The Army was happy to have her. The only surprise was that she ended up in the medical field. Or maybe it wasn’t, because deep down Officer Cadet Leandra Butler was still nerdy little Lee B. who wanted so badly to help her sister get up from that hated chair and make her long, beautiful legs healthy again. She wasn’t disappointed to find that wasn’t going to be an option. She wasn’t. People told her time and again she’d never be anything but a grunt, or a nurse, or that she wouldn’t be able to hack army life and was going to muddle through only to slink away with her tail between her legs when her contract expired. Leandra stared at them impassively, shrugged her bony shoulders, and said, “We’ll see.” Then she proceeded to get a doctorate, got involved in high-security projects, and started to work her way up the ranks.

The lessons she’d learned at the age of ten stuck. She always had to work harder, be better, be tougher than her male colleagues, but she wasn’t bitter about it because she’d known it was going to be that way. No use bawling about injustice. Nobody would change things for her; that wasn’t how it worked. You wanted a better life, you had to get off your ass and fight for it yourself, and live with the fact that a lot of people were going to call you a bitch for not taking their shit. So when there was talk about budget cuts, she made sure to be indispensable, because she was a single black woman officer and well aware of what that meant. When shitty things happened anyway, she did what her mother had done: she cried in private and then bucked up and did whatever was necessary for damage control.

Now, just shy of forty, Lt. Dr. Leandra Butler was one of the leading military neurologists, heading a team of top scientists in a high-security facility, and was angling for a captaincy and a second doctorate, this time in anatomic pathology. She had little to no personal life and frankly didn’t particularly mind. If she had wanted two-point-five kids and a picket fence, she’d have chosen a different line of work. Her mother had passed away painlessly in a comfortable apartment financed by Leandra, and she’d died knowing fragile Kitty was cared for and not-so-fragile Lee was thriving even in the male-dominated environment of the US military. She’d

grudgingly accepted that grandkids weren’t going to happen, which, frankly, had been a relief. Leandra was as happy as she was going to get, she supposed. She might not have been much closer to making her sister walk again, but she was definitely one of the people who might just make it possible for future generations to heal paraplegia. She’d reached a satisfying status quo.

Then a bona fide spaceship crashed in Texas and Leandra got to examine three charred alien corpses, and suddenly the future was rife with a million new possibilities.