Cristina was crying. Her face was shining, wet. Tears bridged between her eyelashes, her long thin black lashes were thick with them and gathered in points like Liberty’s crown. “You don’t know him, you don’t know him,” she said, over and over. “I need to go. I need to be somewhere else. I’ll be up at the reservoir.” Her face was a knot, her eyes shining white over blue through the wetness.

“Please,” she said, looking up at him. “Please.”

Her hand was so small as he gave her the keys, bright silver against the whiteness of her palm. As she closed her fingers over them her knuckles whitened, and he saw a thin gap between her cuticles and the pink polish on her nails, just the thinnest crescent of whiteness there.

And the rotors were in a blue and white box on the third shelf in the back of a Shell Station in Azusa, California. The top of the box was covered with thin layer of brown shop dust.

He was standing in the test chamber and the air around him was alive with flying robots, humming, hovering, arranging themselves in the preset patterns on command. Through the goggles of his mask he could see them gently floating in the thin gas of the chamber, discharges of electricity forking and crackling between the hovering machines, sustaining the charges in their power packs. Memo stood beside him, monitoring the gas mix on her thin console.

They had settled on three types: Mixers, Sensers, and Prompters. Splitting up the functions allowed them to build different levels of redundancy into the system, and avoided the necessity for design compromises related to intermingling the functions within a single type of flyer.

The M-series, the Mixers, were the most numerous and the largest, and they were the largest robots he had ever built. They had a thermos-sized body with twin half-meter helio-paddleblades top and bottom and a stabilizing prop mounted two-thirds of the way up. Their job was to hold a position and spin like hell, preventing the heavier helium gas-isotopes from stratifying at the base of the hull of the zeppelin.

The S-series were based on his darter plane, their job was to provide a continuously-updated database of the gas mix throughout the lifting body. They were triangular, roughly the size and shape of a folded paper plane, with tiny gas sniffers mounted at six places on their wings.

The Prompters were the smallest and fewest fliers they needed, grasshopper-sized and bristling with antennas, they were the relays that maintained communication between the other bots nearby and Memo’s computer.

It was a dynamic system, robust despite the fragility of the parts, and it worked, maintaining the inert mix of hydrogen, helium and Memo’s other isotopes that was the key to the success of the whole enterprise, that would enable ZDI to build cargo-carriers that were safe, fast, and cheap to build and operate, expensive to hire.

On Memo’s nod, he pressed the button for free flight and waited. Imperceptibly at first the flyers began adjusting position. Through the goggles of her mask, Memo’s eyes shone at his.

His neck hurt like fuck. His whole back was burning. His left arm was dead to him, beyond numb, gone. Something was chewing his neck, biting him, hard, like the beak of an eagle tearing at the tendons, looking for meat between the nerves of his spinal column.

He tried to remember what happened. He remembered a spider web, he remembered the spider, he remembered carrying a plastic bag in the darkness. The lab, it was the lab. Damn his neck was killing him.