Paige dreamed of hummingbirds and giants again.
This dream was different however. Suddenly, in place of giants, she saw Harmony Highshine, watched her case unfolding and saw her mother – something that looked like her mother – step out. She realized that she was holding Gnat in her grasp, but could not hold on. She watched her break free and run into Harmony Highshine’s arms. Then she saw the robot’s eye glowing, and remembered a moment of pain, before darkness.
I’m dreaming, Paige told herself. Which means I’m alive.
Wake up, she told herself.
Wake. Up.
Paige gasped for breath, a wrenching gasp that made her sit up with a start. Her head pounded. The hazy light of dawn stung the one eye she found she could open. She reached up and gingerly touched her face to find a raised lesion ran from her forehead all the way down to her left eye, which, try as she might, she could not open.
“Gn-Gnat…!” she cried, her voice a dry wheeze. She tried to stand but immediately fell on to her knees. She rubbed her remaining eye. When her vision cleared enough for her to take in her surroundings, she wondered if in fact she was still dreaming. All she could see was an ocean of discarded cases.
The Piles, she thought.
There were no functional robots in sight. No single junk case had made a home on this particular mass of metal parts. The ocean of unwanted robot bodies stretched as far as she could see in every direction. Which Pile was it? How far was she from the city? How could she hope to get back to help her sister? She repeated Gnat’s name again and again, her eye blurring with tears. This time, she couldn’t control her sobs. They came loud and gasping and insistent. She cried for her mum, for her sister, and for the terrible secret she’d kept until today. She even cried for the robot that Gnat had named Scrap. Paige cried until she was hoarse, and nauseous, and exhausted.
It was only when at last her tears began to subside and dry and her vision started to clear, that Paige’s gaze strayed to her left. There, lying next to her, was Scrap’s lifeless case. His chest panel lay open, his core cavity empty.
They dumped us both here, she thought. Dumped us on the Piles, and left us for dead.
Paige shuddered as the terrible reality of her situation began to sink in.
She wasn’t getting off-world.
She was never going to see her sister again.
She pulled Scrap’s case into a seated position and propped it up against a mound of robot legs. She sat up next to him and leaned her head on his shoulder. Scrap’s case was cold and rough with rust, but it was his. Not comfortable, but comforting.
Paige felt lost but at least she was not alone.
She stared out over the Pile for the longest time, listening to the wind gently whistle through the empty cases.
Then she saw it.
A point of light, glinting in the distance.
Sunlight, reflecting off the cases?
No, this was something else. Something more.
It glowed.
“Can’t be…” Paige muttered. She wiped her eye and made another attempt to stand. Every inch of her ached with pain, but she pulled herself to her feet. “Don’t go anywhere,” she whispered to Scrap’s empty case, and began stumbling across the Pile, clambering, tripping, tumbling over cases.
The nearer she got, the surer she became, until finally she reached the source of the light, nestled between two large, dark cases. It shimmered with uncanny brightness, and Paige had no doubt as to what it was.
Scrap’s core.
Paige cried out in relief and hugged the core to her chest. It felt warm, and pulsed with strange power. By the time she had returned to Scrap’s case, the core cradled in her arms, Paige felt her strength redoubled. She set the core down next to the case, took a deep breath and rummaged in her satchel. Her hand immediately found a handful of cupcakes. Shoving one into her mouth, she returned her hand to the bag and searched again. Finally she retrieved a slender, four-pronged tool with a series of tiny buttons along its handle.
“Shift-widget, check,” she said with a sigh of relief. As she held it tightly, her hands shaking, she remembered her mum telling her that just because no one had used shift-widgets for a hundred years, that didn’t mean they weren’t a perfectly good method of shifting a robot’s core – if you knew what you were doing.
“You know what you’re doing,” Paige told herself. “You’ve done it a whole bunch of times … in your head.” She nodded with quiet determination, before accidentally dropping the shift-widget into Scrap’s chest cavity. She quickly retrieved it and took three deep, long breaths.
“You can do this,” she added, looking down at Scrap, his head lolled to one side. She picked up his core and placed it inside his chest cavity. She paused, her shift-widget shaking in her hand. “Don’t short the circuit, don’t blow the relays,” she said. “Make the connections at the right time and in the right order. Bring him back. On the count of three. One … two…”