They seemed to glow on the screen, glinting with something that felt as if it might reach right out of the tube and grasp him.
It had happened! Just as Amy herself had said it would.
Like Adam, she had changed.
She was no longer the Amy he knew.
And she was evil.
As she kept talking, whispering to him that she’d found another place, another project that was just like the one at the Academy, he began to understand what she wanted.
She wanted him.
She was lonely, and she wanted him to come and join her.
Cold fingers of fear clutching at him, Josh reached out and turned the computer off.
An hour later, when his mother came home from work, the machine was sitting on the long balcony, outside the front door.
“Josh?” Brenda said as she came into the apartment. “What’s your computer doing outside?”
From the couch, where he was sprawled out watching television, Josh spoke without looking up. “I don’t want it anymore.”
Brenda frowned. “Don’t want it? Why not? You’ve always been crazy for computers.”
Josh looked up at her. “That’s why I don’t want it anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to be crazy.”
Brenda was on the verge of arguing with him, but then a gust of wind blew the curtain over the open window aside, wiping the shadows away from Josh’s face. As she got a clear look at him, Brenda realized that something had happened that afternoon.
Something that she somehow knew Josh would never tell her about.
But it had changed him.
Changed him forever.
For the first time since she’d brought him home from the Academy, Brenda MacCallum knew that her son was going to be all right.