Katerina Donlan, called Kat by her friends, was most often found in her lab. It was a nice little place, very cozy as labs went, and full of nifty little gadgets that could do all sorts of things. Lately, the gadgets had been replaced by robot parts, but there were still a few little things tossed into odd corners. They were old projects that she was determined to return to someday, but she simply hadn't found the time to do so, and when she did have the time, she was with her friends. She couldn't just push her friends away to work on old projects, so she tended to leave them forgotten and gathering dust.
It was a beautiful day, or so Kat assumed from the conversations she overheard. She kept the door to her lab closed most of the time – Annie and Paz knew they were always welcome, but she didn't want just anyone barging in – but it wasn't thick enough to be soundproof. If there was anything she wanted to be unheard in her lab, she had to speak quietly, but the people passing by either didn't know there was someone who could hear them or didn't care whether they were overheard, so Kat heard snippets of conversation, along with heavy footsteps and laughter.
"I've never seen a sky that blue!"
"Do you want to see how far we can sneak down the bridge this time?"
"A friend of mine's found a new way up to the roof! No, you don't know him, but he's really cool."
She didn't mind all the noise. It was almost enjoyable, in a strange way. She liked to be reminded that there was still life outside. It kept her from spending her days locked away inside, and sometimes she heard Annie and Paz approaching before they arrived. That always made her stomach leap with excitement, and it was even better than them surprising her.
It was a beautiful day, Kat realized as she glanced at the window. There was just one in the lab, but one was plenty. It let in sunlight in case one of her projects needed to be charged before it could work, and she could tell what the weather was like, or if she had stayed there too long and needed to get some sleep. (It was surprising how difficult it could be to tell whether she was tired if she had been working for a long time.) The sky, as the girl had said, was a brilliant blue, with only a few cirrus clouds far away. The sun wasn't shining directly in the window, but the light it gave off was still enough that she didn't need any of the electric lights unless she wanted to go into one of the corners. There was no need to, though; everything she needed was right in front of her.
Today's work wasn't all that difficult; she was just repairing a bit of circuitry in a robotic mouse. According to its friend, it had been acting rather strangely, and though she wasn't sure what could have caused it, something had indeed gone wrong with the wiring. She'd thought it had been perfectly fine the last time she checked, and once it was repaired, she would have to ask what was wrong. In the meantime, she just wanted to make sure it was all right.
She hummed as she worked, and it wasn't long before the wiring problem was sorted out. The mouse did need a few replacement parts, and Kat added a few extra pieces of protection to make sure it wouldn't short out, or at least that if it did, it would be able to get to a place where it could ask for help instead of waiting for someone to rescue it. Once it was all put back together, she set the mouse in the window for the sunlight to charge it and, while she waited, checked her hair in the reflective surface of a spare bit of metal. She had a date with Paz later that night, and she wanted to look nice for it instead of looking like she had crawled out of the lab only five minutes before.
The fact that she might well crawl out of the lab only five minutes before the date was beside the point.
Her hair looked fine, or as fine as short hair looked anyway. It could probably use a bit of a comb, and perhaps it was time she washed it, but it would do for a date. Besides, there was a comb tucked in one of the cupboards, just in case.
The mouse still hadn't finished charging, so Kat wandered around the lab, trying to find something else to do while she waited. There weren't any other projects waiting for her, and she could easily slip out for a walk, but she didn't want to abandon the mouse. If it woke up and found itself alone, it would likely be frightened, and it was a sweet little thing. In the end, she settled on sorting through her screws to make sure they were all in the right drawers for their sizes.
They were, and so were the wires, and so were the batteries. Even though she wasn't terribly thorough in her search, Kat had enough small things that needed to be sorted according to size that she hadn't finished when the mouse whirred, letting her know that it was active. Closing the drawer she had been working on, she raced to stand beside it.
"Angel?" it asked, its little green eyes alight. Kat grinned as warmth rose up her cheeks. She still wasn't quite used to being called an angel by the various robots of the school, even if she wasn't quite as flustered by it as she had been.
"It's me," she said, holding out a hand. The mouse scurried off the windowsill, and she carried it to a worktable. "Are you all right? You looked like you were falling apart inside."
"I was always broken," the mouse said.
A chill ran down Kat's spine, as though the blue sky outside had suddenly been replaced by fog and the summer weather by autumn. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"I was always broken," the mouse said again, and again Kat felt that chill run down her spine. When she glanced out the window, the sun was shining as brightly as ever, but a sense of foreboding had taken hold of her and would not leave.
"How were you broken?" she asked.
"By the ones who came before."
It was almost an answer, but not quite enough of one to satisfy Kat. She wanted a proper answer, not a riddle to solve. "Who came before?"
The mouse hummed, and it shook so violently that Kat was afraid it would break despite the little protections she had put into it. After several seconds – that felt like much longer – it stilled but did not answer her.
Kat sighed. She hated when this happened. Something was wrong with her robots, and she had to find a way to help them, but she didn't even know where to begin. "All right. So you can't tell me who came before. Is there anything you can say? I can't help you unless I know something."
"I was always broken," the mouse said, then it hummed again. "You have helped me. You put me back together."
"So you're not broken anymore?"
"I am always broken."
Kat buried her face in her hands and muttered a Romani curse that she had overheard from her mother. There wasn't any time to ask another question, however, since just then she heard a knock on the door. A moment later, the knock was repeated, and Kat hurried to answer it, calling out, "Just a moment!"
She hadn't known who to expect, only that it couldn't be Annie or Paz. They knew that they didn't have to knock, since Kat only bothered to lock the door after she left, and even then, she wasn't sure she had to. Her lab was tiny, and most of the things in it were things that only she would really be able to use. Most people around the school didn't even know it was her lab; it was just a tiny room with nothing really interesting in it. She'd even been considering getting a sign to say so, but Annie had told her that it wouldn't work as well as leaving it unlabeled.
Kat pulled open the door, and anything she might have been about to say faded from her mind when she saw Jones standing in the hall. The woman looked as unruffled as ever, and she gave Kat an impassive look before asking, "May I come in, Miss Donlan?"
"Sure," Kat said, stepping aside so Jones could enter. She closed the door and asked, "Is there anything I can do for you?"
Jones looked around the room once before asking, "Is this your lab?"
"Yeah," Kat said. "I use it for personal experiments." She was sure she wasn't technically supposed to have it, but no one had tried to stop her from using it, and she didn't think Jones was there to keep her from breaking any rules.
"I see. Have you been working on anything interesting lately?"
"Nothing too interesting," Kat said, hoping Jones didn't have some kind of lie detecting ability. "Just various things here and there. A couple projects that aren't going anywhere yet."
Jones glanced at her, and in that glance, Kat thought she saw that Jones knew she was lying. It was impossible to read any expression on the woman's face, but something prickled at the back of Kat's neck, and she was sure she knew, even if she had no proof. "Is it all right if I look around?" Jones asked.
"Sure," Kat said. "Is there anything I can help you find?"
"I hope not."
Leaving Kat to figure out what to make of that statement, Jones began walking through the lab. She glanced over some papers that Kat had left out and peeked into a few drawers, but never for very long, and she never disturbed any of the contents. Once Jones's back was to her, Kat glanced at the table and saw that the mouse was gone. It was probably in hiding somewhere, for which she was glad. She wasn't sure what kind of explanation she would give for a robot mouse just sitting around her lab among various innocuous schoolgirl experiments.
Jones's search lasted for less than half an hour before she returned to Kat. "Have you ever looked inside those old drawers back there?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" Kat asked. "The ones I use to keep stuff from years ago? Not really." She didn't like to be reminded of the various embarrassing mistakes she'd made, and so far she hadn't really found a way to get rid of them. She supposed she could donate them to another lab and see if any of the younger students could make anything of them.
"I see." Jones walked to the door, and before Kat could ask what she had meant or why she had even been asking, she was gone, and Kat was alone.
The day was getting stranger and stranger, with no signs of stopping. With a sigh, Kat looked around the lab. There was still no sign of the mouse, and she couldn't even tell where it might have got to. It had left no disturbances, and when she wandered around a little, she couldn't pick up a trace of it. "Hello?" she called. "Mouse? You can come out now. Jones is gone."
There was no response, but Kat thought she heard a faint hum coming from one of the dark corners, near the old drawers Jones had been talking about. Frowning, she turned on the light.
With the bright sunlight streaming in through the window, the electric light didn't make much difference through most of the lab. In the corners, however, it made all the difference, and suddenly Kat could make out the parts of the room that had been in shadow. She also found the mouse, which was sitting by a little drawer close to the ground, one that Kat barely remembered. She must have noticed it before, since she had gone through the lab as thoroughly as she could before starting to use it, but it didn't seem familiar at all.
"It's all right," she said, kneeling by the mouse. "Jones is gone."
The mouse continued to hum, and it stared straight at that little drawer with an intensity that sent a chill down Kat's spine. If the mouse had heard what she said, it made no response, and it did nothing at all when she set a hand on its back.
"Mouse?" she asked. "Mouse, what's the matter?"
The humming only grew more intense, and it got louder as Kat reached for the drawer. Whatever was inside it, it would be at least part of the answer of what had happened to the mouse, and she had to understand. These robots were like her people – like her children almost – and if something was hurting them or causing them to break down, then she had to know so she could get rid of it.
The drawer stuck a little when she pulled on the tiny handle, but after a bit of tugging, it slid open easily, revealing a tiny space. There was nothing inside but a plain gold ring. It was cool to the touch, and surprisingly heavy when Kat picked it up.
As soon as it left the drawer, the mouse stopped humming and the lights in its eyes died.
Kat dropped the ring, which fell to the ground with hardly a clatter, and scooped up the mouse. Not bothering to turn the lights off or even clear the table away more than just shoving everything on it to the side, she laid the mouse down and opened it up. Her hands were trembling, and as she leaned close, she found herself whispering, "Please, please, please," though she didn't know who she was asking. She peered at the inside of the mouse, poking around through the wiring and inspecting every space she could find, but it seemed as though nothing was wrong. The insides were as she had left them only a few hours before, and it couldn't have lost its charge so quickly. To do so would have run down its motor, and that looked perfectly fine.
It was as though the mouse had just died.
Wiping tears from her eyes with her sleeve, Kat closed up the mouse and set it aside. She would have to bring it to the other robots and try to explain what had happened, but she wasn't at all sure what she could say. This was like nothing she had ever seen before, and the only explanation she did have was that she had picked up a ring and the mouse had stopped working.
The ring. It still lay where she had dropped it, and now she walked back to the corner and looked down at it. The drawer was indistinguishable from all the other drawers around it, but the ring stood out against the drab floor, shining with a reflection from the electric light. She picked it up, and it was still surprisingly heavy, though it looked a bit smaller than it had before, small enough to fit well on one of her fingers. For a moment she was tempted to put it on, but instead she stuck it into her pocket. If it had caused some kind of disturbance in the mouse, she couldn't just leave it lying around. She couldn't bring it near the other robots, either, just in case it did something to them. The best place for it was to hide it somewhere in her room.
Kat wrapped the mouse in a little handkerchief. It seemed more respectful than just carrying it, although she did tuck it into another pocket so she would have both hands. The hall was empty when she left her lab, although just after she locked the door, a young couple came down the hall, holding hands and whispering. They were too wrapped up in each other to notice Kat, and she hurried away.
Of course, if she left the ring in her room, there was always a chance that Reynardine would find it. He had changed since first trapping himself inside the body of Annie's toy, but she still wasn't sure she would trust him with something this dangerous. Maybe she could tell Annie to forbid him from looking wherever she hid it. But then she would have to explain to Annie what was going on. She could just make all of her stuff off limits for Reynardine. That would let her hide the ring anywhere, and it would sound more believable, as long as Annie didn't notice that Kat had never been concerned about that sort of thing before.
At least she wouldn't have to explain it at once. When Kat reached their room, she found that it was empty. Annie was probably off with Mr. Eglamore learning how to use a sword. Reynardine was out of sight, probably nestled in the pile of blankets at the foot of Annie's bed or tucked inside her backpack. Even so, Kat was careful to keep her back to Annie's side of the room as she hid the ring inside a bundle of socks.
Once that was done, she headed out again, now holding the bundle with the mouse in her hands. It felt a bit more respectful than just holding it in her pocket, and she couldn't help pitying the little thing. Something had happened to break it worse than she could imagine, and it ought to be at rest with other robots.