I am not strong enough. Not wise enough.

By yourself, you are not. But I have given you companions, for knowledge and for comfort. The woman pauses, smiling. And for something more, if you have the courage to lay hold of the gift. Will you refuse it? Look.

An eddy forms in the brilliance, light swirling like the waters of a whirlpool. An opening appears, and Kirsten finds herself looking down from an infinite distance. A slight figure with pale hair lies sprawled on the floor, its face already waxy with the spirit’s passing. A tall woman, dark, with a cloud of black hair wild about her face, kneels beside her, her fist rising and descending again and again to the rhythm of the drum. It comes to Kirsten that her own body is the drum, the fierce pounding a summons to return. There are words in that calling, but they skim past her awareness to be lost in the light and the voice of the drum.

There is, really, no choice.

I will go back, she says.

The woman’s smile becomes radiant, like the sun, bright beyond comprehension, yet not painful to look upon. A long-fingered hand, smooth, so smooth it is the bottom of a rock-bottomed stream, lays itself upon her and a benediction flows into her soul. It is cool, cool like the spring, like the morning, like the dew that bleeds across her bare ankles as she runs through a clover-filled meadow, a bounding, gray-furred beast at her side, matching her stride for stride, lope for lope.

The massive head turns, and she falls into eyes piercing and clear and blue, blue as the spring, like the morning, like the dew that slides across her naked flesh as she falls and falls and falls until her whole world is falling and nothing but.

Her landing is soft, but she awakens with a gasp and her hand clenched to a chest which is burning and throbbing to the rhythm of a newly beating heart.

Disoriented, she calls out for an anchor.

“Dakota!”

The hoarse call pulls Maggie Allen away from her conversation with a nearby medic. Approaching the bed, she lays a gentle hand on Kirsten’s shoulder and smiles. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Doctor.”

The sudden, absolute silence is something she can control, and Kirsten reaches behind her ear, only to have the motion stopped by Allen.

“Woah, woah, wait a minute there, Doc. You remember what happened, right?”

Easily reading the colonel’s lips, a skill she’s had for longer than she cares to remember, Kirsten nods. “I got caught in a self destruct feedback loop.”

“Exactly. The metalhead is out of the picture, but the base’s audiologist got fragged when the droids went over the wall in the first attack. We don’t know if your implants are still working, and if they are, whether or not that feedback loop is still active. Turn them back on, and you could short circuit yourself all over again.”

Kirsten knows enough military lingo to get a good sense of what Allen is trying to tell her, and nods again. “My computer?”

Reaching down by the side of the bed, Maggie grabs Kirsten’s computer and hauls it onto the bed. “Maybe you better tell me what to do, huh? You’ve had a rough time of it.”

The look she receives causes Maggie to throw her hands up and step back. “You’re the doc, Doc.”

Opening the case, Kirsten boots the machine quickly, pleased to see that it wasn’t harmed in what she is quickly coming to term “the event”. Reaching into one zippered pouch, she pulls out a small wire that ends in an electrode and plugs it into a port in her laptop. The electrode she places behind her left ear, pressing softly until it adheres to her skin. One pale finger depresses the ‘enter’ key, and she watches intently as data streams by in unintelligible—to the normal mortal—strings.

With a satisfied grunt, she ends the program and peels off the electrode before turning on her implants. Sound flows back into her world once again. She smiles, briefly, before slumping back against the wall, suddenly more weary than she can ever remember being. The ache is back in her chest, and it sets off a spasm of coughing that makes her feel as if a giant hand has reached down her throat and is even now tearing her lungs from their moorings. Breath is an elusive beast and her gasps chase after it with all their might, capturing only small slices before it slips away again.

She feels herself pushed back into bed by firm hands as a soft oxygen mask is pressed down over her face. Words, intelligible as an insect’s hum, swirl around her head, but she wastes no energy deciphering their meaning. She knows she’s being chided, in any event.

After another moment, the sweet, cool, dry oxygen flows into her lungs, and her hoarse gasping becomes winded pants, and then, as her constricted breathing passages open up to the size of interstate highways, the quiet inspiration of normal breathing.

Standing above her, Maggie’s shoulders slump in relief. “A little warning before you start playing Superwoman next time would be appreciated, Doctor King.”

“Sorry,” Kirsten replies, hoarse voice muffled behind the oxygen mask.

Maggie blinks, mildly shocked at the apology and the slight blush of embarrassment that dusts the younger woman’s cheeks. “Yes. Well….” She clears her throat. “I’m going to leave you alone for a bit, then. Please, Doctor, have the good sense to stay in this bed for awhile, ok? I’ve heard that bumping noses with the Grim Reaper takes something out of a person. Even a person as self sufficient as you.”

Pulling the mask off of her face, Kirsten nods. “I’ll stay. I could use a nap, anyway.”

“I’d imagine so.” Maggie’s tone is wry, to match the small smirk that curves one corner of her mouth. “I’ll see you later, then.”

She is almost to the door of the small hospital room when Kirsten’s voice reaches her again.

“Colonel?”

“Yes?”

“Dakota…Doctor Rivers…she was the one who saved me, wasn’t she.”

Maggie turns to face her. “It was pretty much a team effort, but yes, she’s the one who figured out what was wrong first and started CPR on you. She also shut off your implants. How did you know?”

Her dreamlike trek into the afterworld is slowly fading from her memory, but certain things stand out with crystal clarity. She also knows, with the same clarity of thought, that the experience is something she is loathe to share. “I just…had a feeling.”

Maggie nods, knowing there’s much more to the story, but accepting the statement at face value. Pulling teeth from a rabid wolf would be a cakewalk compared to getting information this woman. “I’ll tell her you’re awake and doing well when I see her.”

“Thank you.”

“Not a problem.” With a final smile, she exits the room, closing the door softly behind her.

Left alone, Kirsten sinks back into the bed’s soft comfort and stares blankly at the white cork ceiling. The words of the Mother—or whatever it is that the image represents—come back to her as if being whispered just now into her ear.

And for something more, if you have the courage to lay hold of the gift. Will you refuse it?

“What gift?” she asks the ceiling, frustrated. “How can I refuse something if I don’t know what it is?”

But some voice, one that she recognizes comes from within the depths of her own soul, tells her that she already knows the answer to that question, and needs nothing but the courage to listen and understand.

Pondering that voice, she falls into a light, troubled sleep.

3

Koda stretches luxuriously, planting her feet against the front of the tub. Her shoulders, higher than she would like because the damned thing is not made for six-footers, press against its back. Lightly scented with lavender, steam rises up about her, soothing her sore body, easing the soreness that lingers in mind and spirit. For the first time since setting out into the snow and the alien place her world has become, Koda misses her own home. She misses the firm platform bed; she misses the fireplace, larger than most people’s closets; most of all she misses her bath. The tub, almost deep enough to paddle in, long and wide enough to accommodate more than three quarters of her, had been the first renovation she had made to the hundred-year-old house, even before she and Tali had decided to marry.

Sharp and sweet as the lavender, the memory slips into her consciousness:

Late at night, walking Tali into the bath with her hands over those laughing eyes, both of them naked and languorous from lovemaking, leading her down into the warm water where candles float and the scents of rose and lily of the valley mingle in the rising steam.. Tali, laughing still as they pursue each other through the water like otters, rolling and tumbling, declaring that Koda must have been Cleopatra in a past life. “If I had been,” Koda answers,, “I wouldn’t have bartered my kingdom away with men. I’d have ruled alone except for my favorite handmaiden.”

“Me?” Tali asks.

“Who else?” And she draws Tali close, pinching out the candles one by one until a lone flame casts their shadow, also single, on the wall and lights their wet skin like molten gold.

It had been a lifetime ago, in a different world. As surely as if there were an angel with a flaming sword at its gate, Koda knows she can never go back. It is not only that the world has changed. She has changed, become something new, a creature that can no longer live in the environment that gave birth to her. It is time, she tells herself wryly, to recognize that she cannot go back into the trees. Time to come out of the water and grow legs.

Figuratively, that is. This is her second soak, and she estimates that she has at least another fifteen minutes before the water begins to cool. She had taken ten minutes to shower off the dirt and blood, the acrid stench of black powder that clung to clothing and skin alike. Then she had soaked, her wet hair piled up on top of her head. When the first tub had cooled, she had run a second in defiance of all self-discipline and conservation of resources. She rubs now at the sore spot between her shoulders where she can feel the muscles still bunched. Maybe Maggie can get the knots out later. Maggie, of the long, clever hands and many skills.

Maggie had known without being told to snatch up the phone and order in a medic and a portable defibrillator when Kirsten had arrested while probing the captured droid. Koda still was not entirely sure what had happened or how, but she remembered in every cell of brain and body her horror as the self-assured—all right, be honest, the more than slightly arrogant—scientist had turned pale, her lips and eyelids going blue as she slumped over her terminal, her lungs emptying in a sigh as her chest stilled and her pulse grew silent.

Koda’s nerves and muscles had responded before her brain knew what was happening, clearing the airway, starting the regular compressions of the sternum that would keep the failed heart pumping. One-two. One-two. One-two. At some point the count had become Hey-ah, hey-ah, hey-ah, and from somewhere she had heard the deep resonance of her grandfather’s drum as it beat out the rhythm of the blood chant. Her hands and shoulders pressed down and released in perfect synch, precise as the steps of her brother Phoenix as he stamped out the figures of the grass dance, remaining steady even as she felt her own spirit gather and hurtle out of her body in pursuit of the dying woman’s soul. She had streaked down the spiraling dark after her, howling wordlessly, feeling the insubstantial spine of her spirit form coil and release like a spring as she gave chase. The way had been barred, then, by another in animal form like herself, but still Kirsten had plunged toward the pinprick of brightness that lighted the Blue Road. A woman of power, Koda could walk that path and return, but for someone untrained it led irrevocably into death. Half-panicking then, she had felt herself somehow divided, leaping forward to block Kirsten’s way, warning her back even as she kept pace alongside. Twice, she had been so split, and twice she had failed to catch the other woman’s soul.

Then a blinding light had burst on her just as someone had grabbed her roughly by the shoulders and pushed her out of the way, making room for the defibrillator and the medtechs with it. Her eyes wide and sightless, Koda’s body had reeled backward and collapsed onto the tiles. As Koda hurtled down toward it from an infinite height, she heard Maggie’s low “Damn!” distinct amid the shouts of the medics, then felt the almost physical impact as her spirit slammed back into her flesh with the shock of a meteor burying itself deep in the earth’s rock strata.

Maggie had been holding her when she came to, half in and half out of her lap. Her dark face had been ashen with fear, but she had spoken steadily enough. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Rough landing, that’s all.”

“Hmph,” Maggie had snorted. “I’ve set down easier after one of Osama’s boys tried to put a SAM up my tailpipe.

Koda had gathered her screaming muscles and sat up, only to lower her head into her hands with a groan. The drum was still with her, only this time it was pounding right behind her eyes.

“Doctor Rivers?” Maggie again, formal as always in the presence of subordinates.

“M’okay,” she had said softly, not to reinforce the thunder in her head. “Shamanism 101. Never touch a body whose proprietor is temporarily absent. Bad things can happen.”

“Thought for a moment we had two patients here.” That was the medic, wanting to check her vitals as a pair of orderlies had carried the now steadily breathing Kirsten toward the infirmary. Koda had let him take her blood pressure and her temperature simply because that would take less time than arguing with him.

Then she had headed straight for the bath and the now cooling water.

Carefully, Koda grips the handle on the soap holder and pulls herself up, reaching for the pair of heated towels on the nearby rack. She feels infinitely better, the headache receding now to a dull pain no worse than ordinary tiredness. She needs food. She needs sleep.

She needs to know why Kirsten’s near-death fills her with a terror beyond anything she has ever known.

And she needs to know why that fear is so very familiar, a rooted ache in her heart.

Mitakuye oyasin. We are all related. It is the first teaching of her people. But there is more to it than that. Somehow this woman is part of the hoop of her own life.

She does not yet know how, or why. But she will.

4

Through lowered lashes Koda gazes at the soft brown globes before her. She runs her tongue over her lips, remembering their velvet smoothness, the firm but yielding texture between her teeth. Her hand moves toward them, hesitates, withdraws. I shouldn’t . I really shouldn’t. It would be too much.

Maggie leans toward her, laughing softly. “Go ahead.”

“No, I really shouldn’t—”

Maggie laughs again, “You know you want it. Go ahead.”

Koda meets the other woman’s eyes, feeling color rising beneath her own cheeks. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.” Maggie pushes the wicker basket with the one remaining roll across the table. “I’ve never seen you so starved. Have at it.”

Koda knows she is blushing and not for the first time is glad of the coppery skin that masks her embarrassment. But she takes the bread , breaks it in her fingers and begins to mop up the creamy sauce on her plate. From his place under the table, Asi whines pitifully, pawing at her knee. Koda pauses in her pursuit of the last streaks of gravy just long enough to deposit her chop bone in his dish. “Sorry, fella. I didn’t leave you much.”

“You certainly didn’t.” Maggie rises and begins to collect the frying pan and other utensils, scraping them into the compacter beneath the small sink. “I know I’m a decent cook, but I’m not that good. Battle agrees with you.”

There is silence for a moment. Then Koda says, “It does, you know.” Her voice is very quiet, barely audible even to her own ears.

Maggie meets her eyes across the room. “I do know. Want to talk about it once I get the dishwasher going and we can be comfortable?”

Koda hesitates, then nods. Her plate looks as if it has already been washed. Without warning, her stomach growls again.

“Dessert?” Maggie offers. “I think I still have some frozen berries.”

To hell with embarrassment. “Yes, please. I’m sorry—this isn’t the fighting. It’s being out of the body. Exaggerated hunger is a textbook response.”

Maggie stows the last of the dishes and hits the button. The motor whines, gears grating. The Colonel swears and gives it a smart kick; with a reassuring sound of water jets, it finally turns over. “Don’t know what I’ll do when this damn thing gives out now.” Returning her attention to Koda, she raises an eyebrow. “Textbook. Like the low temperature and blood pressure that had the medic wanting to put you into the hospital, too?”

“Just like that.”

“You know, I don’t think I’d have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. Hell, if I’d seen it happen to anyone else, I don’t think I’d have believed it.”

“You should have seen my grandfather conduct a yuwipi. What I did was nothing in comparison.”

“Yuwipi?” Maggie pauses with the freezer door open, a bag of small wild blueberries in her hand.

“A spirit-calling ceremony.”

“Well,” says Maggie. “I’m willing to believe what I see with my own eyes. But if you’re going to do something more flamboyant than take a little stroll in the spirit world or the astral plane or whatever, try to give me five minutes warning next time.”

Koda laughs as she accepts a bowl of berries and they move toward the living room. “Count on it. Just as long as I have a bit of warning myself.”

A quarter hour later, Koda sets her empty bowl on the low chest that serves as a coffee table between sofa and fireplace. Asimov has reclaimed his place on the hearth tiles, lying on this back with his forepaws resting on his chest. His tongue lolls out of his mouth as if in his dreams he is licking some last succulent morsel from his whiskers. His soft snoring mingles with the snap and hiss of burning pine branches. The sleep of the just, Koda notes wryly to herself. She glances at Maggie whose face, underlit by the fire, is a study in bronze and shadow, the only points of brightness the reflected flame in her eyes and the glint off the golden bobcat cuff on one ear. She might be some ancient battle goddess, Koda thinks, African or Egyptian.

Sekhmet the lion-headed, Beloved of Ra her father, the One who holds back darkness, Lady of the scarlet-colored garment, Pre-eminent One in the boat of millions of years. As if from a great distance, almost beyond the range of hearing, there comes the soft sound of a small drum and a silvery tinkling of sistrums. Voices, too, though Koda cannot make out their words. Then the music is gone, and there is only Maggie and the sleeping dog and the light of the fire.

And where, for all the gods’ sake, did that come from? Very deliberately, she leans forward and places both hands on the wrought metal hinges of the chest.

Maggie says nothing until Koda pushes herself back against the sofa cushions with a sigh. Then, “Cold iron?”

“Residual effect. Sometimes you stay a bit sensitive for a while.”

“How long?” Maggie makes a circular gesture with one hand that encompasses a myriad of questions.

How long have you been seeing things?

How long have you been wigging out?

How long will it be before you go entirely round the bend?

But that is unfair. Maggie has been far more accepting than any other person of any race but Koda’s own has ever been. She tries to imagine having this conversation with Kirsten King and cannot. Cold iron, indeed.

She says slowly, “I started—being aware—of things other people couldn’t see or hear when I was six or seven. But my grandfather truly began to teach me when I was twelve, after I had done my hanblecheyapi—my first vision quest. What I saw then led me to be a healer, particularly a healer for the four-footed and winged peoples.”

Maggie nods, setting down her coffee cup. “And you are extremely good at it. If it hadn’t been for your license plate, I would never have suspected that you weren’t an MD. Not after the fine work you did on some of my troops that day we ran into the droids.”

“But, see, that’s not the vision I wanted.” Koda meets Maggie’s dark eyes across the small space between them. “I wanted to be a warrior. More than a warrior--Dakota Rivers, liberator of the Lakota Nation.” She feels one side of her mouth quirk up wryly. “Don’t say it. Grandiosity--pass the Thorazine.”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with that,” Maggie says softly. “Do you know, when I was a little girl I had two heroes. One was Sojourner Truth. The other--” Maggie hesitates for a moment, then goes on. “The other was Joan of Arc. See, there was this old movie on the late, late video one night, called The Messenger. Everybody said it was a terrible film, and they’re probably right. But what I saw in Joan was a woman absolutely possessed by her calling—a woman who needed to be a warrior because that’s what her soul was. And her society wouldn’t let her. She found her way, though, even if she died for it in the end.”

“Because that’s what her soul was.” Koda repeats the words slowly. “That’s exactly how it feels. Like some part of me locked away, trying to get out.”

“And now it is out. How do you feel about that?”

“Relieved.” The word comes to her lips without thought. “Lighter. Like I’ve been wearing boots a size too small, and suddenly I can run barefoot.”

“What about killing? You haven’t blown away anything but droids so far, have you? What happens when it’s another human being aiming an M-16 at you?”

Koda starts to give the easy answer, then checks herself. After a moment she says, “I don’t know. I gave one of the men at the bridge that day an overdose, but he was suffering and beyond saving. That’s different.”

“That’s different, yes. If you’re lucky, the first time you have to kill a man or a woman it will go by so fast you won’t have time to think about it. You have the fighting instinct, and I think that will carry you through. There’s something to be said for losing yourself in the battle.” She pauses. “Rise up like fire, and sweep all before you. That’s in a poem somewhere. What’s harder is to order your own troops into a situation they won’t survive. But that you do know about.”

Reeves. Johnson. More to come.

“I know,” she says softly. “I hate it.”

“And that, my dear, is the price of leadership. Because you are not just a warrior, you are a born leader.” Maggie smiles suddenly. “God, I wish I’d gotten my hands on you ten years ago. You’d be the goddamned youngest brigadier in the Air Force.”

Koda smiles in return, tension she has refused to acknowledge draining out of her muscles. “If you’d gotten your hands on me ten years ago, it would have been fraternization and we’d both have been in trouble.”

“Oh, yeah.” Maggie’s face splits in a grin. “But me, I like trouble.” She rises and moves to extinguish the fire. “And so do you, my dear.

“So do you.”

5

As Kirsten wakes up from the pleasant grip of a rapidly dissipating dream, she finds herself looking into the very eyes that dominated that dream. The transition is so seamless that she can’t help but smile; a rare and radiant smile that transforms her entire face into something beyond simple beauty.

It’s a smile that Dakota, caught totally unaware, can’t help but respond to, and she wonders at that response, even as she wonders at the less than subtle response of her own body as it notices exactly what a smile does for the woman lying on the pristine white sheets of a narrow hospital bed.

After a long moment, both women realize, simultaneously, that they’re grinning at one another like idiots, and each looks away, smiles slowly fading even as roses of embarrassment bloom on their cheeks.

Kirsten finds the weave of her blanket utterly fascinating and plucks at it as Koda rubs the back of her neck, not quite fidgeting, but close.

“I….”

“Are you….”

Koda chuckles a bit, and steps back. “You first.”

The gaze that meets hers is almost—not quite, but almost—shy, and Koda ponders if this morning of wonders portends an omen of some sort.

“I…just wanted to thank you. For saving my life. I, um….”

“It’s alright,” Koda replies, smiling. “I’m glad I was there to help.” Pausing, she looks the young woman over with a clinical eye. “How are you feeling? Any residual effects?”

“I’m feeling…pretty well, actually.”

“Good, good.”

Silence, dense and uncomfortable, settles over them once again.

“Well, I guess I’d better leave you to your rest. I’ll talk to you later, alright?”

Kirsten smiles. “Alright. And Doctor?”

“Dakota. Please. Just…Dakota.”

Another almost shy smile, and Kirsten nods. “Dakota, then. Thank you, again, for saving my life. I know that sounds painfully inadequate, but….”

“No thanks necessary,” Dakota replies, laying a quick touch on a blanket-covered foot. “I’m glad I was there.” White teeth flash in a brief smile. “Rest up and get stronger, alright?”

“I will. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

As the door clicks softly closed, Kirsten leans her head back into the pillow and once again stares into the blank ceiling, her mind busily replaying her most out-of-character behavior. “Jesus,” she whispers. “What in the hell is happening to me?”

The ceiling, wisely, remains mute.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Do virgins taste better than those who are not?Are they saltier, sweeter, more juicy or what?Do you savor them slowly, gulp ‘em down on the spot?Do virgins taste better than those who are not?

AS SHE PULLS her new truck into Maggie’s carport, Koda finds herself actually humming along with the jaunty tune. And how long has it been, she asks herself, since I’ve done that? The truck, and the truck’s stash of Celtic and Celtic rock discs, are her unexpected inheritance from the Base’s veterinarian, currently missing in action and presumed taken or killed in the last attack on Ellsworth. Dr. LeFleur’s practice has become hers, too, at least temporarily. Koda has spent the morning vaccinating and treating minor injuries and infections among the survivors’ pets and examining the MPs’ canine contingent. It is the closest thing she has had to a normal day’s work since the uprising began.

As the song ends with the vow that “We’ll just have to make sure there’s no virgins at aaaaallllll” and a disappointed dragon, Koda switches off the engine and collects the filled syringes she has brought from the clinic. She doesn’t know when Asi was last vaccinated, doesn’t know when the chance to give him his boosters may come again. Might as well do it while she can.

He greets her at the door with a bark and a furiously wagging tail, rising up on his hind legs to investigate the stranger smells that cling to her shirt, her boots, her jeans. He follows her into the kitchen, snuffling furiously at her heels and at her knees where she has braced the MP’s dogs against her for their shots. He barks again, sharply, and trots over to the table where Kirsten is seated with her laptop. She looks up from her screen and holds out a hand, which he licks with enthusiasm. The blond woman smiles slightly, rubbing his ears in her turn. While it is not the transforming brilliance Koda remembers from the hospital room, even the small upturn of her lips warms Kirsten’s face almost past recognition. And what, wonders Koda, did the dragon answer?

She feels the heat rise in her face at the thought. To cover her embarrassment she says, “It’s good to see you feeling well enough to sit up. I though we’d go ahead and give Asi his boosters while we have the chance, but I seem to have offended him.”

“How’s that?” The smile, miraculously, has not faded.

“Infidelity.” Koda indicates the dog and cat hairs that still cling to her jeans and the sleeves of her flannel shirt. “I’ve been with other critters all morning. Have you had lunch?”

Kirsten shrugs. “I forgot.”

Let’s see what we’ve got, then.” Koda rummages in the fridge for the tub with last night’s leftover soup and a wedge of cheese; the pantry yields a box of whole wheat crackers and some canned peaches.

As she is setting the soup to heat, Maggie’s sportscar pulls up behind the dark blue truck. With an odd sense of combined disappointment and relief, Koda sets out a third bowl and adds another measure of coffee to the brewer. As she turns to tend to the soup, Koda catches a glimpse of Kirsten’s face. One instant the smile is still there. In the next, Maggie crosses the space in front of the kitchen window and the smile freezes, shatters, falls from the woman’s face. Almost Koda imagines she can hear the chime of ice shards against the tiles of the floor.

Maggie strides through the door with a burst of the south breeze that has been blowing all morning, sweeping away the clouds. It is cold still but carries with it a hint that somewhere, far away, snow is melting into spring freshets while crooked shoots push up through the earth toward the sun and the year’s turning. Maggie’s jacket is half off before she closes the door behind her with a shove of her foot. She is back in her flight fatigues and boots, and a delighted grin spreads across her face when she sees Koda. “It’s flying weather—no ceiling and visibility all the way to Denver! Want to come up on recon with me?”

“This minute?” Koda asks with an answering smile. “Or do we get to eat our soup?”

Maggie drapes her jacket over one of the chairs and makes for the sink to wash her hands. “After lunch is fine.” She turns to Kirsten. “Dr. King, I’m glad you’re feeling stronger. When the medics give the okay, I’ll be happy to take you up too, if you’d like.”

“Thank you, Colonel. I appreciate the offer.” Kirsten turns back to the data streaming across her screen. The temperature in the room seems to sink to near-polar levels. Maggie darts a puzzled glance at Koda, who shrugs almost imperceptibly. Lunch has become, in the military dialect Koda is rapidly picking up, a Situation.

The next twenty minutes, as conversation fails entirely and the only sounds are the thump of the oblivious Asi’s tail against the floor and the spoons clinking against the soup bowls, are among the most awkward Koda can remember. It feels rather like the preternaturally stretched out time spent in the hall outside Mother Superior’s office in grade school, never quite certain what offense she had committed, never quite sure how to defend herself.

In the end, she gives Asimov his shots while Kirsten holds him, crooning soothing sounds in his ear and rubs his neck.. As she follows Maggie out to her car to head for the flightline, Koda glances back through the window. Kirsten remains seated at her computer as before, one hand absently stroking the dog’s head in her lap. The other props up her forehead as she stares at the screen, her glasses off and her gaze open and unfocused, all the anger gone. It is a curiously vulnerable look, and Koda senses an isolation behind it that is somehow different from her own aloneness—not so much a longing for what has gone but a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of what might be.

Almost she turns back. She knows she will not be welcome, though, not now. The other woman’s defenses are all back up, the barriers impregnable.

Someday, Koda promises herself as she settles into the passenger seat of the elegant little car.

One day.

2

The plane sits on the apron waiting for them, its canopy up, its ladder down, underwings bristling with missiles. The winter sun gleams off its metal skin, running like liquid silver over the sleek length of the fuselage, striking off the extended wings and the double tail that rises above the afterburners like a pair of ancient banners. The squadron’s gunfighter bobcat is emblazoned in gold and black on both panels, together with the Base’s call letters. Like the fighters parked on the snow bound road the day she first met Maggie and her band of resisters, this machine of titanium and steel and lexan seems somehow alive, a beast of prey lost in time. A frisson that is half fear, half excitement runs along her spine. The warplane is freedom and feral grace, and unrestrained power. It calls to her spirit in the wolf tongue that is as much hers as human speech.

Something of her feelings must show on her face , because Maggie touches her lightly on the shoulder and says, “Oh, yeah. It gets to everybody first time.”

Koda turns to the pilot with a smile. “Even to you?”

“Especially to me. It’s never stopped getting to me.” Maggie’s eyes go soft the way they do in bed, and she says, “The first time I ever saw one of these beasts I wanted to run off into the woods with it and have its cubs.”

“Cubs?”

“Or chicks.” Maggie settles her helmet on her head and motions to the ground crew who have gathered in a sunny spot where the enormous bulk of a C-5 breaks the wind. “Whatever. It’s a primal urge kind of thing.”

The tech chief takes up his place at the foot of the ladder, while the others slip their protective earmuffs into place and the traffic director postions herself to guide the plane onto the runway. Maggie takes a moment to double-check Koda’s flight suit and helmet, adjusts the automatic pistol strapped under her arm. Apparently satisfied, the Colonel gives her a small push. “Up you go.”

The ladder only reaches halfway to the cockpit. From there, Koda finds the hand and foot holds built into the side of the plane and with an upward push maneuvers herself into the rear seat, ducking a little not to hit her helmeted head against the edge of the canopy. She fits into the confined space as if it had been molded to her. As she settles, she takes note of the bank of lights and switches and dials that occupy the control panel. The plane can be flown from her station, but ordinarily the second seat is occupied by the radar intercept officer, and two LED screens and other readouts take up most of the space in front of her. Maggie follows her up, and from her perch on the fixed portion of the wing supervises as Koda secures herself to the ejection seat and straps her oxygen mask into place. She points to a red-lighted button on the panel. “See that?”

Koda nods. The weight of the helmet carries her head forward; is not uncomfortable, exactly, but it is uncomfortably reminiscent of a morning after.

“Good. That’s the ejection button. Don’t go anywhere near it unless I tell you to or you know for sure I’m dead or unconscious. Your chute should open automatically in that case, but if it doesn’t”—she reaches for a cord attached to the seat and drapes it over Koda’s shoulder”—“here’s your manual.”

Koda grins up at her. “The things normal flight attendants don’t tell you.”

Maggie snorts, an entire dissertation on commercial aviation in a single sound. She points to a couple toggles by the screens. “There’s your camera switch; I’ll tell you when to turn it on. That’s the zoom—you’ve probably heard that these babies can pick up the dimples on a golf ball. This one can pick up a flea sitting in the dimple of a golf ball. Anything interesting you see on either of these screens—moving blip on the radar, moving anything on the video--you pass it up to me with this. Capiche?”

“Got,” Koda answers.

“Good.” Maggie switches on her mike, gives her a pat on the shoulder and, with grace born of long practice, swings along the fuselage and up into her own seat in front. After a moment or two, Koda’s mike crackles. “You all right back there?”

“Fine.”

“Okay. Let’s take her up.”

As Maggie starts the engines, the Tomcat shudders and begins to vibrate, sending a tingle of excitement through Koda’s nerves. She has flown before and loves it, but has never before felt this sense of intimacy with the craft. Following the hand signals of the traffic director, the plane begins its taxi onto the runway, turning stately onto the long stretch of pavement, making for the northern end. Maggie’s voice comes through the speaker. “Watch your head. I’m putting the lid down.”

As the canopy descends, the plane makes its second turn to face south, into the wind. Maggie kicks the engines in full, and the plane shudders a second time with the force that, once in the air, will send it racing ahead of its own sound. For long moments the plane remains stationary, its power held in check. Then Maggie throws the throttle open, and the jet is streaking down the runway at a speed that presses Koda into her seat and takes her breath away. Her heart pounds against her sternum and shouts to be let out, blood running in her ears with the roar of the Colorado in spring flood. Between one breath and the next, it seems, she feels the nose come up and the lift of air beneath the wings, and they are airborne, climbing steeply into the clear, impossible blue of the afternoon. The ascent goes on and on, leveling out finally when the land beneath is no more than intricate swirls of brown and green and white, with the course of the occasional river cut into it like the trunk of a vast tree, its tributary streams forking off into branches and twigs.

The craft banks into a turn, and sun glints off the wing and the canopy in bursts like small stars gone nova. When they level off again, the wings sweep back close to the body of the plane, like a falcon stooping. All around her now is the open sky, and with it a sense of perfect freedom. There is only herself and the blue air and the wings that carry her.

This must be how it feels to be Wiyo.

The tang of oxygen flowing into her mask brings her out of her reverie, followed closely by Maggie’s voice. “Engage the camera and radar now. We’re going to make a sweep up the Cheyenne and then follow the Missouri into North Dakota..”

Koda thumbs the toggles and stares at the images that rise to her screen. She can make out the rectangular shapes of roofs, outlined in shadow, as they pass over the small villages that dot this part of the state. Beside them stand tall hardwoods, winter-naked, or evergreens with fans of needles spread against the unvarying snow. When she engages the zoom, antennas and chimneys stand out of the snow that blankets the roofs. Once she sees a pair of deer, or elk, perhaps, breaking their way through the snow that covers the main street of a small town. Abandoned cars and farm machinery form mounds in the spaces between the houses, anonymous under the snow.

“See anything?”

“Negative,” she responds. “Mostly snow, apparently abandoned homes, buried vehicles.”

“Hang on, then.”

With no more warning than that, Maggie flips the fighter over in a barrel roll. Koda gasps with surprise, then yells into her mike. “Do that again!”

Maggie rolls the plane twice more, then streaks out of the third flip upside down, with earth turned suddenly to sky and the blue depths of the sky below. Koda feels the adrenaline pouring into her blood, hitting her brain in a rush of pure physical pleasure. . Then they are rightside up again, and Maggie is laughing through the mike. “Liked that, did you?”

“Gods, yes!” she all but yells. “That was wonderful!”

“Okay. Tell me if this gets uncomfortable.”

The fighter begins to climb, straight up, corkscrewing. The ascent becomes a curve becomes a loop, and they are upside down again, sweeping into a descent that has left all sound behind except the low whisper of breath, and Maggie brings them out again into even flight for a space before the plane skims along its upward trajectory for the second time. The G-force holds Koda motionless, back pressed into her cushions, the whole force of their speed against her solar plexus. The sensation rides the thin line between pain and pleasure , pleasure and sensory overload. Then they are plunging down from the sky to skim no more than three or four meters above the snow along a thin flat stretch or road, only to climb again at an impossibly steep angle, reaching toward the edge of the envelope of air that is the first frontier between earth and space. When Maggie levels off again, five miles up, Koda’s breath comes in little gasps and her rational mind has gone AWOL. When a thought finally forces its way upward from the part of her brain that is still functioning, it is sex. It feels like sex. Her blood sings in her veins, her sated muscles hum. I want to have its babies, too. Hatch its eggs. Whatever.

The sensation fades gradually over the next half hour as they quarter the landscape beneath them. Maggie flies a straight-line grid pattern over the ruins that were once population centers, but they can detect no gathering of humans or droids, no movement that is not solitary. Roads have become largely impassible and look fit to remain so till spring thaw. Many will still be blocked then, by storm-felled trees or the tangled remains of accidents. They have been flying for a little more than two hours when Koda picks up a line of—something-–moving on the highway leading south from Bismarck.. She zooms in on it, tweaking the fine focus. “Maggie. Have a look.”

She transfers the image to the pilot’s readout, but she knows already what she sees. It is a column of troops, some droid, some apparently human, preceded by a coterie of snowplows and followed by a contingent of armor. There are personnel carriers, several tanks, a dozen flatbed trucks loaded with something long and rectangular. Construction materials? She tweaks the image again, and the cargo comes into focus. Mobile missile launchers.

“This,” Maggie says dryly, “is not good. I’m gonna take ‘em out here and now. Hang onto your hat.”

Maggie kicks in the afterburners, and the Tomcat comes streaking down out of the sky with the sun behind it. Half a mile above the column, she releases a long stick of precision-guided five-hundred pounders, laying them down with mathematical exactitude in the center of the long column, spaced precisely to destroy everything on the road. The explosions are muffled by distance and the roar of the jet’s engines. On the video screen, Koda watches as the mobile launcher swivels on its truckbed to get them in its sights. A puff of smoke in the frigid air, and a long, lean shape rises toward them. Maggie has already seen it; even as Koda forwards the image to the pilot, she feels a faint thump as a Sparrow missile leaves its roost on the plane’s flank and streaks to intercept the enemy fire. The kill is almost instant, a burst of flame and vapor in the cold air. The plane swerves wildly as a second ground-to-air missile passes by without harm, a clean miss.

There is no third try. Maggie turns to makes her second bombing run, and when she slows for the final pass to check and record results, nothing moves along the road at all.

“And that,” she says quietly, “is the end of that.”

The flight back to Ellsworth is swift and straight. When the Tomcat comes once again to rest by its hanger, Koda finds, like a child at the carnival, that she does not want the afternoon to be over. As she climbs down the ladder, she runs her hand over the plane’s sleek skin, all cool steel and titanium belying the fire within.

“In love, are you?” Maggie smiles at her, unstrapping her helmet and tucking it under her arm.

“A little,” she admits. She feels the silly grin spread across her face, and can do nothing to stop it. ‘When can we do it again?”

At that, Maggie laughs outright. “You know, I really do wish I could have gotten my hands on you ten years ago. You’d have made one hell of a pilot. You got the tape?”

Koda hands the Colonel the small cassette with the record of their engagement. It is the first indication they have that humans are collaborating with the droids. It is also the first evidence of large-scale droid movements since the uprising. Serious matters both, and they are on their way to the General with their report without bothering to change their flight suits.

But sheer joy runs in Koda’s veins and will not be denied. “You’d have been a hell of a teacher. But don’t you think one Rivers in your squadron is enough?”

3

It is a rare warm—if temperatures in the single digits can be considered warm—winter’s morning, and Dakota drives along the snow-packed roads with her window rolled halfway down and her gloved hand curled around the door’s support, long fingers splayed against the roof. She’s humming softly to herself; a song heard, and remembered, from long ago. One of Tali’s favorites, if she recalls correctly.

The truck rattles and buzzes and screeches, but she pays it no mind as her fingers tap out the rhythm of her humming on the salt-dusty roof. Nor does she pay special heed to the scent, old coffee, old sweat, and something high and sour and rank that she doesn’t even want to identify, that emanates from the truck’s interior.

She’s soaring high, caught up in the exhilarating memories of flying with Maggie the day before. The sense of unbounded, heady freedom was something she had only felt during her dream journeys; journeys always taken in a form other than human. The incandescent rush is with her still, and she wraps it around her like a blanket, feeling very much as she did the when she first kissed Tali, behind the stables in the moonlight.

“Kiss? Hell,” she snorts into the truck’s warm cab. “It felt closer to what we did on our wedding night! Jesus.” A pleasant shiver skitters down the length of her spine, and her limbs break out in temporary gooseflesh.

“Ok,” she intones as her inattention to detail almost runs her off the road, “that’s quite enough of that. Mind on the road, Rivers, and outta your pants, if you please.”

Looking up into the pristine winter sky, she sees a large flock of birds pacing her truck. The flock is suddenly split almost directly down the middle, and wheels off to the left and to the right as another airborne object dives down through the vacated space like a star falling from the heavens.

Koda’s face splits into a grin as the dive bomber levels out and casts its shadow along the unbroken snow just to the right of her truck. “Welcome back, old friend.”

As if hearing her, Wiyo’s call pierces the silence of the still morning as the red-tail glides on currents of air, shadowing Dakota’s return to the place of her birth.

Still grinning, she turns left over the cattle-guard that marks the entrance to her parents’ property and starts down the long, snow covered and ruler-straight road that will lead her to the family compound. She is being watched, she knows, by creatures human and non, but she senses no danger from the watching, and so continues on, still humming.

Off in the distance, to her left, she sees a white mist rising. It’s either a vehicle moving in her direction, or….

“Ah,” Koda says, laughing as the mist resolves itself into something easily recognizable. Her laughter is rich and full-bodied, breathing life into the woman she had once been and might yet be again.

The herd moves closer, with Wakinyan Lutah, her huge blood bay stallion, leading them. His black mane flutters like a war banner as he approaches the fence and rears, slashing forefeet pawing at the air, clots of snow flinging from his well-shod hooves.

Her laugh is that of a young girl; boundless, full of life, and joy. Pulling over to the side of the road, she jumps out of the truck before it has come to a complete stop, striding across the road even as the heavy beating of air above her head almost knocks her hat off.

Wiyo lands on the top rung of the fence and proceeds to strut across it and back, like a miniature general before a platoon.

Wakinyan Lutah rears again, slashing hooves coming perilously close to the red-tail. Wiyo stares at him, completely unperturbed, and settles her wings more comfortably over her back before resuming her walk along the fence.

“C’mere ya big baby,” Koda says, rolling her eyes and holding her hand out over the fence.

Nervously eyeing the red-tail (Dakota believes she can see the proud gleam in Wiyo’s eye even from where she’s standing), the stallion sidesteps closer to the fence until he is able to nudge Koda’s hand with his nose, whuffling a great, warm breath into her palm.

“Hey, boy,” Koda says fondly, rubbing his nose and that spot between his ears that has him all but groaning in ecstasy. His coat is winter thick and gleams in the winter sunlight like freshly spilled blood. The comparison causes Dakota to wince and swallow hard as it dredges up memories best left buried until she has time to dissect them.

After a moment, Wakinyan backs up and tosses his head in an unmistakable invitation.

When Dakota doesn’t respond to his satisfaction, he whickers, tosses his great head again, and paws at the snow, digging deep ruts into the frozen ground beneath. Breath streams from his nose in foggy jets.

Unhappy with the sudden wind that ruffles her feathers, Wiyo hops onto Koda’s forearm, then sidesteps up to her shoulder and expresses her displeasure with a loud hiss. These two are rivals of old, and Koda can’t help but chuckle at their long familiar, and much beloved, antics.

After the stallion gives a final call, Koda shakes her head and sighs. “Oh, alright,” she says, sounding more aggrieved than she really is. After taking one last look over her shoulder at the truck parked by the side of the road, she hitches in a breath and vaults over the fence, dislodging the red-tail, who hisses again and beats at the air with her huge wings, taking low flight.

“Ready, goober?”

Wakinyan nods his head, shaking out his mane.

“Alright, then.”

Another deep breath, and she vaults aboard the stallion’s broad, muscular back, threading her fingers firmly in his mane. A light touch of her heels to his flank, and he wheels, and takes off, flying across the snow-packed ground, the herd following close behind.

Dakota whoops with pleasure. Her hair, exactly matching the color of her horse’s mane, streams behind her in inky waves, her eyes flash, and her full, perfect lips split in a wide, take-no-prisoners grin. Her spirit soars as the land passes beneath her in a blur of white on white, and she feels a sense of connectedness that has been absent for a long, long time.

She is wild.

She is free.

She is home.

4

With a grunt of frustration, Kirsten wrings the glasses from her face and tosses them on the battle-scarred desk upon which her computer rests. Hours upon hours upon hours of searching and nothing worth a fart in a windstorm to show for it.

Leaning back in her chair, she rubs a numb hand over weary eyes, then looks down at Asi, who lifts his head and thumps his tail in a canine hello. The house is quiet, almost sterile in a way that only military housing can sometimes be. Outside the window, the afternoon is crisp, clear, and blessedly sunny. Looking upon the colorful parade of passers by, she once again feels that unwanted but familiar sense of dispossession and dislocation. On the outside looking in. Again.