his tablet.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
His eyes weren't as worried as before. He must have heard our laughter.
"Yes, everything's okay," I replied, smiling.
He returned me a hopeful smile.
Poly followed me into the bedroom after I fetched the basil, not only to clean up crumbs but also to whir curiously around Shellby, clearly fascinated by the new robot in the house. We watched them interact, Shellby the turtle so deliberate and slow, and Poly a whirlwind of energy, laughing together as we munched on CocOatCookies.
The tight knot in my stomach that I had carried for days loosened a little in that moment. That evening, I almost forgot all the bad things that had happened.
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