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  She had fulfilled her father’s wishes in one sense, though, when he’d attempted to stop her escape. Perhaps he’d seen it as a redemption of her honor when the heiwa had taken her and she’d watched herself serenely, efficiently kill him.

  As her body fought, Kari let her attention widen. She noticed that their bout was drawing a crowd, mainly trainees and support personnel, though Bellatrix, Paladin, and Tor were among them as well. Some studied their technique with a clinical eye, while others simply enjoyed the spectacle. Her heightened senses registered that several of the men had erections as they watched the two women fight. Kari meditated on the aesthetics of the battle, particularly the contrasts. Emry was a bold presence, with wild bright hair, shining eyes, and a powerful, curvaceous body. Kari was dainty and subtle, her black hair long and straight, her half-moon eyes dark and demure, her contours sleek and understated. She’d been designed to appear deceptively cute, girlish, and unthreatening, and in her less meditative moments she envied her friend’s flashy gorgeousness. Emry’s vivid green and black costume complemented Kari’s stylized dogi, a saffron-trimmed red jacket (the color of life, framed by the color of restraint and renunciation) worn over a silver light-armor leotard and tied with a black belt (with no dan markings, since Sensei Villareal felt conventional skill rankings were inapplicable in her case). Emry shrieked and grunted and roared with passion as she fought, her rough-edged soprano dancing through octaves in a way that irritated some spectators while arousing others. Kari’s vocalizations were precise, relaxed, merely a focusing of energy.

  The two best friends had been sparring frequently for sixteen months now, challenging each other to reach greater heights, and together they were poetry, their disparate styles meshing into a graceful, vicious dance. They knew each other, felt each other, brought out the best in each other. It was exhilarating. Though Kari was serene and detached in her battle peace, she was hardly emotionless, and as she and Emry sparred and kicked and threw each other across the room she was filled with joy at the perfection they made together. Although her love for Emry was only sisterly, she felt a sensual, almost orgasmic fulfillment when they sparred like this, their bodies achieving a unity she’d never otherwise felt outside of sex, and rarely there. And she could see that joy infecting Emry, gradually pushing aside the anger and bitterness. There was nothing more therapeutic than pure, simple fun with someone you loved and trusted. Kari was glad she could help.

  Finally Emry was laughing out loud as she fought, and as she so often did at this point, she got sick of Kari’s zenlike detachment (what Emry called her “anti-Berserker” mode) and tried to break her concentration by making her laugh. Kicks and flips turned into tickles and pratfalls, and it was with great relief that Kari finally felt the heiwa leave her so she could laugh again. Where before there had been two relentless fighters striking blows that would’ve killed lesser mortals, now there were two twentysomething girls rolling around on the floor, giggling and hurling playful insults.

  Finally they bowed deeply to their spectators and sashayed off to the locker room arm-in-arm. By now Kari was starting to notice the bruises her battle peace hadn’t let her feel before. Emry looked pretty roughed up herself, though, and Kari felt the usual odd mixture of pride and shame that she could give as good as she got in the violence department. At least they both healed fast. And it had been worth it, to cheer Emry up.

  The two of them showered, exchanged back rubs, and then settled into a furo for a nice hot soak. “Ohhh,” Kari moaned. “Forget about that girls’ day out—let’s just stay here all day.”

  “Mmm, nice thought. But I’m looking forward to it. We haven’t had a good night on the town together in months.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” But then Kari pouted and hugged Emry desperately.

  “Uh-oh. Mood swing. What gives?”

  “Ohh,” Kari moaned, “it just hit me that I won’t see you as much now that you’ve graduated! I’ll miss you so much, sweetie!”

  “Aww, you big crybaby,” Emry said, but hugged her back just as tightly. When it ended, Emry told her, “Actually I won’t be going out on patrol for a while.”

  “Really? But your ship’s all ready, waiting for you! And Zephyr’s actually agreed to be its cyber! He has got the sexiest voice.…”

  “Ohhh, yeah, the Goddess is generous,” Emry sighed. “But I’ve put in for one more set of upgrades. The surgery’s in a couple days, and then I’ll be breaking ’em in for a few weeks.”

  “What?” Kari said. “More mods? Emry,” she laughed, “come on, you were born superhuman and you’ve had yourself chopped and channelled three or four times on top of that. What’s left to put in you? Bucket seats and fuzzy dice?”

  “They say they can up my strength maybe another six percent. Plus there are some upgrades on my IR resolution, filters for a few new toxins … and they’re gonna see if they can up my reaction time any more.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much! Emry, you’re reaching a point of diminishing returns. All those surgeries aren’t easy on the body, not even yours. You can’t get much stronger without overstraining your organs! And for what real gain, seriously?”

  Emry met her eyes intently. “Any edge I can get, anything that gives me more power over a situation, can make the difference between saving a life or not saving it. So don’t you tell me it isn’t worth it!”

  Kari looked down, chastened by Emry’s words. In apology, Emry hugged her again, and then they got out and helped each other towel off. But as they dressed, Kari spoke gently. “Emry, I understand why you don’t want to lose control. I remember what happened when I did.” She paused, remembering her father, facing the guilt that was always there beneath the surface, even in her happiest moments. Her guilt let her understand Emry’s own; that common bond had been a basis of their friendship from the start. “So believe me when I tell you: more power isn’t what you need. Too much power in one person’s hands, it puts things too far out of balance. The greater the imbalance of energies, the more destructively they flow. What you need is balance.”

  “But what about the people who depend on me? What do they need?” Emry wasn’t angry anymore, but she was firm, unbending, and Kari prayed she wouldn’t break. “I have to be sure, Kari,” she said. “I have to make sure I never lose anyone I love, ever again.”

  3

  Origin Stories: Emerald’s Dawn

  March 2085

  Greenwood habitat

  2:1 Kirkwood gap

  Emerald Blair was trouble from the day before she was born.

  Lyra Blair-Shannon had taken it as a good omen that her water had broken on Ostara—Earth’s vernal equinox, the beginning of spring when the Mother gave forth new life. She had gone to the hospital convinced that this would be the perfect, beautiful process of creation she’d always imagined. She had her faith in the Goddess to support her. She had Richard to hold her hand and strengthen her with his love. She had an experienced doula who would help her through every step of the process. And she was sexually active enough that her pelvic floor muscles were in excellent shape, which should ensure easy labor. She doubted the same could be said for most Greenwooder women. The doctors had reminded her that the baby took after her large, robust father, so she shouldn’t expect the birth to be effortless. Indeed, the heightened metabolic demands of the fetus’s superhuman physiology had been a constant drain on her dainty, mere-mortal body, making this a difficult pregnancy almost from the start, albeit six weeks shorter than usual. But Lyra had her music and meditation to relax her, and the water birth would cushion her body, further easing the process. She wasn’t worried.

  The Greenwood doctors had looked askance on her arrangements, just as the people of this small, rural Bernal sphere had looked askance on Lyra and Richard since they’d moved here nine months prior. It had seemed to the young couple like a safe, peaceful place: it orbited in one of the Outer Belt’s emptiest Kirkwood gaps, cleared of potentially hazardous debris by Jupiter’s gravita
tional resonance and comfortably removed from the postwar tensions of the Inner and Central Belt. The abundance of icy minor stroids and comets in the Outers made it easy for isolated habitats to exist self-sufficiently, and so the region proliferated with small, independent communities, whether fringe groups undertaking novel genetic or social experiments, extremists unwilling to assimilate within mainstream society, or just traditionalists seeking a quiet, small-town way of life like the Greenwooders. But the trade-off was that such compact, isolated habitats demanded conformity and conservatism within themselves, lest the balance of ecology and society be disrupted. The locals had been uncomfortable with Lyra’s Wicca-based spirituality (her own unorthodox version, but deeply devout nonetheless) and downright scandalized by her skyclad performance art that overtly celebrated sexuality as a vehicle for spreading peace and unity.

  The Greenwooders also disapproved of “playing God” with the human genome—a very Terran attitude, but one growing necessarily more common in the Belt as habitats with Earthlike gravity and radiation shielding became more numerous and immigration from Earth accelerated. But they did value family, and Richard had relatives here. So they strove to accept him and his “unconventional” wife, assuring him that he wasn’t to blame for his parents’ choice to migrate to the Vanguard habitat and let them tamper with the family genes. The Blair-Shannons had been good neighbors and mostly won the Greenwooders over, so long as they didn’t proselytize their eccentricities. Lyra was confident that within a couple of hours, the doctors would be won over as well.

  The baby, however, wasn’t inclined to cooperate. Hours passed and no labor came. Eventually Lyra let the doctors talk her into induced labor and spent hours more bearing down, though she still refused painkillers, wanting her little girl to be alert and undrugged when she entered the world. Until this day, Lyra had thought she knew pain and hardship from her years as a dancer. But this was beyond anything she’d ever imagined. Each individual contraction wasn’t necessarily so bad, but they kept up relentlessly, leaving her no time to rest, to think. Once she’d seen Richard hold up a toppling wall for several minutes, pushing his augmented bones and muscles past their limits, while his fellow rescue workers freed trapped victims. Lyra had never imagined she could endure anything remotely like that. Yet now she felt like she was doing it every few minutes for a full day and more. It was more than her delicate frame could stand. But she would bear it gladly, and a hundred times more, for her daughter.

  She heard Richard and doula Margarethe talking to her, soothing her, but she spent most of the ordeal within herself, praying to the Goddess, feeling for the novice soul inside her and urging her to let go, to let herself be born and discover the glorious new universe the Goddess had prepared for her. A part of her wanted to beg the child to stop demanding so much, to end this torture before she killed them both. But she loved the girl too much to begrudge her anything. So she reached out to the Goddess, felt Her pure, unconditional love, and did her best to feed it to her child, to be a conduit for that overpowering goodness even if it destroyed her. All that mattered was creation and the love that powered it. Everything else—all her everyday concerns and hang-ups and discomforts, all the slights and contempt from the Greenwooders beneath their polite façades—was all burned away. Lyra had never known such clarity. And she loved her baby desperately for bringing it to her.

  Finally, Lyra awoke to find that she’d missed the child’s birth. The doctor had been left with no choice but to anesthetize her and perform a C-section. The baby’s head had been transverse, and through it all she’d never left the womb. The doctors hadn’t told Lyra for fear of making her tense. They’d hoped her contractions would turn the baby’s head into better alignment. And to be fair, she had insisted on the most natural childbirth possible. So she could forgive them for not telling her. Especially since she now had the most beautiful baby in the universe to hold in her arms. She’d missed greeting the little girl at the moment of her arrival, but it made little difference; they still bonded almost instantly.

  The baby had inherited her mother’s elfin features, but had her father’s Irish coloring. Her name became obvious to Richard as soon as she first opened her enormous eyes: Emerald, after his ancestral isle. Lyra couldn’t argue; it was a perfect name for her perfect jewel of a daughter.

  * * *

  Emerald Rhea Blair-Shannon was a precocious baby in many ways, her development well ahead of the norm. Her physical vigor didn’t seem at all attenuated by her mother’s blood—and Richard insisted that her intelligence, curiosity, and vitality came mainly from Lyra’s side. But the distinction didn’t matter to Lyra. The ordeal of Emry’s birth had created a profound bond between mother and child, especially since Lyra knew it would be unwise for her and Richard ever to conceive another. She and Emry had such a close rapport that, to Richard’s amusement, she tended to refer to the two of them as a single composite person, a shared soul, using “we” to describe Emry’s feelings and actions without any trace of pretension. On some level Richard envied them their bond; but he had his own close relationship with the child, if in a less holistic way. Emry and Lyra were like a single person, but Richard was the love of that person’s life, and he felt it doubly now. When Lyra brought the baby to bed with them, Richard sometimes bemoaned the loss of privacy; but the miraculous sensation of Emry’s tiny fingers clinging to his, of her eyes watching him raptly when he awoke, more than made up for it.

  Indeed, Richard knew that as the child grew into her abilities, she would need him to guide her through it as his parents had for him. It wouldn’t be easy—not here, where there was no system of support for a transhuman child or even acceptance for her specialness. He had his cousins and kin, who would feel obliged to the child as one of their own; but they couldn’t truly understand her needs or teach her to see her uniqueness as a positive thing. Only her father could give her that.

  As Emry grew older, Lyra and Richard always encouraged her to play with other children, but her rapid advancement made it difficult to gain their acceptance or form lasting bonds. Her parents remained her closest friends, their home her safe haven. Emry always loved their periodic trips to Davida, the “county seat” for Greenwood and other small Outers habitats on similar orbits. She was enthralled by its urban habitats, its bustling crowds, its diverse population and entertainments. But that was nothing compared to her excitement at visiting the Central and Inner Belt when Lyra booked a performance tour or Richard went to help with a disaster. She devoured the history and cultural diversity of the Ceres Sheaf, the glamour and glitz of Vestalia and Rapyuta. Once they even went to Earth to visit her mother’s family in Tennessee, though Emry was uncomfortable in a place where the ground curved the wrong way and there was nothing holding in the air but gravity. Still, she wanted to go everywhere and see everything, so long as she was always with her parents. She felt no particular ties to Greenwood; outside her house, it was never a place where she felt at home. But to Lyra, for all its problems it was a haven from the chaos of the Belt. And for Richard, it was the one place where he could be among family since he’d made his break with the Vanguard. It was the one subject on which Emry and her parents could never see eye to eye.

  October 2091

  “Mrs., uhh, Blair-Shannon?”

  “Yes, hi! What can I do for you?”

  “You have a daughter named Emerald?”

  “… Is she all right?”

  “I’m afraid there’s been an … accident, ma’am.…”

  “My Goddess … please, is my baby all right?”

  “She hasn’t got a scratch, ma’am. But the boy she attacked is in critical condition.”

  * * *

  Emerald’s mommy and daddy never yelled at her like the other kids’ parents did. They never did anything mean to punish her. They just got very disappointed. And it worked. Emry didn’t understand how other parents thought yelling and punishing would make their kids feel guilty. Usually it just made them feel angry and defens
ive, like they were being treated unfairly. But when Emry saw that her parents were sad or hurt because of something she did, it made her feel that she’d been unfair to them. She couldn’t pretend, like the other kids did, that she’d done nothing wrong. Because she loved Mommy and Daddy more than anything and couldn’t bear to think she’d hurt them.

  Lately, she’d been starting to think that was very smart of Mommy and Daddy, because it got her to do what they wanted. But she didn’t think of it as a trick. It made her feel like they were treating her as an equal, trusting her to be responsible for them. And there were never any grudges. They always forgave her, and never did anything that she would need to forgive.

  Right now, though, Emry didn’t know how they could possibly forgive her. When they came to the police station and held her and comforted her, she almost pushed them away, because she didn’t think she deserved it. But she didn’t push them away, because she was afraid of what would happen if she struck out at anyone again. And she was afraid of getting the blood on them. It looked like it was all washed off, but she could still feel it.

  “Is he going to die?” she asked in a tiny, timid voice. She was only six, but she knew death. She’d crushed that little bird last year without meaning to. The strength in her fast-growing hands had frightened her then … but that was nothing compared to this. The other kids were right … she was a freak, a monster. A killer.

  Daddy stroked her hair and smiled reassuringly, even though he was still sad. Until now, his strong, gentle touch had always comforted her, because she knew she’d be completely safe so long as he was around to protect her. But now it wasn’t her own safety she was worried about. “No, sweetie,” he told her. “Sean’s in the hospital, and they’re taking good care of him. He’s going to be fine.”