‘Premature aging?’ Melissa asked.
Nava gave her a look and she shrank in her seat, but she still got an answer. ‘They wanted a product they could use quickly. They accelerated our development process. We spent five months in the incubators. We had mature, adult bodies by the age of nine. Nine Earth years. The base where they did all this was established on Earth, where no one bothered to go looking.’
Courtney nodded to herself. She said nothing, but that confirmed her speculation. Nava had been born on Earth, one hundred and forty-six light years away.
‘They got the genetics wrong at first,’ Nava went on. ‘The accelerated development became accelerated aging. Dramatically accelerated in some cases. Number six died young. She seemed okay at first, but she looked to be about seventy by the time I was three. Her heart gave out on her during daily exercise.’
‘Doesn’t that mean your lifespan–’
‘No, Mel, I’ll live longer than you. When they were creating the later genomes, they added every anti-aging trick they could find. If the lower numbers hadn’t died anyway, they’d have had shorter lives, but Maya, me, and a few earlier ones were engineered to live long, useful lives. I can expect to make two hundred years, uh, something like a hundred and sixty or more Alliance-standard years, even without any other intervention.’
Mitsuko let out a breath. Nava glanced at her and then went back to looking at the table.
‘Anyway, they started on the real training when I was six or so. We learned sorcery. Attack spells and spells to help us get in where we could kill our targets. As it went on, more and more of the girls were evaluated as “not up to standard.” Or they died. Uncontrolled, untreatable cancers. Organ failure. Not enough power or talent. The ones in the last category, like Maya, were taken away. I was told they were dead. Executed. It seems like at least some of that may have been part of my training.’
‘But Maya wasn’t dead,’ Courtney said.
‘No,’ Fawn said. ‘We’d all like to know how many of them the Redwings lied to Nava about. Maybe Maya was the last. We just don’t know, which is worrying.’
‘There are four more I can’t account for,’ Nava said. ‘I saw most of them die, but five, including Maya, were taken away as rejects. They wanted an emotionless, fearless weapon, so part of the training was emotional manipulation spells and attacks with Terror. The Terror spells worked. I just don’t get afraid like normal people. I suppose you could say I developed an immunity to fear. The emotionless bit… Well, I learned not to show my emotions. I got so good at hiding what I felt that I can’t stop. After Maya was gone, they started teaching me the final step. Two spells that were to make me their Handmaiden of Death. Some of the scientists wouldn’t shut up about that. Anyway, two spells. Magic Burst and Hand of Death. Hand of Death causes instantaneous heart failure in anyone I touch.’
‘That’s what killed Jesse Audley,’ Courtney said. ‘When he came after Mel, you killed him with that.’
‘Yes. Another thing they drilled into me was that enemies deserved to die. Enemies had to die, no matter what. Anyone I faced in combat, I had to kill. They would capture people and bring them to the base and offer to let them go, if they could kill me. None of them ever escaped. I’ve killed… a lot of people. I stopped counting.’
‘But… How did you end up like you are?’ Melissa asked. ‘Maya was… was a fanatic. You’re not like that!’
Nava shrugged. ‘I’m not entirely sure. They wanted me emotionless and I resisted. They taught me to sense when people were lying, and I started seeing that they were lying to me when they told me how corrupt the Clan Worlds were. They told me how the Redwing clan had been unjustly outlawed. It wasn’t even as if they believed what they were saying. When the ASF raided the base, I saw my chance.’
‘Huh, yeah,’ Fawn said. ‘We were working our way in, meeting fairly stiff resistance. And then it just stopped, and this girl walked out of one of the doors ahead of us, hands in the air. She got down on her knees before we could say anything. Turned around, dropped to her knees, and put her hands behind her head. She said, “You can take the rest of the facility now. They’re all dead.”’ Fawn glanced at Nava, then away. ‘It was the way she said it. Flat. Emotionless. It wasn’t a voice that ought to belong to a young adult. We brought her back here, taught her how to behave in clan society, and arranged for her to enrol at SAS-squared.’
‘And gave her rank in the ASF,’ Kyle said. ‘You called her “specialist.” That means she has rank as a sorceress.’
‘Officially, she’s a second lieutenant, specialist, under the junior officer programme. Well, semi-officially. It’s a secret. Mostly because we don’t consider it as informal as that position usually implies. Nava is an asset we’d like to develop further. Potentially, she’s one of the most powerful sorceresses in the Alliance.’
‘You mean she isn’t already?’ Mitsuko asked. ‘She’s way ahead of pretty much everyone in the school. Including faculty.’
‘She can get better.’
‘Because I’m not–’ Nava began.
‘You don’t need to tell them that,’ Fawn said quickly. ‘That’s… personal.’
‘If I’m telling them how I got here, they might as well know it all.
