Scrap limped over to the door and banged on it with fist and claw.
“That case-takin’ gub! He’s locked us in!”
Before he’d realized that his angry hammering was doing more harm to his hands than the door, Paige had hurried to the window. She searched in vain for a way to open it, before peering down into the darkness. New Hull – the city of a million cubes stretched out far below them. Without warning, memories of last night’s dream flooded her mind – of giants and hummingbirds. Paige rubbed her eyes. “It’s a long way down,” she noted. “Anyone know how to fly?”
“Wake up, you!” Scrap barked, giving the currently comatose Morten Prometheus a feeble kick. “Wake up, so I can knock your -zk- block off!”
Paige checked the display on his vast power battery –
“Maybe half an hour or more till full charge,” she said. “Why would he lock us in here?”
“I don’t know,” replied Scrap, giving the door one last feeble thump. “But he’s just turned this place into a prison.”
Gnat had already pulled her helmet off. “I’ve never been to prison,” she said, excitedly pouring a jigsaw-puzzle-filled box all over the floor. “But I think we can spend one or ten hours here at least.”
Paige rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help smiling at seeing her sister so happy. Her mind raced with ideas of how to escape (most of them involving the grenade stashed in her satchel), but then she began to peer around the room. Despite the abduction, Morten Prometheus seemed to be less threatening than the other robots she’d encountered – and his home was filled to bursting with an excess of objects she had often imagined but never seen. She decided she could definitely think of worse places to be cooped up.
“We dreamed about stuff like this in the Foxhole…” Paige said, more or less to herself. She took off her helmet and satchel and placed them on the table next to the books. She’d just started leafing through a book entitled So You’re Moving to Somewhere?, when she spotted a familiar object propped up against the far wall. It looked like a microwave oven, with a clear door on one side, and what appeared to be a typewriter mounted atop it, with brightly coloured symbols on each key.
Paige gasped.
“Is that … a Food-O-Copier™?”
“What?” Gnat screamed. She raced across the room so quickly that she kicked up a bright cascade of puzzle pieces. By the time Scrap reached them, the humans were both huddled around the mysterious box, and their squeals had become almost inaudibly high-pitched.
“Does it work? Let me try…”
“Don’t jab at it…”
“I’m not jabbing, you’re jabbing!”
“It’s warming up…”
“Paige, it’s working!”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Scrap huffed as the hum of fully functional technology filled the air. “But don’t you think we’d be better tryin’ to find a way out of this—”
“Scrap, look!”
Gnat spun round to face him. Her hands were cupped, as if she was cradling a newborn kitten. “Look,” she whispered again, happy tears welling in her eyes. “It’s a cupcake.”
Scrap had no time to inspect the cake before Gnat crammed it into her mouth. “Tayssteeee!” Gnat squealed with glee, spitting cupcake crumbs all over Scrap’s face.
Paige quickly pressed another key on the top of the machine – in a flash of colour and a promising hum, a glossy red apple materialized inside. Paige sunk her teeth into it without pause.
For the next ten minutes, Paige and Gnat were engrossed with the Food-O-Copier™, pressing every button and gleefully eating everything it produced – tasty approximations of food neither of them had ever eaten – fruit, biscuits, bread, sweets, even – messy as it was – soup. Then, at Gnat’s insistence, they produced enough food to fill Paige’s satchel five times over. Before long, the Food-O-Copier™ was all but buried among cupcakes.
While they were trapped in this room, at least the humans had the means to sustain themselves, Scrap thought.
But they were still trapped.
Fifteen more minutes passed in Morten Prometheus’s excellent room of things. Scrap spent the time pacing up and down and glowering at Morten Prometheus out of anger, jealousy or a combination of them both.
With their bellies full of food, however, Paige and Gnat were briefly giddy; Gnat ran around frantically, identifying as many objects in the room as possible, before discovering a small, green-furred teddy bear, which she declared to be her second-best friend after her sister. She lay on the sofa on top of Morten’s cosmic-themed cape, and began to tell the bear the story of her adventures in the world beyond the Foxhole. Paige soon felt overwhelmed with tiredness but dared not sleep. She picked up a book called It’s Not You, It’s Me – Why the Human Race Broke Up with Planet Earth and started to read. After a while she looked over to the still-pacing Scrap and said: “I’m sorry you lost your case.”
Scrap tried not to appear taken aback at the human’s unprompted compassion.
“Thanks,” he replied. “I’m sorry you lost your -zk- world.”
“Yeah…” said Paige, looking back at her book. A long sigh shuddered out of her mouth.
There was another pause, before Scrap broke the silence again.
“What you said before, outside the Strongbox. Do you really think you can shift my core?”
Paige didn’t look up.
“Will you help us if I do?”
Scrap shook his head.
“It’s not my help you need, it’s his,” he said, pointing to the slumbering Morten Prometheus. “You heard him, he’s unbeatable. With that case, he might as well be ‘King of the Robots’. I still think trying to find the Pink-Footed Goose is -zk- madness, but if anyone can get you back to your mum, it’s whoever’s wearing that case.”
Paige put her book down and looked at Scrap at last.
“Listen,” she began, “I need to tell you something—”
The sudden screech of the hunter’s flight-cycle was unmistakable. Neither Scrap nor Paige paused, racing towards Gnat at once and leaping on to the sofa. Paige clamped her hand over her sister’s mouth as Scrap pulled Morten’s starry cape over them, leaving himself just enough of a gap to look out of the window.
There was Terry. His flight-cycle moved slowly past the glass. The hunter craned to looked inside, his long cloak billowing behind him, an amber light pulsing in the middle of his spheroid head.
“Do you think he knows we’re here?” Paige whispered, under the cover of the cape.
“Oh, Scra-ap!” howled Terry from outside. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Scrap sighed.
“Yeah, I think he knows we’re -zk- here.”
Paige sniffed Gnat’s armpit.
“Do you think he followed our scent again?” she whispered.
“He’s here, isn’t he?” Scrap whispered in return. “Maybe try not to stink so much…”
“Me? You smell like motor oil and dustbins!” Paige hissed.
“Maybe I do, but the killer robot isn’t sniffin’ for dustbin stink, is he?”
“Well, if he was, he’d smell you from a mile—”
“Time’s up!” Terry exclaimed. Scrap saw the flight-cycle pivot in the air to face the window, and then two Gatling guns fold out from its sides.
“Oh, for cog’s— Move!” cried Scrap.
And with that, the hunter opened fire.