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“I saw that!”

Nate ran the scraper down the fourth door and kept working.

A couple of minutes later, Leo came through the sitting room wall. “Your machine is out of control.”

Nate barely looked up from what he was doing. “How so?”

“It went under the china cabinet.”

“It’s supposed to clean under the furniture.”

“I’m fairly sure it’s possessed.”

Nate set the scraper aside and looked at him.

“Don’t,” Leo said.

Nate turned back to the cabinet door, but clearly he wasn’t fast enough to hide his smile because Leo made an outraged sound and vanished back through the wall.

A minute later, from the dining room: “I know you’re up to something.”

Marvin hummed again.

Maybe an hour later, the vacuum ran out of power and drove itself back to its dock.

Nate watched from the kitchen doorway as the disc bumped over the threshold, swung around, and backed onto its charger with a small triumphant chime.

Leo eyed it suspiciously.

“It has to charge,” Nate explained.

“And it’ll start again when it’s done?”

The dock light pulsed slowly. Leo positioned himself in front of it, arms crossed like he was getting ready to play prison guard for the night.

Nate left them to it.

He got another hour of work in before his back told him to stop. Then he heated up leftover pizza, sat at the kitchen table, and pulled the day’s footage onto the laptop.

The promo cut was easy. He had the unboxing, setup, and first run. Sponsors liked footage where their product moved.

In the background of one shot, the dining room door stood open. Nate slowed the clip and watched the doorway, frame by frame, just to make sure that it did not move. Things tended to move when Leo got very animated.

But the door behaved.

Good.

He exported the cut and drafted the email to the sponsor.

Once it was sent, he looked at the vacuum’s app on his phone. Then he ate the last slice of his pizza and listened to the house. The dining room was quiet. Either Leo was still standing guard over the dock, or he’d declared the matter settled and gone back on patrol.

Nate should text Jonah.

That had been the plan. A construction site was no place for a robot vacuum. It would eat a drywall screw within a week and die an expensive death, and the sponsor had only asked for one video.

He picked up his phone. Typed: got a robot vacuum for you. filmed my thing with it, it’s yours if you want it.

His thumb hovered over send.