“I am sure I don’t, but I want you together. If it has to be together in that building, so be it. Go.”

She let him push her toward the tree, but didn’t start climbing. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Soon. I need to make a patrol.”

“I’ll come with—”

“No. Stay here and keep your people together.” He walked away into the storm.

Amber struggled up into the tree, which was not as easy as even Nicci made it look. Her hands, numbed by freezing rain, couldn’t seem to hold their grip; her technique consisted of lunging and sliding until she could climb onto the broken wall itself. There was a large heap of debris directly beneath her, so she wiggled over as far as she safely could before dropping down. Her boots hit the ground with a painful shock that went straight to her knees, which buckled and pitched her directly into the pile of concrete chunks and tree bark she’d been so careful to avoid falling on. It wasn’t a bad fall; she scraped her palms, thumped her elbow, bunched up her shirt and scratched her side, but that was all. She was fine.

“Nice dismount,” said Crandall, and a few people laughed.

“You okay?” asked Nicci.

“Yeah.” Amber swiped away the pain-tears that stung at her eyes and rolled off the worst of the debris. Mr. Yao was there to help her up and he kept his hands on her until her eyes adjusted to the considerable dark of the ruined building.

What she saw struck her briefly speechless.

This wasn’t a warehouse. She didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t a warehouse. Dominating the first floor of the cube they had invaded was some sort of inner chamber with perfectly round, perfectly seamless, transparent walls. It reached all the way up to the ceiling and through it, up through the next floor and however many floors were between them and the top of this building, where it let in plenty of grey stormlight, enough that she could clearly see the spiders and the web.

They weren’t really spiders, only three wiry legs around a shiny, metallic ball, but that was all she could think to call them. There didn’t seem to be many of them, but since they were all exactly alike and moved so fast, it was impossible to say just how many there were. They swarmed back and forth, effortlessly leaping, climbing and sliding along the thousands of filaments that filled their chamber. When Amber reached the inner wall (she had not been aware of walking toward it) and craned her neck to see up past the dark ceiling, she could see the entire web, with something like a spider’s egg sac the size of a man suspended in the very center. On this side of the spider-chamber, a bank of perfectly recognizable, if alien, computer stations formed a tight ring right up against the glass. Evenly-spaced between monitors were clear tubes that made Amber think of hamster cages. Now and then, a spider would slip through one of these tubes and extrude a proboscis of some sort from its stomach into the back of a computer, insert whatever it thought it was inserting into the entirely dead system, and then scuttle back out and onto the web.

“What is it?” Amber asked, dimly aware of what a stupid question that was. No one here could possibly know the answer.

“Besides creepy?” asked Maria.

Beside her, Eric turned back to give the spiders a speculative looking over. “If I had to guess, I’d say either some sort of power generator or maybe a data storage and retrieval system. But yeah, all it is now is creepy.”

Scott brought out his flashlight and clicked it on, painting the glass with a sudden pool of white radiance. The spiders scuttled on, oblivious. Scott watched them for a second or two, his face flexing uncertainly between wonder and revulsion, before a sudden gust of howling wind reminded him he was supposed to be saving the day. He swung the light around and almost immediately illuminated a door.

Everyone looked at it, at each other, at the door. Scott took a tentative step forward, then abruptly changed his mind and went to examine one of the computer panels instead.

There were chairs, Amber saw. Most of them were still neatly tucked in under their matching desks, as if the workers monitoring this station had only just stepped away for lunch and turned out all the lights behind them. There was a coffee cup at one of the desks, or whatever kind of cup they called it when they didn’t drink coffee. It had writing on the side, almost aged entirely away but still just perceptible in the fading light. ‘Gann’s Best Dad,’ maybe, or ‘Techies Do It With Tools’.

“Where’s the lizard?” asked Scott suddenly.

“He wanted a look around,” said Amber, still staring sickly at the cup.

“But he’s coming?”

“That’s what he told me.”

Somewhere, Crandall snickered, whispered, and got a few more people to laugh.

“Why is it so clean in here?” Nicci asked suddenly.

Amber, once more blushing, looked back at her baby sister and then around at the room. It was clean, she realized. The glass she’d been staring through for who knew how long now was damned near spotless. There was no stain of long-emptied drink on the inside of the coffee cup. The dead eyes of the many monitors were dust-free. The rain had brought in a spreading slick of water, but there was no sign of previous flooding. Amber had fallen on a good-sized heap of debris caused by the tree crashing through the wall…but ‘heap’ was definitely the operative word, and it was a clean, well-managed little heap at that.

“Someone’s living here,” said Dag. “Someone’s living here right now.”

And the door opened.

Amber jumped along with everyone else. A few people screamed. She didn’t, but only because Nicci slammed up against her and knocked the scream out of her throat.

Scott’s flashlight beam came swinging wildly around, shining a spotlight over the open door, the blank wall, the ceiling, and then finally at the floor where the little robot came whirring in.

The second group-scream was almost as loud as the first, but the thing reacted to the sound no more than the spiders reacted to light. Short, squat, and rounded—a metallic blister with many panels and a black scanning plate that ran around its middle, it looked so completely like one of the cleanerbot models that you sometimes saw advertised in tech catalogues or (if you didn’t mind a plastine model) on TV late at night that no one screamed again even when it came at them.

It rolled inside, sending a thin bead of light ahead of it, indifferent to the rapid retreat of the many humans before it. When it reached the glass wall, it hesitated, then opened a small panel and sent out a thin, metallic tendril, like the questing arm of a squid, to tap and test at the surface it found. It clicked at itself under the anxious weight of fifty alien stares, then withdrew its tendril and opened a second panel. It sprayed out two careful bursts of some kind of greyish foam, paused as if undecided, then added a third. It turned away, leaving the ‘soap’ to bubble and gradually start to slide up the glass, picking up speed as it climbed.

“It’s a cleanerbot,” said Scott. He sounded utterly astonished. “The lizards have cleanerbots! Just like ours!”

Amber leaned a little closer to the glass in spite of Nicci’s tugging hands and saw a thin, spreading mass of tiny beads. Metallic, like the spiders, and like the spiders, lifeless as they went about their work. “Not quite like ours.”

The bot had moved on, rolling slowly through the shuffling feet that surrounded it until it reached the first puddle of rainwater. There it stopped, testing, tapping. It began to roll from side to side, trying to map out its dimensions, and, finding that it reached from wall to wall, retreated a short distance to think.

“Is it okay?” Nicci asked nervously.

Amber shook her head.

The bot sat immobile, ‘arms’ retracted, ‘face’ dark. Every so often, that bead of light would dart out and flicker off the water. Twice it opened a panel, half-extended some unidentifiable tool, hesitated, and retracted it again. It hummed now and then, audibly and for no reason that Amber could determine, as if it were talking to itself.