Science fair prep took place in a large gymnasium. Thea doubted she’d accomplish her full idea in the next few days, but she just needed something to work on while she spied on Aymes. And she was confident she’d at least finish a prototype.
Thea looked up as Jasper approached her table. “Do you think you could grab me some supplies?” she asked. “I have a list—”
“You’re supposed to be talking to Aymes.” Jasper looked at the table next to Thea, where Aymes was sorting through a box of vials.
Thea waved a hand. “Yeah, yeah, I’m building up to that.”
“What are you working on, anyway?” Jasper picked up one of the scraps of metal Thea had snatched from various locations around the school.
“I’m building an android.”
“An android? Can you do that in two days?”
“Not a good one, but the prototype of what I’ve really been wanting to make,” Thea told her. “A body for Mia.”
“Aww, really?”
Thea nodded. She’d felt a strange connection to the A.I. ever since first interacting with it, shortly after Jasper had rescued her, Holly, and Dax and taken them in. She couldn’t think of any logical reason for it, so she’d never brought it up. Maybe it was simply the way her technopathy interacted with more advanced programming.
After watching Thea poke at her scraps for another minute, Jasper shot a pointed look at the back of Aymes’s head. With a sigh, Thea scooted her chair toward Aymes. “Excuse me, do you by chance have a marker I could borrow?”
“I think so.” Aymes turned away from the box he’d been digging around in and reached into his bag.
While he dug around, Thea reached for the smartsphere at the edge of his table. Her fingers had barely grazed it when Aymes popped back up, marker in hand. She accepted the marker and pulled her hand away.
“Ugh,” Holly groaned through comms. “I don’t know how, but I wound up in fourteen theatre kid group chats. I don’t know these people. Or understand their inside jokes. My sphere won’t stop buzzing. I’m going to throw it into that fountain in the middle of the foyer.”
Thea sighed. “Please don’t,” she muttered. “I made a lot of programming modifications to our spheres—”
“Too late. It’s in the fountain.”