Free The Android Chronicles Book One: The Android Defense by Marling Sloan Page A

cops investigating my dad’s
disappearance case.”
    “Wait here.” The dispatcher
picked up her phone and dialed a number.
    “Hey, Grimes. There’s a
Mandelie Miles here to see you. Mandelie Miles. Yeah, yeah, Jason
Miles. That must be it. She’s waiting here. Come down and talk to
her yourself.”
    The dispatcher hung up and
returned to her tasks. Mandelie waited until she saw a lean,
ascetic cop walking towards her. He seemed surprised by her
presence.
    “How can I help you, Miss
Miles?”
    “It’s been a month since my
dad’s disappearance,” Mandelie said. “Has there been any progress
with the search?”
    Grimes glanced at the
dispatcher.
    “Let’s go to my desk and
have this conversation,” he said. “Follow me.”
    Mandelie followed Grimes
through an area of open police desks, where some cops were sitting,
absorbed in their work. Grimes stopped at his own desk, which was a
cluttered mess of papers and notebooks. He dragged a chair forward
for her.
    “Sit down,” he said, as he
sat as well.
    Mandelie sat. Grimes leaned
back in his chair.
    “Um, well, we haven’t had
any breaks in the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of … I guess you
could say weirdness surrounding your dad’s disappearance. We had
those blood samples from the lab investigated. But only some of it
matches your dad’s DNA. We don’t know where the other blood came
from.”
    Mandelie’s heart
rose.
    “If only a little was his,
then maybe he’s still alive.”
    “I don’t know,” Grimes said.
“I can’t say.”
    “I looked through the lab,”
Mandelie said. “There’s a lot of things missing.”
    “Yeah, they’re in the
evidence room,” Grimes said. “Waiting to be analyzed.”
    Mandelie’s eye was caught by
a familiar-looking notebook sitting on Grimes’ desk. It was her
father’s notebook in which he kept notes on the progress of his
experiments.
    She rested her arm on the
desk and pretended to knock a pile of papers off of it.
    “Oh, sorry!” she said. As
Grimes leaned down to pick up the papers, Mandelie swept the
notebook off the desk and into her bag.
    “Well, I’m sorry to have
bothered you,” Mandelie said. “Can you please let me know if you
make any other discoveries in the search?”
    “Sure,” Grimes said, in a
non-committal voice. “Have a nice day, Miss Miles.”
    He did not accompany her
back to the front of the station. Mandelie walked quickly out of
the front doors, hoping Grimes would not notice the missing
notebook and chase after her. He did not.

    “Isn’t this fantastic?”
Carlie whispered in Luke’s ear as she sat beside him in the private
box seat overlooking the huge gleaming sports arena in the Staples
Center. She wore a jersey belted into a dress and her usual
stiletto heels.
    Luke resisted the urge to
shrug. He had a sudden memory of a hockey game he had played with
Jake in the parking lot. He had found that a lot more interesting
than this current activity.
    “It is,” he said instead.
Carlie took a sip from her drink and danced in her seat to the
music blasting from the arena speakers.
    Damian had excused himself
to take a call in the hallway outside the room.
    “Want another drink?” Luke
said to Carlie.
    “Oh, sure,” Carlie said. She
beamed.
    Luke got up and went to the
bar at the back of the room. He made sure Carlie was not looking in
his direction and then he closed his eyes and accessed his
communication console.
    There were no messages
waiting for him from Mandelie. She had not responded to any of his
messages since the night they had kissed.
    Luke returned to his seat
beside Carlie. He felt heavy, weighted down, as though his internal
mechanisms had turned to lead.
    “You okay?” Carlie
said.
    “Fine,” Luke
said.

    “You said you wanted the
Super Soldiers to be terrifying, and I promised you they would be,”
Damian said in the half-darkness to the person on the other end of
the phone. “And I always come through on what I say.”
    He listened for