The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet by Bret Schulte Page B

game in a while have you?” Lucas asked in an accusatory tone.
    “I don’t really have the time. Oh-” Zoey yelled angrily as she jumped out of her seat, rubbing her shin. “What was that?”
    A two-foot tall robot with outstretched Frankenstein-style arms and tank-tread wheels rolled out from under the table.
    “Feed me,” the robot said in a creepy buzzy robot voice.
    “Hey Esteban,” Natch said.
    “Hey Natch,” the robot buzzed.
    “What is that?” Zoey asked. She seemed more curious than angry now.
    The small camera mounted where the robot’s head should be swiveled to look at her.
    “Hello Zoey Dalal, my name is Esteban Ruiz. Pleased to meet you.” The robot tipped forward slightly as if bowing. “Sorry for bumping into you.”
    “Uh, hello , Esteban,” she said examining the camera closely. “That is quite all right.”
    “You two have a nice chat. I’ll be right back,” Natch said as he got up and headed back to the buffet line.
    Zoey squatted down to have a better look at the robot. She poked at the robot’s left arm. Sam zoned out when Zoey started asking very technical-sounding questions about how the robot was built.
    “Ah, young love,” Lucas said sarcastically. “When girl meets robot.”
    Sam couldn’t help but laugh at that.
    “Do you know this Esteban fellow?” Sam asked in her mock-concerned-mom voice. “Is he a fine upstanding young gentleman?”
    “Sort of,” Lucas answered seriously. “He lives on my floor, but he has never come out of his room as far as I know.”
    “Never?”
    “Nope.”
    “So you’ve never seen him?”
    “Correct.”
    “I wonder how he goes to the bathroom,” Jerry said, annoyingly interrupting Sam and Lucas’ fun back and forth.
    “We are eating here, man,” Lucas said to Jerry as he carelessly tossed his fork down on the table in annoyance.
    “Sorry,” Jerry said sheepishly and went back to eating his pudding.
    But something had just occurred to Sam.
    “So if he doesn’t ever leave his room, he must not go to classes.”
    “Right,” Lucas said.
    “So how does he know Zoey?”
    Lucas put both of his hands up to cover the sides of his mouth.
    “He knows everyone,” he said quietly. “He’s a computer nerd. He hacked into the school’s systems and read everyone’s files. And he’s tapped into all the cameras.”
    “That’s creepy and probably illegal,” she said. “A nd he can read lips?”
    “We don’t know. But why risk it?”
    She put her hands up to her mouth just like Lucas. “How do you know he’s done all this?”
    “Natch,” Lucas said with a nod of his head. “He’s been using Esteban to look up information on everyone. And he bribed him to not tell me his real name.”
    “Wow, major paranoia,” she said. “But he knows everything that’s in our files?”
    “That is correct, Samantha Diane Hathaway of Presley, Illinois, daughter of Drs. Samuel and Joanne Hathaway, born April 1, in Menlo Park, New Jersey,” Lucas said with a sly look.
    “That is so creepy,” she blurted out. “What else do you know about me?”
    “Nothing, really,” he said defensively.
    She could tell from his face that he knew he had done something wrong, not just that he had said something wrong, but that he had actually done something so stalkerishly creepy that she might jump up from the table and never talk to him again. But in reality she was wondering exactly what her file said. It could have useful information on her parents or the stupid Lantern of the Blue Flame that eve ryone wanted so badly.
    “Uh, listen,” Lucas said hurriedly. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know to make us even. My middle name is Horatio. I don’t know how to swim. Uh, I’m from Riverside, Iowa. When I was eight I took all the clothes off of my sister’s Barbie doll because I was curious. I-“
    “It’s okay,” Sam said, cutting him off. “Well, maybe not the Barbie part, that is kind of sad. But I’m not mad.”
    He let out a long