That morning last spring, when she saw the blood in her sheets, she realized her mother would never know about it, and cried.

No. She cried because, even if her mother could know, she probably wouldn't care. She'd be too busy getting drunk to care.

That morning, the first morning of her first period, was one of the worst mornings of Kalinka's life. Mostly because of thinking about Mother.

She made do with a wad of tissue and a fresh pair of undies. Then she balled up her stained sheets and the plaid pyjama bottoms and waited two hours in her room to tell Papa. She only told him after he came up to knock on her door because he was worried she was sick.

It sucked so much telling Papa. What sucked about it most of all was that she knew Papa was thinking about Mother too. They were both thinking about Mother, but neither of them could say it out loud.

Awkward.

To be specific, Papa was thinking about how he wished Mother was around to explain all this stuff to Kalinka, which then led to him thinking about what a horrible father he was for not being able to keep Mother around. He never told Kalinka that, but she knew. She hated when Papa thought badly of himself.

What a shitty freaking day.

But the day when she was nine and Mother called had been way worse.

"Oh, my God... Kalinka..." said a woman's voice, when Kalinka had picked up the line on the netscreen. "It's you, isn't it?... I didn't think you'd be the one to answer… Kalinka, my baby..."

"Um, who are you?" Kalinka said.

"I'm your mother, of course," the voice said.

"No, you're not," said Kalinka. "My mother died in a plane crash five years ago."

"Mikhail told you that? No, that's not true. You see..."

Papa was standing in the doorway, white as a sheet.

"Kalinka, who is that?"

"Mikhail… I'm so sorry," said the woman's voice, hesitant and trembling. "I just… I just had to call…"

"How dare you," Mikhail barked at the netscreen. "Five years without a word, and now, out of the blue… What the hell do you want from us?"

As it turned out, Mother wanted money.

That was one of the few scraps of information which Kalinka was able to gather within the next several minutes of jostling with Papa for a turn to talk to Mother. The questions flew out of her. Where was Mother now? In Moscow. And why wasn't she at home? Because she'd been a bad Mother. Well, was she ever going to come home? No, she wasn't. But couldn't Kalinka at least see her? Couldn't she come to visit her? No, she couldn't. And did Mother realize how much it had freaking sucked for Kalinka to spend five years without her?

"Language, Kalinka," Papa said between gritted teeth.

Right. Did Mother realize how very, very horrible it had been for Kalinka to spend five years without her?

No answer. Just a bunch of stupid sobbing.

Kalinka saved one especially important question for Papa, after Mother had cut the call.

"Why did you tell me she was dead?"

Papa, looking at the floor and rubbing his beard, talked and talked for a long time, but all of it was stupid, all of it was bullshit. It even seemed like Papa had chosen each stupid word just to hurt and confuse her even more.

As Papa talked, he went blurry. Then everything else went blurry.

Kalinka ran out of the lab and up the spiral staircase, with an ache rising in her throat. The landing rattled and went clang, clang, clang under her feet.

Papa ran after her. Clang, clang, clang went Papa's footsteps. Kalinka opened her bedroom door, ran through, slammed it shut. Locked it.

Knocking. "Kalinka…"

"I hate you!"

She didn't come out all afternoon, or even for dinner. That would show Papa. Around eleven, when she couldn't hold it anymore, she snuck out to use the bathroom. All the lights were off; the Cossack Numbers had retired to the lab, and the house was quiet. No sign of Papa. Whew. When she tiptoed back to her room, she stubbed her big toe on a plate outside her door.

She sat on the floor of her room devouring the sandwich Papa had left for her. She still definitely hated Papa, but she felt kind of bad about it. Then she remembered Papa's lie, and the sandwich went blurry in her hands.

Learning she'd been lied to about Mother being dead, or learning that Mother was alive but had chosen to be far away, instead of with her: which was worse? Kalinka tossed and turned all night, wondering. She couldn't decide.

What a shitty, shitty freaking day.

But way, way worse than that was the day only a week after Mother's call, when she woke up on a faded green sleeping bag in a room with a cold linoleum floor and bare grey walls.

Her head and her limbs were heavy.

After a lot of effort, she managed to push herself upright. She stared at the walls for a long while, wondering if she was dreaming. She rubbed at a sore spot on the inside of her left elbow, where she discovered a little bandage. She couldn't remember how she'd gotten it. She felt like she might throw up. How weird. She'd never been nauseous in a dream before.

As the heaviness and nausea faded, the fear set in. She realized she wasn't dreaming, and that she didn't know where she was. When she was at last able, she got up and stumbled over to the door. She tried the lever. It didn't budge.

Above the lever a tiny slit of a window, no wider than her hand, was her only view to the outside. Beyond it was a long hallway, empty and utterly unfamiliar.

She pounded the door with her fists. "Hey!" she shouted. "Somebody. I'm stuck. Help me!"

No one came.

She turned back. Next to the green sleeping bag was a stack of magazines and some brown, dog-eared old paperbacks. In one corner of the room, a shower curtain hung from a rod; behind it was a toilet, a sink, and a roll of paper. There was a two-liter bottle of water and a box of crackers in another corner.

She felt her heart pounding in her ears. She wasn't "stuck." Someone had made this prison for her. Someone had put her here.

"Good morning, Miss Cossack," said a voice from up above. "Well, morning for you, at least."

She gasped, then she looked, and for the first time she noticed a small camera and an intercom speaker mounted on the ceiling. The voice was oddly familiar, but not in a good way.

"I know you have a lot of questions," the voice said, "so allow me to answer some of them now. I'm Dr. Albert Wily, and this is my underground lab. Perhaps you've heard of me? Anyway, I've asked your father to do me a little favor - and if he succeeds, you'll be free to go home. The task should take him… oh, a few weeks, hopefully less. Until then, you're going to stay here. One of my robots will be coming by each day to bring your meals."

She knew that voice and that name from the newscasts that had haunted her dreams. Dr. Wily was a madman. He'd used robots to kill people.

"N… no," Kalinka said. "Let me go now. Please…"

Beep went the sound of the line being cut, and the room was plunged into silence.

She sank to the floor and hugged her knees. Papa. She wanted Papa.

Within only a few hours, she'd exhausted every possible idea for escape and found them all wanting. She definitely wasn't going to try slipping past the Wily-bot that brought her dinner - too scary. She'd paced the room a hundred times, hurled the paperbacks at the wall, and kicked the door.

There was nothing left for her to do but to retreat into her mind.

She wasn't a prisoner in Dr. Wily's lab. She was a princess and this was her castle. That wasn't a sleeping bag, but a four-post canopy bed with satin sheets. The walls weren't bare, but covered in colorful tapestries made by the most highly skilled weavers in the kingdom. She saw minstrels, stags, unicorns. She wasn't wearing pajamas, but a pink gown made of the finest silk. So what if she couldn't leave her boudoir because the castle was being besieged by trolls? Her father, the bravest knight to ever live, was riding on a galloping white horse to her rescue this very moment. And once he'd slayed every last monster, he would pardon her mother, the noble Queen of a distant land, and welcome her back from her years of exile. They would all live happily...

A mechanical shudder in the hallway snapped her rudely out of her daydream. The lights through the tiny slit of her window went out one by one. Then hers went out too. She was in pitch darkness.

She screamed all night.

In her thirteen years, Kalinka had seen her share of shitty days. But today… today took the freaking cake.

With her chin in her hands, she glared down at the schematics Dr. Light had sent her, willing those numbers and squiggly lines to make sense.

He's gonna know I'm lying.

Her face was hot. She looked up at her clock on the wall. 1:12 a.m. Her stomach started doing somersaults. Blues was going to visit soon… if he was going to visit at all.

Oh, God, she hoped he would. She wanted to see him. But if he came to visit, she'd have to see him ill. Dying. And she'd have to tell him a bald-faced lie.

She hated lies, especially the one Papa had told her about Mother.

And Blues trusted her. She was, as far as she knew, the only person he trusted. If she lied to him, and if he knew it, she'd rob him of his only friend. He'd go away, and she didn't want him to go away.

She almost wished Blues wouldn't come.

No, no. Because if he didn't come, his core would kill him. It could kill him any minute now.

Hurry up, hurry up.

Her hands were trembling. She reached out and grabbed Blues's replacement core. It was cool to the touch. She pulled it close to her. Hugged it. It was beautiful. Inside this core was Blues's entire future: many happy years. If he never trusted her again after this operation, she wouldn't care, as long as he was alive.

She tried to imagine how Blues had felt the day he blasted through the door of her cell and spirited her away to Papa. Made a sudden break with Wily, put his own life on the line. Had he been frightened? If so, it hadn't stopped him.

Oh, Blues… you're so good.

She'd be strong like that. She'd have to be.

And then in her dresser mirror she saw a familiar flash of light.