After her transition to a gbeto, Fela underwent the field training, which followed many of the ancient ways. Perfecting spear throwing and other aiming skills. Tracking animals. Running nonstop for kilometers on end. Climbing trees. Swimming across river channels. How to camouflage. And she withstood various punishments. Gbeto had to learn to endure pain. That was the road they walked now. Like all military leaders, Maulana was tasked with choosing prospective members of the HOVA leadership. Such selection brought prestige to a home, thus Fela suspected a certain amount of calculation to his choice. But she’d still have to prove herself worthy.

The rain cut at her in thick sheets. She found no footing; each step slipped backward before she could make any movement forward. The droplets pelted her without mercy. The wind an invisible lash. The only clothing she wore was the thin nanomesh as she completed the ten-kilometer sprint. At the base of the mountain that served as her finish line was the rest of her gear. A powered-down carapace, a navsuit, and a talon. She had to don the gear and ascend to the base camp, nearly four thousand meters above her. She collapsed into the mud. The navsuit alone weighed over twenty kilos, which felt ten times heavier when she struggled with it.

She still adjusted to her posttransition conditioning. Women adjusted better to the mitochondrial insertion and other genetic modifications of the gbeto. The transition included genomic and cellular modifications so that her cells not only possessed dual mitochondria but could rapidly detoxify reactive oxygen species and other cellular wastes. Maulana yelled at her that she wasn’t actually tired. Her mind still thought of herself, her body, in pretransition terms, with its limitations imprinted on her mind. She was tired only because she thought she should be tired.

She battled the dysphoria in her own mind.

“I can’t do it.” Fela slipped under the carapace rather than try to lift it over her head to slip on. When she tried to stand, her legs buckled under her.

“How can you be trusted with a weapon? How can your sisters’ lives be trusted with you?” Her brother stood under a partitioned canopy, shielding him from the elements.

“To hell with you. You’ve always been hard on me!” Fela yelled.

“Yes, I have been. And I will continue to be the hard stone that sharpens your edges!” he yelled without pity. “Now pick yourself up and fight for your sisters.”

From a place deep within her she didn’t know she had, she latched on to a pool of strength. She stood up, her talon secured on her back, and she began her …