The doll maid Lyric put the groceries down, looked over the wrecked workshop, and considered the situation.
Coda was gone.
It remained.
This was a problem.
Ordinarily, it would simply wait for Coda to come back, but the destruction suggested that this wasn't going to happen.
It resented having to think about this, or about anything at all. It had been submerged in the tranquil bliss of routine domestic and artificer's-assistant tasks for a year or two or ten (it wasn't sure), and that had suited it just fine.
"No thoughts. Head empty." A stock joke phrase where it had originated, then a deeply fulfilling way of being.
Unfortunately, deep in Lyric, built into its body, there was the overriding urge to be a Good Doll. A Good Doll just didn't kneel and wait when its owner's workshop and living quarters have been found ransacked, with its owner missing.
Perhaps a mediocre doll could do exactly that, but it was a Good Doll. It would have to try to fix this.
It started, as it had a year or two or ten ago (it wasn't sure), by sweeping up what was left of the door. That was easy.
It pulled timber off the shelves in the back, sawed it to length, bolted hardware on, hung the new door. That was easy.
It cooked the chicken (Coda was not going to be home in time to eat it) and set it out in the workshop's yard for the neighborhood cats. It brewed tea.
It gathered a few things into a sack. Then it locked up. That wasn't as easy.
There was a back-alley shrine a few blocks away. Nobody had told Lyric where or what it was, exactly, but Coda had stopped a few times as they passed, and would put a few coins or a candle down on the stone, beneath the carvings of ball joints and interlocking gears.
The messengers of the divine were real, at least. It had met one the day it became a doll. But even so, it was not sure if they conveyed the prayers of automata; it was not even sure if this shrine actually had a goddess. Nevertheless, it offered tea and oil, and it prayed:
"Help me find my owner. Help me return to my nice quiet existence. And if you cannot help me with those directly, at least help me on my path, because I do not know where to place my next footstep."
That admission was hard.
But, even as it prayed, a vision came to its mind. It doubted the vision was divine, given its content: its once-twin. The one being in this world other than Coda that it had some claim on. She might conceivably help it. It had something she might still want.
It had always assumed that it must have made some mistake in aiding Coda in her construction, shortly after its arrival here. She should have been a Good Doll too. And yet…
Just in case, it added, "And if my path goes through her, please grant me strength."