PROLOGUE

Frankie Stein’s thick lashes fluttered open. Flashes of bright white light strobed before her as she strained to focus, but her eyelids were too heavy to lift all the way. The room went dark.

“Her cerebral cortex has been loaded,” announced a man, his deep voice a blend of satisfaction and fatigue.

“Can she hear us?” asked a woman.

“Hear, see, understand, and identify more than four hundred objects,” he replied, delighted. “If I continue filling her brain with information, in two weeks she’ll have the intelligence and physical capabilities of a typical fifteen-year-old.” He paused. “Okay, maybe a little smarter than that. But she’ll be fifteen.”

“Oh, Viktor, this is the happiest moment of my life.” The woman sniffled. “She’s perfect.”

“I know.” He sniffed too. “Daddy’s perfect little girl.”

They took turns kissing Frankie’s forehead. One of them smelled like chemicals, the other like sweet flowers. Together, they smelled like love.

Frankie tried to open her eyes again. This time she could barely make them flutter.

“She blinked!” the woman exclaimed. “She’s trying to look at us! Frankie, I’m Viveka, your mommy. Can you see me?”

“She can’t,” Viktor said.

Frankie’s body tensed at the sound of those words. How could someone else decide what she was capable of? It didn’t make sense.

“Why not?” her mother seemed to ask for both of them.

“Her battery pack is almost drained. She needs a charge.”

“So charge her!”

Yeah, charge me! Charge me! Charge me!

More than anything, Frankie wanted to see these four hundred objects. Wanted to study her parents’ faces while they identified each object in their kind voices. Wanted to come to life and explore the world she had just been born into. But she couldn’t move.

“I can’t charge her until her bolts finish setting,” her father explained.

Viveka started to cry, her gentle sobs no longer sounding joyful.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Viktor cooed. “A few more hours and she’ll be completely stable.”

“It’s not that.” Viveka inhaled sharply.

“Then what?”

“She’s so beautiful and full of potential, and it…” She sniffed again. “It just breaks my heart that she’ll have to live… you know… like us.”

“What’s wrong with us?” he asked. Yet something in his voice suggested that he already knew.

She snickered. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Viv, things won’t be like this forever,” Viktor said. “Times will change. You’ll see.”

“How? Who’s going to change them?”

“I don’t know. Someone will… eventually.”

“Well, I hope we’re around to see it,” she said, sighing.

“We will be,” Viktor assured her. “We Steins tend to live long lives.”

Viveka giggled softly.

Frankie desperately wanted to know what about these “times” needed to “change.” But asking became unimaginable as her battery drained completely. Feeling both light-headed and impossibly heavy at the same time, Frankie floated deeper into the darkness, settling in a place where she could no longer hear the people around her. She could not recall their conversation or smell their flower- and chemical-scented necks.

All Frankie could do was hope that by the time she woke up, that thing Viveka wanted to be “around to see” would be there. And if it wasn’t, that Frankie herself would have the strength to get it for her.