Michael Reed, robot mechanic and One-Man Band, was sometimes quiet, but not often speechless.

Hatchworth had brought him something surprising… a stack of scrapbooks he had found while burrowing through Jon's stuffed animal pile looking for Rabbit during a game of hide and seek. For some reason, Hatchworth never looked for the telltale plume of steam to help him locate his brother.

Knowing Jon, Michael wasn't surprised that he had chosen to make these collections of memories, or to keep them secret… especially when he looked inside.

Some weren't too serious… Collections of newspaper clippings about the Steam Man Band over the years, concert photos, pictures of friendly squirrels in Balboa Park. Each squirrel looked the same but he was sure Jon had known each of them by name.

Other albums were more sensitive, like those holding photos of soldiers in the various wars in which the robots had served, or times that the robots had been called in to help in disaster-stricken areas. Their trip to New Orleans took up an entire book.

Then he came to a scrapbook with a cardboard cover that had been colored in black and yellow stripes with crayon. He eagerly opened it, suspecting rightly that it was about Honeybee. It had everything, from a brochure for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair to a photo of Honeybee's funeral in 1965, just before the robots left for Vietnam.

Michael sighed. He'd never had the chance to meet Honeybee. She had malfunctioned from time to time since they had found her, he'd heard… the perfect girl for Rabbit, he thought with a smile. Unfortunately, the part that had malfunctioned the most was her brain, and one day, it had just… stopped. They'd offered to try and fit her with a blue matter core, but she'd refused. From what the headstone in Walter Cemetery reported, she and Rabbit had only had fifteen years together, after seventeen apart.

It was a romance worthy of an Edwardian novel… as well as a love song… despite the fact that Rabbit was on one side of it. If it weren't for the heartfelt quality of the song, he would have been more skeptical about the romance. But Rabbit only recently had been willing to start singing it for regular audiences in Balboa Park, just a few years back, and still malfunctioned regularly in the process. They'd managed to cut a single but it had required several tries and a lot of cutting to remove all the glitching. It was new ground for him, but Michael was pretty sure that was as close as a robot could get to true love.

Steve Negrete stumped into the library and plopped down beside him. "What's with the photo albums?"

"They're Jon's. I can't believe he just left them under his plushies and headed off to see the world. There's some incredible clippings in some of these."

"Jon's into scrapbooking?" Steve looked through the squirrel scrapbook and laughed. "Seriously?"

"Not that one! Check this out." He shoved the bee-striped book at him.

Steve flipped through it and whistled. "Wow, don't show it to Rabbit. I heard he was dealing with losing her pretty well, but why take chances?" He looked over at the stack. "Pass me another one."

Michael, deep in a scrapbook about various robotic advancements over the last 100 years, scooped up a book trimmed in white lace and dropped it in his lap. "There's a manly one for ya."

"I'm not proud. Actually, I was wondering why Jon would use white lace… Rainbow, I could see." He opened the book… and froze.

Michael didn't notice at first, as he was examining a small clipping about early computers. Steve flipped through the pages almost frantically.

Michael, unable to concentrate, looked up and said, "What?"

"Dude… this had to have been some kind of publicity stunt…"

"Let's see." Michael scooped up the scrapbook and flipped through. His jaw dropped.

There was a clicking noise at the doorway, and a gush of steam. Rabbit trundled in and scooped up the striped book from where Steve had carelessly dropped it, before they, distracted as they were, could stop him.

"What's this?" he yelled brightly. He opened it and flipped through it all in one go.

"Rabbit?" said Steve worriedly when the automaton froze on the spot.

Rabbit, staring with his eyes wide at a random spot on the far wall, slowly clutched the scrapbook to his chest plate, wrapping both arms tightly around it. "It's beautiful…" he said, his voice squeaking dramatically. Oil began to trickle from both eyes. "I hafta g-g-go f-feed the d-d-ducks…"

He was gone, clutching the scrapbook, before they could ask him about the white lace album.

"Well, that was… unexpected," said Steve.

Michael shrugged. "He didn't shut down. That's the good part. He's going to be emo for days, though…"

He returned to the white photo album, leafing through it more slowly. The picture that caught his attention most was at the beginning. A young man with strong Walter features, wearing a fedora, was standing in the park, holding hands with a pretty girl, smiling and posing for the camera. He had his vest and tie draped over his arm as though they had gotten too warm.

What was troubling was that the one Walter, in all the household portraits, that he most resembled… was Peter A. Walter I. The man in the picture was almost identical to him. And while the twins had resembled their father, the only family members whose faces were an exact match… were robots.

He couldn't be sure, not knowing the height of the woman, but it seemed to him that this Walter was fairly tall… That led to one likely culprit… The Spine. Maybe his human disguise… but The Spine didn't get too warm, as this man clearly was. Besides, The Spine's wig was good, but not that good… and there was the five-o'clock shadow…

And most confusing of all, below the picture was written, in Jon's neatest writing, "David and Marie."

"Who's David?" said Michael. Steve shrugged.

The next few pages left them even more bewildered.

"That's a nice cake…" said Steve. "Hm… small ceremony."

"I'd think it would be! Is this even legal, that's what I want to know…"

"What, the cake?"

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I know."

"It's just… I don't think it's a stunt, Steve. It says David here but just inside the cover… 'The Spine and Marie.'"

"Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue… Marie! Oh, stupid! You remember that mystery headstone out in the cemetery? The one no one talks about?"

"Oh, yeah… Marie Walter," said Michael, looking at Steve. "Yeah, that is interesting. You ever notice the epitaph?"

"No… What is it?"

"'Beloved wife.'"

"Ho-ly crap…"

There was a thunderous, clock-ticking pause.

"Seriously?"

"Well, yeah, it does say that…"

"But come on!" Steve cried. "It's… it's… no. Just no."

"Why not?"

"Well, first of all… The Spine."

"What?"

"In love? Mr. Cool?"

"Sure! She dies, he keeps it a secret, won't talk about her to anyone? It totally fits. Probably has a little shrine to her in his closet."

"Oh, please…"

"Honeybee sometimes gets to him, didn't you notice?"

"Notice what, exactly? It's been one flawless performance after another from him."

"Except for Saturday. The piercing electrical shriek? They blamed you?"

"Well, yeah, but that was…"

"You never figured out why the mic did that when it came to his line, did you?"

"No, not as such…"

"See?" Michael said, smugly. "He lost it."

"That was a fluke. Besides, there's no sign there was ever another woman here outside of the ones we know!"

"What about the old start-up sequence?"

"What about it? I never heard it."

"The voice had a southern accent. I never could understand why. They just said the lady who recorded it had one. Weak."

"That proves nothing. There's still no trace of her in the house."

"Have you searched every inch of it? It's the freakin' House of Many Ways…"

"The what?" Steve raised one eyebrow.

"It's a book. Look, Steve, Spine's old… a guy who's been around over one hundred years… Think of all the secrets he could have!"

"But seriously, now, let's just think about this. Going somewhere I really don't want to go right now, bear with me…"

"Don't, man…"

"Married? Man and wife? Til death do us part?" He cleared his throat. "A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife…"

"Stop it, Steve."

"…And they shall be one…"

"Seriously, don't even go there…"

"Flesh," he finished mercilessly. "But how, Mike?"

"I'm not listening."

"You can't tell me he's capable…"

Michael plugged his ears and started singing the refrain from "Brass Goggles."

Steve waited patiently until Michael opened one eye, gave him a stern look, and unplugged his ears.

"No more about it, man. I mean it."

Steve nodded and they sat in silence for a moment before he cried, "Let's ask The Spine!"

"No!" cried Michael, eyes wide.

"Aww… Why not?"

"Why… why not?" Michael was almost speechless. "Why not ask him about what we're pretty sure is his dead wife? Why not ask him how they…? No. No way."

"Aww..."

Hum. Hiss.

Steve looked at Michael. Michael looked pale.

They had each noticed it at the same time. Directly behind them.

"Oh, crap…" muttered Steve.

The Spine fixed each in turn with a cold but otherwise inscrutable stare, silently tweaked the scrapbook from Michael's unresisting hands, and left as quickly as Rabbit had. Each man exhaled the breath he was holding… The Spine could be surprisingly scary, and his silences were the worst.

"Forgot the whole place was wired…" Michael whispered breathlessly. "Still want to ask him?"

Steve shook his head.

On his way back to the Hall of Wires, The Spine flipped through the scrapbook eagerly. Jon, though he could just about kill him for it, had been thorough. He lingered longest on the first picture, smiling through oily tears. David and Marie. So that's where it had gone! He eventually closed the book and wrapped his arms around it, clutching it to his chest-plate, though he didn't know it, exactly as Rabbit had.