In truth, Sister didn't really mind when Brooklyn assigned cleaning tasks as punishments. The sight of one of their siblings laboring at menial tasks usually made the younger hatchlings scatter like cockroaches, lest they be pressured into helping out. So any punitive chore she received often came with a rare period of peaceful solitude to think over the situation, and she supposed that was the point of Brooklyn assigning them. Sweeping stone skin dust from the floor was somewhat satisfying to her, and even the aggressive elbow grease required to effectively scrub out the bottom of the rookery's large pool was somewhat cathartic, particularly when paired with images of Coldstone's creepy half-living face. But scrubbing the rest of the play equipment was quite another matter.
She had spent nearly two hours hanging from the various layered elements of climbing equipment that was mounted among the decorative canopy of metal tree branches in the rafters of the rookery. Scrubbing relentlessly at every sticky surface she could find, Sister had no choice but to come to the conclusion that every last one of her siblings was an actual pig. So far, she had recovered four spoons and a fork, a collection of gum wads that could fill a soda bottle, the stick from a melted and congealed popsicle, a banana peel, a dozen Nerf darts, a piece of bread that was smothered with peanut butter and then stuck to a wall, Legos and broken crayons, candy wrappers, a gray, shriveled sphere that she suspected had once been an orange, four hair ties, and at least 27 empty pudding cups. Disdainfully, she moved from platform, to rope, to swing, to structure. The rhythm of her aggressive scrubbing was accompanied by intermittent grumblings about Coldstone and Coldfire, as well as the clan's filthy hatchlings.
The water in her plastic, yellow bucket had taken on a dingy grayish brown, while speckles of glitter floated on the surface, so she decided to slide down a rope swing to refresh it. To her surprise, she almost landed on top of Lark and Lyndon, who stood together with arms crossed and critical looks on their faces.
"Micah told us everything," Lyndon informed her.
"What does he know?" she retorted, quickly recovering from her surprise.
"That Brooklyn is keeping Adelpha prisoner in her room," Lark explained airily as she studied the growing pile of recovered 'treasures' with repulsion, "And you're being punished for mouthing off at Brooklyn because of it."
Sister shrugged her shoulders and neither confirmed nor denied as she poured out the foul water and rinsed the bucket.
"Why doesn't Brooklyn want Adelpha to see Coldstone and Coldfire?" Lark demanded.
"I think it's them that don't want to see her," she admitted in a bitter tone.
"Why not?" Lyndon pressed as he hopped onto the edge of the tiled pool, imposing his persistently wide-eyed gaze on Sister.
"Don't worry about it," Sister told him sanctimoniously as she turned off the faucet and carried her bucket back toward the training room, "It's grown up stuff you aren't old enough to understand yet."
"So, she doesn't know either," Lark told her brother with a snort and they both broke into giggles. Sister scowled
"So, what are we going to do about it?" Lyndon asked eagerly.
"What do you mean, 'we'?" asked Sister innocently.
"Come on!" Lyndon replied, "We know you've got a plan. Micah said something about a tantrum?"
"I've got no idea what you are talking about."
"Are you kidding me?" Lark cried indignantly, "You're going to leave us in the dark?"
Lyndon snorted sarcastically.
"No, that's cool. What good are two little tech geeks anyway?...In a battle with two robots?... I'm sure Sister's plan will work perfectly without us. After all, she has Micah and his tantrums! What more could she need? Come on, Lark!"
"Wait a minute," Sister interrupted, raising a suspicious brow at the two impish hatchlings, "What have you got in mind?"
The twins turned around and shared wide, mischievous smiles. Triumphantly, they clacked together their matching horns, which encircled each of their round heads like woven crowns.
"First, we'll help you get out of your punishment," Lyndon declared, hopping enthusiastically to the center of the training course, where a large, plastic bin was waiting.
"What's this?" Sister asked, eyeing the Xanatos Enterprises logo on the outside of the box with some trepidation. Lyndon pried off the lid and tossed it aside, exposing what looked something like a miniature moon rover.
Lyndon lifted the robot from the box and set it on the floor.
"It's a new prototype," he explained, "Xanatos' developers used the technology that Lexington created for the probe he built to crawl over the walls of crime scenes and find blood and DNA samples. But this one just finds dirt and clean and sanitizes it. It can climb on almost any surface and it can stretch its legs and tool extensions over twelve feet to get to those hard-to-reach spaces!"
"Are you sure it will work in here?" Sister asked doubtfully, "With all this hanging stuff and weird climbing surfaces?"
"Of course we are!" Lark replied arrogantly, "Lexington brought it up from the development center a couple weeks ago. He's used it to clean out that weird smell and green smoke residue out of the atrium, after Fleet and Micah set off those smoke bombs. It cleaned off the entire room, all the glass windows, the rafters in the ceiling, and it even got off all the Sharpie marks the hatchlings drew all the playground equipment!
He's been letting us play with it in the lab while he works. He wouldn't mind that we borrowed it to get some cleaning done!"
Sister was a little skeptical about this claim but she was also getting a bit stiff from the scrubbing.
"All right," she agreed, "How does it work?"
Lyndon pushed a button on the top of the round body of the machine and a small hatch popped up, revealing a thin remote control, which he slid out of its hiding place. He pushed a button and the machine made a low grinding noise, followed by an electronic bell.
"Please enter your password," the machine directed with a voice that sounded strangely familiar to Sister. She raised an eyebrow at the hatchlings. They had clearly not expected this request.
"It wasn't password protected before!" Lark pointed out apprehensively.
"Yeah, well, maybe that's because we were playing with it then," Lyndon suggested, "And Lexington didn't want to have to keep putting the password in over and over. I'll try the one from the cable box in the TV room."
Lyndon typed the password in and pressed enter. An obnoxious light, like one on the top of a police car, began to rotate and flash.
"Incorrect password," the machine announced in what Sister was quite sure was Lexington's pre-recorded voice, "Power down the drone and return it to the lab immediately!"
"Uh oh!" Lark replied anxiously, "Now what?"
Looking a little desperate, Lyndon tried again.
"He uses this password all the time," he assured them.
Suddenly, the room was filled with the wailing of an alarm and the lights began to flash even faster as Lexington's voice grew louder.
"Your attempt to breach security has been recorded! Power down the drone, replace it in its container, and step away!"
"Lyndon!" Lark shrieked, "Stop! You're making it worse!"
Then, to all their horror, the machine began to count down from ten in an increasingly parental tone, between the shrieks of the alarm.
"Ten…nine…eight…"
"Lyndon, quick! Power it down!"
Both hatchlings dove onto the machine, searching desperately for the power button, while Sister dove for cover behind the long bench that separated the training room from the sunroom.
"Four…three…two…one…"
For a brief moment, they all gasped, and being prepared for nothing short of a nuclear explosion, they were horrified by the sudden silence that followed. But Lexington was not given to idle threats. A short whir of a mechanism sounded, and the machine burst an enormous cloud of glitter and heavy pink mist.
"Auaaaaaagh!" both twins screamed as they covered their faces and ran for the pool which Sister had just cleaned.
"Get it off! Get it off!" Lyndon yelled as if in agony.
"What is it?" Sister asked, refusing to believe that her beloved uncle would pepper spray his own hatchlings.
"It's…it's…perfume!" Lark cried, "We're going to smell like Aquaneta!"
'Aquaneta' was the nickname their uncles had given to Doreen, the woman who had been the Xanatos' head housekeeper for years. Her arrival was always pre-announced by the scent of copious amounts of hairspray and cosmetics; enough to make even Xanatos' human eyes water a bit when he'd been stuck in an elevator with her. She always worked until five in the evening, so there were only a couple months of the year where her path would potentially cross with a gargoyle's, but the clan was thankful for her notable, if a bit unpleasant, stench as well as the sound of the loud headphones that she played as she worked. These always gave them plenty of warning to hide before she came into a room to vacuum.
"Ugh!" Lyndon cried in dismay as he leapt into the pool and turned on the hose, "We're going to smell like an army of Aquaneta!"
"Hey!" Sister yelled, "You're covered in glitter and I just washed that!"
But the desperate hatchlings had no pity. They splashed themselves recklessly, trying to get the floral and chemical stench off. After several moments, they had managed to get the overwhelming smell down from 'Doreen's Army' to the fog that always hung over the cosmetic counter at Macy's.
"It's better," Sister suggested awkwardly, and both the hatchlings wailed in defeat.
"Come on," Sister ordered bitterly, "Now we have an even bigger mess to finish!"
Exhausted, the three young gargoyles worked together to clean up the horrendous glitter mess as well as the glitterized pool and the equipment Sister hadn't finished before.
"We're going to be dead when they get home from patrol," Lark commented gloomily as she replaced the lid on the plastic box.
"Not necessarily," Lyndon suggested in a sneaky voice, "We could reinstall the operating program and I bet that would erase whatever it recorded."
"How would you do that?" Sister asked.
"Lexington showed us how to install it," Lyndon explained, "We just have to download it off the castle cloud and put it on a drive with a USB port. Then plug it into the computer inside. We'll need to borrow your laptop though."
"Why my laptop?" Sister asked suspiciously.
She and Orion had each been given new computers when Orion had started at his new school. Until that point, all of the hatchlings had been obliged to use devices with no internet capability, a fate the younger rookery had not been liberated from and the twins thoroughly resented. Under adult supervision, they had caught glimpses of what was possible on the internet and they thirsted for the freedom to learn all they could. Lexington had tried to appease them by curating a massive drive of databases, programs, and games that they could access wirelessly from anywhere in the castle. He'd placed all these resources in what he called the "Castle Cloud", and any of the clan's devices could access it, but the twins could not be satisfied with fake, parent-manufactured internet. They were constantly after Orion and Sister, wheedling and outright begging for merely an hour of unfettered access. But the two older siblings knew better.
Their laptops were a privilege that had not been given without apprehension. The elders realized that if the young ones were going to become warriors and take their place in the world, they would need to learn about what was out there. Therefore, Orion and Sister were brought into a clan meeting, during which they were lectured on responsibility and trustworthiness, as well as the importance of coming to a grownup if they encountered any problems. There had been so much fuss, Sister had started to wonder if, as part of their warrior training, she and her brother were to be left alone in a jungle somewhere and made to face a series of trials before they could return home. She was actually a little disappointed to find out this was all over a simple computer.
It had not taken either of them long to realize why their parents had been so protective. The internet gave them access to endless information and much of it was true, beautiful, and useful, but not all. Sister had been horrified by so many of the things she had seen online and had quickly come to the conclusion that if a gargoyle spent too much time examining humanity through the lens of the internet, they would soon question if mankind was a species that was even worth protecting at all.
Still, she enjoyed the privilege of having the computer. In addition to the tutoring program the clan had provided her, Youtube and Google were her main windows into the human world. And since, unlike her brother, she could not go to a proper school and mingle with human youths, she cherished this opportunity to learn and was hard pressed to do anything to risk losing it.
"There's no way I'm giving you two my computer," she firmly told them.
"You wouldn't have to give it to us," Lark explained, "We just need it to pull up the program that controls the robot and install it on the drive."
Sister gave them a suspicious look.
"And why can't we use your tablets?" she demanded and the twins looked at one another sheepishly.
"Linnet took our tablets," Lyndon confessed.
"She did?" Sister replied, "Why?"
An unusual hint of disunity among the twins was revealed as Lark gave her brother a silent glare. Sister suspected she had found a sensitive topic.
"I would prefer we not speak about that right now," Lyndon replied diplomatically.
"It's probably for the best," Lark agreed as she gave her brother another sour look.
"If you got your own devices confiscated, why should I risk giving you mine?"
"You can watch us the whole time!" Lyndon promised.
"It'll just take a minute!" Lark added, "We'll get it setup and the robot will be doing all the rest of the work!"
Reluctantly, Sister fetched her laptop from the library and typed in her security code where the twins couldn't see. The twins bounced almost giddily when she brought it to them and she reluctantly followed them to the room that the clan called "the lab". This was where Lexington did most of his designing and building, sometimes with the help of Linnet and Thorn, who were both very much interested in machines and technology, and had the patience and fortitude to suffer the half-pint genius' manic ways. Lark and Lyndon were also common visitors to the lab, though they often proved more nuisance than help. Still, the adults admired their curiosity and tenacity and encouraged them to keep learning and working, even if they could be a bit distracting at times.
The lab itself could be a distracting place. When one thinks of a laboratory of scientific inquiry and research, they wouldn't be mistaken to envision a clean, white room, with pristine countertops covered with neatly arranged vials, well-labeled documents, and well-organized shelves of carefully-stored chemicals, samples, and equipment. All ready to be studied by the organized mind. Lexington's lab, however, was about as far from that as one could imagine.
There were two desks. One was quite large and the other quite small, and both were swamped from edge to edge with computers and computer equipment. The corner surrounding the desks was full of lockers and filing drawers, from floor to ceiling. These drawers were meant to contain important notes for various projects, though many boxes worth of poorly labeled files could also be found scattered around the room. Shelves and drawers were cluttered with tools, hardware, adhesives, and boxes of mismatched materials. Any tool or furniture that was large enough to provide a square foot of level surface was also piled with crates of more equipment. Models and prototypes were laid out on three large and heavy tables. Strange lights and heavy equipment hung ominously over them from heavy steel rods near the ceiling. The lab was a constant state of chaos, but from its depths, Lexington made many wonders appear.
As soon as they entered the lab, Lyndon quickly ran to the desk and found a very thin, black box with the Xanatos Enterprises logo printed on the top, along with several barcodes.
"What is that?" Sister asked suspiciously.
"This is the drive that we're going to use to reinstall the program that runs the robot," Lark explained.
"But whose is it?"
The wide grins that spread across the twins' faces betrayed conspiracy and Sister groaned.
"What?" Lyndon asked innocently, "We are just going to borrow it for a minute and then put it back. Lexington doesn't mind if we use stuff like this."
"If he wouldn't mind, there's no reason to sneak," Sister pointed out, "And there's no way you're using my computer for that! Lexington will know you hooked his drive up to it and I'll get in trouble."
"Don't worry!" Lark replied with a dramatic roll of her large, round eyes, "We know how to wipe the memory clean so the grownups will never find out."
Sister gave in and let Lark use her computer to upload the driver for the cleaning drone and then put it on Lexington's drive. As she worked, Sister glanced anxiously around the lab. They hadn't turned on any of the lights as they entered, so it had a creepy sort of dimness, illuminated only by two security lights near the ceiling and the glow of the LED computer screen. The indicator lights of various machines blinked and glowed at them and she imagined they were like glowing eyes in a dark forest. The strange mechanical whirring sounds didn't help the ambiance.
"Hey, what's that?" Lyndon asked, abruptly disturbing the quiet. Sister followed his gaze to an oddly shaped pile in the corner, that was covered by a heavy tarp.
"Probably none of our business," Sister suggested uneasily.
"It wasn't here before," Lyndon remarked curiously, hopping down from his stool and creeping across the floor toward whatever was under the tarp.
"Just leave it alone, okay?" Lark reprimanded him from behind the screen, "We've cleaned up enough messes already!"
"I'm not going to mess with it. I just want to see!" Lyndon retorted, then yelled, "Hey! It's an arm!"
Sister looked up abruptly.
"What do you mean? Like a real arm?"
"No!" Lyndon laughed, lifting up the tarp so they could see, "A robot arm! And here's another one! And a wing!"
Sister rose and peered at the pile of robotic body parts.
"I know what this is," she told them grimly, "It's Coldsteel!"
"Coldsteel?" Lyndon repeated, looking at the pile of parts as if he rather wished it had been a real arm, "They took him all apart?"
"I guess they had to," Sister replied as she stared at the disturbing collection.
"Well, where is he now?" Lyndon asked uneasily.
"What do you mean?" Sister asked, "He's…here."
"But where is he? In what part? Or is some of him in all the parts?"
"I…I don't know," Sister stuttered. The whole line of questioning made her anxious. It seemed horribly wrong to her that a soul could be divided up among parts. Surely, if her arm was chopped off, part of her soul would not disappear? But then again, Alexander had told them that Demona had created the original Coldstone from pieces of dead gargoyles, and each piece contained a different soul.
"Cover him back up!" Sister ordered suddenly, as if she had decided that gawking at the dismembered robot was indecent. Lyndon didn't argue, and replaced the tarp with a morbid look on his small face.
"I'm just about done," Lark announced as she rose from the floor, where she had crouched to plug the drive into the belly of the drone.
"Good," Sister replied with relief, turning her back on the eerie, irregular shape in the corner.
"Hey, look!" Lark exclaimed as she went to close the laptop, "Someone is messaging you!"
"Sister's got a boyfriend!" Lyndon sang obnoxiously and he hopped back onto the stool by the desk and pulled the laptop from Lark's claws so he could get a better look.
"Knock it off!" Sister ordered, taking control of her computer, though she didn't believe anyone was messaging her as she didn't know anyone online other than members of the clan and their human friends, and they never used PMs to communicate.
Sister looked at the screen in puzzlement. There was, indeed, a strange dialogue box open, with a message inside.
"Let me out!" the message read.
"Who's that?" Lyndon asked.
"I don't know," Sister replied honestly, "It's not in my email account and I've never used any instant messenger before.
"Please! Help me!" the message repeated.
"Should I answer?" Sister wondered out loud.
"No, it's probably a scam or something. If you click on it, you'll get a virus."
"I beg you! Please, release me!"
"Just ex out of it," Lark advised her, but Sister noted that the strange box didn't have an 'X' in the corner like a normal program would. She tried clicking on her desktop and the box disappeared.
"There. It's gone now," Lark told her confidently.
"Weird," Sister observed, "But the patrol will be ending soon. Let's head to the courtyard to meet them. She shut the lid of the computer and gathered it into her arms, but stopped suddenly as she heard a strange sound, like a tiny motor running.
"What's that?" Lyndon asked, glancing to the side of the desk where the sound was coming from. There was an oblong shape laying there under a white cloth, next to a coil of cable. The shape didn't appear to move, but it was certainly the point where the strange sound was coming from. Curiously, the three children approached the object and, as they stared, two red lights began to glow through the cloth in the strangest way.
Bravely, Lyndon approached the shape and gingerly pulled the cloth away to reveal a robotic head with glowing red eyes. The children gasped in surprise to see Coldsteel's grim, horned head staring back at them. Then, to their shock, the face of the mechanical head came alive with a snarl and the eyes burned with a brighter light. The twins shrieked in horror and ran for the door, followed by Sister, who ran after them with her computer in her arms.