The ghost dog stopped growling, but Maddie couldn't exactly breathe a sigh of relief yet. It hadn't taken anything from her, and she wasn't sure if it would.
Her eyes caught on its collar. "What do you say, Cujo? Do you want a treat?" She waved the cookie for emphasis, but she'd seen its ears perk up at the name.
She'd never called it by its name before.
She hadn't known its name before.
She'd never gotten close enough to it to notice its name before.
There would be a lot of firsts from here on out, assuming things went the way she hoped they would.
"Normally you couldn't have this because it has chocolate chips in it," she cooed, trying to convey with her tone what she couldn't with words, "but you're a ghost, yes, you are, which means that doesn't matter anymore."
"Not like a few chocolate chips would take out a dog that size anyway," Alicia muttered, and Maddie had no compunctions about driving her elbow into her sister's side.
Overriding Alicia's yelp, Maddie said, "Here you go, Cujo! Here's a treat for you." She tossed the cookie, and the dog swallowed it whole.
And then it shrunk in size until it was the little pup it had been when it had first come through the ghost portal—which had already vanished at some point when she'd been distracted earlier, from the looks of it.
She hadn't been sure that would work, but maybe it appreciated that she was trying, if it had enough concept of what she was doing to understand that.
Or maybe Danny had told it that threats were fine but maiming was off the table.
Either way, she wasn't going to bet on its good mood lasting if it changed so easily.
"Are you looking for Danny, Cujo? Are you looking for Phantom?" She had no idea what name the ghost dog associated with Danny. She had no idea if the ghost dog understood what she was saying. Tone would only get her so far, but she had to try.
"Hey, little buddy," Alicia said, getting down on one knee and holding out a hand. The ghost sniffed and then let her scratch it behind the ears. "We don't know where Danny went, but it must be pretty important if you came to find him, eh? Is there something we can do to help?"
Personally, Maddie thought Alicia was banking on the ghost dog understanding a good deal more than she was.
Cujo whined.
"Yeah, you're a good boy who just wants to help," Alicia said as she continued to pet the ghost as if it were a real dog, "so how about we help you, yeah? Which of the kids needs our help?"
"It's not going to be able to answer you," Maddie murmured, and Alicia shot her a skeptical look.
"Have a bit of faith, won't you? Once he knows we ain't gonna do more harm than good, he might take us where we need to be."
Well, the ghost dog hadn't tried to bite Alicia's hand off, so Maddie supposed there might be some truth in that after all.
Although—
Wait.
"You said you didn't know where Danny was going, but you do. He's going to talk to Danielle, and you know where she is."
Alicia huffed. "He never said he was going straight there, and I doubt he will if he's worried about being followed." She turned her attention back to Cujo. "You just missed him, boy, but I'm sure you can sniff out where he's been and find him back there again."
She was still being very careful not to mention their location in Maddie's hearing.
Not knowing what else to do, Maddie gave Cujo another cookie, hoping her son would show up in the meantime.
He didn't.
Cujo didn't leave them, either.
Maddie wasn't wearing her HAZMAT suit. She was still in borrowed clothes. She had no containment devices in her pockets, no weapons up her sleeves, nothing within arm's reach that would help her fight a ghost unless she wanted to take it on with Alicia's cast iron frying pan and a salt shaker—neither of which worked well (or sometimes at all) on the ghosts they'd encountered in Amity Park, judging by the preliminary tests she and Jack had conducted. Any ghost that was more than a fleeting memory of who they'd been when they were alive was too strong to be contained by those methods, and those that appeared to have formed naturally from semi-sentient ectoplasm weren't affected at all. There were herbs—
No. No, just because the ghost dog had come here, it didn't mean the trouble on the other end was a ghost.
It might be something—someone—she could defeat without any of that.
Even unarmed, she could hold her own against humans.
So could Alicia.
That was one thing they still had in common.
All right, then. Maybe this was another thing Alicia was right about. Cujo must be looking for Danny—this encounter would hardly have gone half as well if the ghost had been after her—and if it (he) had enough sentience to do that, she should stop selling it (him) short.
Maddie dropped to a crouch beside Alicia and held out her own hand towards the ghost dog. "Will you take us to where we can help?"
Cujo sniffed at her hand and licked it clean of crumbs before sniffing around and scratching at the floor by their feet, which Maddie supposed counted as progress but didn't really help in the grand scheme of things.
Then again, she hadn't really expected this ghost to suddenly start talking—or understanding, for that matter.
Maddie glanced at her sister and asked in a low voice, "Do you really think there's trouble? Cujo's shown up back in Amity Park to play with Phantom more than once." Three days ago, she'd have said to terrorize various neighbourhoods, but her perspective had shifted a bit since then. It had shifted in the last three minutes, really, never mind three days. She wondered if it would ever stop, but stopping wasn't necessarily a good thing. She wouldn't turn up her nose at a plateau, though. "If he tracked Danny here…."
Alicia pursed her lips. "I'm still worried about the kids." To Cujo, she said, "Hey, buddy, do you think you could dig us a tunnel to wherever you need us to be? Do you think you could do that? For Danny?" Her hand was empty, but she drew it back as if to throw something and sent in an arc towards the floor. "C'mon, Cujo, let's go!"
Cujo yipped.
Even as Maddie watched in astonished disbelief, he started to paw more vigorously at the kitchen floor. Instead of leaving scratches in the wood, though, she started to see the lurid green she associated with ectoplasm shining through.
The patch grew, and she feared Cujo might disappear into it entirely, but even once the would-be portal was large enough to fit him, he stayed. And dug, as much as he could dig without harming anything in the physical realm. It looked like some special movie effect. He stood over what seemed to be a glowing green puddle, scratching at the edges until it was large enough for a human to tumble through, and then—
Then, something about the puddle—the portal—changed.
The green flared brighter and then took on the appearance of a sun-stained pop bottle. It seemed…thin. Flimsy. Brittle.
And not entirely green, as she got a glimpse at the thinner parts.
Beside her, Alicia had gone quiet, but the sound of her sharp intake of breath told Maddie she'd recognized something in the warped almost-image Maddie herself hadn't.
"What? What is it?"
"Danielle's in trouble," she said, reaching forward to grab Cujo's collar with one hand and Maddie's arm with the other just as Cujo broke through.
An ear-piercing trilling sounded through the air, and Jazz jumped and spilled half the contents of her coffee mug.
Mostly on the floor as opposed to herself, fortunately.
She abandoned her mug on the counter and grabbed a tea towel to blot at her clothes, thankful now that it was closer to lukewarm than scalding.
"Ah, you'll have to excuse me," Vlad said as he got smoothly to his feet. "That means it's time to feed my cat."
Normally, Jazz wouldn't buy an excuse as weak as that, even though she knew cats typically either disappeared the moment company showed up or were immediately demanding attention, but Danny had mentioned something about Vlad and a cat, hadn't he?
Still.
She couldn't just trust him.
"You have a cat?" Jazz echoed as Vlad opened a hidden panel in the wall by the light switch and silenced the constant ringing. "Did you lock it in a room or something?"
"She's upstairs."
"And you need an alarm to remind you when to feed her? Shouldn't she be coming to you demanding to be fed? Especially if this is the time you usually feed her?"
"She's upstairs," Vlad repeated as if that explained everything. Maybe he'd locked her in a room—or series of rooms—if she hadn't shown up yet. Maybe Jazz could call animal welfare on him? That might depend on how healthy the cat looked….
"I'll come with you," Jazz said even as Vlad shook his head and told her there was no need.
Tough.
She was going with him anyway.
Vlad must have resigned himself to this fact because the most he did was ask her to move aside so he could get into a cupboard that held what looked like crystal saucers. She'd think the extravagance was purely for show, except it was Vlad, and there were good odds that he truly didn't want to use anything less.
A can of wet cat food was still a can of set cat food as far as Jazz was concerned, though. It was no doubt the best money could buy, at least if Vlad was putting his money where his mouth was, but Jazz took some comfort in the fact that the entire routine meant Vlad hadn't been pulling her leg about the cat.
She trailed after him as he headed upstairs.
The cat, it turned out, had been locked into a series of rooms, but to Vlad's credit—if Jazz were being generous enough to give him any credit—it included a screened off outdoor play area at the back of the house that seemed to span the width of at least two rooms.
She couldn't remember it being there the last time she'd been in his backyard, but she hardly made a habit of being in Vlad's backyard.
Jazz joined Vlad on the deck and leaned against one of the cat trees, watching him as he put down the full saucer, picked up the empty one, and traded the old water bowl for a fresh one. "Where's your cat?"
Before he could answer, Jazz heard a hiss from somewhere above her.
She looked, but she still couldn't see the cat.
"Did you get a ghost cat?"
"I assure you, Maddie is perfectly alive. She is simply discerning about those she allows to touch her."
And see her, apparently.
Jazz made a face. "You named her Maddie?"
"If you could see her, I'm sure you'd agree she looks like a Maddie."
Jazz was sure she wouldn't agree, but whatever. Better Vlad have a cat than keep up the creepy pining after her happily married mother. This was improvement. Not a lot of improvement, but still improvement. "Okay. Great. You fed your cat who hates anyone who isn't you. Now will you finally be honest with me? About this whole situation with Danny and Danielle and whatever garbage you've been feeding Mom?"
She wasn't expecting him to agree.
She wasn't expecting him to disappear, either.
Crud.
Jazz lunged forward to grab at where Vlad had been, but her hands closed on nothing but air. Either he'd turned intangible at the same time or he'd already moved. She spun and raced for the door instead. It was still closed, but with Vlad's ghost powers, that wouldn't matter. She'd have to take the time to open it; he wouldn't.
Jazz grabbed at the door handle, but it wouldn't turn. "Vlad?" She pounded on the door with the heel of her hand. "This isn't funny! Let me out!"
No answer.
Crud, crud, crud.
"This is false imprisonment, you know!"
Nothing.
When she got out of here, she was going to kill him.
Jazz glanced behind her, but Vlad's cat hadn't emerged from her hiding spot. Jazz scowled. Feeding time, her foot. Whatever that alarm had been for, it hadn't been the cat.
She pounded on the door a few more times for good measure, screaming the obscenities she hadn't voiced earlier, and then shook out her stinging hand. She could get out of this. She just needed to figure out how.
It wasn't likely that Vlad had spared any expense building the cat structure, but Jazz wouldn't let the disembodied hissing deter her from looking for weak spots she could exploit. Or makeshift tools, come to that. She'd hardly had a chance to explore these rooms. There had to be something.
Maybe, if she could find herself something nice and solid, she could just try to punch a hole straight through the wall. It would serve Vlad right for trapping her in here. She'd need to avoid the support beams, which would likely require a more reliable method than knocking on the wall, but if she got desperate enough, she'd take her chances.
Jazz glanced at the door again.
The lock was on the other side.
The hinges were not.
If she could find something to help her get the hinges out, could she open the door from the other side? Even if it was locked? Could she open it enough to create a weak spot where she could kick her way to freedom without worrying about breaking something on a bad swing? It was wood, not metal. Kicking a hole it in should be possible. Maybe not if the door was solid wood—something she'd happily check with any convenient inanimate object she could pry loose—but then again, that might just make it more difficult. Not impossible.
Jazz touched the Fenton Phone on her ear to switch her mic back on. "Sam, Tucker, I hit a little snag, but I'm going to recover and get back on Vlad as soon as I can. Any updates on Dad?"
"No," was Tucker's reply.
"Define 'a little snag'," was Sam's.
"Some alarm went off and Vlad locked me upstairs with his cat."
"I'm sensing a story there," Tucker said, "but that'll have to be for later. I thought you disabled his alarms."
"So did I. Maybe I did it wrong. Or maybe he re-enabled it with a clone or something once we were back in the kitchen. I can only stop what I can see."
"And now you can't see anything. Because he locked you in with Maddie the cat."
Leave it to Tucker to point out the obvious. "I'm working on it. This is a setback, not a victory for him." She bit her lip. "You've really got nothing on Dad? Still?"
"Sorry." Sam's voice sounded apologetic. "Maybe try his cell phone in case he came back through a natural portal? He could've hit one early on, and that would explain why no one has seen him."
Yes, it would.
It wouldn't explain why Jack hadn't called them, though.
Even if he'd arrived in a dead zone, he was using the Spectre Speeder. That thing had been designed to keep up with ghosts. He could have been spat out into the middle of the open ocean and still made landfall by now, right? It had been hours since anyone had started to look for him and longer still since he'd left for the Ghost Zone. Besides, the Spectre Speeder had a GPS system. He wouldn't be lost.
Failing that, Jazz was fairly sure they'd installed a satellite phone as part of the Spectre Speeder itself. It went hand in hand with the navigational system. Not every system would fail. That would be enough. Something would be enough.
Wouldn't it?
Danny had told her time travel was possible. Once. In an offhanded comment he had refused to elaborate upon.
The iron vice in Jazz's chest that she was refusing to acknowledge tightened around her lungs.
They'd find Jack.
They had to.
He couldn't go missing now that they'd finally found Danny—or, at least, now that Danny had let himself be found.
"If you try phoning and don't get an answer," added Tucker, "try not to think the worst. It might not be the worst. It might just be a dead zone. Which is painful, don't get me wrong, but it's not the worst."
Jazz couldn't fault Tucker for not remembering the finer details of the Spectre Speeder. Why would he bother learning about the satellite phone when all of them carried extra Fenton Phones, just in case?
"Yeah," she said instead. "I'll keep that in mind. Thanks."
She sighed and slumped against the door, forehead first, and closed her eyes. She should be scavenging for supplies. She should be venturing into the demon cat's territory in search of something useful. She should be doing something, figuring out some way out of this, figuring out how to fix everything—
She was just so tired.
"This is all Vlad's fault," she said aloud, but the words came out all wrong. It sounded like she was trying—poorly—to convince herself of them. "He saw an opportunity with Dad and took it. He wants the leverage."
There.
That was a little more convincing.
Jack wasn't leverage if he couldn't be returned hale and whole and alive, right?
Jazz sucked in a breath, held it, and then let it out in a rush.
She would figure this out. She would fix this. Danny was safe. Danielle would be okay. They would find Jack. She might be able to smack that smug smile off Vlad's lying face.
…She'd leave the punching to Danny this time. He'd need a fitting target. He might not have confirmed what she suspected about Danielle, but the lack of details with the little she did know painted a pretty good picture. It might not be completely accurate, but it would be accurate enough.
She'd figure out the right words to say to get through to their parents. She would. Or she'd catch Vlad in a lie. Or maybe, at the end of all of this, they'd see it for themselves, and she wouldn't have to say anything.
That would be nice.
"Okay," Jazz muttered. "First things first: get out of here before Vlad does something to somehow make this situation even worse." Then she could figure out what to say to fix things.
Second things second, after all.
Maddie had still had the sensation of falling, even though her head told her she hadn't always been falling down.
She'd rolled forward and down—and through, somehow—and now she was on her back. She'd fallen, but she'd also—come up? Unintentionally somersaulted but hadn't gotten all the way back to her feet because she hadn't expected her downward to suddenly become her upward?
However it had happened, she now lay on a bed of fescue, squinting up into the sunlight. "How—?"
"I don't think we have time for questions," Alicia said, looming into Maddie's view and offering her a hand.
Maddie took it, letting Alicia pull her to her feet, and then she blinked as she recognized her surroundings. "Is this the old Jones place?" The farmyard up the road hadn't had occupants on the home quarter since before Maddie had been born, but everyone in the community still used it as a landmark.
"Dottie wasn't the only one I asked for a favour," Alicia said. She hadn't bothered to brush off the grass from the landing after their tumble through the portal, and more than a few broken strands had caught in her hair. Maddie figured she mustn't look any better and started to brush herself off, but Alicia clicked her tongue. "Come on. Cujo might've come to fetch Danny, but if he did, he must've just missed Danny's arrival, because I'm pretty sure your boy's already here. He'll know help's on the way, too. Cujo already went inside."
Now that Maddie was looking for it, she could see a steady green glow filtering through the windows on the second floor. The house had never been boarded up—she and Alicia had biked over here to explore as children on more than one occasion—and was mostly intact despite its lack of upkeep, but Maddie hadn't ever— "Who even owns this place now?"
Alicia frowned at her before turning away and starting towards the house, though she did call over her shoulder, "If you have to ask questions, can you at least try to keep them relevant?"
Maddie caught up to her in a few quick strides and grabbed her arm. Alicia stopped, maybe because she was being nice and maybe because she didn't want to be on the receiving end of the martial arts skills she knew Maddie regularly honed. "We should be smart about this if Danny's fighting off a ghost. I don't have any weapons on me." Maddie's world might have been turned on its head recently, practically everything she knew about ghosts very much included, but if Danny was fighting a hostile ghost, giving that ghost two targets to overshadow that Danny would hesitate to hurt wouldn't help matters.
"Would you feel better if we grabbed a big stick or some rocks first?" Alicia shook free of Maddie's grip and pointed down the overgrown lane. "Road's over there if you want gravel."
"I know where the road is," Maddie said, not bothering to keep the annoyance out of her voice. "That's not the point. Those won't do anything against a ghost."
"So we don't fight it. We distract it and let Danny handle the fighting. From what I gather, he's good at that. Too used to it not to be."
Maddie sucked in a breath but didn't want to let Alicia know how much that had stung. "We could be making matters worse."
"Not doing anything might make matters worse, too. You wanna chance that after Cujo brought us here? I don't think he'd've done that if he didn't think we could help."
Maddie bit her lip, watching as pink flashed against green.
Walking into the middle of a ghost fight unarmed was the worst thing she could think of doing, but her instincts hadn't been doing her any favours lately.
"Okay," she whispered, "but we stay low and try to keep out of sight until we see an opening to actually do some good and help."
"You do that," Alicia said. "I don't do the hiding thing. I just go in there and do the doing thing."
"But we don't even know who's inside!"
"And we won't know if we don't go in there. Not like you can sneak a peek through a window."
"But—"
"How will knowing who it is help you anyway?" Alicia huffed. "You know what? You're right. It is better if you stay out here. We don't have Danielle's answer yet. So I'll go up and help, and you stay out here and shout if you see the wrong kind of backup coming."
Maddie frowned. "You know perfectly well ghosts can make themselves invisible. If more come, I doubt they'd let me see them."
"Yeah, see, that? That's why you're actually right this time. Because your first instinct was to correct me about ghosts instead of being concerned about the fact that Danielle is up there in the middle of a ghost fight she's not equipped to handle—"
"I've seen Phantom fight. I know how good Danny is."
"But we're still both hoping that he's up there instead of finding out for sure because we're standing around yakking like we've got the time to waste when in reality Danielle could be trying to defend herself against whoever or whatever is up there with her!"
"What do you want me to say?" Maddie snapped, her temper getting the better of her. "What do you want me to do? Like you've told me, I can't just fix this, and every move I make has the potential to make it worse! So what's the right play here if you're so wise? Do I go in there and try to help or stay out here because going in there might make everything ten times worse than it already is?"
"What do you think?"
"If I knew what to think, I wouldn't be asking you!"
"You damn well know what I think by now," Alicia shot back. "Sometimes there aren't any right answers. Sometimes you make the wrong decision. But you need to accept that you made the wrong decision and set about making things right instead of dithering over the thing like feeling bad about it will make the entire mess go away. And if this is a thing that can't be fixed? Then you fix the things that can be fixed and stop poking the bear."
"You—" Maddie swallowed. "You really think this can't be fixed?"
Alicia's mouth twisted. "I think saying it can be fixed like it's as simple as slapping a band-aid on a kid's scrape is underestimating the complexity of the situation."
That wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no, either.
"I'm going up. You decide if you want to follow or if you're good out here."
Maddie's stomach twisted itself into new and interesting knots as she watched Alicia slip inside.
Without weapons, they couldn't help. They'd be liabilities. They'd make the situation worse.
But Alicia had already gone inside, armed with nothing more than grit and determination, and Maddie….
Danielle was here, and maybe going in would make things worse. Maddie wasn't dressed like she was in the lab, but she couldn't change her face. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if she kept her distance? Made it clear she wasn't coming back to finish what she'd started?
Jazz would know, but Jazz wasn't here to give Maddie the advice-laden lecture she sorely needed.
The kids might need help, though.
They might need her help.
Fighting a ghost was perhaps not the best way to try to show Danielle that she was trying to change, but trying to help might be a start.
Maddie took a deep breath and then closed the distance to the front door, wincing as the wood of the porch groaned beneath her weight. Inside was little better—the wood might be less weathered, but everything was coated in more than a fine layer of dust—but it never had been great, and if the stairs had taken Alicia's weight, they'd take Maddie's.
She couldn't hear shouting from upstairs, though. That was unusual for a ghost fight, especially one that Phantom—Danny—was in. Banter was part and parcel of his game.
Maddie climbed the stairs, following Alicia's tracks and skirting a broken cobweb that had tangled with the railing.
Every room upstairs was empty.
Well.
Every room was empty of people, anyway—Alicia included.
If they hadn't argued outside, if she hadn't hesitated—
It was too late for that.
She'd have to piece this together on her own.
One bedroom contained a mattress that clearly hadn't been there long enough to become a home to mice or any other critters. A rumpled pillow sat on top of it, but the blanket was pulled half off the bed and stretched across the floor. The room was free of dust but not of scorched wallpaper, and even through her dust-clogged nose, she thought she could detect the sharp, ozone-like smell that spoke of the aftermath of a ghost fight.
Half-hoping for an entertaining light show or a setup had been wishful thinking, though.
Even if nothing else had given it away, the stains of blood and ectoplasm on the mattress and the wood around it were hard to miss, and some of them were bright enough to be fresh.
Not to mention the bugs. Not real ones; these were too large for that, at least for this area. These particular bugs were—or at least had been—electronic.
Maddie toed a blackened beetle that was a good six inches long, nudging it over to get a proper look at it and promptly wishing she hadn't.
It looked entirely too much like the invention she'd been working on with Vlad to be anything but his work.
These weren't electronic; they ran on ectoplasm, just like all her inventions with Jack, and the ectoplasm they used as a power source—
Pink against green.
Different sources of ectoplasm.
Vlad wouldn't have any reason not to use his own when it was his most readily available supply and he was in no danger of destabilizing his ghost half.
She wasn't smelling the aftermath of a ghost fight; she was smelling the aftermath of an attack by these—these robotic beetles, the same ones that were supposed to have the destroy part of the proposed search and destroy function disabled to expand their range. (Not that Maddie had gotten the impression that Vlad had implemented that idea in the first place, despite it being in his plans, but clearly a lot of her impressions had been wrong lately.)
There should only be one beetle. Vlad had said it was a prototype, and he hadn't shown her earlier prototypes in their quest to see what might be most easily adapted to their purpose. At the time, she'd assumed it was because he hadn't had any more, but between the tracker she'd found earlier and…and all of these…. She could see enough pieces (smashed or frozen or simply blasted to bits) between the very scorched, very intact robots that she knew the beetle she'd worked on either hadn't been a prototype at all or it had been the prototype meant to improve upon whatever these were.
Meaning Vlad had lied to her.
Why was that so surprising when she knew what he could be like? When Jazz and Danny had both warned her what he could be like?
Why had she been so naïve as to think he wouldn't lie to her when she was in a desperate situation?
Why did it hurt so much to realize he had?
Maddie didn't have gloves, but she picked up the robot at her feet and examined it anyway. It was warm to the touch but not uncomfortably so. That was definitely a blaster coming out of its mouth, with the firing mechanism making up most of its head; its power source was embedded in the abdomen, and there was something in the thorax, something that was clearly meant to do something or it wouldn't be there, but the firing proboscis told its own story.
So did the scorch marks on the walls, come to think of it.
The green glow had been steady. A shield, then, rather than repeated ectoblasts? If the ricochet—
Maddie stopped and shook her head. She didn't have time to be analysing the aftermath of a ghost fight. She didn't need to. She knew what had happened. Danielle had been here. Danny had been here. Alicia might have been here long enough to be responsible for the smashed remains of the last few beetles before they'd all disappeared, and Maddie wouldn't be surprised to learn Cujo was responsible for their escape.
But the beetles.
Vlad's inventions.
Not only were they much further along than anything he'd shown her, but they'd also explicitly arrived and attacked.
This wasn't defense.
She'd seen enough fights to have an idea of what that looked like.
Something this small, already capable of flight and scuttling into nooks and crannies to hide, didn't need to devote a lot of resources to defense. The blaster had been designed for offense. It could tilt to adjust the angle, but she couldn't see a means for it to shape the ectoblast—the ectoplasm—around itself as a shield. That was hardly the most common ghost defense, anyway. It was much easier for a ghost to simply go intangible or invisible—
Wait.
Maddie looked at the thorax again, and then she looked around for another robot that hadn't been reduced to scrap metal as a comparison.
Could that have been designed to output a pulse that would disrupt the light waves from—?
No.
No, she was getting sidetracked again.
That wasn't the point.
The point was that these machines were inventions of Vlad's, they'd found Danny and Danielle, and they'd attacked, despite Vlad's insistence that he wanted to find the kids as much as she did.
He had never specifically said why he'd wanted to find them, so of course she'd assumed his reasons aligned with hers, but now—
Maddie might—might—have believed that one beetle attacking had been a mistake. A glitch. An error in programming. Vlad was careful, but mistakes were made, especially in a rush.
She wouldn't believe the same mistake was responsible for the actions of the ten or fifteen robots that looked to be scattered in this room in various states of destruction. Something like that would've turned up in earlier testing, and these weren't prototypes. They couldn't be. They were too consistent. Vlad had never been one to make multiples of the same thing without testing it out first; he'd always complained that Jack was wasting resources whenever Jack had done that in his excitement. Maybe something had changed in the last twenty years, but—
Danny was right.
Alicia was right.
She hadn't been listening.
Not to the right people, at any rate.
She'd been too worried about making the same mistake all over again that she'd been ignoring the evidence right in front of her, reasoning away the concerns of the people whose opinion should have mattered most—
Not anymore.
Maybe this wasn't a situation that she could fix, but she had to try, and she had to start somewhere. Since she hadn't really started before, despite her intentions, then she was going to start right now.
Or, rather, she was going to start once she found them again.
At least she knew the way back to Alicia's from here.
