Alien in the House

human.”
    “You’d show to recruit,” Chuckie said. “But why would you want to? And recruit for what? If you’ve created robots who are passing as representatives, you don’t show your next victims so they know you’re going to kill and replace them.”
    “You also don’t take specific, detailed, accurate technical information and toss it around randomly,” Ravi said. “I’m not joking—I believe we can build a working robot from that information, and by ‘we’ I don’t mean Dulce. I mean we like Amy and Kitty.”
    “I think I should resent that somehow.”
    “Oh, I do resent that, no somehow,” Amy said.
    “Point made,” Chuckie said, presumably to keep Ravi alive. “And I don’t believe Pia was really trying to stop the robot makers, either.”
    “Mossad agrees with you,” Tim said. “No way she was trying to stop these particular bad guys. My bet, and they’ll research it, is that she was connected to Antony Marling in some way. And because we’re all tense, I’m not going to make a French Connection joke.”
    “Your self-restraint is impressive, Megalomaniac Lad.”
    “Okay, so what was Eugene doing with the full packet of schematics?” Amy asked. “Do you think he stole it from Gaultier? He wasn’t working on that project, we’ve confirmed that both with his supervisor and our own research.”
    “Why did he take the job at Gaultier?” I asked. “He was freelancing. Maybe he was trying to find information for Pia.”
    “Or confirm the information she gave him,” Naomi said, proving she was at least listening with one ear.
    “I’d want confirmation,” Abigail added. “You know, before I tried to murder someone and all.”
    “Maybe, but I don’t know that we’ll ever know,” Reader said. “And if we do figure it out, I don’t think it’ll be today, because Eugene and Pia are both dead.”
    “If we’re disregarding the letter L theory,” Raj said, “then perhaps we should also assume that there is no group of Stop the Robot Representatives people forming, either.”
    “Raj . . . you complete me.” Raj grinned while Jeff and Reader both glared. Felt all special for a minute.
    “If we assume that Eugene was the only one shown the information by Pia, then that begs certain other questions,” White said. “To Olga’s point, why Eugene Montgomery?”
    “Can I ask a question or two before we try to answer that?” Michael asked.
    “Certainly,” White said with a smile. “We’re all on the same team.”
    “Okay. I understand the Master and Apprentice thing, at least I think that’s what you mean by the Sith Lord theory, right?”
    “Yes,” Henry said. He looked like he was going to keep going, but Amy shot him a glare almost worthy of her husband and he shut up.
    “Okay. But why do we think there’s only one Apprentice?” Michael asked.
    “Because that’s how it is in the movies,” Stryker and I said in unison. We looked at each other. “Eddy, does that reply seem as totally lame to you, now that we said it out loud, as it does to me?”
    Stryker grimaced. “Yeah. Sort of.”
    “Totally, dude. Totally. And, come to think of it, before we went to brunch, Raj had already posited the idea of more than one. Sorry, Chuckie and Mom, I forgot.”
    “Me too,” Raj said quickly.
    “And he’s a loyal suck-up, too. I love that in Embassy staff.”
    Tim snorted. “You like that in everyone.”
    “What’s your point? Anyway, sorry, where are you going with this, Michael?”
    He shrugged. “I get why you’d only have a few people in the know, but when we’re choosing who gets to go into space and who doesn’t we start with a select group and we whittle them down via a variety of trials. Sometimes you don’t go for a simple reason—you caught the flu. Sometimes you don’t go for a more complex reason—you underperformed in key stress tests and scenarios. That’s done so that the team that does go into space is the very best it can be, and that includes being able to complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”
    “You firmly believe there’s more than one Apprentice, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, I do. Let’s face it, twenty people is a lot. Sure, we have a professional assassin out there who’s working for the C.I.A. But I can’t think of a better way to make someone prove loyalty to me than to have them kill someone on my order.”
    “The Mob’s been using that philosophy for decades,” Chuckie said. “And it’s been