Teer, Samuel

After her mother accepts a job as the star of an international dance tour and will be gone for the summer, fourteen-year-old Almudena learns she'll be spending her summer with her father Xavier, a man she's never met. Moving into a dilapidated brownstone, Almudena learns Xavier only speaks Spanish and that she's expected to help him renovate the brownstone into apartments for others in their neighborhood. Though their relationship starts out rocky, Almudena slowly gets to know her father and others in the Latino neighborhood he lives in and comes to terms with where she fits into the mix.

An orphaned girl raised by robots in a factory discovers she has the ability to speak with machines, and under the tutelage of Assembly, she learns the three laws of the machines, but it is the secret fourth law, avoid the Gremlin, that leads Veda down a dangerous and compromising path on her journey of self-discovery.