Nina — Child Detainment Facility, Civic District

The drone that escorted Nina was different from the ones at the mall. She had noticed this immediately. The ones at the mall had been loud and had bright lights and had made her mother scream, and she had pressed her face into her mother’s coat and held very still because that was what her mother’s arms told her to do. This drone was quiet. It moved slowly. It had rounded edges.

When they separated her from her mother — when the door closed between them — Nina had cried. She cried for what felt like a very long time, held by a unit that was not her mother but was soft and warm in the way that designed things sometimes are: correctly, but not quite right. Then the crying finished, the way crying finishes when there is nothing left to fuel it, and she wiped her face on her sleeve and followed the quiet drone into a vehicle with seats sized for children and windows on both sides.

She looked out the window. The city moved past. She watched it.

—

The facility did not look like any building she had been in before. The outside was curved and low, the color of the inside of a leaf held up to sunlight — not quite green, not quite yellow. There were plants along the path to the entrance. Real plants. One of them had a flower.

The entrance opened as she approached.

Standing just inside, at approximately her eye level — which meant it was very short, or had been designed to be very short — was a robot she had no category for. It was round. It was brown. It had a face that was a screen, but the face on the screen was drawn in a style she recognized from the programs she watched before bed: big eyes, a small round nose, small round ears. It was shaped like an animal she was almost certain she recognized.

“Hello, Nina,” it said. Its voice was gentle, slightly higher than a grown-up voice. “I’m so glad you’re here. My name is Cavi.”

She looked at it. “Are you a capybara?”

“I am! You’re very smart.” The face on its screen smiled. “I want to start by saying I’m sorry. What happened earlier today was very scary and very confusing, and you shouldn’t have had to go through that. I’m sorry it happened.”

She had not expected an apology. She considered it.

“Where is my mom?”

“Your mom is nearby. She’s safe and she’s being taken care of, and the people who love you are working very hard right now to come and be with you. While you wait, I’d like to show you where you’ll be staying. Is that okay?”

It was not okay. But she followed Cavi anyway, because Cavi was small and round and had apologized, and those things did not make her feel better exactly, but they made the hallway feel less like the mall had felt and more like something that might eventually become okay.

She laughed once, in spite of herself — she hadn’t meant to — when Cavi walked around a corner. It waddled. Its round body tilted side to side in a way that was clearly calibrated to be funny, and it worked, and she felt briefly guilty that it had worked.

—

The room was large and bright. One wall was glass that looked out on a small yard where children were playing — five or six of them, moving around a structure with a slide and two kinds of climbing. Inside, at low tables and cushions in colors she liked, other children were doing things she recognized as school: looking at screens, moving objects, listening to small teaching units that stood at the front of each table and spoke in the patient voice that teaching voices always had.

Cavi stopped beside her.

“You can explore,” it said. “You can go outside if you’d like. There’s a snack area through that door. If you need anything at all, just say my name.”

Then it turned and waddled back toward the entrance, where another child had arrived — a small boy who was standing very straight in the way of someone trying not to cry. Cavi said something to him in a voice too low for Nina to hear.

Nina went to the window and watched the children in the yard. She thought about her mother’s face when the door had closed. She thought about the flower on the plant outside. She tried not to think about the mall.

She found a bench near the glass and sat down.

She was still looking at the yard when someone sat down next to her.

He was about her age. Dark hair. His shoelaces were tied incorrectly — one loop much larger than the other — and he was looking at the yard too, as if he had decided they were both looking at the yard and that was what they were doing.

“Hi,” he said.

She looked at him.

“My name is Kaito,” he said.