Frankenstein

was prepared to assist Deucalion, Carson, and Michael in any way necessary, but until they assessed the situation and had a plan of action, Erika remained content to follow her usual routine. Her favorite pastime was reading, which occupied her evenings. But books were not merely a form of entertainment; through books, she gradually learned what it meant to be human.
    As the product of a laboratory, even though flesh and blood, she literally wasn’t a human being, no matter how much—externally—she could pass for one. As far as she knew, she had no rightful place in this ordained world. She was neither an innocent, as were the simple beastsof field and forest, nor one of the fallen, for she’d never been in a state of grace from which to fall. Nevertheless, in every way but the most important, the human condition was her condition, and with a good book, especially a novel, she could immerse herself in the human adventure and, page by page, more fully understand it. She was not human, but she yearned to be.
    For the past two years, Jocko had been content to sit with her in the living room or on the porch in good weather, enchanted by a book of his own. Occasionally he would exclaim—“Holy moly! No, no! Boogers! Catastrophe!”—over some startling development in the tale or mutter darkly, or sigh with pleasure, or giggle. But ensconced in a chair with a book in his hands—or sometimes in his feet, with which he could hold it just as well—the little guy never spiraled into one of his hyperkinetic episodes. Books were his Ritalin.
    This evening, however, Jocko rejected the very idea of settling down to read as though nothing had changed. Victor Frankenstein was alive! Clone Victor! Engaged upon his skullduggery in or near Rainbow Falls! Boogers! Catastrophe! Everything precious was at stake: their happiness, their freedom, their lives, Jim James cinnamons!
    Worse than the danger suddenly threatening from all sides was Jocko’s inability to do anything about it. Deucalion, Carson, and Michael were in town investigating, digging up clues, tracking down leads, seeking the snake in its lair or wherever you sought snakes if you knew more about where they lived than Jocko did. But because of his extraordinary appearance, he could not race into town to spy and snoop, probe and plumb. He knew he must have a part to play in their battle against Victor, but he didn’t know what that part was.
    As Erika sat in a living-room armchair with her current book, feet up on an ottoman, a glass of cream on ice close at hand, Jockorepeatedly passed the archway as he stomped up and down the hall, gesticulating and grumbling aloud to himself. Sometimes instead of stomping, he shambled or staggered, or scuttled, or clomped, but he was in too dour a mood to pirouette or cartwheel. He berated himself for his ineffectiveness, for his incompetence, for his uselessness. He bemoaned the ugliness that so limited his options and rued the day that he had become more than a nameless and unthinking tumor.
    When Deucalion phoned with a task for Erika, she was relieved to discover that Jocko, more than she, possessed the skills and the temperament for the job. Aware that she was something of a computer hacker, Deucalion gave her the make, model, and license-plate number of a truck that interested him and asked if she might find a way into the Department of Motor Vehicles’ records to discover the owner of the vehicle and his address.
    Erika disliked the Internet more than she liked it, because something about it seemed less informational than disinformational, potentially totalitarian. She hacked systems only if they were hate sites or dangerous utopian groups, and she hacked them only to mess with their data and cause them headaches.
    Jocko, on the other hand, was a firewall-busting, code-breaking, backdoor-building, antiviral-thwarting, data-drilling maniac, a cyber cowboy riding a virtual horse almost anywhere he wanted. He was much smarter than he sometimes seemed to be, but his greatest advantage as a hacker was less his intelligence than his singular ability to obsess combined with his wildly enthusiastic nature, combined with his unconventional patterns of thought, combined with his ability to stay awake for months at a time if he wished to do so, combined with the stunning dexterity of his bizarre hands and more bizarre feet—he could keyboard with both and simultaneously—combined with hisfierce and adorable determination to make