He was somewhere around four hundred and seventy when he heard a mail tube pop through the floor of his ship. He laughed when he saw a flash of pink inside of it, and flipped backward to intercept it before it hit the floor.
Sportacus,
Where ARE you!
Stephanie
The letter was surprisingly brief for the usually loquatious Stephanie. He frowned. Was it she who was in trouble? It seemed unlikely. When he last saw her, she had been playing basketball with the others.
Sportacus slid down the ladder and looked around the playground. "Where's everyone gone?" he asked himself, giving his head a scratch. He nearly leapt out of his skin when he was tackled from behind by a panicked Stephanie.
"Whoa, whoa!" he said, grabbing her shoulders. "Slow down! What's wrong?"
"--and the others ran away because they were scared and it's been half an hour already and where were you?" Stephanie finished breathlessly. She banged angrily on his chest with her fists, and he watched her with surprise. There were tears in her eyes.
He leaned down so that he was looking her in the eye. "I couldn't see anything wrong," he told her gently. "My crystal's been trying to warn me for hours. What happened?"
Stephanie reached up to grab his hand, and he could feel her shaking. "Something horrible's happened," she said, more quietly this time. "I was the only one who stayed, because the others were afraid. That girl we saw the other day? She's broken."
"Broken?" Sportacus asked, bewildered. "What do you mean?"
"It's like, well..." Stephanie sighed and tugged on his hand. "You have to see. Maybe you'll know what to do."
She pulled him over to the recycling dumpster where they had first spotted the peculiar girl. Sportacus couldn't see anything wrong, but Stephanie wasn't finished. She grabbed the lip of the canister and pulled herself up to the edge.
"There," she said, pointing inside. Sportacus leaned over to have a look.
A mangled Wren was curled up in the far corner. Her hair was a mess, and the black ribbon she normally used to tie it back lay uselessly in one hand. Her jumper was in equal disarray, and it looked as if she had torn part of the skirt in her attempt to climb into the large recycling bin. The only indication that she was even alive was the occasional slow blink from eyes that were eerily blank.
"She's not moving," Stephanie said. "I tried talking to her, but she doesn't even look up or talk or anything. I don't know how long she's been here, but I was afraid to get Uncle or the doctor."
"Why?" Sportacus asked. "When there's something wrong, you should always find the first adult--"
"No, you don't understand," Stephanie said. "Look. Look at her head."
Sportacus leaned in farther, and finally spotted what had upset the children. Part of the girl's skull was set improperly, and lights flickered from beneath strands of matted brown hair. A tight nest of wires was visible in another section, though it too was camouflaged by hair.
"She's a robot," Sportacus said in wonder. The pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. "Robbie invented a robot girl."
"Robbie threw out a robot girl," Stephanie added, reaching out to grasp his hand again. "Oh, Sportacus, we can't leave her like this. She's all broken. Pixel couldn't even fix this kind of thing, but she...she's just..."
Sportacus hopped over the edge of the dumpster and leaned down to pick the girl up. She weighed as much as a regular little girl would, and he didn't struggle with her. She was motionless in his arms.
"I have a smart computer," he said once he was out again. Stephanie nodded, but her eyes were fixed on Wren. "I'll plug her in and see if it can do something to help her."
He threw Wren over his shoulder and began the climb back up to his airship. He was several feet up when he paused to look down at Stephanie. "Stephanie? Maybe you shouldn't mention this to anyone."
"Why?" Stephanie asked.
Sportacus chose his words carefully. "I think...that she has enough trouble to deal with, without people knowing that she's not quite...human." He saw Stephanie's expression change from sad to thoughtful, and knew that she would also manage the damage control with the other kids.
He returned to his airship without any trouble. Wren was pliable and silent, and when he lay her down on his bed, she still didn't move. He "hmm"ed thoughtfully, and began to look her over.
It didn't take him long to find the switch on her neck. It was still in the "ON" position, which is how he figured she had been able to get into the recycling bin in the first place. He was about to look elsewhere when his hand brushed her cool skin, and a console opened up beneath the red switch.
Sportacus peered at it, and realised that it was a spot for a plug. Just a regular plug. "Easy enough," he said. He ran over to the far wall and with a leap, grabbed the extension cord that shot out of one of the wall's small holes. He rolled Wren onto her side and plugged her in.
"Repairs initiated," Wren said, her voice dead and emotionless. "Time pending: seventeen hours, two minutes, forty six seconds. Do not disconnect."
It appeared to be the correct thing to do. Sportacus shrugged. It would just be a matter of waiting, now.
Unfortunately, "seventeen hours later" was in the middle of the night. Sportacus had given up on waiting and gone to bed, wrapped in a duvet beside his bed. She hadn't moved since he had plugged her in, but he hoped that something was happening somewhere inside of that little body.
He was awoken in the dim light of false dawn by an unfamiliar sound. He yawned, stretched, and sprung to his feet.
Wren was sitting up under her own power. She'd removed the cord that connected her to the ship and coiled it neatly to one side. Her hair was still mussed, but it looked as if she'd tried to tame it into some semblance of order with her fingers. She'd also tried to get rid of the blood on her face, though she hadn't been able to do more than rub the dried bits off. She was sitting at the head of the bed, speaking intently with the little computer screen that was hidden there. It was responding to her in a quiet murmur, but he couldn't make out their conversation.
Deciding that it was best to leave them alone for now, Sportacus put away his bedding and fetched breakfast.
He had just decided to start soccer practice when he realised that Wren had gone silent and was watching him with solemn grey eyes. He went to the bed and sat down on the far edge.
"Thank you," Wren said. Her voice had its regular tone back, though it still sounded odd.
Sportacus wanted to ask her what had happened to damage her so badly, but thought twice about it. In the brief time he had known her, Wren wasn't the kind to be especially garrulous about herself. "What were you talking about?" he asked instead.
"Your computer's nice," Wren replied. "She told me about what you do. She said you wouldn't keep me if I wanted to go home."
"She?" Sportacus blinked, and looked over at the main console for his on-board computer. He'd never had any idea that it was anything but a tool, or that it knew anything about him. It felt a little odd to suddenly realise that he'd been living with a sentient being for so many years without knowing it.
"You were pretty broken up," Sportacus continued, shrugging it off for now. He'd have to have a talk with his computer later. "I had to bring you here. But 'she' is right. You can go home whenever you want. Or you can stay, if you need to."
Wren didn't respond right away, but he could have sworn he saw her eyes flicker to brown for a moment. "I...can't," she finally answered. "I should go home. Robbie gets scared when with I'm with you."
"Scared?" Angry, Sportacus would have said. It was obvious that the blood smears on Wren wasn't her own, and there was only one other obvious explanation. "I was supposed to be broken," Wren explained. "So I threw myself out. Now you've fixed me. I need to go home so Robbie can decide if he wants to keep me and reformat my hard drive, or if he is going to disassemble me."
"What is reformat your hard drive?" Sportacus asked. Not for the first time, he wished he had brought Pixel.
"Reformatting my hard drive means that I start over again with only my basic operating system. Maybe I won't make the same mistakes again." Her jaw tightened, and again Sportacus saw her eyes flick from grey to brown and back. "I hope I don't."
"Wren, I don't think--"
Wren's head jerked up. "Don't call me that," she snapped at him. "That's what's gotten me into trouble all along. I shouldn't have gotten a name. I shouldn't have even gone outside during the day. Now I have to go home and he's so scared and he's going to hurt me again and I just...I just..."
The girl tried to stop it from happening again, but she couldn't. Tears spilled from her brown eyes, and her hands had begun to shake again. Sportacus reached out to comfort her, but she batted his hand away.
"Take me home. Now."
It was late in the evening before Wren's rescuers could get together to discuss the day's events. They sat on the airship's platform, looking out at the sunset that was painted before them.
"So you took her back?"
"She's not an object, but she's not quite a child either. I think she loves him. What else could I do?"
"Keep her in your airship. Stop him from hitting her. Kick him in the kneecaps..."
"You know I can't do that."
"What would you do if she were me?"
"That's different. I wouldn't let that happen to you."
"Even if I wanted to go back to it?"
"Even then."
"You're confusing me, Sportacus."
"Love always complicates things, Stephanie."
"Hm."