This installment of Artifact X contains multiple chapters.

CHAPTER FIVE

It has been a morning that would have slung nearly anyone else back to bed with sheer exhaustion. But Brant, Thu, and Uncle Clive are just getting started.

After boarding the long-distance bus that will whisk them to the Gulf Coast Regional Robo-Ruckus, Brant can’t help but notice something. His uncle is tremendously nervous. And the anxiety proves to be contagious. We’ve already learned that Brant more than anything wants the robot he built to win today... In this chapter, we learn why that’s true. And why this particular robotics meet feels, for Brant, like an all-or-nothing last chance.


CHAPTER SIX

Somewhere west of San Antonio the creeks turn dry, the grass dies away, the trees go from stunted to nonexistent, and a sprawling landscape of desert and sun-blasted mountains begins. Deep in that merciless wilderness where, as the locals say, “everything bites, stings, or sticks,” a mysterious old man is all alone, waiting. Decades and decades of hard work are about to pay off. And if he has done everything right, literally nothing about human history will ever be the same.

But first he needs about three dozen cans of yellow spraypaint.