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Otis switched his Geiger counter on and held it up to the face of the clock like a match to a flame. The needle on the dial shot up and the little red light started blinking like crazy. “Shazam,” he said.

“Indeed,” Rusty said. “That’s one hot clock.”

“How much is it?” he asked Rusty.

Rusty bent over and fished around for a tag. “Seventy-five bucks. A steal, right?”

Otis stared at the clock, a big fat plastic thing with a black face and green hands. The hands had been painted with radium, but there wasn’t enough radium on the hands to make the Geiger counter go nuts like this. What was the source? There must be more inside the clock. He felt his heart tripping along as fast as the light on his Geiger counter was blinking. “I only have thirty bucks,” he told Rusty.

“We offer layaway,” she said.

“I need it now.”

“Well, she won’t go down that much.” Rusty shook her head. Then she said in a low growly voice, “Just take it. I’ll show you where the back door is.”

“Steal it?” Otis had never stolen anything in his life.

“Beatrice!” Jabba’s voice sounded far off. “Royce just pulled up! You aren’t leaving until you help me sort these clothes!”

Rusty bent toward Otis, her medicine bag brushing his arm, and breathed her cigarette breath on him. “You’ll be doing us a favor, right, getting this nasty thing out of here. And you need it to save mankind, right?” Rusty picked up the clock and thrust it into Otis’s arms, grinning at him.

Suddenly Otis had a mental picture of Rusty from third grade, long before she went goth, standing at the front of their classroom, grinning in just this way, wearing an Atlanta Braves shirt, her hair in two ponytails sprouting out above her ears, holding up a baseball she’d caught at their spring training camp in Lake Buena Vista. Otis had been so jealous.

“He who hesitates is lost,” the older, scary Rusty hissed at him.

There was no question that this clock should be his. It had a nice weight in his arms, the same weight as his mini poodle, Parson Brown, his boon companion. “You won’t tell anyone, right?” he asked Rusty. “About anything. What I’m making. You know.”

Rusty scrunched her eyebrows, thin black lines that looked like they’d been plucked and darkened. “Never!”

It was too dark back here for Otis to read Rusty’s expression, but he knew he wouldn’t have been able to read it even in the bright sunlight. “Do you still have that baseball? From spring training?” Otis asked her, but Rusty was already shoving him toward the back door.

* * *

It was the next afternoon, Sunday afternoon, before Otis could get free of the rest of them—free of chores and homework and anything else his mother could find for him to do—and escape to his shed. Once inside he locked the door, propped open the windows, switched on the fan, and sat down on his stool with his stolen clock in front of him on the table. He would have to work as fast as he could, now that he’d broken the law and could be arrested at any minute. If she missed the clock, Jabba could find out who he was and where he lived easily enough. It was exciting, being a lawbreaker, handling stolen property. He might have to break a few more laws before it was all over, but he was sure that he’d be pardoned once it came to light what he’d accomplished.

Otis loved his shed. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, always stank of burned something and was full of insects; but it was his very own uncomfortable, stinky, buggy place. And even though it was full of dangerous, unstable chemicals, it was the only place he felt truly safe and at home. His mother said that people with Asperger’s often did not get irony, but in this case, the irony was not lost, even on him.

Back when he’d first decided to embark on his quest to make a model breeder reactor, he’d spruced up the shed in preparation, giving it a coat of white paint inside and out, hanging a poster of the periodic table on the wall, arranging an old green carpet he’d found in somebody’s trash on the floor.