As soon as Anabel was released from the hospital, she went to the lab. Not the computer lab at DCU, no. The research lab at her own wonder would suit her much better, and make it easier for her to get her work done without being bothered by her uncles or her friends. All of the real thinking work was done, her database code was all written out in her netbook, ready for translation into whatever language her Code spoke. Ancient Mercurian? Whatever it was. She'd added some sections to the database, things she thought were needful. Organizations, resources, points of contact...

It wasn't about redemption. She couldn't bring back the knights who had died on her stupid, foolhardy mission. Though she knew, in her head, that it wasn't her fault, she closed her eyes sometimes and saw how they died. Degrasse. Menae. Ankh, wise and kind and sacrificing himself for a monster... Mistral closed her eyes and saw nothing, a blessed darkness behind her eyelids.

Her ceremonial uniform was hung carefully in an old closet that had no smell. What she wore was the lab jumpsuit, black and shiny-slick. Once she hadn't bothered, but then she'd gotten a nasty scar from magitechnical feedback. The jumpsuits seemed to ground everything that might hurt her. Someday, she was going to find out how to replicate the effect. Not yet, though, she didn't have the materials, and she needed every uniform she could find. She was Mistral. She'd figure something out.

For now, she had a different mission. She hauled up a box of scavenged raw material and dumped it across her workbench. It was an eclectic mix: sheet metals she knew had no Earth analogue, a half-spool of twisted wire that looked like it could be gold, chunks of fabric and padding. In a drawer of the workbench, there was a set of tools--she knew what to do with them--and after checking her notes, she was ready to begin. Mistral pulled a pair of goggles off the wall and pulled them on. It tinted everything ever-so-slightly orange. She clicked the hairdryer-esque shaper on and got to work.

It took longer than she'd wanted, the creating. She had expected it to go fast, since she knew what she was doing after her experiment with Babylon's alethiometer. That had been a small thing--a compass, handheld--and this was something entirely different. A computer. Not just a computer, but a space computer, for server space that didn't really exist. And she only had, guesstimating from the amount of material on her workbench, two tries to get this exactly right. Or close to right, since she had time to fiddle with it.

The first try ended in disaster, which was not unexpected. For the second try, she created a scaffolding and a pattern for the metal protecting the inner workings of the computer. This time, when she tried to close the cooled metal on her arm, it worked. Mistral flexed her wrist and her elbows, rotated her shoulder. There was no inhibition on her motion, or there wouldn't be once she'd sanded down the edges.

Now for the really hard part, she thought, sitting down at the workbench again. Thank god she had another week of vacation.

[541 words]