A moment’s lapse, and Sparrow would have been lying on the floor, blood oozing from a half-dozen different wounds. Kira could see it in her mind.

She took another breath and then forced herself to smile. Not an angry smile. Not an evil smile. A flat, calm smile that said, You can’t break me. She meant it, too. She and the Soft Blade were working together, and Kira felt a solid sense of control, not only over the xeno, but herself.

Sparrow grunted and stepped back. The tension in her shoulders slacked. “Not bad, Navárez.… Not bad.”

Kira allowed the pattern to melt into the surface of the Soft Blade. “That was really fucking risky.”

A quick laugh from Sparrow. “It worked, didn’t it.” She returned to the bench and sat.

“And if it hadn’t?” In the back of her mind, Kira couldn’t help but feel a sense of triumph. She really had made progress on the way to Bughunt. All those practice sessions alone in the dark had been worth it.…

Sparrow clipped a bar attachment to the weight machine. “You’re going dirtside tomorrow to poke around an alien city, looking for some scary-ass alien superweapon. Shit could go sideways real fast, and you know it. If you couldn’t handle a little something like this”—she shrugged—“you shouldn’t leave the Wallfish. Besides, I had confidence in you.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” But Kira smiled as she said it.

“Nothing new there.” Sparrow started to do pulldowns on the weight machine, using fairly light weight. She did a set of ten and then stopped and hunched over, eyes screwed shut.

“How’s your recovering going?” Kira asked.

Sparrow made a disgusted face. “Well enough. The doc kept me at a slightly higher metabolic rate than normal in cryo, which helped with the healing, but it’s still going to be another few weeks before I’m rated to get back in an exo. And that really burns me.”

“Why?” said Kira.

“Because,” said Sparrow, massaging her side, where she’d been injured, “I can’t fight like this.”

“You shouldn’t have to. Besides, we’ve got the UMC with us.”

Sparrow snorted. “You grow up on a colony or what?”

“Yeah. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Then you ought to know you can’t off-load responsibility on someone else. You have to be able to take care of yourself when shit goes down.”

Kira thought about that for a moment as she put away the weights she’d been holding. “Sometimes we can’t, and that’s when we have to rely on other people. That’s how societies work.”

Sparrow sucked her lips against her teeth in an unpleasant little smile. “Maybe. Doesn’t mean I have to like being disabled.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

5.

As they left the hold, they passed by the Marines, and Kira greeted them as she had on the way in. The men started to reply, but then they saw Sparrow and their expressions grew cold.

Tatupoa jerked his chin toward her. His tattoos gleamed like sapphire wires amid the shadows cast by the storage racks. “Yeah, we looked you up. Just keep walking, gas-head. We don’t need your like around here.”