“Geez, I thought you were pacifists,” he said.
“Mary never joined the church,” said Mim, untying the hose.
“Oh, okay, I get it. I’m a pacifist myself, actually. I’m a Mennonite? From Lancaster County? We’re probably related.”
Standing up, he was over six feet tall. He had dark brown skin and long fingers like raspberry canes.
“I don’t think we’re related,” I said.
Getting him into the dress and cap was difficult, not because he fought us but because he kept whining that we were going to make him laugh.
“Oh my God, this is torture,” he moaned as Mim forced his weird, snaky hair up into the cap. At last he was dressed, and I took his arm and led him upstairs. He hopped along, doubled over, explaining to me that in addition to his need for the outhouse, he had a twisted ankle.
“I twisted it in the river,” he said. “I’m, like, the easiest prisoner. Seriously. Hey. I really appreciate you taking me to the bathroom.”
“Be quiet,” Mim snapped from below. “And Lyddie, go inside with him. He’ll get up to something.”
“She’s superuntrusting,” the foreigner said.
In the outhouse I stood with my back to him while Mary waited outside. My nose nearly touching the wall, I stared at the grain of the wood. It was warped and greenish, almost black. This is really happening, I told myself.
“Is this what I’m supposed to use?” the foreigner asked. “These leaves and stuff?”
I washed him up at the bucket outside and returned him, limping, to the cellar. Hard Mary followed. I noticed she was able to manage the stairs. She came slowly, with a little thumping sound, like pushed-out air. As always, it gave me a pang to think Mim had done something new to her. The foreigner, however, was delighted. “Your friend is really smart,” he told me. “She’s done amazing stuff with whatchacallit, Mary. Ah. May. Zing.” He shook his head, a hair-snake waving where it stuck out over his forehead. “She doesn’t even have a keyboard, does she? It’s all voice recognition?”
“Don’t tell him anything,” said Mim as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “And you, sit down.”
“Gladly,” the foreigner said, seating himself on the sacks. Mim’s mother’s dress only reached to his knees. Below it his dungarees stuck out, wet and muddy, ending in a pair of striped green shoes.
“Yo,” he said, giggling weakly, and pointing at himself, us, and Mary, “we match. We totally match.”
“You’ve got nothing to laugh about,” said Mim.
“Okay. That’s cool. Can I take the hat off? And maybe my shoes and socks?”
His name, he told us, was Jonathan. “Jonathan Otieno? But my mom was a Hartzler? You have Hartzlers here, right? Or Zooks? I have Zook cousins.” It was he who had left Hard Mary behind the barn that winter night. “I was gonna come back for her, except you guys found her. Which is cool. Better you than someone else.”
“You mean Dr. Stoll?” I asked.
He nodded. We exchanged a long look. Jonathan seemed to shrink; for the first time, he looked like a prisoner.
“Who’s Dr. Stoll?” asked Mim in icy tones.
“The man from Mary’s dreams,” I said, still looking at Jonathan. “The one who made her.”
“Whoa,” said Jonathan, frowning. “Totally not. He did not make her. It was a collab. A group project? For all the Helpmeets, but especially this one. Honey. C19. I mean whatchacallit, Mary. This one’s extra-special. Me and Judy, that’s another intern? We fitted her up to be a double.”
His story emerged in bits and bursts, like water from a clogged tap. Often it was hard to understand him. Eventually, though, we gathered that Mary had been made as a servant, one of many, and that these servants had hidden eyes. With her hidden eye, Mary was sending news of us to the Profane Industries. “The bird’s-eye view,” I whispered. “Yeah,” said Jonathan, nodding. “Sure.” That was how they knew she was here. “It’s not perfect,” Jonathan said. “There’s a lag, or it cuts out sometimes, or you get things in the wrong order. But basically yeah.”
The back of my neck tingled as if someone was holding a candle there. “She’s looking at us right now.”
“Yup. But like I said, there’s a lag. Like, six weeks? Dr. Stoll thought something got fucked up, excuse me, wrong, he thought something went wrong with one of her uploads. But me and Judy? We think it was us.”
He and Judy had worked on Mary at night, when no one was watching. “Just for fun. We’d get some wine and just hang out and code, you know?” One night, as a prank, they had made Mary into what he called a “double”: she could send her memories to PI and also play them back on her own camera. “So then she was, like, recording Dr. Stoll, but for herself. We thought it was funny. We were gonna collect the captures and show them to him, like for his birthday or something, if we could ever find out when his birthday was. But then she started having these failures, and he got really pissed off about it, and we got scared. We knew if he kept testing her he was gonna find the captures and then we could lose our internships and be on the street. So we decided to wipe her.”
“What do you mean?”
He passed his hand over his brow, as if brushing off sweat. “You know, erase her. Delete. Boom.”
I looked at Mim. She was perched on a stack of old pipes, holding her knees very tight. She looked small and concentrated, like paper crumpled into a ball. Jonathan said he had dumped Hard Mary in Jericho one night in a moment of panic, and when he came back for her, she was gone. He only found out where she was when Dr. Stoll discovered her. “You guys finally came through on her feed and we were like, holy shit. I mean, we were like, wow. You guys are into robots! We got your names, but like, supergarbled. I think she read us the entire Bible.”
“You could hear us?”
“Pretty good.”
“Because we—”
“Lyddie!” Mim said. “Be quiet.”
It was too late. Jonathan’s eyes sparkled. “I get it! You found the captures! They’re cool, right? I mean, they’re pretty low quality, but they’re cool. You can get the audio too, we just didn’t get a chance to connect it.” He cracked his long fingers. “If you let me have my backpack, I can do it for you, just to give you a look. Or hey, maybe I can use your stuff.” He gazed at the wall behind Mim, where her tools hung neatly on nails. “Because this is crazy. You’re like MacGyver. What is that, a kitchen whisk?”
Mim stepped behind him, jerked his arms back, and began to tie the hose.
“Aw, man,” said Jonathan.
“Mim,” I said, “we have to let him go.”
She pulled the hose around him and began, clumsily, to wrap it about his legs. He hissed a little when she jostled his injured foot. He’d taken off his shoes and socks. One ankle was thin, the other an ugly bulge.
“He needs help,” I said. “You should have brought Kat. And we have to let him do this . . . wiping.”
Instead of answering me, she told Mary, “Come on.” They went upstairs.
“Your friend is superintense,” Jonathan said. “I respect it, though.”
I caught up with Mim and Mary at the corner of the house. The day had grown dim, a mist drifting in from the east. The mists from that direction always have a mournful, acrid, mineral smell. They come to us from town. They come from the Profane Industries. I seized Mim’s arm, and she looked at me. At the same moment, Mary stopped and looked at me too. Though she was taller than Mim, with those regular, softly shining features, their movement was the same, the same speed, the same angle. It gave me a jolt to realize it: they looked alike. I even thought that Mary’s expression, always so tranquil, seemed stiffer than usual, as if she had taken on some of Mim’s fierceness—for Mim’s face, though of mortal flesh, was harder than any brass. She glared up at me with her witchy little scowl.