She bent down and shuffled the folders, presumably to look at them in a different order. Straightening up, she winced and hissed. The girl's hands flew to her ribs.
She must still be in pain, Derek thought. She'd been very quiet about the bruises and injuries and he'd forgotten about them. He thought that Nell was very used to hiding things, and that keeping up the illusion of health came naturally to her after years of practice.
Finally, he made himself leave the computer room. Nell's head whipped around to look at him. "Decided to talk to me?" She asked.
"Getting coffee."
"Oh." She sounded disappointed. "Can you at least tell me if you've made progress?"
"Not really."
"To which question?"
"Both," he said with a smirk. He walked past the girl, and was amused to see that even when she stood on a chair, she wasn't quite as tall as he was.
"In other news," she segued, "I've been thinking about Ben."
"Your robot?"
"She wasn't my robot. She was her own robot. She was sentient, as smart as a person."
"Not as smart as a smart person if it got caught."
"The news, you told me, said the government had her."
It bothered Derek that Nell had rigidly assigned gender to a sexless robot. He supposed it was because the thing had pretended it was a woman, but that didn't mean it actually had a gender. "Yeah. Took it apart."
"Mercenaries were the ones after me. If they found Ben, why didn't they leave her or take her and sell her on the black market?"
Derek thought Nell made an excellent point. "I think I see what you're getting at and it makes sense."