Page 18 of Even Robots Die (Even Ever After #3)

Florentine

T he day passes slowly. I don’t have much to do and I can’t call my sisters. I receive messages from them. Most of them are about the fact they’re happy dad is back and that me being in Blois is a huge opportunity for me.

Like it’s just a very lucrative job, not me being stuck here with no other choice.

Actually, yes, I have a choice. I can either stay here like a prisoner—gilded cage and all—without doing the job Brice is expecting of me, and cave in when dad will have run out of money, or I can do it now.

It’s not lost on me that I started negotiating, but that we never agreed on a finalized deal.

Do I need to make more demands? No. I don’t really need more than I asked for. I just need to be paid upfront, though.

Why? Because humans make mistakes and if I fry Brice’s brain inadvertently, I still want to be paid.

I still need to be paid.

Daniel—the guy I almost killed—comes and picks me up for lunch, but I’m not really hungry.

I eat alone this time and it makes me wonder where Brice’s team eats, or if they eat here, but at another time just to make sure it’s not with me.

Daniel is nice. He asks me questions about my accommodations, if I slept well and things like that. He’s not eating with me, but he makes it feel like I’m not eating on my own either.

I don’t know if Brice sent him—especially because of what happened yesterday—to see how I would react, but whatever goal he had, it succeeded.

Because my stomach is in knots and I can barely eat with the way my conscious is hammering at my shame. I almost killed the man.

He looks so alive and oblivious, and I almost killed him.

I half answer most of his questions because the little words I manage to get out are trembling and it’s hard to make peace with the fact I made an error. A very lethal error.

“Do you know if I can order material to tinker?” I cut Daniel in the middle of a sentence. I don’t really know what he is talking about, anyway. My mind has been spiraling ever since he started talking and I’m not sure I would be able to remember anything he said.

“Brice left his bank account ID for you,” Daniel answers me like it’s totally normal and all I can do is open my mouth like an idiot.

“Be careful, you might catch bugs if you keep that mouth open,” Daniel adds.

I close my mouth, but I still can’t believe what he just told me.

I knew Brice had money, and that he wasn’t really putting a limit on what I could spend to make this operation go smoothly, but knowing and having proof—and more—is something very different.

“Where is it?” I ask, after shaking my head.

“Give me your holo and I’ll enter it on your payment program,” Daniel answers.

I don’t know what to think of that.

Does Brice realize I could empty his account? I have no idea how much there is in there. But if the fact he didn’t bat an eye at my demands for money earlier is any indication, there’s bound to be way more than that in the account.

He should be scared.

Or maybe it’s just a test.

When I come back to my room after lunch, there’s a note on the door and the machine I saw in the mad scientist room is inside my room next to the door on a desk that wasn’t there when I left for lunch.

Miss Furious,

If you don’t want to go to the lab, the lab will go to you until we have a new one.

It’s not signed, but there’s no doubt who wrote it.

I know Milton always calls me Miss F., but why did he have to draw that out and give me a nickname that makes me sound like a lunatic?

I don’t know if he’s expecting me to start working when I didn’t get a deposit in the first place, but I’m not about to do it.

I’m not petty, it’s just that if I just do as he asks without fighting even a little bit, then what prevents him from thinking he can do whatever he wants with me?

Except, I do want to be back as soon as possible.

If dad emptying his bank account is any indication, I’m not sure the girls are going to have everything they need if I’m not there anymore.

Hell, I’m not even sure any of them know how to start the washing machine. What is going to happen when they’ve run out of clothes from their closets?

Yes, I know it sounds like I’m coddling them, but it’s always been like that, and it’s not going to change because I’ve been absent for a day.

But do I want to be away longer than necessary? No. So, I hide my pride in a corner.

“Milton, can you scan the evil machine?”

“Of course,” the AI answers me.

After a few seconds, Milton projects the three-dimensional view of what was left on my new desk.

“The outer view is all loaded. You will have to open the core for me to confirm some of the composants,” it adds.

Do I want to open it already?

No. I need to see how it functions first. I turn it on and a holographic screen projects on top of it.

It’s obviously locked with a password, but I plug Milton into the box and it unlocks it in under a minute.

I toy with the interface for a few minutes and finally find the code page.

Or pages. There are hundreds of pages and I realize that modifying this machine to get it to heal Brice won’t take me just a few days.

Fuck. How long am I going to be stuck here?

Because Brice may pay me handsomely, but I didn’t sign up for this kind of work.

I actually didn’t sign anything at all.

I feel disheartened.

“How strong are the electrical shocks?” I ask Milton when I finally stop moping around.

Feeling sad for myself won’t make this go faster.

I don’t have time for a pity party.

“Six milliamperes,” Milton tells me.

“Oh, that’s way less than my gloves,” I exclaim to myself. The shocks they deliver are around thirty amperes, so yeah, my gloves are five thousand times stronger than the probes of the torture machine. I’m not even sure I would feel anything if I touched them while they worked.

“At least I won’t have to be careful while working,” I mumble to myself.

It won’t solve the problem at hand, though, because I have no idea how this infernal device works. Although I might trust Milton to know we can modify it, I’m not sure I trust the data it gets from strangers to do it.

We’re about to fry someone’s brain with this thing after all.

I won’t let it be because I didn’t double check everything.

I sit on the chair behind the desk and push the machine so it’s against the wall and I can drop my elbow to the desk.

I guess I have a whole day of reading in front of me.

Why didn’t those asshole birds write a manual like normal beings?