ONE

Kirra Barret

Kirra was born in a frontier zone swamp. She was orphaned that very same day. All because of a scientist her clan called the dragon lady. Kirra's mother had been a clan member, her father a scientist in the frontier lab. The clan assumed the dragon lady had forbidden their love because Kirra's clan came from the city-state's poorest district. Kirra did not need to know the woman's name to hate her.

Her mother was the first of the Barret clan to graduate with a higher degree. She was by all accounts as intelligent as she was lovely. And Kirra's mother was very beautiful indeed.

Kirra grew up shielded from the surrounding threats and dark ways for the same reason her mother had been granted a chance. The clan Barret took care of its own.

For an orphan like Kirra, lovely and alone, the clan was everything.

It did not mean her life was easy or even pleasant. This was, after all, the mining community of Fifth Ward, a region known to all its inhabitants as the Stretch, named after time in prison. As in, trading one stretch for another.

On the bad nights, and there were any number of these, Kirra had the dream. The one that was actually not a dream at all, but rather a genuine memory rendered and twisted by time and slumber. Sometimes the dream made her six years old, the age when the event occurred. Other times she was her current age, and in those she often switched from observer to combatant. Those were the worst dreams of all.

The day the event actually happened, the Black Watch made another raid. Police, federal agents, whatever the badge they wore, there was only one name for the uniformed might keeping an iron grip on the Stretch. They always wore black, the Watch did, and swarmed in great numbers. Always with the loud alarms and megaphones blasting threats and weapons on the ready. Only this time had been different because the clan was celebrating. Kirra and four distant relatives had all reached the age of six, which was known in their community as the Milestone. This was a sign from past ages that the threats of infant death were behind them. Today's party marked their first rite of passage, and something more besides. Their clan was almost unique, how they and protected the innocent, the infirm, the vulnerable. Their Milestone festival celebrated how the clan Barret had defied the Black Watch and the city-state's Council and the mines and the passage of eons. The clan cared for their own.

But the Black Watch came hunting that day. And the clan had lined up in the building's central corridor with their faces to the wall, like always, everyone from Elder Barret to the youngest able to stand. The Black Watch invaded their homes and smashed things as was their habit. Ruining the celebration.

When the Black Watch departed, the clan tromped back inside and silently began cleaning up the debris. Kirra let her four cousins weep over the celebration that was no more. Even at her young age Kirra recognized a bitter rightness to their tears. But for Kirra, what happened that day marked a transition.

Something inside had shattered.

In her dreams, every single one, the sound inside was loud as an explosion, the snapping of an internal component far deeper than the level of bone and sinew.

Kirra always woke after that sound, and lay in her bed and relived what happened next. The six-year-old child had followed the clan back into the corridor, where her two favorite relatives, men of twenty-one and the dearest of friends, were fighting. The clan watched, silenced by the fury these two normally cheerful men showed the world. Kirra was astonished by the brawl, for she had always assumed she was the only one filled with such futile rage.

When Elder Barret started to end the fight, her husband halted her by saying, "You know as well as I do, they need to let it out." Elder Barret's husband was almost always silent. When he spoke that day, his wife listened. So, they stood and watched two good men beat themselves to bloody pulps.

Kirra's dreamscape always faded the same way. More vivid than the fight was what came from that internal breakage. Standing in the fetid corridor, surrounded by her clan, watching them fight. She saw clearly how these good people were stained by exhaustion and wasted lives. Kirra knew she was going to get out of there. Six years old, this became the mark of her own private Milestone. Whatever it took. If she failed, she died. It was that simple.