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“Ted, come here. Ted, come with me,” Edwin said, gently pulling the automaton down from the table. “Ted, no one’s going to turn you into a can opener. Maybe you got wound funny, or wound too tight,” he added, mostly for the doctor’s benefit. “I’ll open you up and tinker, and you’ll be just fine.”

Back in the corner the doctor relaxed, and dropped the scissors. He set the screwdriver down beside a row of test tubes and placed both hands down on the table’s corner. “Edwin?” he said, so softly that Edwin almost didn’t hear him. “Edwin, did we finish breakfast? I don’t see my plate.”

“Yes sir,” the boy swore. He clutched Ted closely, and held the automaton away from the doctor, out of the man’s line of sight should he turn around.

“Oh. I suppose that’s right,” he said, and again Ted had been spared by the doctor’s dementia.

Edwin stuck Ted down firmly between the wall and his cot, and for one daft moment he considered binding the machine’s feet with twine or wire to keep it from wandering. But the thought drifted out of his head, chased away by the unresponsive lump against the wall. He whispered, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you need to stop. I don’t want the doctor to turn you into a can opener.”

Then, as a compromise to his thoughts about hobbling the automaton, he dropped his blanket over the thing’s head.

Bedtime was awkward that night.

When he reached for the clockwork boy he remembered the slow, calculated turn of the machine’s head, and he recalled the blinking bright flashes of firelight in the glass badger eyes.

The doctor had settled in his nook and was sleeping, and Edwin was still awake. He reclaimed his blanket and settled down on his side, facing the wall and facing Ted until he dozed, or he must have dozed. He assumed it was only sleep that made the steel jaw lower and clack; and it was only a dream that made the gears twist and lock into syllables.

“Ted?” Edwin breathed, hearing himself but not recognizing the sound of his own word.

And the clockwork face breathed back, not its own name but something else–something that even in the sleepy state of midnight and calm, Edwin could not understand.

The boy asked in the tiniest whisper he could muster, “Ted?”

Ted’s steel jaw worked, and the air in its mouth made the shape of a, “No.” It said, more distinctly this time, and with greater volume, “Tan…gle…foot.”

Edwin closed his eyes, and was surprised to learn that they had not been closed already. He tugged his blanket up under his chin and could not understand why the rustle of the fabric seemed so loud, but not so loud as the clockwork voice.

I must be asleep, he believed.

And then, eventually, he was.

Though not for long.

His sleep was not good. He was too warm, and then too cold, and then something was missing. Through the halls of his nightmares mechanical feet marched to their own tune; in the confined and cluttered space of the laboratory there was movement too large to come from rats, and too deliberate to be the random flipping of a switch.

Edwin awakened and sat upright in the same moment, with the same fluid fear propelling both events.

There was no reason for it, or so he told himself; and this was ridiculous, it was only the old Dr. Smeeks and his slipping mind, infecting the boy with strange stories–turning the child against his only true friend. Edwin shot his fingers over to the wall where Ted ought to be jammed, waiting for its winding and for the sliding of the button on its back.

And he felt only the smooth, faintly damp texture of the painted stone.

His hands flapped and flailed, slapping at the emptiness and the flat, blank wall. “Ted?” he said, too loudly. “Ted?” he cried with even more volume, and he was answered by the short, swift footsteps that couldn’t have belonged to the doctor.

From his bed in the nook at the other end of the laboratory, the doctor answered with a groggy groan. “Parker?”

“Yes sir!” Edwin said, because it was close enough. “Sir, there’s…” and what could he say? That he