The Mother herself.
I remember her hand on my cheek a year ago, her choice to send me to the Juno, a blessing that has made me a target of many Sisters’ jealousies. Many Aunts whispered that I was a favorite of hers. Still, why in the Goddess’s cosmos would the Mother personally contact me?
The letter is brief.
Dear First Sister of the Juno,
It is with great joy that I send this missive, for a favorable opportunity to serve the Sisterhood has presented itself. Provide for Saito Ren with your talents and keep close to her, as is your duty. But on this occasion, you must also entrust your Auntie with anything remarkable about Captain Saito.
I am praying for you and your endeavors. May the Goddess watch over you on your path of service.
Mother Isabel III
Behind the letter are pages and pages on Captain Saito’s history, her full dossier. My breath catches in my throat. My eyes flick over the letter again and again, not quite believing what I’ve read. We Sisters are not supposed to tell our charges’ secrets to anyone, not even our Aunties, yet that is exactly what the Mother has asked of me.
Is this an answer to my prayer? Has the Goddess withered one branch only to bless another into flowering?
“Will you do as your Mother bids you?” Aunt Marshae asks, her hands squeezing the back of an empty chair until her knuckles turn white. “I feel it necessary to say that if you are caught, it will be you who takes the blame, not the Sisterhood.”
Now the bare, cold offer presents itself. They want me to be a spy. If I do as I am commanded, I will receive Captain Saito’s dossier, a sure way to keep my position; but in return, I will be expected to break the rules of the Sisterhood, becoming some sort of holy operative. Yet the Sisterhood is the body asking this of me, and if I don’t do as the Mother wills, I know Aunt Marshae will simply find another girl who is more pliable. The letter is addressed to the First Sister of the Juno; that could be anyone if I am demoted.
No. I must keep my rank. I must impress Saito Ren. This is certainly a step deeper into the politics of the Sisterhood, but it is still the best way to survive on the Juno.
Perhaps the Goddess does bargain after all.
As the Mother commands, the Goddess wills, and I obey, I sign. If I was so willing to give myself to one captain for the rest of my life in order to change things, I should accept the benefits this assignment offers me. Perhaps the Mother will personally reward me at the end of it. Yet my stomach twists at the wrongness of it, at the way I am supposed to go against all I have been trained to do since childhood.
“The dossier is yours, then,” Aunt Marshae says, her grip loosening until her fingers bloom pink.
Thank you, I sign, and gather the file beneath my arm. I want to be done with this strange interaction with its blasted bargain. But as I retreat from the room, one question burns in my mind: What does the Mother want with Saito Ren?
PLAY: 02
The first time I ever saw you, Lito, I loved you. You were some skinny boy who looked more like a mistreated dog: scrawny, hungry, ready to bite if anyone got close to your snarling mouth.
With one look, I sized you up. You weren’t like the rest of our class at the Academy. The glimpses of your wrists between your gloves and sleeves said your uniform was secondhand, but your boots, polished to a shine despite the worn soles, told me you were proud to be there.
All of it together? It screamed your truth. You shouldn’t have been able to afford tuition, yet here you were. Determined. Rebellious. A fighter.
And there was something in the brutal way you stood, with your shoulders hunched forward and your dark eyes like black holes meant to swallow stars, that said you’d keep fighting anyone who made the mistake of underestimating you.
You would have to, if you were from a worker-class family. I didn’t even need to know your name to recognize you weren’t from my level of Cytherea.
You glared at me like I was the source of all your problems. Maybe in some way I was. But everyone looked at me like that.
All of our classmates hated me. I know they did. How could they not? I was Hiro val Akira, and my father had either worked with their parents or donated to their causes. I could trace my lineage directly back to Murakawa Akira on the Icarus. My family built the worlds that theirs worked to maintain.
Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: I didn’t plan on going to the Academy that morning. I wasn’t late because I thought it would make a joke out of the instructors or my fellow students, or whatever everyone else said later. I was going to run away.
I know, I know. Stupid plan. Where could I run that my father’s long arms couldn’t reach? I was val Akira, and all the benefits of having that name came with just as many disadvantages. There was nowhere in this universe I could disappear. I couldn’t even visit a geneassist and change everything about me without my new genetic makeup being reported via a Val Akira Labs computer and stored on a Val Akira Labs server. Hell, the majority of geneassists were using Val Akira Labs techniques, leaving copyrighted markers in my very DNA. Proof that my father owned me through and through.
So after standing at the train station, looking at the line that would take me to the Academy and the one that would take me away from it, I made a decision. I’d go to the Academy. I’d do as my father asked. But I’d do it my way. I wouldn’t try for high enough scores to go into Command like my eldest brother, Shinya, and I wouldn’t be a Rapier or a leader. I’d be a Dagger. A Lefthand. The perfect tool of subterfuge, a sinister liar through and through.
Then I saw you, and it was like everything fell into place.
I was late. I wasn’t in uniform. My hair certainly wasn’t regulation. So we had to run—all of us—because group punishment is a staple of military life. But as we were running, you in your used boots and me in my flexglass platforms, we kept pace with each other. No matter how hard I pushed myself—and for once in my life, I found myself actually trying—you dogged my heels. We were meters ahead of everyone else. We were a world unto ourselves. And I knew, right then, that you were exactly what I needed.
Throughout the rest of the day, I shadowed you. Instructors paired us in all our classes, in math, languages, and philosophy. I sat with you at lunch. I even bribed a girl bunked next to you to move her shit to another location so I could sleep above you.
And when a snarky voice asked into the dark, “Hey, Hiro, are you a boy or a girl?” I remember your answering scoff.
Maybe the asker had made fun of you earlier in the day. Or maybe you didn’t know her at all, and simply wanted to fight everyone around you. I could hear your heavy exhalation, and the whisper that followed: “Hey, Barker, are you an asshole or a bastard?”
I laughed. Really, truly laughed, until everyone else fell silent, and the room echoed with my voice.
“I am what I am. Neither. Both. Who cares?”
I was me. Finally, I was who I wanted to be. You never cared about anything beyond what I could do as your Dagger.
And that made you my perfect Rapier.
CHAPTER 4
It was the discovery of hermium on the surface of Mercury that gave the scientists of the Icarus their first breakthrough. With its extraordinary ability to withstand extremely high temperatures and conduct energy with almost no transfer loss, hermium became the key to unlocking the mysteries not just of energy production and harnessing but ultimately of living in previously uninhabitable places.