The Wells Bequest Read Online Free PDF Page A

to an array of glass numbers. Some of them were glowing. “When your number lights up, come back and get your items.” She flashed me a smile. She had straight white teeth, with one crooked canine. I had never seen anything as perfect as that one crooked tooth.
    Get a grip, Leo, I told myself again. I thanked her and sat down at a nearby library table where I would have a good view of the board—and of Jaya.
    I tried not to stare as she moved around the booth talking to the other patrons, putting plastic tubes into the pipes, and taking things out of a small elevator in the wall. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Her quickness. Her big, dark eyes.
    She was real! The girl in my impossible dream wasn’t a dream after all. And I’d found her without even looking!
    How could that have happened? It was the kind of coincidence that drove my sister crazy. Sofia hated what she called “crucial coincidences.” When they happened on a TV show, she would throw pillows at the screen, yelling, “Bosons! Bosons!”
    Of course, if you thought about it, my finding Jaya wasn’t really a coincidence. It just looked like one because I didn’t know the future yet—but Future Leo did. My meeting her today was always going to happen. You could call it fate.
    Did Jaya know about the time machine? Should I tell her? No, she probably didn’t know yet. She hadn’t recognized me. If I told her, maybe she would freak out and think I was scary nuts.
    But Future Jaya seemed perfectly comfortable with flying around on a tiny time machine. So if she didn’t know already, sometime between now and whenever that was, she would find out about it. If it freaked her out, she would get over it.
    A light flashed above the wall elevator. Jaya took two robots out of it and carried them to the counter. She flicked a switch and the number 17 lit up on the board.
    I went up to the window.
    â€œHere you go,” said Jaya.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    I sat down at a table with my two robots: Leonardo da Vinci’s knight and the wooden beetle from sixteenth-century England.
    The knight was about the size of a desk lamp. It moved when you wound a crank. It was wearing armor, but you could open it up to see the insides and adjust the movement, which worked by pulleys and cables. Da Vinci had done an especially impressive job designing the neck mechanism—the knight could move its head just like a real person. I could see why everybody thought the guy was a genius.
    As I put the knight through its paces, my mechanical-vision thing kicked in. I saw the knight’s patterns of motion traced like glowing lines in the air. I looked back and forth between my own arms and the knight’s arms. I could see how my own muscles worked like cables stretching and pulleys tightening too. For a moment I wondered if I were just an automaton myself. Had some genius built
me
?
    I got out my notebook and started to draw the knight.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    â€œLeo Novikov?” I looked up, startled. It was Jaya. “Are you almost done with those items?” she asked. “We’re closing soon.”
    The room had an orange glow. The sun was setting in the stained glass above me. I must have been working for ages. “Schist! How did it get so late?”
    Jaya laughed. “Schist?” she said. “Is that another of your family expressions?”
    I nodded. “It was on our science vocabulary list last year. It’s a kind of rock. It’s what happens to hot sandstone when it gets squished really hard for a few million years.”
    â€œI know,” said Jaya. “But I’ve never heard anybody use it as a curse before. It sounds really bad—in a good way.”
    â€œYeah, it’s one of my favorites. Even strict teachers can’t object to a word from a vocabulary list, right?”
    â€œQuark, no!” said Jaya.
    â€œGood one!” I grinned at