She—it was a young woman, about Maya’s age—definitely a woman—and—

Oh.

Maya had left home at age five, so it had fallen to Jaedia to explain the facts of life to her. Maya had known some of it—she’d lived on a farm, after all—but she remembered listening with a vaguely horrified feeling as Jaedia went through the mechanics of sex and what she could expect from puberty, and taught her the exercises to use if she ever wanted to become fertile. She’d explained how one could find oneself attracted to men, women, both, or neither. It had all seemed very theoretical at the time, and Maya had doubted any of it really applied to her.

And then, one night a few years later, they’d been at a village dance. A pretty girl with yellow-gold hair and silver eyes had smiled at her across a campfire, and Maya had felt her heart lurch and her skin flush and she’d thought, Oh.

Not that she’d had a chance to do anything about it, then or later, except in the privacy of her own bedroll. That sort of entanglement was forbidden for agathia, and while Jaedia might have been willing to bend some rules, Maya had never found occasion to test her on this one. Now she felt the same lurch, that same oh, because the girl standing naked and dripping wet in the doorway was the most beautiful thing Maya had ever seen.

She was taller than Maya, with long green hair that, wet, curled down her neck and over one shoulder. Her skin was a few shades lighter, though not as pale as Jaedia’s, and she had a dusting of freckles across her cheeks that continued down to her shoulders and the upper slopes of her small breasts. Her eyes were hidden behind thick, gold-rimmed spectacles. For a moment Maya thought these were opaque, and that the girl might be blind, but then she pulled them down, blinking, and Maya realized they’d fogged over with steam. Her eyes were a deep navy blue, and they narrowed as she squinted at Maya.

“Sorry,” the girl said, stepping out of the doorway. “Can’t see worth a thaler without these.” She rubbed the lenses against her arm, put them back on, and blinked. “Ah. Hello.”

“Um.” Maya swallowed hard, pulling the towel a little tighter around herself. “Hello.”

The girl stared at her a moment longer, then moved to the bath.

Say something, Maya told herself. Say something say something say something. You’re being weird. Her throat felt thick. You’re nearly a centarch, for the Chosen’s sake, you can talk to a pretty girl in the bath.

At least get her name. Empty as the Forge seemed, there were still hundreds of Order members there at any given time. Finding someone you didn’t know wasn’t difficult.