The Fire Didn't Stop Her

I Promise, Cress My Heart

Iko was still acting like a child about the state she found Cinder in. "You were in the arms of the prince! Girls would have killed to be you right then!"

"Stop! Just stop!" Iko was only making the situation worse. Cinder hadn't really planned for this, at all. She thought her flaws were too disgusting for anyone to love her. And she certainly hadn't anticipated falling for the prince either. But both of those unlikely events just became highly likely. No, they just became the present. This was actually taking place. And under any other circumstances, she would be ecstatic about a man she cared for having similar emotions. But if Levana discovered this, she would be forced to marry Kai. Causing the Commonwealth to suffer her aunt's wrath.

"What happened to the plan?! What happened to saving two planets?!" Iko was sporting a surprised and elated expression.

"Things got .... complicated."

"I'll say. You slept with the prince!"

"Don't say it like that. It makes it sound so dirty." (said Shawn Spencer)

"Well, what am I supposed to think? That you two just sat their?"

"Yes. Because that's all that happened."

"Sure ..."

"Ugh. You're impossible!"

"Can't help it. It's in my programming," she shrugged. "Oh. And you said we could work on that chip you found in the prince's android."

Thankful that Iko had changed the subject, she opened her calf compartment and used steady fingers to fish out the chip. Cinder jumped off her bed in the direction of Iko's old body. She pried the chest plate off to get to the inner circuitry. "What are you doing?" Iko sounded half confused, and half frightened.

"I'm rewiring this body into a device that will allow us to view the information on this chip."

"Is that even possible?"

"Yes. If you know what you're doing."

No more than a few minutes passed before Cinder successfully used the parts of the lifeless shell to create a chip reader. The head would act as the monitor, and the body as the connection to the source of the signal. The final touch was connecting the chip to the machine in the correct place. Selene fiddled with a two of the remaining wires that dangled from the inside. One of which was red. The red one is always the bad one, so I guess green. Sure enough, green was the right choice. The screen displayed a jumble of colors until Cinder smacked in with the back of her metal hand.

The colors morphed and cleared as the formed a desk, a room, and a mattress on the floor. "What is that?" Iko sounded.

"The source of the chips programming," what is this place? "It looks like a ... bedroom?"

Out of the corner of the room, a small girl spun into view. She seemed to be dancing or in a routine of sorts. "Hello?" Iko broke the girl out of her dream. She turned to the screen and shrieked. She hid under the table her netscreen must be on.

"Iko!" Cinder scolded. "Hey, it's okay. We just want to talk to you."

"Who are you?" the small girl squeaked. "What do you want? And how did you set up this link?"

"I can answer parts of that with one statement," Cinder responded, slipping into her diplomatic tone. "I found a chip, in the android of the Prince of the Eastern Commonwealth, that was causing it to malfunction. I used an old robot body to make a tracer and way of communication. That is how I made this link."