Aqua decided to squeeze in a few repairs while waiting for Kieran to arrive. Keeping busy helped her avoid thinking too hard about the strange tension she’d felt ever since Aries moved in — and the even stranger tension she felt when she called Kieran for help.
She hunched over one of her father’s earliest robot prototypes, a wrench clamped between her teeth as she maneuvered a screwdriver with her right hand and held a magnifying glass with her left. The basement lab hummed around her — the soft whir of cooling fans, the faint ozone scent of solder, the comforting clutter of half‑finished inventions.
Her phone buzzed against the metal table.
Aqua froze.
Already?
She spat the wrench into her palm and checked the screen.
Kieran: Here.
“That was fast…” she muttered. Cherry must have p
