MACHINE

6. The Man in the Moon, Came Tumbling Down, and Ask'd His Way to Norwich

I was waiting by the door to the back garden, a small bag of batteries in my hand. Juliet had been gone for a couple of weeks for vacation in some resort near the border. We were left alone in the house, trapped by security systems. We had done it, we had found a way to get out of there. Or rather, Lucas had. My mind drifted back to about a month ago when we had first begun to plot our escape.

We had figured out somewhere to go when we got out, roughly, as we patched together an idea of what the surrounding area looked like through snippets of conversation overheard from Juliet's living room (when she had guests over) that over the fence and beyond the forest were train tracks. Juliet had been complaining (in a polite but snobby way) to two of her friends that the noise of the train was so disturbing when she had picnics down by the river in the forest. I remember telling Lucas that if the train was loud it was a train from a poorer area, not a smooth upper city train, and that if we hitched a ride we would likely end up somewhere where it was admittedly, messier and much more dangerous, but easier to hide from Deathmongers. Also, if we were in the city there would definitely be batteries or charging stations somewhere. It was a stretch, but I prayed to whoever was listening that it would work out. After that, we just needed a way to get off the estate.

I proposed the idea that, if we could find some voice recordings of Juliet's, perhaps we could undo some of her commands, and then escape freely. Lucas was the one who found a way to make that happen, though.

We had to find a place to conduct our business secretly without alerting the house's alarm systems, and three days ago we had located a blind spot in the security cameras. Ever since then we met up there frequently. I saw him there a day after Juliet had left, examining the Butler-Bot that we met that first day, the one who had greeted us at the door. He had shut it down and dismantled it. He used to work in Bot repairs some years ago (before he met me), and so he knew a lot about their composition. He dismantled the entire thing without setting off any alarms or defense mechanisms, and retrieved a small metal box.

"Its voice box." He told me. Apparently other than creating the Bot's voice, it also kept a log of everything that happened around the Bot in the form of audio recordings, any of which it could replay at any time.

The small box-shaped device was still attached to the Bot by threads of red and blue wires. Lucas dug his hands into the Bot, connecting wires and pressing a multitude of buttons. I heard a few sentences starting in Juliet's and other voices but Lucas skipped past them until he found the sound clip he wanted to show me.

"Leave." Said Juliet's voice. "You're free to go, I want nothing more to do with you." Her voice sounded extremely upset at whoever she had been talking to.

I looked up at Lucas in excitement. "Do you think that's enough for our systems to let us out of here?"

"We can only hope." He said. "But it's the best chance we have."

And then I was by the door waiting for him. We only waited those few days because we needed to find a blind spot where we could get out. Those three days Lucas paced around the garden looking for a blind spot near the fence where we could escape from, whilst I searched the mansion for spare batteries which we could use to power ourselves.

"Let's go." I heard a small voice say from the entrance, breaking my train of thought. I stood, retrieving the pouch of batteries from where it was hidden (behind a stack of books), and followed him out into the garden. We followed a careful procedure of steps and tried to inconspicuously slide into the blind spot. We stood there, standing between two security cameras which were facing away from us, giving us a small triangle of space to walk forward and climb the fence.

"Are you ready?" I asked Lucas, clutching his cold metal hand with my own and giving him as reassuring a grin I could with my rubbery plastic features.