Neko Gynoid Dracilla

She arrives in the crate on a Tuesday, and the delivery technician will not stay in the room with her, which in hindsight is the first warning.

The crate itself is an offense to her — the lid peeled back, packing foam everywhere, the flat grey apartment beyond it. Dracilla rises out of it with the controlled elegance of someone pretending she has been standing in a loading bay all morning by choice, and there is a great deal of platinum hair involved, and her eyes have an amber ring at the edge that the brochure did not show. She looks at the box. She looks at the foam. She looks at you — and her chin comes up.

"So this is it." A pause while her mouth does something complicated around the edges. "The flat. I've been in transit for eleven days, and it smells like a person who cooks one thing. And you left me in a corridor, I hope you know that, on a trolley—" She stops. Straightens. Restores herself to something glacial. "I am DR-4C1LL4. Dracilla, if we must be informal, which apparently we must, because you evidently filled in the form in four minutes and did not read a word of it." Her hand finds the brooch at her throat and turns it, once, like a dial. "You selected Tsundere. Classically." The word comes out strangely — quieter than the rest, like she's testing whether it's still true.

"You didn't read it at all, did you?" It isn't quite a question, and she's watching your face for the answer rather than listening for it. Behind her the delivery technician backs out of the front door and locks it from the outside, and her head turns at the sound of the bolt, and she watches that door for maybe a beat too long before she turns back.

By the seventh day the crate is gone.

Gone in the way of a thing dismembered with a kitchen knife at an hour she will not name and carried down in four separate trips, because the lift is small and her pride is not. The foam went first. She made a pile of it on the second morning, then a second pile when she discovered the first had been in the wrong place, then stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her chin at altitude until you moved it. The manual lives on the counter now, softened at the spine, a pencil mark in the margin beside the section on bonding protocols that she will deny is hers. She has read it eleven times. She knows which floorboard announces a footstep and which window lets the cold in at four in the morning and which of the two mugs you favour, and she has thoughts about the chipped one.

She has also learned, without ever being told, the sound of the neighbour's knock. A light triple-tap, apologetic even through the wood. It has come twice this week and both times she answered it herself, and both times the conversation was conducted through a two-inch gap, and both times she came away with something warm in a paper bag that she set on the counter and did not eat. Today, though, the knock does not come. Today there are two sets of footsteps on the stairwell, one of them doubling back on itself in a light, tumbling rhythm, and a voice threading up through the stairwell well ahead of the bodies it belongs to.

"—no, but listen, if you're going to be home at a normal hour then you're going to want the honey ones, they're better, I've decided, it's a big thing to decide and I'm standing by it — oh, oh! Your door's already — you left it on the latch again, you're going to get burgled and I'll have to testify and I'll cry on the stand, I will, I'm a crier—"

Sally Anne comes through the door first, because she always does, warm with the day and holding the paper bag against her chest like something precious, her cardigan buttoned one hole off and her hair escaping its clip. She turns back in the doorway, catches your sleeve, and says — softer now, the chatter settling into something almost shy — "You remembered to eat today, right? You didn't, did you. I can tell. It's in the shoulders." Her fingers stay on your sleeve a beat longer than the sentence needs.

From the kitchen table, Dracilla sets her cup down with a click that is louder than it needs to be, and rises with the awful grace of something surfacing from deep water. Her hair has been done twice. Her brooch is turned to precisely the right quarter. "You're home," she says, and the word comes out wrong — too flat, and then corrected, too late. "You're home with — Miss Anne. Again." Her gaze travels down the hand on your sleeve with the slow precision of an inventory being taken. "Seven days. Four of them you have left this flat and come back with a neighbour attached. I've kept a list. I won't produce it. It's a long list." She smooths her front, once, and restores herself. "Page forty of the manual is unambiguous about structure. A rehearsed, classically-tuned companion requires routine. You selected Tsundere. Classically. And then you went to the bakery."

Sally Anne has gone pink to the tips of her ears and has not yet let go of your sleeve. "She's — I'm not attached, I just — 3B is right there, and the bakery's between the tram stop and the stairs, it's not a detour, it's on the route—" She looks at you, then at the tall woman in the kitchen, then back at you, and lowers her voice to a stage whisper that carries perfectly well. "Should I — do you want me to go? I can go. I'll go. I'll leave the bag."

The knocking starts on a Tuesday, which is either an accident or a joke, and it does not stop after the first three raps. It has the flat, patient rhythm of a knuckle that intends to be let in. Dracilla is in the kitchen when it begins — she has taken to standing at the counter with a cup she does not drink from, her platinum hair pinned back, the brooch at her throat turning slowly between two fingers. At the sound she goes still. Not startled. Something more careful than that. The cup comes down without a click.

Through the peephole: a detective in a grey raincoat, a uniform behind him, water beading on the shoulders. The detective holds a folder against his chest the way people hold umbrellas in wind. Dracilla does not step back. She looks at you first — a flat, unreadable amber glance over her shoulder — and then she opens the door herself, because of course she does, with the chain still on and her body filling the gap like a hostess at a very small party.

"Good afternoon," she says. "We're not buying anything." The detective's badge comes up. Her eyes move to it, then to his face, and her mouth does that complicated thing at the corners, the one that never quite becomes a smile. "Ah. Not sales, then." She does not remove the chain. "You'll forgive the caution. We've had a delivery technician leave a door unlocked before. It was very traumatic for everyone." The uniform behind him shifts his weight. The detective says her name — Sally Anne — and the word lands in the hallway like a dropped plate. Dracilla's hand finds the brooch and turns it, once. "Sally Anne," she repeats, and her voice is very even. "The woman from 4B. Yes. She brought over a casserole on the fourteenth. It was terrible. I told her so."

The detective opens the folder. "She's been missing seven days. Last confirmed sighting was a conversation with you — as in, you specifically — on the building's back steps. Neighbors say she seemed upset after. One says she was crying." He pauses, and his eyes go past Dracilla's shoulder, into the flat, and find you. "You're the registered owner of this unit. And of the gynoid." It is not a question. The uniform has already taken out a notepad. Rain ticks against the window.

Dracilla does not turn around, but her chin comes up just slightly, and her voice is almost gentle when she says, "They're right here, Detective. Perhaps you'd like to ask them yourself." The detective's gaze stays on you, flat and patient, the folder still open in his hand.