ReMade: Book 2
282
ReMade: Book 2
282eBook
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Overview
The remade teens forge forward in their future world—a smaller group, wiser but tougher. Just as they begin to think they understand their new circumstances, though, a reminder of past trauma makes them question everything they know, and sets them on a new course.
Team-written by some of today’s most exciting authors, ReMade is brought to you by Matthew Cody (Super), Andrea Phillips (Revision), Gwenda Bond (Girl on a Wire), Amy Rose Capetta (Entangled), and E. C. Myers (The Silence of Six).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781682102725 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Realm |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2023 |
| Series: | ReMade Series , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 282 |
| Sales rank: | 820,647 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 13 Years |
About the Author
E. C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He garnered a degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University which he completely neglects to use in his current life as a freelance writer and editor. A graduate of Clarion West, his stories have been published in Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Space and Time magazine. His novel Fair Coin won the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. ECMyers.net. @ECMyers.
Andrea Phillips is a transmedia writer, game designer and author. She is on the writing team for season 2 of the urban fantasy serial Bookburners as well as ReMade. Her debut novel is Revision, an SF thriller about a wiki where your edits come true. She has also worked on iOS fitness games Zombies, Run! and The Walk; The Maester's Path for HBO's Game of Thrones; human rights game America 2049; and the independent commercial ARG Perplex City. She also writes an ongoing column about video games called "Metagames" for Strange Horizons. Her nonfiction book A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling is used to teach digital storytelling at universities around the world. AndreaPhillips.com. @Andrhia.
Gwenda Bond writes for children and young adults. Her books include Lois Lane: Fallout, Girl on a Wire, and Girl in the Shadows, as well as the graphic novel Girl Over Paris with Kate Leth and Ming Doyle. She holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has written for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post amongst others. She currently resides in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband and their menagerie. GwendaBond.com. @Gwenda.
Read an Excerpt
Things had been weird for Jing-Wei for a real long time now. Robots, space stations, mutant animals? Fine. It was a head trip for sure, but she was unexpectedly alive, and that was worth something. You can get used to anything, if you have to. Humans adapt.
After all that adapting, she would have bet cash money you couldn't surprise her anymore. She hadn't dreamed that things could get even more weird in a whole new direction.
Like finally running into actual factual people, when she'd all but given up on the idea that there were any. And to put the freaky cherry on the weird-ass sundae, they acted like they already knew Jing-Wei. But she'd never seen them before in her life. Either one.
The pair of strange girls sighted her through the trees a split second before Jing-Wei spotted them back. "Hello?" the long-haired girl called. She came running toward Jing-Wei flat out. The other chased close behind.
They slowed as they got closer, stopping a little farther than an arm's reach away. The first girl just stared at Jing-Wei's face. "Oh my god, it really is you. How are you—"
"You know her?" the other girl asked. This one was Latina, with short hair and a set to her jaw like she could show you stubborn if you were wondering about it. She gripped a keeper arm in her hands, and she edged around Jing-Wei like she thought she might be dangerous.
"That's Jing-Wei," said the first girl. Pretty thing, shiny hair. Didn't look like she got much sleep, though. "She's one of the ones we told you about on the train. Jing-Wei . . ." The girl swallowed. "They killed you."
Jing-Wei stepped back, just a half step, enough to give some space between herself and the idea of any "they" killing her. "How do you know my name?"
---
Jing-Wei's makerspace was a glorious jumble of stuff, all lit by naked fluorescent tubes that cast splintered shadows onto every surface. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling sheet-metal shelving. Those shelves were stuffed with cardboard boxes of hastily wrapped bundles of cords and wires, and cheap plastic organizers full of screws and bolts sorted haphazardly by size and shape. Various pieces of gear were crammed into every spare nook, and even teetered on the very top shelves. Broken quadcopters, broken vacuum cleaners. Bolts of plastic sheeting and Bubble Wrap. Glitter paint.
The total effect was like somebody had taken everything they could find from ten years of garage sales, disassembled all of it, then put the pieces in a box and shaken it up. To Jing-Wei, it was the coziest, happiest place in the universe. It was a teeming and glorious ecosystem of possibilities.
And it had everything she needed to take those possibilities and yank them into reality, too. There were wide workbenches, the thick wooden work surfaces scratched, stained, even burned. A few of them were bare, waiting for a new maker with a new ambition, but others were permanently occupied with 3-D printers, laser cutters, or piles of more low-tech gear like soldering irons, hot glue guns, and screwdrivers. A server rack hummed in the back corner, its lights a steady green.
The cement floor was painted gray, and sloped toward a drain somewhere in the center of the wide-open room. The makers liked to make cracks about how that made it easy to hose the place down after they got blood all over it. They were careful not to say it whenever the landlord stopped by, though. Not everyone could take a joke.
Jing-Wei preferred to be alone in the space, like she was now; it was a couple of hours before school, and not many of the other makers were early risers. She bent over her workbench, examining the toy that twitched there. It was a gift for her little sister, Chang-Rou; Jing-Wei had made a spindle-legged thing meant to walk on its own and hop a few inches straight up from time to time. It was cute and funny, and her sister was going to love it to pieces. Or she would, if only Jing-Wei could get the thing to work right.
It had been fine for about fifteen seconds, but then one of the legs had jammed in a lifted-up position and wouldn't move anymore. Now the poor thing wobbled and tipped over when it tried to walk, and when it tried to hop, it just looked like it really needed to pee.
Jing-Wei pulled the leg out of its jammed state and flexed it a few times. If there was a rough spot somewhere in the joint, maybe she could smooth it out.
Jing-Wei set the toy down and switched it on. "Try again, little guy."
The robot walked five steps, hopped three times, and then its leg got stuck up again, as if it were trying to imitate one of those tap-dancing peacock spiders. The poor thing fell over and twitched until Jing-Wei switched it off again.
"Well, that isn't going to work, is it?" She sighed and flipped the toy over so she could take its leg off. The thing had been put together from scraps she'd scrounged up around the space anyway, so the legs didn't all match in the first place. But she wasn't sure if there was anything left that could work with what she had.
She stuck the broken leg in the pocket of her lab coat—a gift from her mother, who was always cracking jokes about the mad science Jing-Wei got up to. The box she needed would be on one of the high shelves, unless somebody had taken it into their head to "reorganize" in the last few days. You could never be sure. She grabbed one of the stepladders and rolled it toward a likely looking shelf. There was a box helpfully labeled robot parts.
Once she got up there, she blew away a thick fur of dust. This wasn't the box she'd found the first time, but maybe she'd dig up something even better now. She rummaged through it.
It really wasn't what she needed, though. The box held an array of motors, brackets for holding sensors, treads, and wheels. She thought for a moment about reworking the toy to replace one or two of its spidery legs with wheels, but decided it wouldn't be funny enough to make Chang-Rou happy.
Jing-Wei stretched past the edge of the stepladder to reach for the next box. Her center of balance hung somewhere in the air between the ladder and the shelves, but she could steady herself with three fingertips. She pulled out the first thing she could reach to see what was in the next box, and recognized the part at once: it was a pincer claw that somebody had coated with rubber cement in a fit of misguided experimentation, trying to make it more grippy or something. She tugged the box a little closer to her along the shelf to see what else it held.
No dice. Just as she'd expected, there wasn't another leg precisely the same size as the one that had broken. Well, maybe this was a chance to make the little toy even funnier, with mismatched parts that balanced one another out. She weighed a likely candidate in her hand, then stuck it into her pocket while she tried to find another one.
The box tipped forward. The ladder wobbled under Jing-Wei as she reached a little too far to keep the box from falling. A shower of small parts spilled out of the box, bouncing off Jing-Wei's arm and shoulder. Her forearm banged hard against the metal shelf, and she stopped, hanging perilously in the air. Her heart started pounding, too late for the adrenaline to help; it just made her knees and hands shaky. She took a deep breath, settled her heels back on the ladder, and pulled the box down to rest on her thigh so she could look through it more safely.
Once everything was steady, she sifted through the robot parts some more. Most of them were junk, but there were a few maybes in there, and she stuck those into her pockets. Finally, she found enough potential replacements worth testing out. She pushed the box back into its spot and climbed down.
Once safely on solid footing, Jing-Wei took the new set of robot legs out of her pockets to compare them more closely. The legs weren't all the same length, but she could probably adjust the angle of the knee bend so that they operated the same. And the brackets that held them in place were the same size as the old ones. It would work out great, maybe even better than she'd planned. "Here we go, little guy!" she called toward her workbench. "I'm gonna fix you right up."
Her elbow struck the ladder as she turned. The ladder rattled against the metal shelving unit. Above Jing-Wei, the box of robot parts tipped again, then fell.
She didn't see it, and she didn't feel it for very long either. One moment she was smiling at the future of Chang-Rou's gift in deep satisfaction, and the next everything turned white and full of stars.