Mr.Gonzales patted me again and moved off outside without saying another word.
I turned to go inside, but there was a line of people waiting to use our bathroom. I moved to my room, but my sheets were off my bed, and my mattress was leaning up against the wall while Mrs.Xalos stood on her knees with a bucket and scrubbed at the bare mattress, cleaning it. My heart beat faster. My eyes quickly moved to the line of plastic dinosaurs I kept on my headboard, making sure they were still there. The small colorful toys were from Earth, and they’d been Grandpa Lewis’s toys as a kid and his father’s before him. They remained standing there on the headboard, holding court over the invasion of my room. Mrs.Becerra was also in my room, but she just sat on my chair, rocking back and forth praying.
I turned away without saying anything.
As I moved to our front door, Mrs.Perez stopped me to ask where I kept our cinnamon.
“We don’t have any in the pantry,” I said. “We have some cinnamon stores in the hive. My grandfather didn’t like having it in the house, and Lulu and I don’t really do much baking.”
“No cinnamon in the house?” she asked, wringing her hands together. “Yolanda is rolling in her grave.” She patted me on the shoulder. “You should really clean your face off, honey.”
I nodded and pushed past her. I returned to the doorway and just stood there, feeling unsteady, like the ground was still shaking. I couldn’t stop thinking about how angry my grandfather would have been that so many people were here, and I realized that maybe Mr.Gonzales was right: Iwasjust like him.
Chapter 16
Roger’s voice crackled in my ear. The sound startled me. I’d forgotten I was still wearing the communicator. I’d just been standing there in my doorway, almost drifting to sleep, as the honeybees and people around me swarmed. The sun was still high in the sky. It felt as if it should have been the middle of the night.
“Reports have come back from the Yanez farm, and I have visual confirmation of the occupants of the transport. These appear to be human, but I am quite certain they are non-biological. They appear to be Peacekeepers in a different skin than the standard. There are twenty-five of them occupying the farm, and they appear to be turning the farm into some sort of defensive stronghold. Here is a video.”
My bracelet buzzed as the scene appeared. I pulled it up and enlarged it so the image floated an inch over my wrist. It was a shot from one of the UAVs hovering in the trees, watching the transport crunch to the ground. Within seconds of landing, several forms unpeeled from the vehicle and spread out. Chickens, oblivious of all this, had all scattered when the transport landed, but now they were back, scratching at the ground. They ignored the soldiers, and the soldiers ignored them.
I briefly wondered if these were normal chickens or some of Mr.Yanez’s trained circus chickens. The cranky, possibly insane rancher had multiple animals on his farm. Half were livestock. The other half were constantly in training for his “Circus of Miracle Animals.” I had no idea why the crotchety old man even wanted to open a circus, as he seemed to hate everyone. As kids, if we so much as approached his fence, he would threaten to skewer us with a pitchfork. Still, the idea that there would soon be children again in New Sonora had appeared to reawaken the strange man’s desires to train his animals and open a circus.
Hanging on the wall of his barn were several massive banners I’d never seen before. Each one extolled the virtue of his circus-trained animals. From this angle, the spacecraft blocked most of the banners, but I could see one with a group of running chickens on it, though the chickens had glowing red eyes and each wore a clown-like ruff around its neck. The sign read, “Trained Magical Chickens of Amazement and Awe.” The next banner featured Cindy, his obese pig, but I couldn’t see what the sign read.
I still wasn’t clear what the trained magical chickens of awe were actually trained to do. Regardless, all the chickens on the vid appeared to be the normal kind.
As we watched, I realized the soldiers weren’t just ignoring the chickens. It was like they couldn’t see them at all. A soldier stepped on one. The chicken squawked angrily, half smooshed to the ground. It pulled itself away, unharmed. The soldier froze in place for a good five seconds, like the existence of an invisible chicken had broken its brain. Clearly these guys were nonhuman. And they were about as dumb as the drone honeybees.
All these newcomersappearedto be humans wearing bulky body armor. They were armed to the teeth: pulse rifles with strange flat barrels, pistols, disk-shaped objects that were either drones or grenades. Some wore helmets that obscured their faces, like fancy VR rigs. A few wore nothing at all upon their heads. These soldiers had human faces and hair and beards that looked real when I used thedisplay on my bracelet, though the faces were decorated in black-and-white war paint.
“That’s illegal,” I heard myself say. They weren’t allowed to make robots that pretended to be human. It was one of the major tenets of Earth law.
Still, Roger was correct: Even if I hadn’t seen their strange behavior near the chickens, it was clear these absolutely weren’t human but robots. I watched more of the soldiers appear. They’d been collapsed over themselves in an impossible way, like folding chairs, so more could fit in the transport. Some were attached to the outside of the transport, and I watched as they extended twice, their waists moving a hundred eighty degrees to snap in place before they moved off to their positions.
Humanlike automatons were illegal without some sort of disclaimer. Even the bipedal Peacekeepers—which were clearly not human because they were eight or nine feet tall—had flashing warnings on their face masks that warned they were nonhuman.
“Roger,” I started to say, “how are they allowed to…” But I never finished my question as the scene played out.
As the humanoids spread out and started moving about the farm, Mr.Yanez appeared, carrying his infamous pitchfork. I was startled by the sight of him. He’d been on my farm that morning. He must’ve gone back home. Dread filled me.
“You! Get off my—” he started to yell.
One of the androids lifted an arm, and without even looking at the man, it fired a pulse pistol at him, killing the old man instantly. None of the other soldiers so much as twitched.
I found myself leaning against the door, breathing heavily. Holy shit. They’d killed him. Just like that.
“That was Mr.Yanez,” Rosita said over the band. She was just across the way, but we all continued to speak using our earpieces. Our eyes met across the yard. “They killed him for no reason.”
Anger started to rise in me. Up until now it had all been fear.Even after I’d seen all the dead bodies, including the body of little Henry, the only emotions I’d really felt so far were terror and this-can’t-really-be-happening bewilderment. But seeing it actually happen changed something in me deep in my chest. Mr.Yanez had been a grumpy, antisocial jerk. He’d never married. My grandfather had hated him. Still, the man clearly cared for his work. That was why the man had gone back to his farm. He didn’t want to leave his chickens and pigs alone.
He was one of us, and they’d come to his home and killed him for no reason.
“It’s not right,” Rosita said.
My bracelet beeped with a new message from Roger. “This is from another angle. There is more.”
A second view appeared, this one from another UAV atop the house, overlooking the transport. I could see all the banners now. Mr.Yanez also appeared to have hidden behind his barn a half-built circus tent that showed recent work.
