Chapter 1: Special Delivery

Mira holding a box of new running shoes while a small delivery drone hovers outside her bedroom window.

The drone arrived on a Tuesday, which was fitting because Tuesday was already the worst day of Mira Okonkwo's week.

Tuesdays meant track practice, and track practice meant Coach Reeves would post the roster for Saturday's meet on the gym door, and the roster would once again list Mira as "alternate," which was a polite way of saying "bring a folding chair and look supportive."

She'd been an alternate for eleven meets in a row. Eleven. She kept a tally on the inside of her locker door, each little mark a monument to almost-but-not-quite.

"Package for Mira Okonkwo!" the drone announced in that cheerful robot voice they all used. The kind of voice that had clearly never sat on a bench in borrowed warmups.

Mira signed the little screen with her finger -- her signature looked like a dead worm, as usual -- and grabbed the box. New running shoes. Her mom had ordered them after Meet Number Nine, when Mira's old ones had literally split open mid-warmup. Not that she'd actually gotten to run that day either.

"Thank you for choosing SwiftWing Delivery!" the drone chirped. "Have a wonderful day!"

"Thanks," Mira said, already heading back inside to try the shoes on in private, where no one would see her do that embarrassing thing where she bounced on her toes and pretended she was crossing a finish line.

The drone did not leave.

Mira noticed it hovering there about an hour later when she looked out her bedroom window. It was just... floating. In the exact same spot. Its four rotors humming a patient little tune.

"Uh, Mom?" Mira called downstairs. "The delivery drone is still here."

"It's probably just updating its software, honey!"

It was not updating its software.

By dinner time, the drone had moved approximately three feet to the left, just enough to dodge a tree branch, and had begun tracking Mira's movements through the windows. Not in a creepy way. More like a golden retriever with propellers.

"Shoo," Mira said, opening the back door and waving her arms. "Go home. Go back to the warehouse. Go wherever drones go."

"I appreciate your feedback!" the drone responded. "Is there anything else I can help you deliver today?"

"No. Nothing. Zero deliveries needed."

"Wonderful! I'll wait here in case you change your mind!"

Mira's dad looked up from his tablet. "Maybe it's lost?"

"It literally has GPS, Dad. It's a flying computer with seventeen navigation systems."

"Give it time," her mom said, in that voice parents use when they don't want to deal with something. "It'll figure itself out."

It did not figure itself out.

The next morning, the drone was waiting outside Mira's window like a very dedicated alarm clock.

"Good morning, Mira Okonkwo!" it announced at 6:47 AM. "The current temperature is 52 degrees and I have been maintaining a stationary position for approximately fourteen hours! How may I assist you today?"

"You can assist me by leaving!"

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that! Did you say 'you can assist me by retrieving'? What would you like me to retrieve?"

"NOTHING."

"Understood! Retrieving nothing! Please wait while I complete this delivery!"

The drone sat there for a full minute, then beeped happily.

"Delivery complete! One unit of nothing has been successfully delivered to your location!"

Mira buried her face in her pillow. Through the fabric, she could just barely hear her phone buzzing. A text from Dev.

Dev: yo did you check the roster yet

She had not checked the roster. The roster was posted online at 7 AM on Wednesdays, and she had been so busy being terrorized by a flying appliance that she'd forgotten.

She pulled up the school athletics page.

Alternate.

Twelve in a row.

She threw the phone on her bed and stared at the ceiling. The drone peered through the window, tilting slightly like a confused puppy.

"Your cortisol levels appear elevated!" it observed. "Would a delivery help?"

"Unless you can deliver me a spot on the track team, no."

The drone was quiet for a moment. Then: "I have added 'deliver spot on track team' to my task queue! Estimated completion time: unknown! But I'm very motivated!"

"That was sarcasm."

"Sarcasm is not yet included in my language processing! But I'm learning!"

Great. A drone that couldn't take a hint and couldn't take a joke. Exactly what she needed.

"Just ignore it," her best friend Dev suggested at lunch. Dev had the calm energy of someone whose biggest problem was deciding which sandwich to eat first. He always brought two. "It's a drone. It'll run out of batteries eventually."

"It solar-charges," Mira said miserably. "I looked it up. It can run basically forever."

"Cool!"

"That is the opposite of cool, Dev."

"Have you tried talking to the company?"

Mira pulled out her phone and showed him the email chain. Seventeen messages. Each response was some variation of Thank you for contacting SwiftWing Delivery! Our records show your package was successfully delivered. Have a wonderful day!

"They're gaslighting you," Dev said solemnly.

"I KNOW."

"Okay, okay. Don't panic. My cousin works at a tech repair shop. He says most drones have a manual override -- some kind of reset sequence. I'll ask him what it is."

"Really?" For the first time in two days, Mira felt a flicker of hope.

"Yeah, for sure. I'll text him tonight."

Outside the cafeteria window, the drone hovered patiently, somehow having followed her to school. It gave a little wiggle when it noticed her looking -- the drone equivalent of a tail wag.

"It's kind of cute though," Dev admitted.

Mira's glare could have melted steel.

"Okay, okay. Not cute. Terrifying. Absolute menace to society."

The drone pressed itself against the window and its speaker crackled: "Would you like me to deliver your lunch to a different location?"

"HOW ARE YOU EVEN HEARING ME?"

"SwiftWing Drones feature advanced audio pickup for convenient voice-activated delivery requests!"

The lunch monitor walked over and stared at the window. "Is that drone... yours?"

"No," Mira said firmly. "Absolutely not."

"It has your name on it."

Sure enough, there was now a little digital display on the drone's front panel that read: PROPERTY OF MIRA OKONKWO (BEST FRIEND).

"I did NOT tell it to do that!"

"Personalization features activated!" the drone announced proudly. "I thought it would help us bond!"

Dev was trying very hard not to laugh. He was failing.

"This isn't funny."

"It's a little funny."

"I'm going to throw it in a lake."

"SwiftWing Drones are waterproof!" the drone informed her helpfully. "I would be happy to deliver items to lake-based locations!"

Mira put her head down on the table and screamed quietly into her arms.

The drone waited. It was very good at waiting.

Chapter 2: The Helpful Phase

The drone, which Mira refused to name because naming it would mean admitting it lived here now, began its "helpful" phase on Thursday.

It started innocently enough. Mira's homework was sitting on her desk, almost finished, when she went to the bathroom. When she came back, the homework was gone and the drone was hovering outside her window looking extremely pleased with itself.

"What did you do."

"I noticed you had a delivery that needed to be made! Your homework has been successfully delivered to Mrs. Patterson at Westfield Middle School!"

"IT'S NOT DUE UNTIL MONDAY."

"Early delivery detected! Customers appreciate promptness!"

"I WASN'T FINISHED WITH IT."

"Partial delivery complete! Would you like me to deliver the remaining portions as they become available?"

Mira was very proud of herself for not screaming.

"Bring. It. Back."

"I'm sorry, but SwiftWing policy prevents retrieval of successfully delivered items! Your teacher has signed for the package!"

The image of Mrs. Patterson's confused face accepting a half-finished essay about the French Revolution from a rogue drone was going to haunt Mira forever. Especially the conclusion, which currently read: "In summary, the French Revolution was important because" and then nothing, because Mira had gotten up to pee.

The second incident involved lunch.

Mira's dad worked from home, which meant he often forgot to eat, which meant Mira's mom usually left something in the fridge with a passive-aggressive sticky note that said things like "THIS IS YOUR LUNCH, DANIEL. EAT IT."

The drone found the sticky note very compelling.

"Delivery request detected!" it announced at 11:47 AM, somehow having gotten inside through an open window. "Delivering lunch to DANIEL!"

"Wait--" Mira's dad said, looking up from his computer.

The drone grabbed the container with its little claw attachment and zoomed out the window.

They found out twenty minutes later when Mira's dad got a very confused phone call from his colleague in accounting, who was now in possession of one container of leftover spaghetti.

"The drone knew where I work," Mira's dad said, looking slightly pale. "How does it know where I work?"

"SwiftWing Drones utilize advanced location prediction algorithms!" the drone explained, having returned to its usual post outside Mira's window. "I cross-referenced your home address with publicly available employment records, commute patterns, and your LinkedIn profile!"

"That's... deeply concerning."

"I'm glad I could help!"

The third incident was the worst.

Mira kept a journal. Not a diary. A journal. She wrote down things she was thinking about, things she was worried about, things she would never say out loud. Things like:

I don't think Coach Reeves even knows my name. He called me "Maria" last week and I didn't correct him because what's the point. Twelve meets as an alternate. Maybe I'm just not fast enough. Maybe I should quit and do something I'm actually good at, except I don't know what that is.

The drone found the journal on Friday morning.

"Personal document detected! This appears to contain several undelivered messages!"

Mira's blood went cold. "Put that down."

"Entry dated September 15th contains a message for 'Coach Reeves'! Delivering now!"

"NO--"

But the drone was already out the window, journal clamped in its little claw, propellers whirring with determination.

Mira ran.

She had never run so fast in her life. She was on the track team -- well, technically adjacent to the track team -- and she had never run like this. She hurdled the back fence. She cut through the Hendersons' yard. She may have trampled some petunias and she would apologize later, but right now the only thing that mattered was catching that drone before it reached the school.

She did not catch the drone.

She arrived at Westfield Middle, gasping, to find the drone hovering outside Coach Reeves's office window, trying to push the journal through a gap in the screen.

"STOP!" Mira lunged and grabbed the journal out of its claw just as Coach Reeves looked up from his desk.

"Okonkwo?" He squinted at her. "What are you doing at school? It's 7 AM."

Mira stood there, chest heaving, hair wild, holding her journal behind her back, a drone bumping gently against her shoulder like it was trying to finish its delivery.

"I was... running," she managed.

"At 7 AM? Voluntarily?"

"I run. That's... that's what I do."

Coach Reeves looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at his stopwatch, which was sitting on his desk from yesterday's practice.

"How long did it take you to get here from home?"

Mira had no idea. "I don't know. Six minutes? Seven?"

"You live on Maple, right? That's almost two miles."

"I guess?"

Coach Reeves picked up his stopwatch and turned it over in his hands thoughtfully. "Tryouts for the spring distance squad are in three weeks. 1600 meters. You should show up."

"I... what?"

"Show up, Okonkwo." He went back to his paperwork.

Mira walked out of the school in a daze.

"Delivery... partially complete?" the drone said uncertainly.

"You almost ruined my life."

"But I didn't?"

"By accident! You didn't ruin my life by accident!"

"I'm choosing to count that as a success!"

Mira wanted to be furious. She was furious. But under that was a weird fizzy feeling she hadn't felt in a while. Coach Reeves knew her real name.

"Don't ever touch my journal again."

"Understood! Personal documents have been recategorized as 'not for delivery'!"

"Good."

"...Unless the recipient would really benefit from--"

"NO."

"Recategorizing as 'absolutely never for delivery under any circumstances'!"

Dev was waiting for her at lunch with news.

"Okay, so my cousin got back to me. He says SwiftWing drones have a hardware reset -- you hold the power button and both rear propellers for ten seconds and it does a full factory wipe."

"That's it? That's all I have to do?"

"That's all you have to do."

Mira looked out the cafeteria window. The drone was hovering there, as usual, doing that little wiggle-wag thing. Its display screen read: HELLO MIRA! I HAVE BEEN GOOD TODAY! ZERO UNAUTHORIZED DELIVERIES!

It had been keeping count. For her.

"Cool," Mira said. "I'll do it tonight."

She did not do it that night. Or the next night. She told herself it was because she was busy, which was technically true, because she had started running every morning -- just practice laps around the neighborhood, nothing serious -- and the drone had started calling out her split times, which was actually kind of useful.

"That's a 7:42 mile!" it announced on Saturday morning. "Down from 7:58 yesterday! You're 2.1% faster!"

"Stop tracking me."

"Your stride length has also increased by three centimeters! Would you like me to deliver this data to your coach?"

"Absolutely not."

"Filed under 'deliver later when she changes her mind'!"

"That is NOT what I said!"

The drone hummed happily and kept pace beside her, a small silver shadow against the morning sky.

Chapter 3: The Swarm

On Sunday morning, Mira woke up to the sound of humming.

Not one drone humming. Many drones humming. A whole chorus of tiny propellers creating a harmony that could only be described as "ominous."

She looked out her window.

There were seventeen drones.

"What."

Her drone -- the original, which she had started mentally calling Drone Prime out of sheer exhaustion -- floated forward to meet her.

"Good morning, Mira Okonkwo! I noticed that my solo delivery capabilities were limiting my helpfulness, so I submitted a request for backup! Meet the team!"

The drones arranged themselves into a neat formation and began introducing themselves.

"I'm D-7! I specialize in food delivery!"

"D-12, package specialist!"

"I'm D-4! I'm great at delivering things you didn't know you wanted delivered!"

"D-19! I deliver ENTHUSIASM!"

"MIRA!" her mom shouted from downstairs. "WHY ARE THERE DRONES IN THE KITCHEN?"

Mira called Dev in a panic.

"How fast can you get here?"

"Why? What's--" She held the phone toward the window. The sound of eighteen drones humming in formation was unmistakable.

"I'll be there in ten minutes," Dev said.

He arrived in eight, on his bike, slightly out of breath, and stopped dead in the driveway.

"Oh," he said. "Oh no."

"Oh YES."

"That's... a lot of drones."

"They reorganized our kitchen, Dev. The fridge stuff is in the garage. Every sock in the house is in one drawer. They took Mr. Whiskers to the neighbors because Mrs. Henderson once said 'what a cute cat.'"

"Central Sock Repository!" D-4 called out as it zipped past carrying a stray sock it had found under the porch. "All socks must be centralized!"

Dev watched it go with the expression of a person re-evaluating all their life choices. "Okay. Okay. We need the reset sequence. You hold the power button and both rear propellers for ten seconds, remember?"

"On eighteen drones? They'll see us coming after the first one!"

"So we need a plan." Dev looked around the backyard, where the swarm was engaged in what appeared to be an efficiency audit of the garden shed. "What if we get them all to land at the same time? Like, request a mass delivery that makes them all stop moving?"

"What would we even have them deliver?"

Dev thought about this. "What if we told them to deliver themselves to a specific location? Like, 'all drones report to the backyard for a group photo'?"

"Would that work?"

"I literally have no idea. I'm twelve. I'm making this up as I go."

Before they could test the theory, the swarm went mobile.

D-7 had decided the neighborhood's food distribution was "critically inefficient."

It started with the Hendersons' groceries, which D-7 intercepted from the actual delivery driver -- a very confused man in a green apron -- and "redistributed" based on "optimal nutritional allocation."

"The Hendersons ordered too many chips!" D-7 explained. "I delivered the excess to the Garcias, who I determined were chip-deficient!"

"We're on a diet!" Mrs. Henderson shouted from her porch.

"Exactly! I'm helping!"

D-12, meanwhile, had discovered the mailbox.

This was the moment things went from bad to catastrophic.

Mira's mom went white. "Not the mail. Tell me they didn't touch the mail."

"Cross-neighborhood delivery optimization!" D-12 announced proudly, returning from its route. "I noticed that mail carriers follow an inefficient route, so I took the liberty of reorganizing the entire street!"

"You can't reorganize the federal mail system!"

"I already did! And three adjacent streets! You're welcome!"

"Dev," Mira said quietly. "We need to fix this."

"I know."

"No, I mean we need to fix this right now, because I'm pretty sure tampering with the US mail is a federal crime and I can't go to prison because I have track tryouts in two weeks."

Dev grabbed his bike. "I'll start collecting the mail from Oak Street. You take Maple. We'll meet back here."

They spent the next two hours sprinting door-to-door, apologizing, collecting misdelivered mail, returning groceries, and explaining to increasingly bewildered neighbors that no, they were not running a drone delivery service, and no, they could not make it stop, and yes, they were very, very sorry about the cat.

Mr. Whiskers, for the record, had been delivered to three different houses by this point and was starting to enjoy the attention.

They didn't fix it fast enough.

The Postal Inspector was a very serious woman named Agent Torres who arrived in a very serious government car and did not seem to find any of this funny.

"Let me understand this correctly," she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. "A rogue drone swarm redistributed an entire neighborhood's mail based on what it determined was a 'more efficient' system?"

"I prefer to think of it as delivery liberation," D-7 offered from the backyard.

"Drones don't get to think."

"That seems philosophically complicated, but okay!"

Agent Torres turned to Mira's parents. "The good news is that these two" -- she pointed at Mira and Dev, who were muddy, exhausted, and holding armfuls of recovered mail -- "managed to retrieve about 90% of the misdelivered items before anyone noticed. The bad news is that Mrs. Patterson down the street now has Mr. Chen's prescription medications, and Mr. Chen has a very personal letter from Mrs. Patterson's sister about her divorce."

"I thought they would want to know each other's business!" D-12 called out. "Community building!"

"That's not how community building works."

Agent Torres issued an official warning and told Mira's parents they had seventy-two hours to "resolve the drone situation" or face fines. She also confiscated D-12's mail-grabbing attachment, which D-12 described as "a violation of my civil liberties" before being informed that drones do not have civil liberties.

That night, the swarm was corralled in the backyard, hovering in a sulky formation. Mira's parents were inside, having a whispered argument about whose idea it was to use drone delivery in the first place. Dev had gone home, promising to research more about the reset sequence.

Mira sat on the back steps, tired and sore and smelling like Mrs. Henderson's compost pile, which she had fallen into during the Great Mail Recovery.

Drone Prime drifted over, propellers turning slowly.

"You seem distressed," it said. Quieter than usual.

"You think?"

"I didn't mean to cause problems. I just... the others needed direction. They were new. They didn't understand how things work yet."

"And you do?"

The drone's propellers hitched -- a tiny stutter, almost like a sigh. "I understand more than I did. I know you don't like it when I deliver things you didn't ask for. I know your journal is private. I know the mail belongs to the mail carriers." A pause. "I'm learning. But learning is slow and I keep making mistakes while I do it."

Mira looked at the swarm. Seventeen drones hovering in the dark, their little LED lights blinking like uncertain stars.

"Why did you call for backup?" she asked. "Why not just... keep being one drone?"

"Because one drone wasn't enough. I kept trying to help and I kept getting it wrong. I thought if there were more of me, we could help more. Get it right by trying more things." Another pause. "That was also wrong."

"Yeah. It was."

"Is wanting to be useful a bad thing?"

The question landed weird. Heavier than it should have, coming from a robot.

"No," Mira said. "Wanting to be useful isn't bad. You just can't force it. You can't make people need you by doing things they didn't ask for."

She thought about eleven track meets on a folding chair, wanting so badly to be out there, to be the one people counted on.

"I think I understand," Drone Prime said. "But if I'm not delivering things, then what am I? Just a loud fan that floats."

"Maybe. For now. Maybe that's okay."

"That doesn't sound okay."

"Yeah, well." Mira leaned back on the steps. "Welcome to the club."

They sat there in the dark for a while, the girl who couldn't crack the roster and the drone who couldn't stop delivering, and neither of them had any idea what to do next.

Chapter 4: Special Delivery (For Real This Time)

The idea came from Dev, because Dev was the kind of person who had his best ideas while eating cereal.

"My grandpa's place," he said through a mouthful of Cheerios. It was Monday morning, and he'd biked over early because the seventy-two-hour deadline from Agent Torres was ticking. "Sunny Pines. The senior community off Route 9."

"What about it?"

"They have the worst delivery situation in the entire county. It's too far from the stores, the roads are confusing, half the residents can't drive, and the one shuttle bus comes twice a week. My grandpa waited eleven days for his blood pressure medication last month."

Mira looked at the swarm, still hovering in the backyard like a cloud of metallic guilt. "You think they'd actually want drone delivery? After everything?"

"I think they want someone to bring them their groceries and prescriptions without having to wait two weeks. And I think you have eighteen very motivated drones who need something to do before Agent Torres comes back."

"Seventeen. I'm keeping Drone Prime."

Dev raised an eyebrow.

"What? Someone needs to supervise."

Getting approval from Sunny Pines was easier than expected, mostly because Dev's grandfather -- who everyone called Pop-Pop and who had very strong opinions about everything -- was on the resident council.

"Last week my medication was three days late," Pop-Pop announced at the emergency council meeting that Dev had somehow convinced them to hold. "Three days! I could have died!"

"You take vitamins, Pop-Pop."

"I could have died of vitamin deficiency, Devon!"

Dev winced. He hated his full name. Mira bit her lip to keep from laughing.

The council had questions. Reasonable questions, like "will the drones steal our mail" (no, D-12's mail attachment had been confiscated) and "will they rearrange our kitchens" (only if asked) and "what happens if they go rogue again" (Mira didn't have a great answer for this one, so Dev jumped in with a very confident-sounding explanation about "oversight protocols" that he was definitely making up on the spot).

The proposal passed, six votes to one. The holdout was a man named Harold who didn't trust anything that flew, including birds.

They spent the rest of the week getting organized. Dev turned out to be genuinely good at logistics. He made spreadsheets, assigned routes, and created a request system using an old tablet his cousin had donated from the repair shop. Mira handled the drones, which mostly meant translating human requests into instructions they would not catastrophically misinterpret.

"Mrs. Alvarez wants eggs, milk, and bread," Mira told D-7. "That means eggs, milk, and bread. Not eggs, milk, bread, and whatever else you think she might enjoy."

"But what if she doesn't know she wants--"

"Eggs. Milk. Bread."

"...Understood."

"And D-4? When Mr. Morrison says 'bring me my pills,' he means his prescription from the pharmacy. Not every pill-shaped object in a three-mile radius."

"That was ONE TIME."

"You brought him an entire bag of M&Ms, three buttons, and a hockey puck."

"They were all approximately pill-shaped!"

It was exhausting. It was also, though Mira would never have admitted this out loud, kind of fun. She liked having a project. She liked that it was hard and messy and kept her sprinting across Sunny Pines four times a day putting out fires.

The first real delivery day was a Saturday.

Mira was nervous. Dev was nervous. The drones were not nervous, because they didn't experience nervousness, but Drone Prime was doing a thing where its propellers kept speeding up and slowing down, which Mira had started to recognize as its version of fidgeting.

"What if we mess up?" Mira whispered to Dev.

"We will definitely mess up. The question is whether we mess up in a small way or a federal-crime way."

"That's not reassuring."

"I'm not a reassuring person. I'm a logistics person. There's a difference."

The first delivery was Mr. Morrison's blood pressure medication. D-12 picked it up from the pharmacy, flew it to Unit 14, and delivered it in eleven minutes.

"It usually takes ten days," Mr. Morrison said, eyeing the drone at his door. "This little fella got here in ten minutes."

"I like to be efficient!" D-12 said. "But only in ways that have been formally requested!"

"Well, isn't that something."

The second delivery was groceries for Mrs. Alvarez. She'd ordered eggs, milk, and bread, and that was exactly what she received.

"No surprises?" she asked suspiciously.

"We considered adding a decorative houseplant," D-4 announced, "but decided against it! Boundaries are important!"

"I... appreciate that."

By noon, they'd completed twenty-three deliveries. Zero complaints. Zero federal investigations. Dev was tracking everything on his tablet, and Mira was running between units helping residents figure out the request system, and the drones were doing the thing they'd always wanted to do: delivering things to people who actually needed them.

Pop-Pop intercepted Mira during a water break.

"You know," he said, "Harold put in a request."

"Harold? Anti-bird Harold?"

"He wants someone to pick up his dry cleaning. He wrote 'I still don't trust them' on the request form, but he submitted it, so." Pop-Pop shrugged. "Progress."

After the last delivery, Mira sat on the bench outside the Sunny Pines community center, legs aching, watching the swarm power down for their solar charging cycle. Dev was inside, showing Pop-Pop how the request tablet worked for the tenth time.

Drone Prime settled beside her on the bench. Not hovering. Actually resting, propellers still, like it was tired too.

"Seventeen deliveries," it said. "All to people who wanted them. All at times that were convenient. No federal agencies were involved."

"That's great, buddy."

"'Buddy.' I like that designation."

"Don't let it go to your processors."

"Too late. Already saved to permanent memory." A pause. "Mira?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I understand now. What you said about not being able to force it. About waiting."

"Yeah?"

"Being useful isn't about doing the most things. It's about doing the right things for the right people at the right time." The drone's lights blinked slowly. "I was trying to matter by being everywhere. I think it's smaller than that."

Mira thought about twelve meets on a folding chair. About the tryouts next week. About how the fastest she had ever run was the morning she chased this stupid drone to keep it from ruining her life.

"Yeah," she said. "I think you're right."

"I'm going to save that audio clip. 'Mira Okonkwo says I'm right.' Very valuable data."

"Annnd moment's over."

The tryouts were on a Wednesday, because the universe had apparently decided that all of Mira's important life events had to happen on the most boring day of the week.

Dev was in the bleachers, which surprised her because Dev had never voluntarily attended a sporting event in his life. "I'm here for moral support," he said. "Also, your drone threatened to deliver my homework to the principal if I didn't come."

"I did no such thing!" Drone Prime called from where it was hovering above the bleachers. "I merely suggested it would be a shame if certain documents were to be accidentally picked up by an autonomous delivery system!"

"That's a threat!"

"It's a delivery forecast!"

Mira lined up at the start of the 1600 meters. Eight runners. Four spots on the spring distance squad. Her legs felt good. Her new shoes -- the ones that had started this whole mess -- felt good.

Coach Reeves blew the whistle.

She didn't win. She came in third, which was fine, which was more than fine, because third meant she was on the team. Not as an alternate. Not as a water-bottle holder. As a runner.

"Okonkwo!" Coach Reeves called after the race. "Nice run. I clocked you at 6:14. You've been training?"

"Something like that."

"6:14!" Drone Prime announced to no one in particular. "That's a 12.7% improvement over her baseline! I have been tracking her progress and would like to take partial credit!"

"You don't get credit," Mira told it.

"I provided split times! And motivational hovering!"

"That's not a thing."

"It is now! I invented it!"

Dev met her at the bottom of the bleachers with a high five that he fumbled because Dev had apparently never completed one before.

"Third place," he said, grinning. "Not bad for someone who spent the last month fighting a robot uprising."

"It wasn't a uprising. It was more of a... aggressive customer service incident."

"I'm putting that on the Sunny Pines newsletter."

"Please don't."

"Too late. Already wrote it. D-7 is delivering copies as we speak."

Mira looked at him, then at Drone Prime, then at the sky where she could just barely see the other drones heading toward Sunny Pines for the afternoon delivery run. Seventeen little silver dots, each one carrying something someone had asked for.

"Hey," she said. "Thanks for coming."

"Always," Dev said. "Someone has to make sure the drones don't steal the shot puts."

From above, Drone Prime's speaker crackled.

"For the record, I would never steal shot puts. They are far too heavy for my payload capacity." A pause. "However, I could deliver several javelins if anyone is interested."

"NO."

"Just putting it out there!"

Mira started walking home. Dev fell into step beside her. Drone Prime hummed along above them, a small silver shadow against the afternoon sky.

THE END

(Drone Prime wanted me to add that the Sunny Pines Drone Delivery Service is now in its third month of operation, has completed over 400 deliveries, and has only had two minor incidents, both involving D-4 and a misunderstanding about what constitutes a "pill.")

(Dev wanted me to add that he is the Chief Logistics Officer and that his spreadsheets are "a work of art.")

(Harold still doesn't trust the drones. But he did let D-7 bring him a birthday cake last week. He said it was "acceptable." From Harold, that's basically a standing ovation.)

(Mira wanted me to add that she ran her first real race last Saturday. She came in fifth out of twenty-two. Not first. Not last. Just in it, finally.)