slope. She jogs to keep up with it, huffing for breath. It tilts toward her. The inner chrome hoop bangs her head. She makes a little sound of pain, lifts her free hand to press a palm to the hurt place, only to remember she doesn’t have a free hand. The aquaball slips free and strikes the sidewalk with a glassy crack!
Good, she thinks. Smash.
But it doesn’t smash, it rolls, with a grinding, droning kind of music, weaving this way and that, hopping the curb and trundling into the road. A vapordrive hansom cab on gold razorwheels whines shrilly along the cross street, and the aquaball disappears beneath it. Iris tenses, with a certain pleasure, anticipating the crunch and the loud splash. But when the hansom flashes past, the murky green globe is impossibly still rolling, undamaged, along the far sidewalk. Iris has never in all her life so wanted to see something crushed.
Instead a kid puts his foot out and stops it.
That kid.
In one sense Iris has never seen him before. In another she has seen him a hundred times, on her way to her father’s, has glimpsed him from her Monowheel, this kid with his too-cool-for-school slouch, in a gray wool baseball cap and a gray wool coat that has seen better days. He is always here, hanging out against the wall in front of a closed Novelty.
He doesn’t do anything more than stop the ball with his toe. Doesn’t look up the road to see who dropped it, doesn’t bend down to pick it up.
She steers the Monowheel over to him. It’s easier now that she has two hands to guide it along.
“You’re too kind. And I do mean that literally. You just rescued the world’s crummiest birthday present,” she says.
He doesn’t reply.
She leans the Monowheel against the hitching post along the curb and bends to get the aquaball. She hopes it’s cracked, squirting its guts out. What a pleasure it would be to watch that gruesome slug—that sardine-size parody of a woman—swimming frantically around as the water level falls. Not a mark on it, though. She doesn’t know why she hates it so much. It isn’t the mermaid’s fault it’s ugly, trapped, unasked for, unwanted.
“Shoot. I was hoping it would shatter into a thousand pieces. A girl can’t catch a break.”
This doesn’t even earn her a chuckle, and she casts a quick, annoyed glance into his face—when she’s witty, Iris expects to be appreciated—and sees it at last. He isn’t a kid at all. He’s a Clockwork, an old one, with a smiling, moonlike face of crackled ceramic. His chest is a scratched case of plasteel. Within is a coil of cloudy vinyl tubing where intestines belong, brass pipettes for bones, a basket of gold wires filled almost to the top with silver tokens instead of a stomach. His heart is a matte black vapor-drive.
A steel plate mounted to one side of his heart says COIN-OP FRIEND! LOYAL FAITHFUL COMPANION AND CONFIDANT. NEED HELP WITH GROCERIES? CAN LIFT UP TO ONE TON. KNOWS 30 CARD GAMES, SPEAKS ALL LANGUAGES, KEEPS SECRETS. A TOKEN FOR 30 MINUTES OF ABSOLUTE DEVOTION. GIRLS: LEARN HOW TO KISS FROM A PERFECT GENTLEMAN WHO WILL TELL NO TALES. BOYS: PRACTICE THE ANCIENT ART OF PUGILISM ON HIS ALMOST INDESTRUCTIBLE SHELL! THIS CLOCKWORK NOT RATED FOR ADULT/MATURE USE. Someone has scratched a cartoon penis below this last sentence.
Iris has not played with a Clockwork since she was small, not since Talk-to-Me-Tabitha, her childhood beloved, and Tabitha was perhaps a century more advanced. This thing is an antique, one of the novelties from the shuttered store directly behind him, likely planted on the street as an advertisement. A moldie-oldie from the days of Google and chunky VR headsets and Florida.
No one could steal him. His back is pressed to a magnetic charge plate installed in the brick wall. Iris is no longer sure he intentionally stopped the aquaball, suspects his foot was just there and halting her runaway mermaid was only a lucky accident. Or unlucky accident; a lucky accident would’ve been if it had imploded under the razorwheels of the hansom.
Iris turns her back on him and looks despairingly at the Monowheel she still has to push another half mile. The thought of steering it along the road makes her unpleasantly aware of the sweater sticking to her sweaty back.
Need help with groceries? Can lift up to one ton.
She swivels back, digs out her tokens—she has exactly two—and pushes first one, then