We rushed out of the house with many of us still shoveling eggs and toast into our mouths, me in particular only half put-together. Dad was driving since I was terrified of highways, so I did all my makeup using the mirror on the back of the sun visor. We'd be in the first class seats so there was no excuse to look like I'd spent a night in a dumpster. Just as we'd pulled onto the freeway Viv shouted that we'd left her purple tie behind and wouldn't shut up about it until we reached the airport and picked up a new, cheaper gold one from one of those really convenient stores that they have in airports. Since we had all gotten hungry again and had a little bit of time, we stopped at an in-airport restaurant which happened to have a baby grand piano at the front of it, and which was the cause of losing Syl to its keys (there had been a freelance pianist there before, but at some point when we weren't looking her way she kicked him off and was drawing an even bigger audience with a particularly empassioned interpretation of Liszt's Liebestraum No. 3. A couple people had placed dollar bills on the floor next to her). For some reason the front pocket of my art bag split open and fifty Prismacolor Premier pencils exploded into the free air. Right before we were supposed to board, Avi realized that he didn't have his second backpack and took off before we could tell him not to, but was back literally the moment they made last calls.

When we collapsed into our assigned seats at the front of the plane, we looked awful.

Like whenever we did the plane thing, Syl claimed the seat next to Dad, Viv and Ere made an inseparable team at the very front where there was a special wheelchair platform, and I was left with Avi. He could care less to bother me though, much less talk to me — too engrossed in one of his two joys, the video games on his visor or his chemistry homework. Occasionally he'd grunt in frustration or drop a swear word under his breath, but I had my headphones in too so if he was louder than normal, I wouldn't know.

I spent my time mainly switching between writing for NaNoWriMo and working on my colored pencil portrait, the reference picture for which I had edited to make my skin look as if it were a night sky and covered in twinkling stars. I hadn't yet started on the hair — I had no idea how I'd do it, but hopefully, when I finished, it would look like a shimmering golden cloud. Plane drawing was always interesting…not worse than car drawing, but sometimes things happened on planes that I couldn't explain and could never repeat later. I'd match my hand movements to the slight turbulence and something insane would come out and I'd ask myself how I did it, but I'd never know.

The flight lasted a little under two hours, and three detailed cells of colored pencil and five hundred words later, I looked over Avi out the window and saw just water. He'd taken off his visor and pressed his face to the glass, frozen still. Of course, the plane had just been making a circle so as to approach the airport from the right direction, and when we headed over land again, my brother craned his neck to keep his eyes on the ocean.

"Why are you so obsessed with water?" I asked him. He didn't respond, but I didn't really expect him to.

Even before they opened the doors and released us from that claustrophobic smell-tube known as the passenger section, I felt the California heat on my skin and shivered in delight. The one thing I hated about my home was the weather there — arctic in the winter and Saharan in the summer — but this, the humid moderation of All Year Long, this was heavenly. If not for their crumbling economy and terrible wages I'd love to live there. Maybe one day, I mused to myself, if I ever become a world-famous artist and I'd be paid literally anything to work for a studio. Imagine that.

When I got up and glanced over my family, however, I noticed a tenseness in Dad that instantly set me on edge too. He'd been asleep most of the ride but now that he was awake, he looked more stressed and not less — it didn't help that his hair was doing the thing where it stood straight up from every direction. We were getting stares, but what else was new.

"What's wrong?" I asked him as soon as I reached him. He was struggling to pull the kids' suitcases down from the overhead, so I took over the job for him. He checked his watch and swiped away a notification.

"What? Oh, nothing," he said vaguely, and made himself busy somewhere else by helping Viv pick up garbage.

I was not in the least convinced. "That's what I thought," I said. There was one more suitcase in the compartment that wasn't ours, but I pulled that one down too. The surprised old lady to whom it belonged, who had to be a little under half my size, thanked me and complimented my strong muscles.

My cheeks were hot as I threaded through the aisle. "Thank you, young lady. You must have worked so hard on your strong muscles," Viv mimicked in my ear after the old woman had left. I didn't respond because the only real way to get Viv to stop talking was to stop responding.

Once we finally stepped off the plane and into the air-conditioned space of the airport terminal, I immediately saw why Dad had been tense. She was hard to miss, actually, even though she had to be shorter than even Ere (while he was still sitting down). Dressed in a pristine dark green suit, a leaf-green shirt, a clear technical visor, and polished gold buttons that glinted in the windows' filtered sunlight, and with a vaguely-triangular bob of platinum blond hair whose every strand seemed to be the exact same length, she could have passed as just another preoccupied businesswoman waiting to meet a coworker or employee at the gate, if not for the fact that her stance pretty much screamed "FIGHT ME" and that when her green eyes first caught us stepping out into open air, they lit up with a cold fire.

"Elijah Ben-David?" she said, her nasally voice equally glacial, even before Dad had noticed her. He started with a jump, like how our dog Rudy reacted to hearing thunder, and clumsily stumbled through our odd group to face her at the front.

"Uh, that's me."

I knew now why he'd been nervous. As the young woman's gaze passed over us, filling with a little more disdain in every passing second, I became increasingly aware as to how disheveled we were despite the first class seats. Ere had spilled airplane ravioli on his shorts and had drawn a curiously intricate rose on his left arm in marker. Viv's left glasses lens had popped out again and she held it awkwardly alongside the airplane magazine she'd accidentally stolen. Avi had no right shoe and was still wearing his puffy blue winter coat, and upon seeing a New Person Who Wanted To Speak With Us, Syl looked the businesswoman in the eye and put on her headphones. I knew for a fact that I had pencil shavings stuck to my clothes that my eyeliner was uneven. So if this woman was an official anything, really, this wasn't really the ideal image of our family.

She raised one eyebrow, still with a depressing lack of enthusiasm. "I...see." Her voice was less emotive than Danny's, and that was saying something because Danny was half-robot. "Welcome to Los Angeles. I'll be accompanying you to the interview and your assigned accommodations."

Assigned accommodations? I glanced at Dad, but as he shook her outstretched hand he was carefully controlling the urge to look around in a panicked state like he tended to do, and instead merely had the appearance of a man in mild discomfort, perhaps due to spoiled food or a full bladder. He wasn't terribly good with meeting new people. Well...the so-called assigned accommodations certainly would explain the lack of location on the itinerary and the vague name of the place: "HOTEL PLACE TO REST OUR SOLID BODIES". I suspected that name had been tampered with at least once, and the thought amused me as our green guide led us to stars knew where. She exuded an aura of "don't talk to others while around me" but hardly talked to any of us herself, even to Dad, which grew progressively more and more awkward with time.

Her car, a long luxury green vehicle that was shined so meticulously that it might have come straight from the factory, waited outside the terminal in reserved VIP parking and made all the other cars around it look like Barbie Jeeps. She told everyone to get in, opened the back trunk, told me to start putting the luggage in, and then merely stood to the side with her visor on as she watched. Some of the newer visor models had scanners and she was probably just checking that we weren't bringing any explosives or deadly toxins with us, and I was obviously the most physically capable of us six, but even still, the act of singling me out made me feel uncomfortable.

"Um…" The trunk was abnormally spacious, but even still, it was becoming quickly difficult to fit in everyone's suitcases. I wondered if our guide would consent to strapping a few of them to the top of the car, and I glanced at her. "Er...did you tell us your name before?"

The guide seemed to think about it for a second, then looked pointedly at the rest of the luggage. "No."

I moved Ere's plump magenta suitcase tighter against the wall to fit mine next to it. "Can you…er…tell it to us now?"

And in the exact same tone of voice: "No."

Okay. That was fine. Maybe she was a synth or something and just didn't have a name — she wasn't much older than I was, really, and I knew Stirling had been making synths outside his contract with Dad long before I was born. As such I decided just to call her Guide in my head, hoping that I wouldn't have to speak to her much more often to the point where I'd have to call her Guide out loud too.