He was bored.

It was a sunny day and there were plenty of things to do. He could go to the park. That was always fun. Or he could take the bus down to town and browse through the shops - not buy anything, just look. But he didn't really want to do either of those things.

He was waiting for her to come over and she was late. As usual.

He didn't know why he put up with her. Really he didn't. It's not that there weren't lots of other girls in the class that he could have asked out instead. Any one of them would have - ah, who was he kidding? No one else would have even given him the time of day. He sighed and rolled over, getting grass stains all over his white shirt.

It was probably because she was the only other girl in class who shared his interest in all the old things. Transceivers that didn't work, batteries with no juice, all sorts of gadgets that no one knew anything about. One day he had noticed her looking at a broken transmitter and asked her where she got it. She told him that it was from the junkyard nearby and on impulse he had asked if she'd like to go with him to look at it. She smiled and said she would.

That was the first of many trips, and the first time she was late. He had waited for half an hour near his house, growing alternately frustrated, anxious, irritated and was almost verging on anger when she nearly ran into him, a bundle of barely suppressed energy. After they had disentangled themselves they had made their way to the nearest junkyard and spent nearly half the day picking through the rubble. She didn’t apologize and he thought not to raise the issue.

But as the sun was setting, she produced an antique radio she had scavenged from somewhere and shyly offered it to him. Hand behind his head, he had accepted bashfully.

He got up and kicked a nearby rock into a nearby stream, then checked the settings on his hover bike, then finally just lay on the grass and looked up into the sky. Late. Again.

An impish face framed by bangs suddenly popped into his vision. Upside-down, it smiled that smile that he had come to know so well.

He was more than a bit startled but didn't let it show. Instead, he kept his face neutral. "You're late." he said.

"Yes I am." she replied, as if daring him to say something else. He didn't take the bait. She jumped back and twirled a bit while he gave the controls on his bike another once over.

"Well then, shall we go?" He moved over to start the bike only to see her looking at him curiously.

"Go where?"

"The junkyard, of course. We were supposed to go there yesterday."

Now it was her turn to kick a stray rock into the stream. She turned on one foot and spun around again. "I don't wanna."

He suppressed a sigh. Yesterday she was practically champing at the bit to go, asking him every fifteen minutes, and today she didn't want to? "Well, I'm going if you aren't."

She pouted at him and with a single deft motion leapt onto the back seat of the bike. "Ok, let's go then."

He shook his head. He could never deal with her quick changes of mood and had decided not to even try. "Alright then." He gunned the engine and they were off.

He decided to take the scenic route this time. It was only the late morning and they would have plenty of time to spend there later. Besides, he was on his bike now - it wasn't as it they had to walk there.

They passed the promontory out by the rocks and he turned his head to look at the massive hunks of metal that lay there. The teachers at school told him that here was where one of the fiercest battles before the war was fought, and countless robots had been destroyed in it. What they saw today was only a fraction of the war machines that had once battled each other and torn both earth and shore apart.

The surf had come in over the years, pooling in and around the tarnished arms of the behemoths of old, and the passage of time had rusted and eroded what had once been gleaming metal. Fishes swam in and out of them, and algae had begun to grow on the dented surfaces.

He always felt strange whenever he passed them. As a child he had played among the fingers and hands of the iron giants without a care in the world, jumping down from high atop the broken shoulders of the robots until his father shouted at him to stop because it was too dangerous. It was only later in school that he learnt of their history. How they had blown cities apart and slaughtered thousands - no, millions, their armaments raining fire and destruction down on almost every human on the planet. How they had almost destroyed the world.

She didn't appear to care about any of that, though. She chattered excitedly to him about everything under the sun - what they were going to do later, what they had learned in class yesterday, what her friends thought of this or that - a near-constant stream of speech that never seemed to run out or run dry.

And when she ran out of steam (which he thought could never ever happen) she heaved a contented sigh and laid her head gently on his back. He gulped slightly in shock and pleasure and rode on. A stiff breeze sprang up, and as he made a sharp turn around a bend in the road the exhaust from the bike kicked up a spray of sea water. It washed over them in a fine mist, stray droplets dotting his face as he closed his eyes against them.

The road wound past trees, bushes and beyond the ocean graveyard of the iron giants. He made a last turning into the forest that would lead to the junkyard and cast a last glance at the metal hulks which dotted the shoreline. Maybe it was just his imagination but he thought they knew where he was going and were saying goodbye...or maybe hello.

It had taken them the better part of an hour to get to the junkyard, and when they got there she jumped off the bike and rushed towards it as if she couldn't wait to get started. Which she probably couldn't.

She was the only girl he ever knew that was actually interested in any of this stuff. He knew why he was, of course - it was his father's research. Growing up with someone who talked of nothing but lens refraction indexes and concave and convex arrays all day, you grew them like it a bit despite yourself. He knew other kids who didn't, though. There was Barron next door whose mother was a botanist and he swore that he would never have anything to do with plants. He and the other boys in class would always be away catching fish or chasing girls or whatever it was that they wanted to do.

Why was she interested, then? He wouldn't admit it to himself but he never dared ask, for fear of scaring her away. That he would come off as too pushy or too inquisitive and then she would pout or yell and never come with him to the junkyard again. So he didn't ask, but he often wondered why.

They spent the better part of the day looking through the junk for things - specifically, reflectors. Prism reflectors. His father had told him that back in the days of the war, the giant war machines that now littered the landscape used those lenses to focus their energy beams. There were a huge variety of them, in colors ranging from cerulean to emerald - a kaleidoscope of hues and tints scattered among the rest of the scrap like so many glittering jewels.

She loved them, that much he could tell. She would dance atop the rubble and pick them out one by one, her excited gaze darting from one shiny object to another. He, on the other hand, tried to be more scientific about it. Remembering what his father had told him, he compared one to another slowly, taking his time to point out the differences in size, shape and even texture. After a few minutes she shot him an annoyed glance and he stopped talking, suitably chastised. To her it was more of a game than a study, more about pleasure than science.

As the day died down and they grew tired they cleared a space free of rubble and sat down together. He wasn't just tired - he was really exhausted. Not that he would admit it. Glancing out of the corner of his eye, he wondered how she could keep it up.

"Don't you think they're beautiful?" she asked, holding one up to the late afternoon sun. The sunlight shone through it, refracting into myriad rays that scattered and sparkled all around them.

He wasn't sure he could agree. The lens were well-made, of course, and they reflected the light well enough. But he couldn't help but remember their deadly nature, how they were made to kill and not be used as jewelry or trinkets. Or even harmless entertainment on a lazy summer afternoon.

But still...sitting here with her, legs dangling from a stray tank cannon, he could almost pretend that harsh reality of the past wasn't real and didn't really exist. Everything they had learnt in school seemed distant and faraway, and the reality was him sitting with her with the sun shining down and looking at that pretty white dress she wore.

Her voice brought him back to the present. "You didn't answer my question." she pouted at him.

"Well...I guess they are? In a way?" he was being indecisive and he knew it. He laughed half-heartedly, putting a hand on the back of his head, and she reached over to give him a push.

"You're avoiding the question! Answer! Properly this time!"

"They are." And they were. They may have been used to kill in the past, but this time they were just...lenses. Lenses that made a beautiful display when the light passed through them.

The day wore down, and they continued in much the same way as they had before - scavenging around the junk to find old things, beautiful things. After a while he was content to just sit quietly as she flitted from place to place, picking up lens after lens and sorting them into piles. She had gotten her second wind, it seemed. She didn't seem to grow tired and when evening made its inevitable approach he took her back on the bike before it got too late.

She didn't lean against his back this time but instead fastened her hands securely around his waist instead. He wasn't sure which he preferred, but he sure wasn't complaining.

They went back to the junkyard quite a few times after that. They tried a few other places - the scrapheap near to the sea, and another smaller one farther inland. They were fun to explore for a while - although he almost got lost once in some caves that she wanted to try going into, which ended in a shouting match that neither won or lost. But in the end they always went back to the same place.

They didn't search for the same things each time either. Sometimes it was other gadgets, other relics of the war. He took a particular interest in magnetic discs for a while, seeing them spin and hover inches above the ground. He even once threw them in the water to see how far they could go and smiled as he saw them skip across the pond. Three was his record, seven if he turned them on before throwing. She liked the little spark plugs that they sometimes found as they dug through the scrap - they lit up and burnt with a fierce flame for a while before going dark again. Neither of them really knew what they were for, but it was fun to collect them and play with them and then set them down again when the fun was over.

But she always went back to the reflectors and lens - picking them up, tossing them around, looking at them this way and that. He warned her that if she threw them too high they might break, but she just laughed and told him that he worried too much about nothing. And it seemed that she was right. No matter how badly she treated them - and he once caught her pitching them down some rocks by the side of the collected junk - it seemed that however she handled them, they would never break.

Then one day while he was searching through some boxes he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see her winking at him, a reflector lens held in her open palm.

"Here you go, a present for you. For putting up with me."

He was going to say that it was no chore putting up with her but he thought the better of it. No sense in giving her ideas.

"Why this one?" he asked.

"It's special, you dummy! Can't you see?" she pointed at it.

He looked, then looked again. He didn't see what was so special about it. It looked like all the other reflectors - a bright orange hexagon, chipped here and there in a few places. Whatever it was that she saw, he didn’t know.

But her expectant face blinked at him and he found himself saying "Thanks."

She frowned "You avoided the question again. You didn't tell me why it was special."

Because you gave it to me? Because it's the first one on the heap? So many possible answers to that question, and he struggled frantically to find one that wouldn't result in him being smacked on the head. He was still thinking mightily when her knuckles connected with his nose.

It wasn't a punch - somewhere between a push and a shove - but it sent him onto his haunches anyway. He backed away from her glaring face. He blinked in terror and stammered out a reply.

"Okay, okay, it's special! It's special but I can't see why!"

She laughed and tossed the reflector at him. He caught it reflexively and held it up to the waning sunlight. She was right...it WAS special. The rays of the sun hit it bit differently than they did any of the others. It glinted just a little less and shone just a little more than all the others.

He put it in his pocket and thanked her, and she sketched a little bow and went back to searching for more lenses. Evening was fast approaching and so they finished up when they could. He hadn't taken the hover bike this time, so they took the short way home.

There were no fallen giant robots to see on the way back, only trees and bushes, so she contented himself with watching her as she danced down the mossy path and laughed at nothing in particular.

It was another slow and lazy day, and since he just felt like it he took the hover bike over to the broken bridge down by the river and spent the whole day there. Just because he could.

She hadn't been coming to school the last few days, but that was normal for her. She sometimes took a week or so off, and no one knew where she had gone or why. Maybe she was sick...could she even get sick? He guessed that even she could.

He rolled over to get a better look at the sky and felt something in his pocket. The reflector. He fished it out and held it up, squinting at it.

She was right. Everything did look prettier through the lens. Even chipped and broken like this one was, the sunlight hit it and fanned out into several images of black hair and five eyes looking down at him and -

It was her again. This time he couldn't help but be more than a little startled, especially as she had appeared so suddenly.

She pointed at him, laughing. "I got you there! You looked so stupid!"

He pushed the reflector back into his pocket and scowled. Alright, so he had gotten a little surprised. Who could blame him?

"Do you want to go to the junkyard today?"

"No, that's ok. Let's just hang out here for a while." He blinked. Not go to the junkyard? She must be sicker than he thought. But he thought it prudent not to mention that.

She dangled her feet in the nearby stream. There were more fishes here than at the ruins that they passed by, and she pulled her feet back and giggled as one particularly large one brushed by them. Sunlight shone down on the water and it glimmered with a light that was not unlike one of those reflectors - except that these lights pooled and flowed and rushed on in a flow that soon drifted out of sight.

He caught himself staring at her while she skipped and played among the rocks and fishes. She was wearing another dress today - a pastel-hued one that had gotten wet at the hem from the water. Not as nice as the white one from before but pretty all the same.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked, looking at him curiously.

"Nothing." He couldn't just TELL her that he enjoyed watching her frolic. Even if it was the truth.

"Nothing? You're staring at me!" And that was true, even though he had tried his best not to let her notice.

She stuck out his tongue at him and he almost stuck his out in return...except he didn't. Why? Some part of him thought that if he did, she would win, and he didn't want that to happen. She got enough of a rise of him most times that he didn't feel like giving this once.

So what he did do? He made a flying leap for her and she shrieked in startled joy, and they spent the next few minutes chasing each other around the river. He almost had her at certain points but just when he thought his hands would close around her shoulders she would spin and laugh and he would be clutching at air.

It went on until she slipped on a stray stone and fell backwards - and he was there to catch her. He blushed in sudden embarrassment, acutely aware of how close she was, but the next second she had slipped out of his grasp, giggling, like one of the fishes in the stream.

That was somehow the signal to stop. They put out their clothes on the grass, waiting for the sun to come and dry them. The afternoon wore on and they sat and whiled away the time talking, and before they knew it it was almost evening.

Nighttime fell and they were at the junkyard again. They didn't normally come so late but somehow today they had felt like it. There was really not much point in coming when the sun wasn't out - there wasn't enough light to find anything at all - but somehow they were here.

She ran to the top of the heap as always and he trailed behind her. They sorted through some piles just for the fun of it and poked through a few other things but both of them knew that they were wasting their time. So when she pulled him up to their favorite spot at the cannon, he let himself be manhandled into a sitting position as she plunked herself down beside him.

It had grown darker and he could barely make out his hand in front of him, but she knew she was sitting not inches away and that fact comforted him a great deal. He heard rather than saw her scoot back a bit.

"Do you ever think about what things were like before the war?" she asked suddenly, turning to him.

The moonlight shone in her eyes, more brilliant than any reflector he had found or would ever find. He swallowed. What should he do? Should he lean forwards? Backwards? Neither? This was worse than the time at the river...at least he knew what to do then. Now he was utterly and totally confused.

Before he could decide she had pulled herself away again and directed her attention at the stars in the sky. He didn't know whether he was disappointed or relieved, but he cast his glance skyward as well.

So many stars. It was as if the night sky itself was a giant reflector and each star a pinprick of light on its vast black canvas. They sat and stared for what seemed like an eternity before she turned towards him with that curious look that he had come to know so well.

"How many do you think there are?" she asked.

What kind of a question was that? They were stars! You couldn't count them? He had heard his father remark on more than one occasion that there could be millions

But that was the kind of girl she was - asking questions that you couldn't very well answer. He looked at her and there was something in her eyes this time that told him she was completely serious and wouldn't take "no" or "maybe" for an answer.

"I don't know." he replied truthfully. Seeing her face twist in a frown, he hastily added "but I think there are just too many to count. Maybe there's no end to them."

She seemed to like that answer a lot more. Absently she took his hand and for some reason he wasn't embarrassed this time. They sat in silence for a while, admiring the night sky, and gazed at the stars as time seemed to go on forever.

That was the last time they met for many years.

It was only a month later he heard the news. He had assumed that she was sick again, or had gone off somewhere. She used to do that after that one week - just disappear from school and everywhere else. He always assumed that she would come back when she was ready - it was her, after all. But it was only when the teacher told the class that he knew she had moved.

He was torn apart but he never admitted it to anyone. Nor to himself. He went to school as normal and talked with his father and even visited the scrap heaps to find more reflectors from time to time, but everything was different without her there, and after a while he stopped doing even that. There was no fun in collecting things without her around. He amused himself with some new devices that he had found - electric coils and gearwheels - but it just wasn't the same.

Time passed and when graduation rolled around the hats came off he shouted with the best of them, but who he really wanted to shout at was her. Why did you leave? Where did you go? What am I going to do without you? But she wasn't there and so all he had to content himself was the celebratory punch (tame, but still good) and the praise and cheers of everyone else around him. Both did little to lift his mood.

There were other girls, but none like her. None that he could share prims reflectors with, and late nights spent looking at the night sky. None who would pop out of nowhere with a smile or a frown or a wink. There was a nurse, kind and gentle, and a scientist, brilliant and passionate, but none like her. None even remotely like her.

At university he threw himself into his work and did incredibly well, far outstripping even his talented father, who looked on with admiration and more than a little surprise. At the awards ceremony the older man clapped the hardest but his eyes seemed to be asking his son on stage where all this drive to succeed came from. He was hard pressed to answer himself.

And when they had gotten the communication relays up and running and one could make and receive calls anywhere that had a system set up, he had forgotten all about her. Or so he thought.

He kept the reflector that she had given him, the one that had fallen and chipped itself on that day by the riverside, so long ago and faraway. When he was bored he would take it out and press on it, flipping it through his fingers and holding it up to the sun. Once he even threw it as high as he could, but caught it before it hit the ground. He didn't have her luck with these things and if it broke for real...he didn't even want to think about it.

He never lost it, even though he lost his keycard (to the eternal consternation of his housekeeper), and his hover bike controls and everything else. Somehow it always managed to find its way back into his pockets, or a kind stranger would pick it up and give it back to him with a "is this yours?" He would mumble his thanks and push the lens back into his pocket with a sigh of relief.

In the summer after graduation he joined a research team working on lens, and within a couple of years he was leading it. He didn't know it was his natural aptitude or inhuman drive or just because he loved lenses because they reminded him of her. Probably all of the above.

After years of research his team finally found out how the reflectors actually worked. They focused light from a pulsed energy array into a single focal point, amplifying the output of the primary streams many times over. The implications were astounding. As long as the correct lens was used, it was theoretically possible to multiply any energy source as long as it was powered by lasers or something light-based.

The news sent waves through the research community. Energy! They never seemed to have enough of it, that most precious and valuable of resources. The dams could be built now, and the new towns, and one day maybe even the orbital arrays...it all was possible now. All they had to do now was design better energy emission technology, and of course, find more lenses.

More lenses. That was the problem. There never seemed to be enough to go around, and those that they did manage to find weren't good enough. They had to be refined, and refining was costly (more energy!) and that was another problem - they needed to use energy to perhaps create more energy, with no guarantee that they would get back more than they spent. But it was his job to do something about that. So he researched more deeply than ever, determined to unravel the secrets of the small glass discs that could do so much.

Once in the midst of a presentation an image of her sprang into his mind, holding a lens up to the sun, and he had to block it out before he was consumed with memory. After it was over he went over to some stairs at the back that no one used and cried.

He never forgot about her, and sometimes when he was alone he allowed himself to wonder whether she ever forgot about him. He was filled with both pain and loneliness, tinged with no small amount of frustration. Where was she? Where could she have gone? Why hadn't she tried to contact him - conveniently forgetting that he should have perhaps tried to contact her as well. He knew her name, but he had no idea where she had gone to, and while she was in class she had never told anyone. Maybe they were all excuses or maybe they were real reasons, but either way he was here and she was...nobody knew where.

More time passed and he left the town he was brought up in to move to the city. It was an obvious choice - all the most cutting-edge research was conducted there, and they had the equipment and devices that he needed. Other scientists also wanted him near where they were excavating the last of the ruins, so the assessments could be made quickly without having to transport the parts back to HQ. Why would he say no?

Moving was a hustle and bustle of activity, but he left it all to his assistants. There were new theorems that needed polished, methods that needed refining, and he was too busy to bother with mundane affairs like where to stay and what to eat. Leave that to the others and he would do what he was best at.

They had begun to contract their work out to scavenger teams. There were just too many lenses which needed processing, and though they had diggers and boring machines now, the sheer amount of them necessitated some outside support. Besides, there was a limit to what automation could do. They still needed a human eye to discern which were worth bringing back and which could be just ground down to make prism dust to power the machines. Some were junk, but some were so high quality that a single lens could power over six lasers. But put the wrong one and the lasers would backfire and the whole thing would go kaput. They couldn't risk mistaking one for the other.

There had been talk about the workbenches and water coolers of a single scavenger who could somehow outdo all the other teams, who was so good that he or she could find a hundred good lenses in the time it took for everyone else to find ten. He paid it no mind. It was just more idle conversation. He had always been a loner in school and the years hadn't changed that in the least. Let them talk about whatever they wanted to. He had other, better things to do, more research to complete, more equations to solve.

But his assistants wanted him to meet this person. They begged and pleaded and told him all about how it would help the image of the institute, it would show the common folk how they were involved and not just white shirts. Why not, they asked. It would only take a few minutes of his time. He resisted as best as he could but after two whole weeks of badgering he finally gave in. It would save him the time if he just talked to this person rather than putting up with his assistants, he reasoned. Best use of resources and all that.

It was her, of course.

Her hair was longer now, but she wore it in a new style, a single ponytail down her back. She was taller, but she still had the same impish smile and look in her eyes. He stood stock-still, dumbfounded.

"Hi! Remember me?" Of course he had. He hadn't forgotten for a single day. He couldn't.

There were so many things he wanted to say, so many things he wanted to ask. Where had she gone? What was she doing now - ok no, that was obvious, she was a lens scavenger now -but why was she doing that? Where had she been all these years, and -

But before he could do any of them she had whipped out a bag from behind her back with the same quick motions that he knew so well. He moved forwards to look, eager despite himself. Could it be -

And it was. Prims reflectors. So many of them, sparkling like a gemstone hoard. All perfectly shaped and of the highest quality.

"How did you find these?" he managed to stammer out.

"I looked." That was her all over again. She never answered with two words when one would suffice.

"How many of them are there?"

She smiled and winked. "As many as there are stars in the sky."

The things they could do with them! The machines they could make. The lasers they could refine, the things they could build...the orbital arrays seemed closer than ever.

But as he looked up from the bag at her all those things vanished from his mind. He opened his mouth to speak but she just pressed the bag into his hands and left, the spring in her step conjuring images of days gone by.

He didn't follow, because he knew he would be seeing her again. She'd go find more lenses, more reflectors, and he would make new and better machines, and then she'd find reflectors for those as well. He should have known that she would never really leave him. All these years spent experimenting with one prism array after the other, sorting, finding, checking...how many of those lenses were those that she had found and that had found their way to him? She had always been there on the other side of the world, sending them his way.

He looked back at the contents of the bag and he saw myriad possibilities. Machines that could move earth and soil, bend rivers from their course and seed the clouds with rain. He saw her fingers picking, sorting, catching and tossing the shiny shards of glass and knew that they had been among countless junkyards and thousands of scrapheaps, searching, finding and searching once more.

He saw the past, and the future, her bright eyes and nimble hands. He saw the science that he had studied and how he could improve the lives of so many more people, how it could help bring back a world that had once been torn and ravaged by war. He saw her again.

And all of them sparkled more brightly than the stars in the sky.