Free Call Forth the Waves by L. J. Hatton Page A

shaken like this after Arcineaux sabotaged it; hopefully that didn’t mean the Mile was about to meet a similar end.
    Bijou slithered into the kitchen across the ceiling, but it was as unstable as the floor, growing wider as the walls pushed out and thwarting his attempts to make it to the middle of the room. He coasted down to stand beside Xerxes. Both golems snapped into their alert state, ready to expand themselves without permission.
    “Don’t even think about it,” I warned.
    Bijou sat, but Xerxes chose to keep his own counsel and grew three inches taller, confident that I couldn’t reach him in time to stop him.
    “Don’t! You’ll pop the whole house apart at the rivets,” I told him with all the authority I could manage while lying sideways in a heap of tangled limbs.
    Xerxes snapped out another couple of inches, then screeched at me and deflated. He lay down with his wings crossed over his head and pretended to sleep.
    “Penn?” Jermay called over the noise.
    “It’s not me!”
    “Could maybe something that is you try to stop it, then? I refuse to be killed by a runaway kitchen!”
    “Get off the floor!” Winnie shouted down. She had perched herself on one of the cabinets, with her hands around her mouth for a megaphone.
    “I’ll get right on that as soon as I figure out how to stand up!” Jermay shouted back.
    Dev climbed onto the table. Nola was anchored with her hands against each side of the kitchen’s stairwell. Baba had found the single corner in the room that wasn’t shaking. They’d all anticipated it. The rest of us were behind the curve and couldn’t move until it was over.
    Birdie was still screaming, but now she and Klok were nowhere to be seen. She’d made them both disappear.
    Cabinets realigned themselves along the walls; the newly extended floor had wear lines, showing which tiles had been hidden and which had been exposed to dirt, light, and use. Finally, the kitchen table belched itself from a rickety square with four chairs to a long bar with benches on either side.
    Belched. Literally, with an angry rumble and a foul-smelling jolt that hinted at unpleasant things decaying out of sight.
    “Blech,” Dev said, holding his nose. He hopped down now that the floor had settled. “It smells like something died!”
    “Your grandfather’s sanity,” Nola groused. “That was a stupid thing to do!”
    “Bah!” Baba said. It was pretty much his answer to everything. “We needed more space. Now we have it. What’s the harm?”
    “Ask the invisible child trying not to vomit under the table.”
    “You can see her?” I asked.
    Birdie had released Klok back into the visible world, and I could hear her heaving and sobbing under the table, but there wasn’t even a ripple to indicate where she was. The creeper lights streamed out of hiding and relocated to the underside of the table, like they could sense her fears. They shined straight through her onto the floor.
    “I see a lot of things,” Nola answered. “Whether I want to or not.”
    With the expansion routine finished, the kitchen sat ready to entertain. Pots and pans had placed themselves on the stove, and a toaster oven had emerged from the counter. The fridge opened, allowing arms from the light in the ceiling to forage for the necessary ingredients. The table set itself, producing plates and glasses from sliding doors in the top. Everything was automated with the kind of convenience tech that terrified people on the ground who were afraid unnecessary machines and advancement would attract off-world attention.
    “You had to go through this every morning?” Birch asked. One of the creeper lights whirled past his head onto the table in a flurry of spidery legs. It rushed from plate to plate, wiping off the collected dust.
    “There were ten of us. We needed the space. But I don’t remember it being that bad.” Winnie gave him a hand up off the floor.
    The room had completely changed. Not only could we stand, we could