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mismatched machines.
    He knew that he wouldn’t find anything to save Tom’s projector. It was burned out. He could probably get it to project again, but it wouldn’t pick up Tom’s interface very clearly. It’d never get him through testing. Syd could always give the kid a new one, something cobbled together from all these parts.
    A gift, an act of kindness.
    What did Tom Sawyer do to deserve a gift?
    Syd stood in front of one bin of half-assembled transmitters and exhaled slowly, wondering how he always got himself into this kind of mess. Why did he wear his kindness in his hair where any schnorrer could smell it?
    And what the hell was a schnorrer supposed to be?
    He laughed at himself for thinking about Mr. Baram’s weird saying and picked up an ancient plastic pen that had rolled out of one of the bins. He mindlessly clicked the back of it to make the little tip go in and out with a satisfying sound. Why did they even have this antique? Who knew how to write by hand anymore?
    He dropped the pen into his pocket out of solidarity with the total pointlessness of its survival and he rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t believe he’d agreed to go to an all-night Upper City party tonight. He just wanted to sleep and forget that today had ever happened.
    He lowered his hands from his face, let out a long breath.
    And then he froze.
    On the monitors, he saw Mr. Baram talking with two of the most beautiful people in the world. Their features were perfect. The woman’s hair was blond and pulled back into a tight ponytail. The man had a neat wisp of brown hair. Both had bright blue eyes like pieces of a perfect sky. They were dressed in simple custom-made gray suits. They projected authority and inspired longing at the same time, which is exactly what they were designed to do.
    They were Guardians.
    And they had come for Syd.

[6]
    SOUNDS OF SUCTION AND electronic pulses, beeping, blipping, clicking. Lights danced. He tried to push himself up, but thick straps pressed him to a cushioned table. His knees itched, but he couldn’t scratch them. His side ached, but he couldn’t touch it. He heard a screech, metal scraping metal.
    “Stabilize the head,” a voice said, the sound muffled.
    “We have some bleeding,” another said.
    He felt a pinch in his stomach, a wave of nausea. Suddenly, a face loomed over his, a face in a holo projection, wavering in the air, translucent.
    “Knox? Knox?” the face said. Giant teeth. The voice bubbled, like it was underwater.
    Knox remembered seeing a giant fish tank once when he was little. Every few minutes a column of bubbles would roar up and rise to the surface, smashing on the water’s underside. He had pressed his ear to the tank to hear the bubbles roar. Prehistoric sharks, massive toothy creatures swam by his head, inches from his face. Just the glass between them, a tiny bit of plexi between life and death. He remembered his heart racing in his tiny chest.
    He could have stayed there for hours, listening to the bubbles, pressing his face near the shark faces swimming by, but his mother took his hand, led him to the children’s area. It was a party. He remembered laughter and the chatter of grown-ups; his mother’s warm hand on his back, sharks swimming around the room. The roar of bubbles echoing in his ears.
    “Knox? Can you hear me?” The toothy face on-screen was tiny next to a shark’s. Time was collapsing. The shark swam in front of the face. There was no shark. Just the face.
    Knox drifted into aching silence.
    Awake again.
    Staring straight up. He was lying on his back on that same soft table, still restrained. He was in a tube. Plexi all around him, just like the shark from his dream. Sharks can’t stop swimming or they’ll die. Knox couldn’t move, but he felt movement inside him. He wasn’t the shark, he was the bubbles crashing on the surface.
    He heard muffled voices on the other side of the plexi, his father’s voice.
    “Will he survive?”
    “He’s through