Throughout, Kira kept feeling the odd pains in her abdomen. They were starting to concern her.

One thing Sparrow had her do that Kira hated: poke herself in the arm with the tip of a knife and attempt, with each poke, to keep the Soft Blade from hardening in protection.

As Sparrow said, “If you can’t withstand a bit of discomfort for future gain, you’re pretty much a waste of space.”

So Kira kept stabbing her arm, biting her lip the whole while. It wasn’t easy. The Soft Blade insisted upon squirming out of her mental grasp and stopping or diverting the descending blade. “Stop that,” she finally muttered, fed up. She stabbed again, only not at her arm, but at the Soft Blade, wishing she could cause it the same pain it had caused her.

“Hey! Watch it!” Sparrow said.

Kira looked to see a spray of jagged thorns extending half a meter from her arm. “Ah! Shit!” she exclaimed, retracting the thorns fast as possible.

Her expression grim, Sparrow scooted the bench back another few centimeters. “Not good, Navárez. Try again.”

And Kira did. And it hurt. And it was hard. But she didn’t give up.

2.

Kira was sore, sweaty, and hungry by the time Sparrow called a halt to the proceedings. And she wasn’t only tired in body but in mind; contending with the xeno for so long was no easy matter. Nor had it been much of a success, which bothered her more than she liked to admit.

“It was a start,” said Sparrow.

“You didn’t have to push quite so hard,” Kira said, wiping her face. “You could have gotten hurt.”

“Someone already did get hurt,” said Sparrow in a cutting tone. “I’m just trying to keep it from happening again. Seems to me we pushed just hard enough.”

Kira glared at her. “You must have been real popular with your squad in the Marines.”

“Let me tell you what it was like. This one time in training, there was this dumbfuck from Stewart’s World. Berk was his name. We were doing a stint on Earth—you ever visit Earth?”

“No.”

Sparrow half shrugged. “It’s a crazy place. Beautiful, but there’s living things wanting to kill you everywhere you go, just like Eidolon. Anyway, we were doing a manual-fire drill. That means no implants or overlays to help. Berk was having a rough go of it, and then he finally gets in the groove and starts hitting his targets. Bam, his gun jams.

“He tried to clear the blockage, but nothing doing. Thing is, Berk had a temper like an overheated kettle. He’s swearing and kicking, and he gets so worked up, he throws his gun into the dirt.”

“Even I know better than that,” said Kira.

“Exactly. Our range master and three drill sergeants descend on Berk like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. They chew him a new one, and then they have him pick up his rifle and march across the camp. Now, out by the back of the dispensary there was a hornet’s nest. Ever been stung by a hornet?”