Rabbit & Robot by Andrew Smith

Author:Andrew Smith [Smith, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781534422223
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2018-09-25T07:00:00+00:00

The Lost Girls, and the Boy in the Bucket

The “All Clear” song came on while the girls were lost, exploring deck after deck of empty, lifeless staterooms and finding nothing at all but locked doors and parked, sleeping, or broken cogs.

Meg and Jeffrie left their cast-off helmets sitting on the floor of one of the Tennessee’s elevators. When they became exhausted from searching for anyone else who might be on the ship with them, they slept in an ice and beverage-vending room, where Meg told Jeffrie stories about Missing Boy Mountain and the people who lived at Antelope Acres.

They were hungry and alone, and none of the restaurants they found were unlocked. At night Meg would go back to Deck 21 to print food for Jeffrie, who was too afraid of the damaged cogs there to go along with her.

And two days later, frustrated and disoriented, Meg and Jeffrie entered the wreckage of Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique. Everything was upended and broken. The floor was puddled with thousands of gallons of aquarium water and cog slime.

A half dozen tuxedo-clad cogs lay mangled and dismembered in the restaurant. They looked as though they’d all been eaten—just like what happened to the cogs the girls had left behind on Deck 21.

“We could probably change into some tuxedos if we wanted to,” Meg said.

“That’s fucking gross,” Jeffrie said. “I’ll keep the spacesuit. I refuse to undress a dead cog.”

A miniature-sperm-whale snake crawled across the floor between Meg’s feet.

Meg said, “Well, there’s going to be food here, I can tell. I won’t have to go back to Twenty-One tonight, at least.”

From somewhere in the darkness of the vast restaurant came the soft sounds of a crying young boy.

“Clarence? Clarence? Is that you?” the crying boy, Milo, called out. “Please don’t eat me, Clarence. My life is horrid enough as it is. Clarence?”

“Boy,” Meg said. “Where are you?”

Milo wept harder. “I’m over here, hiding under the mop bucket.”

Milo wasn’t exactly hiding under a mop bucket, but he did have an upturned yellow pail covering his head, and he was sitting in a pool of slime and salt water, shivering in a narrow busboy station at the rear of the dining room.

“It’s just a cog,” Jeffrie said.

“I don’t deserve to live,” Milo said. “I’m not even good enough to eat.”

Meg lifted the mop bucket from Milo’s head. The boy cog was wet and streaked with filthy muck from the bottom of the bucket.

A stray cog seahorse the size of a monkey had curled its tail around Milo’s ankle and was grazing on the leg of his trousers, which was completely detached from the waist down.

Seahorses have very small mouths. This one had been trying to eat Milo for two days.

“Go ahead. Eat me. I don’t care anymore.” Milo covered his face with his hands and sobbed.

Meg shook her head. “He thinks we’re cogs.”

“We’re humans, not cogs, you idiot,” Jeffrie said. “Stand up and get a grip.”

But Milo kept crying as the seahorse took tiny nibbles out of his socks.

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