“Absolutely fine,” Yirella replied stiffly. She gazed at Jenner, sitting behind hir desk. The principal was male cycling, dressed in a suit of some shiny ebony fabric with a slim white collar and scarlet piping, which made hir look more imposing than any head of a simple educational establishment should be.

“But then I was never in any real danger, was I?”

Jenner and Alexandre exchanged a glance.

“No,” Alexandre admitted with deep reluctance. “If you’ll indulge me: When did you work it out?”

“Why? So you can avoid making the same mistake with the next yeargroup?”

“That’s not quite as detrimental as you seem to think,” Jenner said. “We are all of us learning here. We simply wish to know if we should adapt our procedures and tell the girls in advance.”

“But not the boys?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They are the point troops. You know this. They have to learn how to act together in a unit.”

“I think even the boys have got that by now,” Yirella growled. “Eighteen years of indoctrination tends to make that very clear.”

“We are not indoctrinating you,” Jenner said immediately. “This is a training facility, that’s all.”

“Training us to fight for you.”

“Humans are a hunted species, Yirella. Sometime, somewhere in this galaxy, we have to stop running and fight back. You have known that it is your destiny, to confront the enemy, from the very beginning. We never withheld that from you. Everything which has followed, everything we have taught you and trained you to do, is designed to give you the greatest chance of success.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Including the cougar?”

“No,” Alexandre said ruefully. “The cougar was a mistake. We didn’t know one was in the area.”

“But the moroxes, they’re not real, are they? They’re just genten remotes.”

“They used to be real,” Alexandre said. “Thousands of years ago in a star system light-years away. A traveler generation starship found a planet with indigenous biological life not dissimilar to terrestrial evolution, which is always a rare and wonderful surprise. They stopped and studied the xenobiology for a century before moving on. We replicated the basic morox form in molecular initiators. It provided you with a believable threat.”

“It nearly ripped Dellian’s arm off!”

“No, it never did that. They were deep scratches, that’s all. Plenty of blood, but no real damage.”

“You scared the living crap out of us to give us motivation? You bastards!”

Alexandre sat next to her and reached out to put hir arm around her shoulders. She shook hir off angrily. “Don’t. Not you. You were supposed to be the one we trusted, our almost-parent. You betrayed us.” She wiped her eyes, struggling to hold tears in.

“I would die before I would betray you,” Alexandre said. “I might not be your biological parent, but my love for you is just as strong.”

Yirella shook her head. “No parent would do this. Doesn’t matter what kind.”