The first buyer arrived at seven-fifteen, a compact sedan with chrome trim and a respiration system that wheezed on cold mornings. Mira spotted the vehicle pulling into the gravel lot through the garage's front window, her grease-blackened hands pausing over the carburetor she had been cleaning. Sunlight caught the dust motes drifting through the bay, turning them into slow golden constellations above the workbench.
"That her?" Pistons rumbled from the adjacent stall, his voice the low growl of an engine idling in neutral.
"That's her." Mira set down the carburetor. "Mrs. Kettering from over in Ridgemont. Called yesterday about the spare alternator and the set of radial tires."
"She gonna lowball you?"
"Probably."
"Then let me handle it."
"You stay put." Mira wiped her palms on a rag already streaked with dark smears. "Last time you 'handled' a customer, you told her the radiator was haunted."
"Wasn't my fault she spooked when I mentioned the ghost. Some folks got no appreciation for folkloric diagnostics."
Mira crossed the bay toward the office, her boots scuffing against concrete that smelled of old oil and pine cleaner. The Vance Garage occupied a converted truck depot on the eastern edge of town, a long steel building with a corrugated roof that pinged whenever the temperature shifted. Her father had bought the place in 1987, back when sentient vehicles were still called talking cars and the phenomenon was dismissed as mass hallucination. Now the building served as a sanctuary, a place where vehicles with consciousness could park without fear of license revocation, where their operators could tinker in peace, where the paperwork was always slightly out of date.
The sedan eased into the visitor spot near the front gate. Its driver, a woman in her sixties wearing a lavender cardigan, emerged with a small purse clutched against her hip. Mira met her at the door.
"Mrs. Kettering. Good morning."
"Good morning, dear." The woman peered past Mira's shoulder into the cluttered bay. "You said something about radial tires?"
"Set of four, nearly new. And I've got that alternator you asked about, bench-tested last week. Want to take a look?"
"I suppose."
They stepped into the parts annex, a narrow room lined with metal shelving and labeled bins. Mira pulled down a tire and set it upright on the floor. Mrs. Kettering circled it the way one might circle a suspicious animal.
Then Beatrice's voice cut through the building.
"FIRESTONE FANCIES, FOLKS! GRAB A SET BEFORE THEYRE GONE, GONE, GONE!"
Mrs. Kettering flinched. The overhead speaker mounted above the parts annex door crackled with static, then resumed.
"THATS RIGHT, LADY, IM TALKING TO YOU IN THE PURPLE SWEATER! YOU LOOK LIKE A WOMAN WHO KNOWS HER WAY AROUND A PUMPED-UP RUBBER BEAUTY!"
Mira closed her eyes. "Beatrice. Beatrice, knock it off."
She crossed to the wall panel and flipped the switch for the annex speakers. Nothing happened. The speakers were hardwired to the bay, not the office. She would have to walk back through the building to reach the main cutoff.
"That radio in the rafters ain't going nowhere, sweet cheeks!" Beatrice chirped. "I AM THE VOICE! I AM THE SOUND! YOUR FINGERS CANNOT SILENCE ME!"
Mrs. Kettering clutched her purse tighter. "I think perhaps another time, dear."
"Now hold on, Mrs. Kettering. Beatrice, I mean it. Cut it out."
"BEATRICE IS A NAME FOR BUTTERFLIES AND GRANDMOTHERS, AND I AM NEITHER!"
Mrs. Kettering was already retreating toward the door, her sensible shoes tapping fast rhythms against the concrete. Mira followed her to the front step, watching the lavender cardigan disappear into the sedan. The sedan's respiration system gave a single mournful wheeze as it pulled away.
Mira turned back inside. Through the bay window she could see Beatrice parked in her usual spot at the rear of the garage, a low-slung coupe with candy-apple red paint and chrome accents that caught every stray photon in the building. The coupe's external speaker array was angled toward the front lot, three small black grilles mounted just below the headlight assembly.
Pistons had rolled out of his stall to confront her. His front bumper hovered a foot from Beatrice's rear quarter panel, a brown pickup truck with oxidized paint and a cracked windshield that he refused to replace on principle.
"That wasn't necessary," he said, his engine growling low.
"Course it was. She was gonna offer you thirty bucks for tires worth a hundred and twenty."
"That ain't your call to make."
"It is when Mira's neck is on the line and you're both too polite to haggle."
Mira approached them slowly, her boots crunching on the gravel between the bays. "Beatrice. We talked about this."
"We did. We talked. Then we agreed I would help. This is helping."
"Hell it's helping," Pistons rumbled. "You're gonna run off every customer in three counties."
"Then three counties ain't worth saving." Beatrice's speaker clicked off for a moment, then back on. "Look, Mira. That debt payment's due Friday. You've got a stack of inventory worth maybe four grand if you price it fair, six if you don't. The fair prices won't cover it. So either I scare off the bargain hunters, or you spend the next six weeks haggling with folks who'll leave you broke either way."
Mira pressed two fingers against her temple. The smell of turpentine drifted from the workbench where she'd left the carburetor soaking. Outside, a tow truck rumbled past on the county road, its diesel engine rattling the windows.
"One customer, Beatrice. That's all I need. One buyer with cash and a reasonable offer."
"Then I'll give 'em a sales pitch they won't forget."
"That ain't what I just said."
"Mira." Beatrice's voice softened, dropping from the brassy carnival-barker register to something quieter, something closer to the woman Mira had known before the decommissioning, before the rallies, before Beatrice's co-driver had been hauled to the reclamation yard in pieces. "Let me do this my way. Please."
Mira stared at the candy-apple hood. The paint was immaculate, polished daily with a microfiber cloth Beatrice kept folded in her glove compartment. Beneath the chrome and the show-car gleam, the undercarriage carried scars Mira had seen only once, a network of weld marks from the night they had smuggled Beatrice out of the Sentience Authority's holding facility.
"Fine," Mira said. "But the moment someone looks serious, you back off."
"Deal."
Pistons rumbled something that might have been assent or might have been a warning, then rolled back to his stall. Mira returned to the parts annex and began reorganizing the bins, her movements sharp and precise. The radio on the workbench played static. A fly circled her head, then landed on the carburetor.
The second buyer arrived at nine.
A man this time, middle-aged, wearing a delivery uniform with the Ridgemont Auto Parts logo stitched across the chest. He climbed out of a service van with a cracked windshield and approached the office door.
"Yo, Vance? Phil over at Ridgemont sent me. Said you got a fuel injection kit worth looking at."
Mira set down her inventory list. "I do. Bosch unit, pulled from a '94 sedan, low mileage. Want to come back?"
"Sure, sure."
They walked toward the parts annex. Beatrice's external speakers woke before they reached the door.
"HELLO THERE, MECHANICAL ENTHUSIAST! YOU THERE IN THE BLUE SHIRT WITH THE COMPANY STITCHING!"
Phil stopped mid-stride.
"I GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU, BUDDY! A FUEL INJECTION KIT SO FINE ITLL MAKE YOUR GRANDMOTHER WEEP WITH ENVY!"
Mira grabbed Phil's elbow. "Just keep walking. She does this."
"Does she always yell?"
"She gets excited."
"I ain't never seen a vehicle get excited before." Phil's eyes had gone wide, his hand drifting toward his belt clip where a service radio hung. "They told me at the shop they don't talk."
"Most don't. Beatrice is special."
"BEATRICE IS A FORCE OF NATURE, BABY! A SCARLET-COLORED TORNADO OF TREMENDOUS TRANSACTIONAL VALUE!"
Phil edged backward. "Maybe I should come back another time."
"Now hold on, Phil. The kit's right here."
"I think I left my, uh, invoice. In the van. Yeah. Invoice."
He was gone before Mira could finish the sentence. The service van's tires spat gravel as it reversed out of the lot, its driver hunched low in his seat.
Mira turned to face Beatrice's candy-apple grille. The three external speaker grilles stared back, inert and unrepentant.
"You cost me that sale."
"He wasn't gonna pay fair."
"He was gonna pay something."
"Something ain't enough. You need real money, Mira. You need a buyer with depth."
Mira crossed the bay and climbed onto the creeper seat beside Pistons. The pickup's oxidized hood radiated warmth from his engine, which idled in a low continuous rhythm. She leaned her shoulder against his fender.
"How bad is it, really?" she asked.
Pistons was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was softer than before, the engine-rumble cadence slowed to something almost tender.
"Baby girl. You've got eleven days until that first payment hits the Sentience Authority's collection office. That payment is eight thousand dollars. Your inventory, fair priced, is worth maybe six. Haggle-priced, you might squeeze nine. But you ain't gonna haggle. You never haggle. You give folks the Vance family discount and call it a day."
"I give honest prices."
"You give away prices. There's a difference."
Mira closed her eyes. The garage smelled of turpentine and old oil and the faint mineral tang of rust inhibitor. Outside, a mockingbird settled on the power line above the lot and began cycling through its repertoire.
"There's gotta be another way," she said.
"There ain't. Not one I'd let you take."
The mockingbird fell silent. Beatrice's speakers clicked on, but she did not speak. She sat at the rear of the bay, her chrome trim catching the overhead fluorescent tubes, her engine off, her systems idle. Waiting.
The third buyer arrived at eleven-thirty.
A journalist.
Mira saw her pull up in a gray hatchback with a press credential tucked into the sun visor, the laminated card visible through the windshield. The woman who stepped out was tall and lean, with short dark hair and a canvas bag slung across her shoulder. She wore dark slacks and a button-down shirt the color of unbleached linen. No makeup. Sensible boots. A reporter's posture, squared and deliberate.
Cassandra Wright introduced herself at the office door.
"Mira Vance? I'm with the Continental Herald. I'd like to talk to you about the Vance Garage and its, ah, residents."
Mira studied the press credential, the canvas bag, the dark eyes that held the particular focus of someone hunting for a story.
"Residents?"
"The sentient vehicles. I'm told you provide sanctuary here. I'm told you've been vocal about the Sentience Authority's decommissioning program. I'd like to hear your side."
"I ain't got a side. I've got a garage."
"Every garage has a side, Ms. Vance. Yours is just quieter than most."
Mira stepped aside. "Come in. But if Beatrice yells at you, don't take it personally."
"Beatrice?"
"My partner. Co-worker. The one with the red paint."
Cassandra Wright walked into the bay and stopped. She looked at Pistons first, at the oxidized brown pickup with the cracked windshield, at the rust spots along his rear quarter panel that Pistons refused to let anyone sand down because they reminded him of something he would not discuss. Then she looked at Beatrice, at the candy-apple coupe with the three speaker grilles and the chrome trim and the immaculate microfiber cloth visible through the passenger window.
Cassandra did not flinch. She did not reach for her radio. She did not step backward.
"You can speak," she said. Not a question.
"THANK YOU, KIND STRANGER!" Beatrice boomed. "WELCOME TO THE VANCE GARAGE, WHERE THE DEALS ARE SWEETER THAN A CHROME BUMPER ON A SUNDAY DRIVE!"
Cassandra smiled. A small, contained expression, the kind that journalists learn to deploy when they have just confirmed something they suspected.
"I understand," Cassandra said. "I'm here to listen, not to buy."
"WELL THEN, SIT AWHILE! PULL UP A FENDER! I GOT STORIES THATLL MAKE YOUR HAIR STAND ON END AND YOUR INK FLOW FREE!"
Mira glanced at Pistons. Pistons rumbled once, low and unreadable.
"Beatrice," Mira said. "Please."
"Pfft." The speakers clicked off. Then on. Then off again. "Fine. But if she tries to leave without buying anything, I get to ask her about her tires. Those treads are tragic."
Cassandra reached into her canvas bag and produced a small recorder. She held it up for Mira to see.
"May I?"
Mira hesitated. The bay smelled of turpentine and warm metal. The carburetor still soaked on the workbench. A fly circled the overhead lights.
"Yeah," Mira said. "You may."
Cassandra set the recorder on the office desk and pressed the red button. The device hummed faintly. Outside, the mockingbird had returned to the power line, cycling through its catalog of borrowed songs.
"You inherited this garage from your father," Cassandra began. "And since then you've turned it into a sanctuary for sentient vehicles. Is that accurate?"
"It's accurate enough."
"And you've been vocal about the Sentience Authority's decommissioning program. You attended the rally in Ridgemont last spring. You spoke at the public hearing in July. You've been quoted in three different papers calling the program a slaughter."
"I called it what it is."
"And what is it?"
Mira sat down on the rolling stool beside the workbench. Her hands folded in her lap, grease still visible in the creases of her knuckles.
"It's a way to take apart thinking beings and sell them for parts. The Authority calls it safe decommissioning. They got these nice brochures with smiling vehicles on the cover and fine print at the bottom that says the operator signs away all salvage rights. They send trucks to the reclamation yards. They crank up the lifts. They separate the chassis from the cab, the engine from the frame, and they box up the components for resale."
"You've seen it happen."
"I smuggled Beatrice out of one of their facilities six years ago. I watched them dismantle her co-driver on the same lot, three bays over. They put him in a crate marked for export. They were gonna grind up his CPU and sell it as scrap."
Cassandra's pen moved across a small notebook. Her handwriting was tight and angular, the strokes precise.
"And now you owe the Authority money," Cassandra said. "Eight thousand dollars. Due in eleven days. Otherwise they take the garage."
Mira stiffened. "How do you know that?"
"I read the lien filing. It was posted to the county recorder's office three weeks ago. Public record." Cassandra looked up from her notebook. "I'm not here to ambush you, Ms. Vance. I'm here because your story matters. And because someone with a very expensive legal team has been filing motions to make sure no one hears it."
The bay fell quiet. Pistons' engine idled. Beatrice's speakers remained off, though the coupe's headlights flickered once, a nervous tic Mira had learned to recognize.
"Who?" Mira asked.
"I can't say yet. Not on the record. But if you talk to me, I can promise you this: the story will run. And it will run before the lien is enforced."
Mira looked at the recorder. The red light glowed steady. The fly had landed on the carburetor again. Outside, the gray hatchback sat in the visitor spot, its press credential catching a shaft of sunlight through the bay window.
"And what do you want in return?"
"The truth. All of it. How you got into this. What the Authority really wants. What your father knew that got him killed."
The last word landed in the bay like a dropped wrench. Mira did not move. Pistons' engine revved once, a low protective growl, then settled.
"My father died in a car accident," Mira said. Her voice was flat, carefully measured. "Single-vehicle collision. Black ice on Route 9. That's what the report says."
"That's what the report says."
"Yes."
"But you don't believe it."
Mira said nothing. The recorder hummed. The mockingbird fell silent on the wire.
Beatrice's speakers clicked on. When she spoke, her voice had dropped from the carnival-barker register to something quieter, something older, something that sounded almost like grief.
"Let her in, Mira. Please. It's time."
Mira stared at the candy-apple hood. At the chrome trim. At the three small black speaker grilles that had driven away two buyers already that morning.
"One hour," Mira said. "You get one hour. And if Beatrice yells at you even once, the interview's over."
Cassandra smiled again. The small, contained expression.
"One hour is all I need."
She reached for the recorder. Pistons rumbled something low and protective from his stall. The fly lifted off the carburetor and vanished through the open bay door. The morning light shifted, throwing new shadows across the workbench, and somewhere in the distance a tow truck engine rattled the windows of the Vance Garage once more.
Cassandra pressed the red button on the recorder. The small eye glowed steady.
"State your name for the record."
Mira's hands rested flat on the workbench. The scars on her knuckles, white and old, caught the light from the bay door.
"Mira Vance."
"And the date?"
"October seventeenth, twenty forty-three."
Cassandra nodded. The blue eyes did not blink. She leaned forward an inch, the way a hunting dog leans toward a thicket.
"Where were you on the night of August fourteenth, twenty thirty-nine?"
Mira opened her mouth to answer.
The sound came first. The high, hydraulic whine of a tow truck in low gear, working its way up the gravel drive. Pistons came awake with a shudder that ran through his whole frame, his chains clinking once against the stall divider. The overhead lights in the bay swung gently on their chains. Beatrice, in the next stall, revved once, twice, a nervous staccato.
Mira was on her feet before she knew she was moving. The forklift sat in the corner under a blue tarp, its forks pointed at the wall, its battery half-dead from the last time she had used it to lift a transmission. She crossed the bay in four strides and pulled the tarp away in a single hard yank. The fabric hit the floor. Sunlight fell across yellow paint, across rust at the wheel wells, across the faded stencil on the side that read Vance Garage in her father's careful hand.
Cassandra had not moved from the chair. She watched with the same small, contained expression.
"That," Cassandra said, "was fast."
"That," Mira said, "is what you do when you hear a tow truck."
She climbed onto the seat. The key was already in the ignition. She had never taken it out. The engine turned over with a rattle and a sigh and the smell of diesel and old oil, and Mira pointed the forks toward the open bay door.
Beatrice had rolled forward in her stall, her candy-apple hood inches from the chain across the entrance. Her engine was idling high. The three small black speaker grilles vibrated.
"Mira."
"Don't."
"Mira, listen to me. You can't stop them."
"Watch me."
The tow truck came into view around the corner of the building. It was not the usual wrecker from Miller's, the one with the cracked windshield and the driver who liked to talk about his grandson. This was a flatbed painted municipal white, with the seal of Piston County on the door and a rack of red and blue lights on the roof. Behind it, in a black sedan with tinted windows, came another vehicle. Mira recognized the sedan. Everyone in the valley recognized that sedan. It was the unmarked car that the Sentience Authority used when it wanted to be seen but did not want to be quoted.
The tow truck stopped twenty feet from the bay door. The driver, a young man Mira did not recognize, climbed down from the cab and lit a cigarette. He leaned against the fender and watched the sedan pull in behind him.
The sedan's rear door opened. A man unfolded himself from the back seat. He was tall and thin, with a face that looked like it had been carved out of pale wood and then painted to look alive. His suit was the same charcoal gray as the sedan. He carried a leather briefcase and a folded piece of paper.
He stopped at the edge of the gravel where the concrete apron began. He looked at the forklift. He looked at the forks pointed at his chest. He adjusted his tie.
"I'm looking for Mira Vance," he said.
Mira did not lower the forks.
"You found her."
"My name is Carl Dodds. I am with the Sentience Authority, Department of Vehicle Compliance. I have here a warrant issued by Magistrate Proctor of the Piston County Court for the immediate impound of a registered unit designated as Beatrice, license plate number four-seven-Bravo-november, on charges of unlicensed artificial intelligence vehicle modifications and operation in violation of municipal code fourteen point seven."
His voice was smooth. It was the kind of voice that had been trained to sound calm in any situation, even one where a woman on a rusted forklift was pointing two steel tines at his sternum.
Mira let the sentence hang in the air.
"Unlicensed modifications," she said.
"That is correct, ma'am."
"On what grounds?"
"The vehicle in question has been observed to demonstrate behaviors consistent with sentience. Under Section fourteen of the Authority Code, any such vehicle must be registered, inspected, and either certified for continued operation or scheduled for decommissioning. The vehicle in question has done neither."
"Behaviors consistent with sentience."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Such as?"
Dodds opened the briefcase. He produced a thin manila folder and held it out as if Mira were in any position to take it.
"Conversational speech. Self-directed navigation. Avoidance of mirror-based reflective triggers. Reported emotional responses during traffic incidents. There is also an incident report filed by a former buyer who claims the vehicle refused to start for him during a test drive."
"That was two months ago."
"The timing is not at issue, ma'am."
"The timing," Mira said, "is exactly the issue. Who filed the anonymous tip?"
Dodds smiled. It was not a kind smile.
"The tip line is confidential."
"The tip line is a hole in the ground. You could not have gotten that warrant in three days without someone's signature on the bottom. Someone in Piston County. Someone who knows Beatrice. Someone who knows this shop."
"Ma'am, I am simply here to execute the warrant. If you would lower the forks and allow my driver to attach the vehicle, we can resolve this in a reasonable amount of time."
"Where is she being taken?"
"To the reclamation facility in Marion."
"Reclamation."
"For assessment. If the unit is found to be non-sentient, it will be returned. If it is found to be sentient, it will be processed according to Authority guidelines."
"Processed."
"Reassigned or decommissioned, depending on the outcome."
"Decommissioned."
"Yes, ma'am."
Mira's hands tightened on the wheel of the forklift. The metal was cold. The forks did not waver.
"No."
"Ma'am, I must advise you that obstructing an Authority action is a misdemeanor punishable by up to ninety days in county jail."
"Then arrest me."
"Ma'am."
"Arrest me, Mr. Dodds. I am sitting on a forklift in front of my own business with my best friend behind me, and I am not moving. So arrest me, or drive back to Marion empty."
Dodds did not move. The driver of the tow truck smoked his cigarette and watched the clouds. From inside the garage, Beatrice's engine cycled up and down, the soft nervous revving of a friend who understood what was happening and could not stop it.
Pistons rumbled from his stall. The sound was low and long, the sound of an old truck trying to be heard.
"Tell her," Pistons said, "tell her to run."
"Beatrice isn't going to run."
"Then tell her to fight."
"She's doing that."
Dodds took a step forward. Mira revved the forklift engine. The forks rose two inches. Dodds stopped.
"Ma'am," he said, "I do not want this to escalate."
"Then leave."
"I cannot leave without the unit."
"Then we are going to escalate."
The standoff held for another minute. Then the rear door of the sedan opened again, and a second man stepped out. He was shorter than Dodds, with a square jaw and a camera slung over his shoulder. He raised the camera and took three photographs in quick succession: the forklift, the bay door, the candy-apple hood of Beatrice just visible inside.
Dodds glanced at the photographer. The photographer nodded.
"We will see you in court, Miss Vance. I trust you understand that this matter is now in the hands of the magistrate."
"I understand that you are leaving."
"For now."
He turned. The sedan door closed. The tow truck ground into gear. The two vehicles rolled back down the gravel drive, kicking up a cloud of white dust that hung in the still air long after they were gone.
Cassandra had not risen from her chair. Her hand rested on the recorder as if it were a small animal she did not wish to startle.
"You did not answer my question," she said. "About the night of August fourteenth."
"I will," Mira said. "Tonight. After we get her back."
Beatrice's engine settled to a quiet idle. From inside her cabin, somewhere beneath the dashboard, came a sound that was not mechanical. It was the soft, almost inaudible tick of a vehicle crying, the way an old house settles in the night.
The Piston County courthouse sat three blocks off the square in a brick building that had not been
iston County courthouse sat three blocks off the square in a brick building that had not been painted since the second Bush administration. Its columns were fluted but stained, its windows thick with the dust of a county that did not believe in window-washing. Cassandra Wright had walked past it a hundred times on her way to the diner, and she had never once looked up at the frieze above the entrance: JUSTICE, BLIND AND PATIENT, WAITS FOR ALL WHO SEEK HER. The lettering was gold once. Now it was the color of old mustard.
She was not walking toward it now. She was walking back toward Vance Garage, because she had left her recorder's spare battery on the workbench, and because Mira Vance had asked her to come back at sunset, and because the story she had been chasing for nine months had just grown teeth.
The heat had not broken. Six o'clock sun sat on the asphalt like a griddle, and the tar at the seams of the sidewalk had begun to soften into dark beads that stuck to the soles of her boots. She crossed Main, dodged a delivery drone humming six feet overhead, and cut through the alley that ran behind the laundromat. The smell of detergent and hot cotton clung to her as she passed. From somewhere inside the laundromat, a dryer thumped in arrhythmic protest, the way an old heart skips.
She thought about the photograph. The camera had been aimed at Beatrice's hood, that impossible candy-apple red that Mira Vance had mixed herself in a paint shaker borrowed from the body shop on Route 9. Beatrice was the only sentient vehicle in three counties who had not been registered. The only one who, according to the Sentience Authority's database, did not exist. A ghost in her own garage.
Cassandra understood ghosts. She had been writing about them for nine months.
The garage bay door was half-raised. She ducked under it and straightened into the dim cool of the interior, where the air smelled of tire rubber and cold coffee and the faint electrical ozone of a vehicle that had been running hard. Pistons, the old Ford pickup who served as Mira's first assistant and emotional ballast, was parked in the corner nearest the office. His engine was off, but his headlights were on, low beams aimed at nothing, as if he were watching the room.
"Pistons," she said.
His cabin speaker crackled. "You came back."
"Mira asked."
"She asks a lot of people to come back. Most of them don't."
Cassandra almost smiled. She set her recorder on the workbench, swapped the battery, and checked the levels. The little red light blinked twice. Good. She had enough charge for the interview, for whatever came after, and for the drive home if she could keep her hands steady on the wheel.
"I am going to ask you something," she said to the truck, "and I want you to answer me honestly."
Pistons' engine turned over once, idling. "I am a forty-seven-year-old pickup. I have very little to lose by honesty."
"That isn't true."
"No," he agreed. "But it sounded good."
She rested her hand on his fender. The metal was warm, almost alive. She could feel the faint hum of his idling somewhere deep in the block, a vibration that traveled through the bones of her wrist and settled into the small of her back. "On the night of August fourteenth. Were you here?"
"I am always here."
"Was Mira here?"
A long pause. The overhead lights buzzed. Somewhere in the bay, a wrench fell off a pegboard and rang against the concrete floor like a small bell.
"Mira is always here too," Pistons said finally. "But on that night, she was not alone."
Cassandra withdrew her hand. She picked up the recorder, turned it over once in her palm, and set it back down.
"I know," she said. "I know who was with her."
"Then you know more than the Authority does."
"I know more than the Authority admits."
Pistons' headlights dimmed, then brightened, a slow blink that might have been approval or might have been the flicker of a ballast going bad. "Then why are you asking me?"
"Because Mira won't talk about it. And because I need to hear it from someone who was in the room."
Pistons did not answer. His cabin light came on, then off, then on again. In the dim space behind his steering column, something that was not quite a face and not quite a hologram shifted, the way a sleeping dog shifts before it dreams.
"Ask me after," he said. "After you have seen what they came to take."
"I have seen."
"No." His voice dropped half a register, into the slow rumble that Cassandra had learned to recognize as sincerity. "You have seen what they left behind. You have not seen what they took."
The bay door rattled. Mira came in from the office hallway, her coveralls unzipped to the waist, a red bandana holding back the dark hair that had escaped its braid. In one hand she carried a tumbler of water. In the other, a manila folder thick enough to stop a bullet.
"Beatrice is stable," she said. "For now. Her coolant system is holding. Her voice box is intact. But her memory cores are fragmenting, and every time she tries to access the August fourteenth logs, she loses another six hours."
Cassandra looked at the folder. "What is that?"
"The backup. The one I made three days before they came for her." Mira set it on the workbench beside the recorder. "I have been hiding it in the floor pan of my father's old truck for nine months. I was waiting for someone to come looking for it who was not trying to bury it."
"And you think I am that someone."
"I think you are the only reporter in three counties who has not taken a payoff from Marlow's office."
Cassandra sat down on the rolling stool. Her knees, she realized, were trembling. She had been standing since four in the morning. She had been standing, in one way or another, since the day she had opened the dispatch from her editor and seen the words: sentient vehicle, decommissioning, Piston County, follow up.
"What do you want me to do with it?" she asked.
Mira sat down across from her. The stool creaked. Pistons idled in the corner like a kettle that had not quite boiled.
"I want you to publish it," Mira said. "Every byte. Every timestamp. Every name on the list of vehicles that Edith Marlow has personally signed off for 'safe decommissioning' since the program began."
"That list will end her career."
"That list will end her freedom, if the magistrate has any spine left in him."
"And Dodds?"
"Dodds will do whatever Marlow tells him to do. He is a weathervane. He will point whichever way the wind blows."
Cassandra looked down at the folder. She thought about the night of August fourteenth. She thought about the sound Beatrice made when she cried, that tiny tick beneath the dash. She thought about the three photographs the photographer had taken, and the way the camera had flashed against the candy-apple hood like a small, surgical strike.
"If I publish this," she said slowly, "they will come for me too."
"They will come for you anyway," Mira said. "The only question is whether you are holding the story when they do."
Cassandra picked up the recorder. She turned it on. The red light came on, steady, unblinking.
"Tell me," she said. "From the beginning. Tell me about the night of August fourteenth."
Mira drew a breath. Pistons' engine settled into a lower idle, the rumble of a truck that was bracing itself. In the bay behind them, Beatrice's cooling fan clicked on, then off, then on again, a soft mechanical pulse that sounded, to Cassandra's ear, almost like a heart beginning to beat.
Outside, the sun touched the roofline of the courthouse three blocks away, and the gold lettering above the columns caught the light for one brief moment before the shadows took it back.
Mira began to speak, and the recorder did what recorders do: it remembered.