Glass Ceiling

By Aadler

Part I

On Cordelia Chase’s twelfth birthday, something important happened, something of such deep and significant meaning to her that she never forgot it:

Nothing.

Her body was starting to change (not visibly, not yet, but she could feel the changes and understood the ramifications); her facial structure, too, had begun the shift to something different, firmer, so that people were no longer saying, “Well, isn’t she gorgeous!” and were now more likely to observe, “Good Lord, she’s going to be a heartbreaker.” She was growing up, and she was going to act grown-up.

So, in the months leading up to it, she hadn’t pestered, hadn’t handed over gift lists or dropped hints or engaged in any such childish practices. She had simply waited, with conscious maturity, to see what her parents would do for her: what kind of party she would have, who they would invite, which gifts they would shower upon her, which privileges she would suddenly possess. Anticipation was mounting agony, but she showed none of it; to parents, servants, friends and teachers she presented the same impenetrable mask of tranquil self-assurance.

The mask was stressed terribly when the day passed without event, but it held solid, though in the end it was maintained by rage. Privately, as the hours ticked by, she had checked and rechecked the calendar (and finally, secretly, confirmed the date by consulting her birth certificate); but externally she showed no flicker of awareness or caring.

They had forgotten. She was the center of their universe, and they had forgotten.

Nor did they ever remember. She went through the first days waiting for their guilty reaction when they realized their appalling oversight. By the time it became clear that the lapse would never occur to them, pride and wrath had forever sealed her against raising the subject.

It wasn’t that they were negligent, that they didn’t care; they doted on her, she had been their princess since birth. But in the aftermath of bitter disappointment, she understood with searing clarity that it was up to her to keep the spotlight centered where it belonged. She was special, yes, no question about that, but her job was to make certain that everyone remembered it.

She did not suddenly change. She formulated her course of action with ruthless meticulousness, and implemented it inexorably but gradually. She became more of certain things, and less of others. Pity she did not need; power, its acquisition and effective use, was a different matter. Everything was evaluated, and either discarded or honed for use, based on its utility in regard to a deeper purpose.

She would prefer to be loved, though she wouldn’t beg for it. She could live with being hated, as long as hate was layered on top of fear and respect. But she would never, ever again, be forgotten.

* * *

The thin, sallow-skinned woman didn’t hate Cordelia; but Cordelia hated her, and it had become her dearest goal in life to see her dead.

There was no time where they were, except as marked by periods of sleep, the space between meals, and how long bruises remained before healing; no sunrise or sunset, for they never saw the outdoors. There was only one training room or another, and no life beyond training; nor were names used between the two of them, so Cordelia simply thought of the other woman as Bitch.

Their first meeting had guaranteed that they would never be friendly. Cordelia had been confused, disoriented, her memories still jumbled and fragmentary. This had not prompted any sympathy from Bitch; she had given Cordelia a quick, scornful inspection, and said, “Jesus, this is what I have to work with?” She had brushed away Cordelia’s feeble protest: “Can it, Princess. Whatever it is doesn’t matter, and if it did I still wouldn’t care. I’m supposed to teach you how to fight. I can fight, but damned if I know how to teach. Not that He cares, so let’s just get to it.”

Then she hit Cordelia in the mouth.

Crying out with surprise and outrage, Cordelia stumbled back, and the other woman followed, speaking conversationally. “Straight punch. Strike with the first two knuckles. Don’t lock the elbow, power it with a twist of the hips. After I turn you loose, you’ll do a thousand of those, right and left, a hundred at a time. That’s the punch. The defense against it — one defense, anyhow — is this.” She slid one arm past the other, sweeping across her upper body. “Outside block. You’ll do a thousand of those, too. But for now, use it.”

And from that point on, she simply followed Cordelia around the room, striking her over and over, always the straight punch she had demonstrated, and instructing her disinterestedly: “Block. Block. No, idiot, block my left with your right, my right with your left.” Later, much later, she would show how one could use a right block against a right punch, if prepared to cover the opening it left; for that first session, she just struck at the opening, hammering Cordelia’s ribs whenever she blocked with the wrong arm.

In fairness to her (and Cordelia was always fair; when the day came that she tortured the other woman to death, she wanted every offense precisely measured so it could be precisely revenged), she didn’t pummel her student simply for the pleasure of it. If she had used her full strength, she would have beaten Cordelia to death within ten minutes. (For that matter, she would eventually have fractured her own knuckles if she had pounded them for so long against Cordelia’s facial bones.) No, she just made it hard enough to hurt, and kept it up until Cordelia was too battered to fight back any longer, or even to stand. Then, looking down at where the bleeding, weeping girl lay huddled on the floor, curled into a defensive ball, she said, “We’ll do the same thing tomorrow. Be ready.”

The quarters Cordelia had been given, though not so luxurious as those in her original home, were adequate for minimum needs. She lay aching in the bathtub for two hours, replenishing the hot water whenever it cooled, before staggering to her bed. Pain and fury kept her from falling asleep immediately; when at last her body began to relax, she was jerked to full wakefulness by the recollection of what awaited her on the morrow.

When Bitch said a thousand repetitions right and left, did that mean a thousand total, or a thousand of each? Cordelia settled the question by doing a thousand of each, slowly, focusing on the motion, feeling her balance and the movement of her muscles, visualizing her enemy. It had not been an especially complex lesson plan, but it had definitely communicated the essential point: she would be shown an attack, then the defense against it, then she would have the holy living hell beaten out of her until she could perform the defense well enough to prevent it.

She returned to the bed with a new set of hurts, from the near-endless repetitions of the blocking technique. An hour later she rose again, and did a thousand repetitions of the punch. With each arm. Because already she knew — knew, because she had sworn it — that someday, someday she would be the one doing the hitting.

* * *

The worst of it was that that wasn’t the worst of it.

She had been in bad shape when they, whoever “they” might be, had brought her here, wherever “here” might be, and her physical recovery had moved well in advance of the rest of her. Accordingly, she had been set first to physical tasks, i.e., martial arts training with Bitch. After several weeks (best estimate) of that, however, something else was added to the schedule.

Cordelia had learned quickly in that time. She was still taking a beating in every single session, but none like the first. Actually it was worse than the first, because she pushed herself pitilessly, and in the second session she had tried a few punches, and learned painfully that the outer block she had been shown could itself be used as a striking technique, against the inside of her arm. Before, the bruises had come from a nonexistent defense; now, they were an inescapable part of the training itself, avoidable — if at all — only at the cost of never learning how to properly strike back. Every night, after thousands of repetitions, she went to bed black and blue; but none of that carried the emotional impact of the first day, when she had been systematically hammered to the ground with no way of preventing it.

By the third week (if that was what it was), she was working six blocks and five different types of hand-strikes, and going toe-to-toe with Bitch four times a day. Then her routine changed, and the change was not to her liking.

It was the end of their second daily session, and as usual Cordelia hadn’t even come close to landing a blow on her teacher/ persecutor. (She had lately begun to scale back, however, going at it with just less than full speed and force, saving that for practice against the heavy bag that had been installed in her room. Why show Bitch everything in her repertoire? better to keep something in reserve, something that could serve as a surprise when the right moment came.) This time, however, rather than the usual brusque instruction to eat, rest, stretch and do repetitions until called on again, Bitch told Cordelia, “Come this way.”

Suspicious — harsh as her current regimen was, at least it was something she understood — Cordelia balked. “Why?”

Bitch could become unpleasant when resistance was offered, but on this occasion she only said, “Part of the program He’s laid out for you. What do you care, as long as it means we don’t have to look at each other as often?”

Good point, Cordelia thought but didn’t say, and followed the other woman through doors that had heretofore been sealed to her, along corridors that opened out into other rooms. It was Cordelia’s first sight of anything new in longer than she could remember, and she felt something within herself subtly realign at this reminder of a larger world.

It had taken her a frighteningly long time to begin wondering at her cicumstances, even to fully notice; it was as if her brain had been so fogged, it could focus only on a small area directly in front of her. She lived in one set of rooms, trained in another; food appeared rather than being brought to her, and in the same way dishes, wrappers and leftovers were taken away (or disintegrated, for all she knew) whenever she was elsewhere. Everything around her was smooth and bland and generic, like a modest motel or the school in a respectable but not wealthy suburb; but there were no windows, and all doors led to sections of the same interior. Housebound with a vengeance.

Her pleasure at this expansion of her environment, none of which she had allowed to show, ended when they reached their destination. It was an electronics workshop, not large but thoroughly furnished, and the woman at one of the tables stood to greet Cordelia with a smile. “Hello, I’m Mandy,” she said. “I hadn’t expected you so soon, but I’m glad He thinks you’re ready. How do you feel?”

“She’s ready,” Bitch said curtly. “She’s starting to try combinations I haven’t taught her, so it looks like she has most of her marbles back. Getting some use out of it, that’s up to you.”

Mandy looked to Bitch with sparkling eyes. “I’m sure she’ll do fine. Won’t you, Cordelia?”

Bitch made a faint, disgusted noise from the back of her throat and walked away, leaving Cordelia with this new phenomenon.

Even as she returned Mandy’s smile with one carefully noncommittal, Cordelia was cataloguing and calculating. Bitch was about the same height as she herself was: whippet-thin, though all of it firm muscle, with a rough, sallow complexion and eyes of a gray so pale as to almost look like silver contact lenses. Mandy … well, picture Sarah Jessica Parker’s bony body, with Amanda Peet’s coloring and facial structure: not as hot as she acted like she was, but definitely with enough wattage to get the job done. Her eyes were a vibrant, liquid blue beneath dark, arched brows, her lips full and moist. She wore a light midriff-baring spaghetti-strap top and a denim miniskirt — frayed hem and all — that just screamed Eighties. (The top was a mistake; you never wanted to show that much cleavage when you had so little to show.) “Why am I here?” she asked; not haughtily, she had already learned better, but not giving any ground before she had to.

“I’m supposed to teach you electronics,” Mandy told her, still holding the smile that said she was sure they’d be such good friends! (Cordelia had already decided to trust her somewhat less than a diamondback rattler.) “Fuses and detonators, mostly — timed, contact, pressure-switch, proximity, command-detonated — plus some alarms and probably electronic surveillance and detection. But we’ll be starting with fuses.”

Cordelia let a little tremble of hope creep into her own smile. She hadn’t yet fully returned to her old form (most of her marbles back, indeed!), but some memories were too stark ever to be lost. Beneath this woman’s ingratiating eagerness were faint currents of two other things she remembered all too well. The first was Natalie French’s smug, predatory amusement at the hormonal reactions of the creatures right below her in the food chain. The second was Xander, lazily tracking any passing female with what Cordelia thought of as his “radar vision”; not pursuing any of them, not yet, but maintaining constant awareness in readiness for the day when he decided one was worth moving to follow.

She had always known he would leave her eventually, but hadn’t been prepared for how badly it would hurt. She wasn’t about to let that happen again — she would kill or die first — but there might, somewhere down the line, be advantage to be drawn from letting someone think she might be so vulnerable …

“Fuses,” she said. “Okay, teach me fuses.”

* * *

Chicks dig scars, the axiom ran, and that might or might not be so; Cordelia had never given it much thought herself. She would, however, be the first to attest that any such favorable response absolutely did not apply to scars in her own flesh. On a bleak night in April of 1998 she had acquired a second navel, courtesy of some moronic run-of-the-mill demon that just happened to catch her off-guard, and the truth she had never admitted to anyone was that the impaling spike had hurt her less than the way Xander had so casually discarded her so he could follow new interests with Amy.

After the first surgery, the doctors had run an intestinal endoscopy to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, and then gone back in to do minor follow-up repair. Both events were complete blanks in Cordelia’s recollection. Not that she would have wanted it otherwise — hello, that’s what anesthesia is for! — but in each case it was an unsettling experience. Forget what you see in movies, a misty fade-out with a slow return to wakefulness; nope, both times she had been talking to the staff, following instructions, and then they were asking her if she could take deep breaths for them, and it was over. This wasn’t like sleep, or even normal unconsciousness (with which she had far too much experience, thank you!); there was no sense of time lost, she was conscious and alert one moment and equally aware the next moment, only the moments were a couple of hours apart and she had missed all of it. Later she had learned that one of the pre-op medications actually chemically prevented memory from being formed; you could be awake, coherent, understanding what you were told and asking intelligent questions, but none of it stuck to your brain. The cells just wouldn’t hold a charge until the drug wore off.

Her current state wasn’t really like that, but it reminded her of it. For a long time she hadn’t been able to make any of the normal connections, so that she had drifted though the days uncomprehending and unlearning. When she did begin to return to herself, it was gradually and sporadically, and still there were gaps. Her bloody introduction to Bitch was the first memory she had been able to retain since her rescue-slash-kidnapping-slash-enslavement. At that point she had still been too disoriented (and, shortly thereafter, too busy recovering from blunt trauma) to think of asking questions; by the time the possibility occurred to her, she would have been more likely to wear Bermuda shorts from Kmart than to demean herself by seeking information from that bitch, Bitch.

However, though that initial training day was her first memory, it wasn’t the earliest. There was another, one so deep-buried that she didn’t so much remember it as discover it; one evening in her room, while going through yet another set of repetitions (and after a vague period spent trying to think of some way she might get close enough to her instructor to perhaps drive an elbow through her sternum), Cordelia had idly wondered just what were the circumstances of her arrival in this where-that-was-nowhere. Part of the way through that train of thought, she had realized that she knew something. It didn’t even feel like memory, more the “oh, yeah, I knew that” of something she hadn’t really forgot, only forgot to remember.

There had been a room, and there had been a man. The room was furnished a great deal more lavishly than the areas Cordelia had seen since; definitely done by a male (and not one with interior designer genes), no imagination or central theme, and the feng shui violations were just horrendous; but everything was expensive, everything was good quality and good taste, a classic baroque along the lines of Captain Nemo’s drawing room. The man … he wore robes, honest-to-God robes, and he was medium-framed but very tall, at least six-four, with dark eyes and dark curly hair, and one of those crisp little facial beards that people called goatees even though they really weren’t. He might have been thirty, or fifty and not showing his age, his features regular and refined rather than strictly handsome. And, inexplicably (even dazed and barely rational, she had known that this was not in keeping with the natural order of things), he had been paying Cordelia no attention at all.

“I agree, not much to work with,” he had been saying, to someone outside either her field of vision or her zone of awareness. “It is a massive overdose, which she will eventually metabolize, but it also appears that her system may have had an atypical reaction to the Orpheus. You will feed her and clean her, and there are some purging rituals that may be of help, but it will be some time before she shall have recovered enough of her capabilities that we can evaluate them. Time, of course, is not a problem. I have learned patience; you would be well advised to do the same.”

There were words in the background, and he had looked back to Cordelia with one eyebrow lifting slightly. “Is she? I very much doubt it. But even if she is aware of us, there’s little likelihood she can understand any of it, or retain anything she might.” He took hold of Cordelia’s chin and tilted her face upward. “Listen to me, girl. We pulled you out of a vampire tenement in one of the more blighted sections of the Bronx. No one was looking for you, because no one cared. You were garbage, regarded as such and abandoned as such.

“Every moment of life henceforth is a gift from me, more than you would have had without me and far more than you were owed. It is yet to be seen if you can be of sufficient use to me to provide recompense for that gift. If ever you do, then I may grant you freedom. Until such time, you are property, and property of little value. Keep that in mind, and comport yourself accordingly.”

He looked past her. “You see? No reaction, no sign of comprehension. Take her away, wash some of the stink from her. Once we see evidence of sentience, we may begin to judge what can perhaps be made of such poor material.”

The memory was not sharp, but there was nothing about it to make her doubt its accuracy. She continued the repetitions, focusing force and body alignment, watching her form in the full-length mirror and satisfying herself that her face showed nothing. She had made note of Mandy’s comment about electronic surveillance, and a camera behind the mirror was such a Hollywood staple. Property, was she? She’d show them property. But it wouldn’t be done by attitude; attitude could put some extra muscle behind the swing of a battle-axe (die, demon cootie!), but couldn’t substitute for one. She needed a lot more mojo before she’d be able to accomplish anything.

Fortunately, it would seem that they intended to provide her with exactly that; not weapons, precisely, but skills and abilities that she could use as weapons. They would regret that. Whatever these people knew, they did not know her, and she meant to educate them in a way they would never forget.


Part II

Cordelia learned fuses, and found that in her own way Mandy was as great a devotee as Bitch to the principle of learning by doing. The major difference was that, impersonally brutal slave-driver though she might be, Bitch wasn’t particular about how something was accomplished, as long as it got done; Mandy, however, was a maniacal perfectionist, insisting that all tasks be performed exactly the same way (her way) every single time. She wasn’t unpleasant about it, but she was relentless.

Correction: the major difference between the two women was their attitude toward Cordelia. Bitch regarded her as an unwelcome chore, and never hid her displeasure at the imposition, but her actual interaction with Cordelia was utterly matter-of-fact; she pounded the crap out of her student several times daily, but as dispassionately as if she were working on an assembly line. Mandy always made it personal, or tried to. She habitually stood just a bit too close, touched just a bit too often and let the touch remain just a bit too long, kept direct unwavering eye contact whenever she could, and strove endlessly, by voice and body language and that not-quite-suggestive smile, to create an atmosphere of intimacy between them.

It could have been a source of awkwardness and discomfort … except that Cordelia didn’t believe for a moment that Mandy was serious. The other woman was testing her, constantly sending out little probes just to see what readings she got; and Cordelia, who had long since mastered the intricacies of implied-sex-as-power, made sure that the return readings were faintly promising but never explicit. She would draw away from the little touches when she could … but not a recoil, just a half-step back and continue with the business at hand. Sometimes she would smile a little herself, and sometimes she would simply put on a thoughtful look, as if she might be considering previously unexamined possibilities. It was the same game she had been playing since junior high, only here she could operate more subtly (with teenaged guys, anything more subtle than a brickbat or full frontal nudity was simply below their perception threshold), and the fact that it was directed toward another woman only meant that Cordelia could proceed with automatic and total objectivity, never worrying that she might become convinced by her own artifice. She was immune, for not just one but three distinct reasons.

First and most obviously, Cordelia was no lesbo. She knew exactly what got her hormones humming, and — PC or not — certain attachments were just not optional.

Second, if she ever were to consider crossing that particular street, even for a visit, it would be with someone worthy of herself. She was eighteen, and Mandy, for all her studied windblown Revlon wet-lip foxiness, would be pushing thirty and was starting to show the mileage. If that kind of attitude was superficial, then superficiality had its advantages. Charlize Theron, maybe. Mandy, nuh-uh.

Third, there was something about the other woman Cordelia couldn’t have hoped to quantify but didn’t question for an instant. She had seen it in Natalie French, she had seen it more and more in Amy toward the end (before Faith had settled the matter by sticking a knife in the girl’s belly), she had seen it in every lame retro minion-vamp strutting through the Bronze: Mandy was a killer. Not just someone who killed; Buffy had done plenty of that without losing control or humanity, and even Faith had been badly shaken by Amy’s death, though there really hadn’t been any other way to save Willow from the Mayor and his little witch-Friday. No, Mandy was someone who wasn’t bothered in the least by killing, and that would pour ice water on any potential fantasies even if Cordelia had had an inclination in that direction.

So she was free to work a carefully-balanced pretense, just in case Mandy might ever actually become truly interested. That would give her leverage, and Cordelia wasn’t about to turn down any potential leverage. (She’d never really sleep with the woman, though. She had learned that much from prime-time television, and then had the awareness honed in the gladiatorial arena of high school dating: Unresolved Sexual Tension kept its power only as long as it stayed unresolved.) She had been brought here naked, and it was up to her to construct an arsenal from whatever she could find …

She used a wire brush to clear the threads on the end of the smooth metal cylinder, then placed the cap and began to tighten it down, exactly an eighth of a turn at a time. Mandy could have watched from the side, but she had chosen to stand directly behind Cordelia, one hand resting on her shoulder and her breath caressing Cordelia’s neck and ear. Cordelia paused and let a little shiver run through her (she could have suppressed it, but dress it up right and you can make a case of the creeps look like the first stirring of passion), then continued, eighth-turn, eighth-turn. When she felt resistance, she picked up the short-handled torque wrench, ran the calibration down to zero and then back up to the prescribed setting, and matched the socket to the angles on the end of the cap. She applied pressure until she felt the wrench’s internal mechanism “break”, then withdrew the torque wrench and stepped back. “There,” she said, looking to her instructor. “How was that?”

“Perfect,” Mandy said, eyes and smile brilliant. “Except, put all the tools back in the case when you finish; keeping your kit is part of the job.”

“Right,” Cordelia said, and began returning various implements to their recessed slots in the carrying case. “I knew that.”

“I know you think I’m compulsive,” Mandy said. “But when you’re working explosives, you can’t be too compulsive. You’re actually doing very well. It’s a pleasure to teach you.”

She was too close again. Cordelia let it hold for a moment, then shifted away, slowly enough for it to appear reluctant, her expression crafted to look like it was supposed to be guarded while revealing guilt, confusion, and a tinge of interest. “What about locks?” she asked. “Will I ever do locks?”

Mandy tilted her head, appraising Cordelia with amused satisfaction. “I hadn’t thought of it,” she said. “It’s not on the schedule, but it might be a good idea. I’ll ask, and we’ll see what He says about it.”

Increments of advantage. That was what it was all about.

* * *

Three days later, Cordelia tagged Bitch on the cheek during one of their sessions. She was on the ground an instant later, mouth open in a huge silent A-a-aaa-hhh! as Bitch applied excruciating pressure to a wrist that was not designed to turn in that direction. The pale-eyed woman stared down at her for an eternity while Cordelia struggled not to wet herself from the pain; then she released the trapped wrist and brusquely ordered Cordelia, “Do that again.”

Cordelia pulled herself to her feet, shaking out the throbbing hand, then began to circle the other woman. Okay, how had she done that? She remembered the move, but not the sequence leading up to it, and you couldn’t just pull this stuff out of nowhere, it had to be carried off under the proper alignment of circumstances …

Yes, there! Long step to the side, hook toward the short-ribs as Bitch wheeled to face her (blocked), hook to the other side and flow around the intercepting block to flash in a backfist from the opposite arm —

She missed by a fraction, Bitch had twitched away from it but Cordelia was moving into the opening, closing to drive a knee at her instructor’s side, only Bitch turned the knee with a hard palm-heel thrust and reaped Cordelia’s other leg out from under her, following her down and finishing her with a head-butt to the face as they landed.

By the time Cordelia could see again, Bitch had moved ten feet away, and watched as Cordelia staggered upright, blowing blood. (This would be the third time she had broken Cordelia’s nose, but here in where-the-hell-ARE-we?, it always healed cleanly and without complication.) “Goddamn,” the other woman said. “God damn. I didn’t teach you knees.”

Cordelia huffed; what was she supposed to do, apologize? “It was what I had,” she said. Then, “You didn’t teach me a defense against head-butts, either.”

Bitch studied her with a curious expression, and Cordelia belatedly realized it was a smile, the first she had seen on the woman. “The defense is to head-butt your opponent first.” She gave herself a little shake. “Okay, that opening you snuck the backfist through? You’ll never see it again, I didn’t even know I was doing it … but that is exactly the kind of thing you should be looking for, so keep your eyes open.” She scowled (okay, back into familiar territory). “You should have chopped me in the throat.”

What? “What?” Cordelia said.

“You get a clear shot, make it count,” Bitch insisted. “Might be the only one you have. That kind of chance comes around again, you’d better put me on the ground or I’ll kick your ass from one wall to the other.”

What have you been doing?, Cordelia thought, but she was already sideslipping the attack, Bitch driving straight for her damaged nose. The other woman always went for the weakest point, and Cordelia had learned very quickly to know her vulnerabilities and guard them.

There was no time for satisfaction, she was too busy being Bitch-slapped to the point of collapse. But that night, as she lay in bed counting her aches and breathing through her mouth, she considered the day’s events and filed them under Definite Progress.

In their next two sessions, Cordelia could tell that Bitch was regarding her differently. For one thing, she actually looked at her. Normally she kept her gaze just below Cordelia’s bust-line, and Cordelia had learned the utility of the practice: eyes on center-mass, your peripheral vision will keep you posted on hand- or foot-movements. Now, however, she was studying Cordelia’s face, as if trying to see (though she had never shown any interest before) the person behind it.

She also taught Cordelia knees. To the belly, take your opponent’s breath. To the ribs, try and crack a few. To the back of the knee, break the balance. To the side of the knee, break the knee. To the groin —

“Hey!” Cordelia protested, drawing back out of striking distance. “Do I look like a guy here?”

Bitch snorted. “It’s not a good move against a guy. They’ll guard the spot automatically, and even if you land one, you can’t really count on it. One time I had a guy take me down after I snocked him solid … and then once he had me trussed up and tucked away, he blew his cookies and laid around for awhile holding himself and moaning.” She showed teeth in a grin that was more of a snarl. “A woman, now, a woman won’t guard that area in a fight; and a good hard shot in the crotch won’t drop her, but it hurts like a screaming bitch, and you can hit her with something else while she’s still getting acquainted with new worlds of hurt.”

This was a new world in itself — Bitch was generally given to demonstrating her lessons directly on Cordelia’s shrieking flesh — but after that lapse she returned to her prior practice, and in the next hour Cordelia narrowly avoided a dislocated jaw, three re-breakings of her barely healing nose, and having her crotch driven up next to her two belly-buttons. (Side-thought: what would that kind of thing do to someone who already sang soprano —?)

Toward the end of the second session, Bitch simply stopped, lowered her hands, and said, “You’re a natural at this.”

Cordelia watched warily; this could be a distraction, the lead-in for another attack. “Well, if anybody would know, it would be you,” she replied at last.

“No,” Bitch said. “I’m good at fighting, always have been, and I worked to get better at it. But you, you’re a natural at learning.” She gave Cordelia another of those odd slantways looks. “If you keep at it, get instruction from other people … you’ll be better than me.”

Cordelia thought about it. “Is that bad?” she asked.

“It’s what it is,” Bitch said, and Cordelia stopped a kick just short of her belly. “Like that. We haven’t been doing kicks, have we? But you dropped a little and used the block for a low punch.” She shook her head, and added, as if to herself, “This might actually work.”

“What might work?” Cordelia asked, and struck at the moment of possible inattention.

They were busy for the next thirty seconds or so; then, while Cordelia was pulling herself back to her feet and blinking away tears from the agonized throbbing in her nose (she’d deflected and evaded most of the impact, but it was still pretty bad), Bitch went on conversationally, “Our fearless leader has some kind of master plan He’s working. He’s basically full of crap, but He may not have been wrong about you. We’ll see.” She glanced at her watch. “We’re about done for now anyhow. Come on, there’s somebody I want you to meet.”

Somebody else? Until now, Cordelia had been given no hint of any presence beyond the four of them: herself, Bitch, Mandy, and the unseen male she probably wasn’t supposed to remember but to whom the others made occasional reference. Or maybe it was him that Bitch was taking her to see. “What about my other lessons?” she asked, following. “You know, with —?”

“Mandy? Screw her, she can wait.” Bitch glanced back at Cordelia. “Better yet, don’t screw her. You know what they say about the praying mantis?”

“I’ve heard stories,” Cordelia said tersely.

“Yeah? Well, where she’s concerned, believe ’em.”

Once again, they were moving through new areas, doors that wouldn’t have budged for Cordelia opening freely before the other woman. Cordelia greedily drank in the further expansion of her world, trying to memorize details; then they came to a door that didn’t yield. Muttering to herself, Bitch rapped on it sharply, twice, and the two of them waited.

The woman who opened it was taller than either of them, sturdily but proportionately built, and Cordelia felt something click! inside her head as she noted that this new person had long, dark hair. Well, well. Most Western women had dark or medium-brown hair, but a sizeable proportion of them chose not to stay that way. (There had been a joke running through Sunnydale High during Cordelia’s junior year, sufficiently offensive to move her to scorching verbal retaliation: What do you get when you turn three blondes upside-down? — Two brunettes and a redhead.) No phony blondes here, and she tucked the information back for further study and a later time: the so-called fearless leader seemed to prefer brunettes. She might be able to use that.

Meanwhile, the as-yet-nameless woman was regarding them without welcome. “It’s too soon,” she said. “I don’t have the ordnance I need, and I’m still drawing up a learning schedule.”

“Lighten up, will you? This isn’t about that.” Bitch hooked a thumb at Cordelia. “She’s coming along okay, actually showing a little talent. I thought a change of pace might do her some good.”

The taller woman looked wary. “Change of pace?”

“Different fighting styles,” Bitch clarified. “She’s learning, but mostly she’s learning how to go against me. Time to mix things up a little.”

Cordelia could see the other woman gathering herself to refuse; apparently so could Bitch, because she said, “Okay, never mind, I’ll just send her over for some more hands-on with Mandy.”

That one struck home. “Go away,” the woman said to Bitch; and to Cordelia, “Come in.”

She did so, noting at a glance that these were quarters all but indistinguishable from her own. As the door closed, she asked, “Is it like this everywhere?”

“What do you mean?” the other woman said.

Cordelia sniffed. “So far, nobody I’ve met here can stand each other. You’re supposed to be working together — color me clueless on what — but everywhere I look it’s hate, loathing, and total lack of sisterhood.”

Her new host laughed. “If that woman was my sister, I’d shoot her. And if Mandy was …”

The expression of distaste was so pronounced that Cordelia hazarded a guess. “You’d shoot yourself?” she ventured.

“No, I’d shoot her with a bigger gun. And then scrub my DNA with bleach.” The woman held out her hand. “I’m Sam.”

Cordelia took it. “Cordelia.”

Sam regarded her with a slight smile. “So, are we going to hate each other?”

“I don’t know,” Cordelia said. “Are you going to pick up something and hit me on the nose with it?”

It was supposed to be a quip, but it came out sounding like something else. Sam lost the smile, and Cordelia postponed wishing she’d said it a different way, and concentrated on assessing the other woman’s reaction. She looked … ashamed, and that was worth thinking about.

“No,” Sam said. “We’ll do sparring — not today, but after I’ve gotten a feel for where you stand right now — but I won’t hurt you just for the fun of it. I’m not like that.”

Cordelia was taking nothing on trust, but this seemed promising. Looking around, she asked, “So what’s your job supposed to be, if working with me hand-to-hand is an add-on?”

“When you’re ready, I’ll be teaching you weapons,” Sam said. “Only it’s driving me crazy, He doesn’t really know anything about that so I have to design a curriculum —”

“Weapons?” Cordelia said. “Samurai, ninja, medieval, what?”

The smile came back. “Military,” Sam told her. “I figured I’d introduce you to the basics: M-16/203 combo, M-9 pistol, MP-5 sub-gun. Maybe some familiarization with the AK models, that’s always good to know; fragmentation grenades, claymores, some close-quarters techniques with bayonet and entrenching tool …”

“Whoa, whoa, time out!” Cordelia made the ‘T’ with her hands. “This is the basic stuff? For what, the invasion of Shadaloo?”

“Right,” Sam said. “Sorry. But you know what they say about too thin and too rich? Well, you can also never be too well-armed.”

* * *

Working with Sam was a lot more of a problem than Cordelia had anticipated.

Her dealings with Bitch and Mandy were, at bottom, based on trust. She trusted Bitch to hurt her at every opportunity, probably without taking direct pleasure from it, but certainly without regretting or apologizing for it. She trusted Mandy to lie to her, manipulate her, play with her for gain or amusement (that was if Cordelia gave her the chance, which she never would), and betray her for a moment’s advantage or even on a whim. But she liked Sam, enjoyed the time they spent together, and wanted to trust her. That, she knew without having to think about it, posed a hideous danger.

In their first meeting, after getting the preliminary introductions out of the way, Sam had asked a few questions about Cordelia’s current training regimen, and then nodded understanding and satisfaction. “About what I thought,” she said. “She’s good, but I think I can show you a few things she doesn’t pay that much attention to.”

“Is she better than you?” Cordelia asked. That information could be useful, as could how Sam felt about the subject. “I mean, could you beat her?”

“Yes, she’s better than me,” Sam said. “As for whether I could beat her … I intend to, if it comes to it, but it wouldn’t be a sure thing. I’ve got reach and strength on her, and I’ll take a hit to give one; but she’s fast, and she’s tricky, and she’s mean as a snake. Meet her on her own terms and she’ll smear you, count on it.”

“She’s been doing that already,” Cordelia said. “But how do I put things on my terms? I don’t have any power here. You guys are the teachers; I’m the student body, and this body has been taking some serious abuse since Day One.”

“I can see that,” Sam replied. “Three and four full-contact workouts a day, with no recovery time? Even here, that’s a killer, it’s a wonder you can even walk.” She looked around. “Okay, sit down over there, facing the back of the chair. I’ll do some massage to get you loosened up.”

Cordelia regarded her with a carefully mild expression. “Loosened up for what?”

Sam’s mouth tightened briefly, then she sighed. “Right. It’d be a surprise if you weren’t suspicious. Look, the old Japanese bujutsu had something called kappo, restorative techniques to help a samurai recover from training injuries. I don’t know any of those, but I figure therapeutic massage can accomplish some of the same things. Sleep is basically the only rest you get, right? Well, you’ll rest better and heal better if your muscles aren’t all tightened up, fighting each other.”

Cordelia sat down; bottom line, these people could do whatever they wanted to her. She would change that — she would — but until such time, acquiescence and the appearance of friendship were the only tools available for her use. Sam started in on her shoulders with strong fingers, careful but not tentative, and talked as she worked. “All right, now. As far as I can tell, most of her style is Korean-based: hapkido, hwarang-do, maybe a little kuk sool. It suits her: quick and nasty, just like her. The thing is, people tend to focus on what they’re good at; which means if you look at what they’re not doing, it may give you a clue to a weakness.”

The steady kneading of her fingers through stiff, aching muscles was a delicious agony; if this was a come-on, it might be worth it. Cordelia concentrated on making her whole body limp so that Sam could work on her without resistance. Not exactly tender loving care — in its way, it was as hard on her as combat sessions with Bitch — but she suspected she would feel a lot better when it was over with.

Sam was still talking. “If I was your primary teacher, I’d probably be running you through a lot of the same things she is. But, the whole idea of bringing you to me was to expose you to something new, so we’ll work at it that way. First of all, you’ll get a good massage every time you’re here … because you need it, I could crack walnuts on your neck muscles. I’ll also show you some yoga routines you can use to relax and build flexibility. As for actual fighting moves …”

She switched to Cordelia’s right arm and began to work down it slowly, seeking out knots of tension and methodically pulverizing them. “She works mostly hand techniques,” Sam continued. “That’s good, hands are fast and precise. But she’s still thinking in terms of human combat. Some things … nerve strikes don’t work as well against a creature that’s plated like an armadillo, or has spines covering its vital areas. For that you need weapons, or power. Your legs are probI don’t trust you. I can’t afford to. You, or anybody else.ably four times as strong as your arms, so you and I will go through different types of kicks, find what works best for you.”

Other arm, the left one. This went faster, because Cordelia had found the rhythm and was able to flow with it, but Sam didn’t rush. “Mostly, though,” she was saying, “I think I’ll teach you close-in grappling. Kicks, chops, punches, those are dandy and I love ’em, but they don’t stack up when it comes to F-equals-mv-two.”

That roused Cordelia from the torpor of near-total relaxation. “Huh?” she said blurrily.

“Physics,” Sam clarified. “Force equals mass times velocity squared. Punch or kick somebody, it’s your strength, your body-mass, your speed. But if you throw ’em … well, once they’re in the air, gravity supplies the velocity, and it’s their body-mass that gets tossed into the equation, and basically you’re hitting them with the ground. Trust me, even if you’re used to that, it’s hard to shake off.”

That’s the problem, Cordelia thought as she surrendered herself to the other woman’s ministrations.

She was alone. But then, she always had been.

* * *

Difficult as Sam’s addition to her daily routine was on an emotional level, it provided immediate and invaluable benefits elsewhere. Her training sessions with Bitch were becoming almost bearable; the massage and yoga really did work, and all the time she spent practicing with Sam was time not being put through a meat-grinder, so that her body had more opportunity to recover. In addition to that, controlled falls on the mat (Sam had brought in something she called tatami, 20'×20', for their workouts) had the effect of loosening her up yet further. The greatest advantage, however, came in her dealings with Mandy.

Thoroughly as she disliked the woman (and just as thoroughly concealed it), Cordelia had to admit that Mandy’s method of instruction was well-suited to her student. Cordelia was good at physical learning — witness her ascent to head cheerleader, she could pick up a new routine the first time she saw it — and even so, Bitch had nearly killed her in those first weeks of hand-to-hand training. On the other hand, though she had a good brain, she didn’t normally do well in technical subjects; and yet Mandy’s methodical approach, breaking every step down into smaller digestible chunks and ceaselessly reviewing previous lessons, was producing results that Cordelia would otherwise have considered impossible.

Cordelia had not, however, gained any ground in the subtler campaign she was waging. She hadn’t lost any, to be sure — she had neither been swayed by any of Mandy’s overtures nor burned the bridges that would be necessary for any possible offensives of her own — but stalemate was not to her liking. She was still in control of herself, but so was her instructor, and she hadn’t been able to think of any way to break that deadlock.

Sam’s addition to the dynamic changed that. Her dislike for Mandy was so pronounced that Cordelia assumed it must be reciprocated; and so, during her next instruction block — she had progressed far enough that she was now working with basic alarm systems — she mentioned her new instructor to Mandy, speaking of Sam with a glowing enthusiasm that seemed to hint at hero worship, punctuated by occasional wistful silences that might have suggested more.

Mandy’s self-conscious vitality had never dimmed in any of their prior dealings, but Cordelia saw it falter now. It was, Cordelia thought to herself, as if one of the chess nerds had taken it on himself to introduce her to the intricacies of the game; carried her along, encouraged her, taken pride in the improvement she demonstrated … and suddenly had to listen and be a good sport while she went into rhapsodies about some AV club geek who was teaching her to operate a teleprompter. No matter how disinterested he might originally have been (the analogy got strained at this point, because of course no guy in school had been disinterested where Cordelia Chase was concerned), that had to be a personal blow; and jealousy of any type, once it appeared, could be used and perhaps redirected.

As further weeks passed, Mandy’s smile no longer came so automatically, and carried a different flavor when it manifested. Before, her attentions to Cordelia, however framed, had been about acquiring power over her. Now, for the first time, it seemed that there might be some genuine desire beginning to make itself known.

She was holding her own with Bitch now in their twice-daily contests. She never won (she still wasn’t on the other woman’s level, and she was still keeping about five per cent of her capabilities hidden for the day when it might serve as an ugly surprise), but the skill gap was shrinking, and now Bitch was putting more attention into teaching and less into unending smackdown. Cordelia was getting stronger, quicker, more sure in her motions, and — not to be minimized — there were days at a time now when she didn’t look like a domestic abuse victim.

Sam finally got the right gear, and began introducing Cordelia to military firepower. Bitch began teaching her joint-locks. Mandy, too, brought locks into her lessons, and Cordelia was working with pins, tumblers, barrels and bolts, as well as with multimeters and magnifiers and tiny screwdrivers and battery-powered soldering irons. Mandy touched her less often now, and with less assurance; and now, about one time in every ten, Cordelia would lightly and quickly return the touch.

She continued to talk worshipfully about Sam, though, outwardly oblivious to the way it gnawed at Mandy.

Power was beginning to shift, and the direction of the shift was just where Cordelia wanted it.


Part III

One day, in the middle of a workout, things changed again.

It was one of those days when everything was going well, when her timing was just on and she seemed to have grown an extra lung; she was in the flow, and rode it for all it was worth. She and Bitch were going at each other like Broadway dancers in the grip of meth frenzy: back and forth, an endless rhythm, bodies closing and separating in flashes of motion. Hits were taken and shaken off, blocked and returned; feints became direct attacks, attacks were abandoned to segue into entirely different techniques, counters were instant and automatic and merciless. A part of Cordelia knew that it wasn’t quite real; Bitch could have taken her down in a second (well, a minute), but she was letting Cordelia learn how it felt to be in the groove, to move with all her mind and muscle and wind in perfect concert with her will. Cordelia could recognize and even appreciate that without allowing it to reduce her dedicated hatred of Bitch by the smallest margin.

She was using kicks in an attempt to break her opponent’s rhythm. The ones she had learned from Sam were power techniques, and she had quickly found that these couldn’t be delivered quickly enough to be effective against her primary instructor; so she was sticking to low kicks, front snaps to the shin and downward-slanting side kicks directed at the knee, always ready to follow up or defend with fists and forearms and elbows. Again she had the sense that Bitch was cutting her just that least bit of slack, allowing her to test and develop an approach, and she pressed it as hard as she could, determined to get maximum mileage out of this unexpected and uncharacteristic lenience …

Bitch slipped her with a breaking spin that looked exactly like a basketball move, and before Cordelia could reorient, the other woman had dropped and taken Cordelia’s feet out from under her with a leg sweep moving about six inches above the surface of the floor. Unable to avoid the move, Cordelia went with it, throwing her body into the fall and turning it into a rolling tumble, and she came back up firing a waist-level thrust-kick to where Bitch might be coming at her in a follow-up.

No follow-up. No Bitch. The other woman was standing well away from her, keeping an automatic eye on Cordelia but with her attention clearly focused elsewhere. Cordelia backpedaled to put more distance between them — she wasn’t going to get caught in what could be a sucker-move — and then darted a glance in the direction her instructor was looking.

He was there, the man from that elusive memory, the man who had to be the He who was calling the shots here. Cordelia hadn’t heard him enter, but that was no surprise; she and Bitch had been going at each other so single-mindedly, it would have required a loud noise (or a glimpse of color and motion, that must be why the other woman had stopped) to catch their attention. Again He wore robes, though of a different pattern and cut, and He regarded the two of them with calm speculation and total confidence.

“You didn’t say you’d be coming here,” Bitch observed sharply. (Note to self: she didn’t just make snide comments when He wasn’t around, she would express her annoyance to his face. And yet, she had made it clear that He was the one in charge. File for future inspection.) “Could have picked a worse time, though. So, like what you see?”

His gaze moved unhurriedly over Cordelia, checking everything and considering what He saw. Not one to be hurried, which would tie in both with the whole master-of-all-He-surveyed theme and with his remembered statement that time was not a concern. At last He said, “Quite impressive, yes. This is your specialty, of course, but it appeared that she was fighting you to a standstill. Have you, then, reached the limits of what you can teach her?”

Bitch jerked her head in Cordelia’s direction. “Ask her.”

The man looked to Cordelia. “I’m told you have learned quickly, and from what I just saw, you clearly have done so. Well? Could you defeat her?”

In the moments since his appearance, Cordelia had been thinking very quickly, though her expression remained the placid mask she had perfected before puberty. She had to choose, right now, how to respond to this new element, and if her chosen course was the wrong one, she had to be prepared to follow it out. By the time He had spoken to her, she had made her decision. “Do we know each other?” she asked.

His eyes showed mild surprise, and perhaps amusement. “Surely it must be obvious that I am He who rules in this domain.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. And a pretty cheap-assed domain it is, she elected not to add. “But that still doesn’t mean we’ve met. I generally like to be introduced to a guy before he starts grilling me.”

“You are under my hand,” He pointed out without heat. “There is no law here other than my will. I could have you flogged simply for failing to show proper respect.”

“Okay,” she said. “So, is that a no on the introduction?”

He smiled. “I am Roxeim,” He said. (The ‘x’ was actually a soft hocking sound, like the German ‘ach’ but less guttural.) “You are alive now solely due to my intervention.”

“Cordelia Chase,” she returned. He almost certainly had the power to know that already, but might not have cared enough to find out. The main thing was that social pleasantries put them into a venue where she could operate with experience and authority. “And I prefer to think I’m alive because the universe can’t stand for this face to be lost.”

His smile held, but didn’t deepen, so maybe little “behold the glory that is me” comments weren’t the best approach. “Be that as may,” he said. “As to the question I first asked: which of you is now the superior in combat? you, or she?”

Cordelia truly wasn’t tempted, not even for a moment. “She is,” she said. “What you saw just now, that was her going light on me so I could stretch out and work something new. She could have decided to teach me something new instead, and pounded me through the floor till I got it right.”

Roxeim looked to the other woman. “This is so?” he asked.

Bitch nodded. “She’s coming along pretty well,” she said. “Better than I expected, and a hell of a lot faster. Right now she’s at a level where she might hang in long enough to take me with a lucky shot. It’s progress.”

Roxeim glanced from one of them to the other. Then he said, “Fight. Do your utmost, withhold nothing.” To Cordelia he said, “You will find it much to your benefit to win.” To Bitch: “You will not, I think, enjoy the consequences if you lose.”

Oh, joy.

Cordelia knew that what her instructor had said was true: she was good enough now that she might win, if she got a lucky break. It was also true that she was highly unlikely to receive any such opportunity. The problem was, Bitch knew she’d been picking up new techniques from Sam, and now was the time when Cordelia could be expected to try them. She would have to reveal at least some of what she had held back, or the other woman would realize that she was hiding a lot more.

Bitch was waiting, watching her with a thin smile. “This is your big chance, Princess,” she said. “Come on. Go crazy.”

Cordelia moved toward her, and they circled one another, assessing, looking (in Cordelia’s case, without much confidence) for openings. No-holds-barred meant they had to be more cautious at the outset, because commitment when made would be total and devastating. If Cordelia had any advantage at all, it was that she had in fact fought for her life before this; it required no mental adjustment for her to reach that frame of mind, she had already been there.

Strike-block-counter, that quickly and then they had withdrawn and resumed the slow stalk of one another. Cordelia had initiated the exchange, she realized: seen a possibility and gone for it, automatic as breathing, and — whoa! That one was from Bitch, lasted almost a full second longer, and Cordelia escaped it with a diving roll that brought her back to her feet in ready-guard position.

It was like dancing, two people who knew each other well moving in response to actions they could read before they were made. It was like fencing, initiating a motion to call forth a reaction, and probing that reaction for a hint of weakness. It was as if the world had contracted to contain only the two women, their awareness focused on one another to the exclusion of all else —

Yeah, right.

Cordelia whirled and dashed at Roxeim with a blood-freezing shriek … then stopped, spinning as if on a pivot, and her shin caught Bitch in the side as the pursuing woman ran straight into the kick. It was the first solid blow Cordelia had ever landed on her and it wasn’t enough but she was committed now, she drove in to close and they were attacking each other with everything they had, short full-power jabs and chops, blocks operating at a distance of inches, knee slamming into thigh, elbow strike deflected by rising shoulder, foreheads smashing together as they tried simultaneous head-butts. The impact stunned and blinded Cordelia but she grabbed for the other woman, caught an arm and a handful of hair and instantly spun in for a throw.

Her vision cleared just as she powered her enemy into the air, it was the sweeping hip technique and she had it perfect, a twist of her hands turned Bitch in a tight circle, slamming her onto the floor with an awesome crash. Now was the time to take a step back and start kicking to ribs or head … but Bitch, from flat on her back, powered a kick straight up into Cordelia’s crotch with enough force to raise her on her toes and oh dear God in heaven she wasn’t kidding about new worlds of hurt, but Cordelia let herself collapse forward, she was going to drop both knees into the other woman’s gut with all her body-weight behind it …

But she wasn’t going forward, she was going over, Bitch somehow had caught Cordelia’s wrist and shifted the kicking foot to brace at the crease between leg and abdomen, and she boosted Cordelia over her in a rising arc. Hitting the floor hurt a lot more than the same fall on tatami, but Cordelia had taken a lot of falls in the past weeks and was twisting even as she landed, ready to break away and drive in for ground-grappling, only Bitch still had hold of her arm, snugging it in tight and pulling Cordelia closer, and then her legs had somehow gone across Cordelia’s chest and she was leaning back, stretching and straightening and pulling back.

It was an elbow lock, and the rule for locks was that once she had you, you had half a second to surrender. It was the only mercy Bitch had ever shown her, and done strictly because breaking an arm or wrist would slow down the training schedule; but Roxeim had said no limits, and Cordelia didn’t know if that meant she was allowed to surrender, and before she could make up her mind, Bitch heaved and yanked and Cordelia screamed as she felt the elbow crack.

She was on her feet, though she couldn’t remember rising, and the pain in her arm was like nothing she had ever known; but she took a stance, left hand forward, and got ready to keep fighting in any way she could. Whatever that might be.

“Enough,” Roxeim said. “I am satisfied.” To Bitch he added, “You were correct, she is not yet your equal; and you were correct, she has shown remarkable progress.” We were both right, Cordelia thought dizzily. So why is my reward a broken arm? “Tend to her,” Roxeim was saying. “Notify me when she is fit again.” He started for the door, paused to look back. “She is determined to kill you if ever she can. You are aware of this?”

“Aware of it?” Bitch said. “I’ve made sure of it.” Then: “Come on, Princess. Let’s get that arm looked at.”

There were many responses Cordelia could have made: cutting put-down, disdainful sniff, icy silence. Under the circumstances, she decided that fainting was the way to go.

* * *

Sam was the one to inspect and set the arm; apparently, along with her firearms skills, she had received some kind of basic medical training at some point in her life. Cordelia’s injury she regarded with white-lipped fury; but when she heard how Cordelia had drawn Bitch out by a feint at Roxeim, her entire face drained of color. “Don’t ever do that again,” she whispered. “Don’t even pretend to do it. Don’t think of pretending to do it.”

“Okay, I got it, he’s the big cheese here.” Somehow, on learning the man’s name (assuming that he actually was a man), Cordelia had stopped thinking of him as He. She could still hear the capital letter in Sam’s voice, however. “He’s mighty and unstoppable, we’re puny slugs cowering under his power, blah blah ad-infinitum blah. It’s just, do you have to cower so hard?”

“You don’t understand,” Sam said. “The way things are here … it isn’t only the power He has over us, his power is all that keeps us alive.”

“Come again?” Cordelia said. Sam had given her a couple of Percocet and a couple of slugs of whiskey; bad combination, according to the AMA, but it hit fast and hard, and she was starting to feel deliciously fuzzy. “He what, how?”

“Where we are,” Sam said. “This place. It’s all from him. I mean, the doors and walls, the food and tools and weapons, He brought them in, the way He brought us in. But the here that He brought us to, He made that. And it’s no place at all, actually, it’s a state of mind. His mind. Where we are is like a bubble in the ocean … but the bubble is his will, and the ocean is … nothing. There’s nothing out there, nothing at all. We can never escape, because there’s nowhere to escape to. We can never defeat him, because all He has to do is relax his will and the bubble is gone. And we can never, never harm him or try to harm him in any way, because if He dies, so does everyone else here.”

Cordelia thought about that for a very long time, “Well, that bites,” she observed at last.

She slept for twenty hours, and then returned to her routine.

Sam welcomed her back with a smile and the field manual for the placement and firing of claymore mines.

Mandy expressed horror and outrage at Cordelia’s injury, and Cordelia got all teary and wound up lying on a small couch with her head in Mandy’s lap, letting the woman hold her and stroke her hair, comforting her while she blubbered. Thinking, Dope.

Bitch launched attacks at the broken arm, and Cordelia fought non-stop with one hand and both feet.

Life went on.

* * *

Given Roxeim’s departing instruction, Cordelia assumed she wouldn’t see him again until she had recovered from the damage to her elbow. The passage of time was hard to gauge, but she made a point of marking it off every time she went to bed for the “day”. The elbow healed in less than three weeks. She didn’t know if this was normal, but it seemed unusually rapid to her, and would tie in with things Sam had said and with how quickly she had recovered from broken noses and other things that should have incapacitated her for at least a while.

In the meantime, she had continued all her other studies. In fact, there had been an unexpected bonus: unable that first week to handle other weapons in her times with Sam, she had practiced left-handed with the M-9 Beretta pistol, and found that she was just as quick and measurably more accurate than she had been with her right. She was also, it quickly became apparent, better than Sam at quick, vicious close-in work with the bayonet and the folding shovel, so that Sam early declined to work directly with her on those, and assigned her solo practice. Not that much of a switch, really, from batons and pom-poms; the weights were different, the movements were different, but the necessary coordination of hand and eye were the same.

Bitch also had begun an introduction to the use of hand-weapons. Whether or not Sam had been right about the woman’s style being derived from Korean arts, her weapons of choice were Japanese: forklike things she called sai; staff (bo); shorter stick (jo); the familiar-from-movies double-stick flail called nunchaku; a police baton with a side-grip that Bitch told her was a modern adaptation of the tonfa; and, most perplexing, bamboo swords (shinai).

Cordelia had chosen not to hide her doubtfulness about the latter. “What good are these supposed to be?” she wanted to know.

“They’re training tools,” Bitch told her. “The bokken — wooden sword — is heavier and good for building strength in the wrists, but a shinai has basically the same weight and balance as a katana, and you work the same techniques. Get good at this, and the transition goes a lot smoother.”

This was intriguing. “Real swords?” Cordelia asked. “Samurai swords?”

Bitch answered that with a laugh. “The day I let you pick up a katana,” she said, “is the day I’ll be watching you from fifty feet away with a rifle. I’ll teach you the moves, but I’m not about to screw around with live blades, not when I’m working with somebody who hates my guts the way you do.”

Cordelia nodded. “Good thinking.” She studied the other woman speculatively. “You told him that you worked to make sure I hated you. For motivation?”

“Does it matter?” Bitch said. “It only works as motivation if it’s real. And maybe I just get a kick out of smacking around the prom queen.”

“Sour grapes much?” Cordelia retorted. “I can’t begin to imagine — ’cause first I’d have to care enough to try — what your prom was like.”

“I cleaned up,” Bitch assured her cheerily. “While the debs were prancing around inside the gym in their formals, I was out back peddling half a bale of rum-soaked pot. Very mellow high. Then some of the local hustlers tried to jump me for moving product in their territory.” She grinned at the memory. “Good times.”

She started with the sai, because — she said — they were hardest. Cordelia couldn’t see it, herself. The moment she picked them up, they became extensions of her hands. It just all made sense. With this weapon, strikes, blocks, traps and locks — any hand technique, basically — became ten times easier. Bitch showed her three moves, and then gave it up … because it was obvious to both women, within the first ten minutes, that here she had nothing to teach Cordelia.

They tested it out, moving against each other with increasing speed and intensity. All the focus that had been missing for Cordelia was there now, concentrated into two formed lengths of metal. She still had only partial use of her right arm, and Bitch still had the advantage of her in speed and in depth of technical skill; but, for the first time, they were contesting as equals with different strengths.

It was all sparring. They didn’t fight. The status of things had changed, and they were mutually aware of it. Any fight, now, would have a final ending. It was a matter of deciding whether they were ready for that.

At last they separated, drew back to regard one another with new eyes. After long, wordless perusal, Cordelia looked down at the twin sai she held. “I know these,” she said. “This guy I used to … this guy at my school, he was heavy into comic books, and one of the superheroes had a girlfriend who used these. She liked to stab with them, throw them.”

“You can do that,” Bitch acknowledged. “If you’re facing multiple opponents, now, throwing a sai means you just have one left. You want to go that route, it’s a good idea to carry a spare. Tucked into a sash, or belt, or boot. Then you can throw one, and still have one for each hand.”

Cordelia nodded understanding. “And stabbing?”

“Not the best use of the weapon, but you can do it.” Bitch gestured with one. “It’s all point, no edge. Okay for disabling — knee, shoulder, wrist — but if you want lethal, it’s strictly heart and brain.”

Again they studied one another, a long, silent assessment. At last the other woman said, “You’re still not at your best. You come at me right now, odds are about three to two in your favor. Another week, week and a half, I wouldn’t be able to stop you. — Well, maybe if I had the jo, but no guarantees even there. ’Course, you only have my word for that.” She nodded to Cordelia. “For all you know, this will be the best chance you ever get. Your call.”

Cordelia considered it. “Why the jo?”

“Because I’m good with the jo. I mean, really good.”

She thought about it some more. “If I beat you,” she said. “If we show him another match and I beat you … would he still have me training with you?”

“I don’t know,” the pale-eyed woman said. “Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. He’s got big plans for you, and even though He says time doesn’t matter, I think He’s been getting a little twitchy the last ten years or so.”

Okay, new questions, but they could wait. “If you think you could beat me with the jo,” Cordelia said, “then I want to learn the jo.”

“All right. We can do that.” And then, “Are you sure you don’t want to just kill me?”

Cordelia shrugged. “It really doesn’t seem that important any more.” She looked to the person who had been the bane of her existence for a time beyond her measure. “I don’t actually know your name.”

“Lynn,” the other woman said. “Lynn Gayer. And … wait, I remember, you told him and I remember: you’re Cordelia.”

Cordelia frowned. “You’ve been beating me half to death for months and you didn’t bother to learn my name?”

“I didn’t care,” Lynn said. “If I thought of it at all, I thought of you as Princess.”

“Right,” Cordelia said. “And I called you Bitch.”

“Ah.” Lynn gave her a twisted smile. “Then I’d say we were both right.”


Part IV

Some things changed, and some didn’t, and some underwent a very small shift that made a significant difference. In the absence of external factors, Cordelia had come to evaluate her situation in limited but sharply specific terms:

First, where she stood within herself. Skills, knowledge, mental strength.

Second, where she stood with the other women; not just what she was learning from them, but who had the advantage within the ebbs and flows of interpersonal dynamics. It was subtler and less direct than the infighting and social machinations utilized by the SHS “in”-crowd, but the base forms were the same. The major difference was in the nature and extent of the power for which all this maneuvering was being done.

Third, where she stood in relation to this world. Which, she had been told — and she would operate on that basis without allowing herself to assume it was true — was synonymous with where she stood in relation to Roxeim.

For herself, she had never been stronger, tougher, more centered, and she was still growing. No problems there, except perhaps the challenge of finding ways of adding to herself that the others didn’t know about. The best weapon was a secret weapon.

Where the fearless leader was concerned, she knew little, but felt reason for wary optimism. She had started off with nothing, totally under his control; the control was still there, but she had increased. At the very least, she was no worse off, and when the time came to deal with him more frequently … well, that’s when the game would get interesting.

It was in regard to the others that the situation became less sure, more fluid. With Bitch — Lynn — things had improved hugely. What had been several-times-daily beatings was now more like a mutual project, expanding and honing Cordelia’s martial arts repertoire. She was still prepared to kill Lynn if necessary, but it had ceased to be a cherished dream. She was vastly satisfied with the new state of things … but never entirely dismissed the possibility that she had allowed herself to be artfully outmaneuvered.

Almost as great was the change between her and Mandy. In fact, the two situations were markedly similar, but inverted. Cordelia had chosen to stay with Lynn, so she could continue to learn and practice; Mandy, on the other hand, had begun to scramble for new things to teach Cordelia, so that she could continue to stay. Both of them were aware of it, and Cordelia occasionally wondered if Mandy knew now that she was being indulged, kept in reserve, maintained as a possible but no longer preferred option. The change had first been set in motion by Cordelia’s use of Sam for leverage, but the alteration in Cordelia’s own status — though she had not spoken of it — seemed also to have factored into the process.

The biggest difference was in her dealings with Sam, paradoxically because there was no difference. Cordelia had become a completely new person, almost as dramatic as the change from human to vampire, and of much the same quality as (though of admittedly lesser degree than) a Slayer awakening. Lynn knew it, and Mandy felt it; but Sam appeared to be utterly unconscious of anything new, and that somehow put a gulf between them of greater moment than the internal barrier Cordelia had carefully constructed and carefully hid.

She had always been alone. It had become almost a mantra for her, and been her single greatest source of strength. But for the first time since being brought here — no, before that, since a great blank spot in her memory that she was still unable to bridge — she found herself feeling lonely.

It didn’t matter. She had delayed it as long as possible, wanting to be completely certain that she was back to full capacity; but eventually it was judged that the broken elbow had properly healed, and she was taken to see Roxeim.

* * *

“What do you remember?” he asked her. Though the living and study and training areas she had seen had been generic school/ office Western in style, this chamber was differently furnished: carpets, low tables, drapes and wall hangings, and mounds of cushions rather than chairs. Middle Eastern, Cordelia thought, or perhaps from an era or culture she had never heard of. Roxeim lounged back among the cushions; he had bidden Cordelia to be seated upon her entry, and she had settled into the cross-legged position Lynn called anza. Unlike her previous meeting, this time it was just the two of them.

“Remember from what?” Cordelia asked in return. (Well, it had been pretty vague.)

“Begin, I think, with your earliest memory here,” Roxeim said. “Then tell me what is your most recent memory before that.”

“Okay,” Cordelia said. “The first thing I remember here is when your ninja-girl played a taradiddle on my face with her knuckles. Have I ever thanked you for that? The last thing I remember from before …” She stopped, thinking. She had omitted mention of her first memory of him (the property-garbage comparisons had not inspired any urge to confide), but her hesitation now was no pretense. It really was hard to bring back anything from the time immediately preceding her arrival, though she had tried many times. “I … there’s something about a soup kitchen … I was, I think I was going there so I could put all my money into rent and keeping my portfolio in circulation … yes, that’s right, I’d change into my sloppiest clothes and stuff my hair up under this awful old boonie hat, so I wouldn’t look too out of place …” There was more, there had to be more, but she couldn’t pull the scattered threads together. “Sorry, zippola past that. I remember leaving Sunnydale, right after the big non-apocalypse that was graduation. Anything else, my brain cells might as well be styrofoam peanuts in a Jacuzzi.”

Roxeim nodded, smiling. “You had been drugged, comprehensively molested, and … not discarded, precisely, more tossed aside for anyone else who might care for a taste. You babbled quite a bit, when we brought you in; I did not attend you, nor am I knowledgeable in such matters, but it would seem that you went to New York City, alone, to attempt a modeling career. A risky venture, by all accounts, unless one had prostitution or waiting tables to fall back upon.”

The thought flashed through her mind unsummoned: With waitressing, there’s always a chance to scarf down some of a customer’s leftovers. Okay, there was a memory she would have been happy to keep repressed. “A waitress needs people skills,” Cordelia said without a flicker of expression. “As for being a hooker, yuck! I can’t even stand to use somebody else’s soap.”

“Ah,” he said. “I know a little, a very little, about your background, and I will confess that you have surprised me. You came from privilege, lost it all, and suffered indifference, humiliation and rejection when you attempted to regain it by your own efforts. You were cast upon the scrap-heap of your society, abandoned and forgotten —”

He had used that word, the wrong word. “I’m not so easy to forget,” Cordelia said sharply.

Roxeim regarded her with amused tolerance. “And yet, it was done all the same. Given your past, I would have expected you to be either completely useless — spoiled and arrogant and full of complaints — or bitterly resentful. You have demonstrated little of either. In point of fact, you approached your training program with a commitment and concentration that I had expected would have to be painfully imposed upon you.”

“There was plenty of pain,” Cordelia replied. “But I’m a quick learner.”

“Very much so,” he acknowledged. “And much to my delight. Almost as surprising, however, has been your lack of curiosity regarding your circumstances: how you came to be here, what is the purpose of the instruction devoted to you. Have you not wondered?”

Not at first, actually. Cordelia had been focused on immediate needs and goals, and her scattered mental state had left her without enough concerted attention to address any larger picture. By the time her awareness had consolidated sufficiently for her to form questions, the pattern of treatment here had been established, and her pride had not allowed her to pose direct questions. Not even to Sam.

Aloud she said, “I knew there had to be a reason for all this. I figured you’d get to it when you were ready.”

“I see. You guard yourself against any weakness, even the inconsequential weakness of desiring an answer when none is forthcoming.”

No, dumbass, I guard myself against showing any weakness I don’t have to. Cordelia held her eyes steady with his. “If you say so.”

“Your instructors report well of you, and I have seen that they do not exaggerate.”

She shrugged it away. “You can accomplish a lot when you don’t have the distractions of … oh, I don’t know … a life.”

If he heard the sudden spark of anger, he didn’t show it. “It would seem, then, that your rehabilitation is complete.”

“Absolutely,” Cordelia said. Then: “Rehabilitation from what?”

“From the drug saturating your system,” Roxeim said. “There was some concern that the effects might be permanent.”

“Great,” Cordelia said. “I get hit with the roofie from hell, and wake up in the Twilight Zone.”

“ ‘Twilight Zone’,” he repeated. “A clever turn of phrase, and an apt description. But the drug is called Orpheus, not Rufius. You have heard of it? no? Its nature is as much mystical as pharmaceutical, and it has an euphoric effect on vampires, when filtered through the bloodstream of a human intermediary. The humans, too, seem to enjoy the effects, so there has been no shortage of volunteers.”

“Of whom you can be sure I was not one,” Cordelia informed him flatly. “Grow up in Sunnydale, you learn one lesson fast: vampires and recreation do not make a cuddly mix. Besides, what kind of fun is something that scrambles your brains for weeks afterwards?”

“That is hardly the normal result,” Roxeim said. “I would imagine that your system reacted as it did because of your demon ancestry.”

There was a long silence while Cordelia considered that. “Demon,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“It is quite true,” he assured her. “Enough demons have bred with humans over the ages — for some of them it is a hobby — that many people have a touch of demon blood without knowing of it. I performed a few basic tests when the Orpheus was so reluctant to release you from its grip, and confirmed that you carry at least two distinct strains. Many times diluted, of course, but the signs are unmistakable once one knows what to watch for.”

“I’m not a demon,” Cordelia said.

“And very fortunate for us all that you are not,” Roxeim said. “Ugly-tempered creatures, and notoriously inflexible in negotiation. Still, a whisper of it in the bloodline can open out some intriguing possibilities, and it is time we investigated those more thoroughly.”

Slowly and clearly Cordelia said again, “I. Am not. A demon. Not any part of me.”

“Denial does not alter fact,” Roxeim said. He picked something up from the low table in front of him, a small chest, and opened it. From within it he withdrew something; its appearance and nature indeterminate, as it was wrapped in several folds of scarlet silk. He held it out. “Take this,” he said.

Cordelia looked at it, didn’t move. Roxeim lay with his hand still outstretched. He waited, watching her without speaking.

She took it. There was no choice. She held it, glanced at him. He nodded, and she began to unfold the silk wrapper.

The thing revealed was slightly smaller than the saucer for a teacup; metal, of a dull greenish gray, edge broken by a regularly repeating pattern of small squares. The surface was so deeply etched that it was almost bas-relief, like a decorative frieze on a building, but the etching was of designs and abstract characters rather than any recognizable figure. Cordelia studied it, looked back to Roxeim. “So?”

“Inspect it closely,” he said. “Without the covering.”

Okay, there was no way this could be good … and no way (yet) that she could avoid it. She removed the covering, holding the cloth in one hand while she turned the whatsis in the other, checking both sides, peering at the characters. She gave Roxeim a lifted eyebrow. “So what am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Do you feel anything?” he asked her.

Cordelia glanced at the metal quasi-disk, back at her host. “It feels kind of greasy,” she said.

He frowned. “Wrap it again and return it to me.”

She did so, and sat waiting, face composed. When the thing had been placed back in the chest from which Roxeim had originally withdrawn it, he looked to her again, brows knit. “You felt nothing at all?”

“Nope, sorry.” Cordelia’s tone held a conspicuous absence of sorrow. “I take it I was supposed to?”

“The enhancement lattice imprinted into the structure of that artifact should have called out and magnified any supernatural potential you might have possessed,” Roxeim said. “You would hardly have been able to overlook the sensation, or mistake it for anything else. This is surprising, and disappointing.”

“Told you,” Cordelia said, letting the slightest glint of triumph show through. “Footloose and demon-free here, this body is one hundred percent authentic American beauty.”

“I made no mistake in my diagnosis,” he reproved her. “But if your heritage has been so washed out by humanity that it did not respond to the lattice, it is too feeble to be of any use to me. Pity, it might have facilitated certain approaches. As it is, we shall proceed with my first intent.”

Right. Cordelia waited. He’d tell her, whether she asked or not; guys like this had to brag about how smart they were.

“You will have noted that I took care to avoid touching the artifact I had you examine,” Roxeim said. “This was necessary caution on my part. I am human — doubtless you have wondered on that point — but humanity is not the only thing within me. This plane of existence was not my native home. I was brought here, as I brought you; the original occupant mingled his blood with mine, worked certain sorceries to bring my vital aura into synchronization with these surroundings, and then made his departure, leaving me in his stead.”

“And may I be the first to say, gross.” Cordelia gave him a tilted look. “Except, let me go out on a limb here: you’ve been shaping me to take your spot. The whole genie-in-a-bottle deal, you can only leave if you get somebody to replace you.”

“You grasp the essentials, but not the particulars,” Roxeim told her. “It is true, my escape from this realm can be accomplished only if a suitable vessel assumes my place. However, you are not that vessel.”

“So I’m here why?”

“To help me acquire it.” He smiled at her. “You are, in fact, uniquely suited to that purpose.”

Cordelia favored him with a tight smile of her own. “I’m unique, period.”

“More nearly so than many who claim the status,” he said. “In this case, however, your personal attributes are of less significance than is your relationship to someone who is important to me.” Roxeim looked to Cordelia, assessing. She knew the look; it was what you saw on someone about to drop what he considered a bombshell, and wanting to be sure he saw the full effect. “When I inquired as to your memories, it was from more than simple vulgar curiosity. I wanted to get some sense of how much she had stolen from you.”

“She?” Cordelia knew she was being played, but just now it didn’t seem important. “She who?”

“The creature for whose sake your disappearance was facilitated,” Roxeim said. “The one who has been moving about with your name, and your face, in the life you should have had.” He smiled again, with deep satisfaction. “And she … she … is a proper vessel.”

* * *

“They were Granok demons,” he explained, magnanimous now that he had at last prompted her to show interest. “Powerful, intelligent, lovers of combat. But other, more subtle forces found them to be too disruptive, and so their essence was shifted slightly outside the normal flow of time. That made them unable to physically affect — or be affected by — anything in the material world.

“Some of them became accustomed to their new mode of being; others sought means by which they might return to their former plane so that they could once again know the joy of battle. One such, my predecessor here, somehow created this place of existence to serve as a bridge by which he might make transit to the physical world. Another, called Sahjhan, set in motion a plot of centuries’ duration, designed to trick humans into recalling him to corporeal form. He, and his works, are what are of concern to us.

“You were part of that plot; you — more accurately, the being that those back in your world now know as Cordelia Chase — were put into place to serve as an agent within the group that Sahjhan needed most delicately to manipulate. It would have been possible, I suppose, to recruit you and motivate you by deception or treasure to act on his behalf; but Sahjhan apparently found it simpler to have you consigned to an Orpheus den, and a lesser demonling imbued with your form and your memories. Sahjhan failed, and has been indefinitely imprisoned; but his creature continued on, undetected, causing increasing mischief and misery … and, in the process, undergoing several further transformations of her nature.

“Among the parlance of your kind, your situation and mine is now ‘win-win’. You return to the world you knew, resume your place, and continue the life that was stolen from you. Those who care for you are freed from the hidden machinations of the thing masquerading as you. And I am gifted with an entity formed in part by the power and essence of a Granok demon, altered by travels to other realms of existence and possession by other powers, and thus rendered suitable for me to use as a substitute for myself, so that I may leave this place which has so long been my prison.”

Cordelia had let Roxeim deliver his spiel; better that he get it all out of his system at once. Now he seemed to have reached a stopping point, and she said, “Not to be questioning my good luck, or your generosity, but what do you need me for? You brought me here, you brought all of us here, so just grab my body double the same way.” She studied her host/ captor. “Not so easy, right?”

“No, it is not, and for several reasons.” He seemed annoyed by the question — or maybe it was just a sensitive subject — but he answered readily enough. “Within this sphere, my authority is absolute, but my reach is limited and of little power outside it. The same characteristics that make our imposter suitable for my uses make it insurmountably difficult for me to seize her by my own efforts. I require an agent in the outside world. I have prepared you to be that agent … or made a substantial beginning of it, at any rate.”

Thinking of the depth and intensity of the training she had undergone, Cordelia observed, “She must be some kind of red-hot demon mama, if you need to force-grow your own personal deadlier-than-the-male-Me to go after her. But then again, why me? I mean, you could have taken the women you put to teaching me, and sent them after her. Not Charlie’s Angels, exactly, but the three of them should have been able to take down and haul back one jazzed-up Cordy-wannabe.”

Roxeim frowned, but spoke evenly. “The circumstances being as they were, I thought it might be necessary for you to extract her from the midst of a group of formidable allies; for that reason, I attempted to prepare you for several eventualities, including stealth, individual combat, and all-out-assault. And yes, her own abilities have increased considerably; she is a demon, after all, and some of her inherent traits have been augmented. But as for dispatching the others to capture her, those I have assigned as your tutors, that I cannot. They are here by compulsion, they serve me because they have no choice. Were I to release them, I could not rely on their loyalty.”

“But you’re willing to take that chance on me,” Cordelia said.

“It is in your interests, and in accordance with your nature, for you to act in a way that benefits me,” Roxeim explained patiently. “In order to reclaim your identity, you must seek out and supplant the entity that now occupies your place. If I free you, you will naturally and necessarily do that which will free me. We have a mutual need, and this I trust.”

“All righty, then,” Cordelia said. “You’ve sold me, I’m your girl. Turn me loose and I’ll go bag your exit pass.”

Roxeim shook his head with a regret that carried every sign of being genuine. “Your preparation is yet incomplete, and there are other matters that also must be addressed. It is difficult, I know, but I must ask you to exercise patience. Remind yourself that it is now in my interests to free you, once you are capable of doing what you must.” He sighed. “We might perhaps have advanced the schedule if the lattice had detected any meaningful mystical potential within you. You can hardly be held accountable, but that was the first disappointment you have caused me since regaining minimal function.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Cordelia said. “I can see it would have really bumped things forward if I was suddenly able to fire exploding nose-hairs or something. Sorry. My bad.”

Roxeim ignored the burr of sarcasm. “This audience has not transpired entirely as I had hoped, but it has not been without profit.” He unfolded himself from the mound of cushions, and stood. “It is time, I think, for you to proceed to the next phase of your education. Wait here; I shall return shortly.”

He left the room. Cordelia did not move from her position; she sat relaxed, breathing quietly, listening.

‘Shortly,’ he had said. That implied at least a few minutes. It was a risk, but she wasn’t willing for this opportunity to escape. The small chest was where Roxeim had left it; decision made, she went quickly to it, removed and unwrapped the nameless object it contained, and held the artifact in both hands, supporting it on her open palms. Her eyes were open, but focused on nothing within the room; her face showed no expression whatsoever.

She stood so for an entire minute, then replaced the artifact and resumed her place. That was risk enough; she would not extend the time, or attempt to repeat the process just now. When Roxeim returned at last, some five minutes later, her position was precisely as it had been.


Part V

Cordelia had made note of the route to her “audience” with Roxeim, marking down and cataloguing what she saw on the way, and she did the same as she followed him now. She was making a map in her mind; by now, after months of work on various subjects, her concentration was more than adequate for the task. Everything new brought her a possibility previously unavailable, and she hoarded each increase in her store with a greed she allowed no one to see.

She was shown now into a garden, a riotous profusion of greenery and blooms. How it flourished indoors, with no nourishment from the sun, was a mystery she didn’t bother to consider; she simply breathed in the heavy, life-laden odors of nectar and humus and chlorophyll, felt the humidity begin to bead on her forehead, and looked around her with pleasure and wonder. All the same, her words were tart. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’ve brought in Sheena of the Jungle to teach me how to swing from a vine and commune with nature.”

“Your flippancy is unattractive and displeasing,” Roxeim said to her, irritation sharpening his tone. “It is also inaccurate. This is to be your newest place of instruction, yes, but this environment is not pertinent to what you will learn; it is merely the preference of its resident. She maintains that it helps her to achieve the proper spiritual balance.” He turned away. “When you are done here, return to your quarters. I will see you again when I choose.”

He left her, and Cordelia stood among the lush growth, waiting. So, Mister High-and-Mighty wasn’t immune to a bit of Cordy-patented snark. It was information to be remembered; not, perhaps, meaningful in itself, but part of what might become a pattern. Meanwhile, there was the matter of 1) where she was, 2) who she was to meet, 3) what she was to learn, and 4) what she might learn that wasn’t on the formal curriculum. Sheena or no Sheena, her world was once again about to get bigger.

Of course, that wasn’t happening while she just stood where she was.

She was about to set off in search of her new instructor, whoever that might be, when a voice came through the shaded greenery around her: “I am here.” She moved in that direction, and within moments came into sight of the speaker. It was a young woman (non-surprise Number One; can you spell “harem fantasies”?) with long, dark hair (non-surprise Number Two), flowing with loose soft curls and bound with a brightly-patterned scarf that had been folded into a three-inch width and tied in a band from the top of her head to a point behind her neck. She wore no makeup — Cordelia’s judgment there was unerring — but her eyelashes were kohl-dark and her lips just a hint more red than was the normal shade; her earrings were actual rings, gold but very small, barely enough circle to clear the lobes. She wore a short-sleeved peasant blouse, adjusted in a way that left her shoulders bare, and a long, wide skirt in the same pattern and material. No shoes.

“Welcome,” she said, her voice low and rich. “You come seeking enlightenment.” There was no trace of accent, but something told Cordelia that English had not been her first language.

“Are you gonna start calling me grasshopper?” Cordelia asked. “Because I’ve had some bad experiences with bug people; I don’t really feel like being compared to one.”

The woman smiled. “No,” she said. “You already have a name.”

“Uh-huh,” Cordelia said. “Do you?”

The woman stirred in the chair where she sat; it was unpainted bamboo wicker, one of a pair, and a small wicker table rested in front of it. “I no longer use my full name; it is … unpleasantly evocative of my enforced presence here. For our purposes, I am simply Kari.”

“Fine. All kinds of fluffy wonderful, in fact.” Cordelia sat, uninvited, in the second chair. “So is the Jungle Room here supposed to be some kind of spiritual backdrop for whatever you’ll be teaching me? Or is this just where you like to kick back and relax?”

“This garden functions as my living quarters,” Kari told her. “I sleep here, dine here, bathe here. I do not leave it unless I must.”

“Okay,” Cordelia said. She was not going to ask about the woman’s toilet arrangements. “What are you, some kind of Greenpeace pilgrim?”

“I am a prisoner,” Kari replied. “I fashioned this abode as a haven, so that I might keep my sanity.”

Cordelia nodded. “And how’s that working out for you?”

Instead of answering, the other woman studied Cordelia unhurriedly, dwelling on every feature, with particular attention to her hands and eyes. “Yes,” she said at length. “You are indeed ready.”

“And once again, I feel a big ‘ohm-m-m’ coming on,” Cordelia said.

“I will not attempt to guide you to spiritual insights,” Kari said. “There is too much turmoil in my own spirit. But I will teach you mental disciplines. How you use them is yours to choose.”

“What kind of disciplines?” Cordelia wanted to know. “And how can they be used?”

“Breathing,” Kari said. “Meditation. Some of the foundations already will be familiar to you, from the yoga practices Samantha has shown you. You will learn to find a pool of calm within yourself. When you can achieve that state at will … There is much that can perhaps be discerned by one whose mind is perfectly clear.”

Cordelia sat back in the chair. “I’m not even going to pretend that this makes sense. I’ve been taught how to fight, shoot, build and disarm and set off bombs, pick locks, slide past alarms and motion detectors, everything a cat burglar/ saboteur/ assassin could ever want to know. And now it gets capped off by a course in intense navel-gazing. What’s up with that?”

“I have said what I will teach you,” Kari clarified. “That is not, however, what I was tasked to do.”

“Say huh?” Cordelia said.

“Our patron’s intent was that I help you to develop your perceptions of mystical forces. I do not have the skills necessary to do this. So I will teach you what I can, in the time that has been assigned me, and we will judge the results as they make themselves known.”

This was definitely a new wrinkle. “He ordered you to do something you can’t do? You’re one of the dream team that’s prepping me for the big get-back-my-life-and-incidentally-help-him-out mission that’s supposed to be the reason for the massive suckage that is my recent existence, and you can’t teach me the thing you’ve been assigned to teach me? That’s the kind of intelligent planning that totally isn’t.”

“Before I was brought to this place, I had certain abilities,” Kari said by way of explanation. “Some He has suppressed, to prevent resistance; some have been nullified by the nature of this separate reality; some have faded as I lost hold of the threads connecting me to my people. I have told him this, but He does not choose to recognize it, so He gives me a part to play which I cannot fulfill. We will do what we can do. More than this is beyond me.”

“Navel-gazing,” Cordelia said again. “This is not giving me warm-wriggly-puppy feelings.”

“But you will do it,” Kari observed. “It is not in your nature to shirk a challenge.”

That drew a pfft! from Cordelia. “You really do not know me.”

“More than you might expect,” Kari said. “Though much is beyond me now, I still have some small trace of the Sight. May I see your palm?”

Without enthusiasm, Cordelia held out her hand. “Reading the future from skin creases,” she said. “That is so lame.”

“We seek meaning in patterns,” Kari said. “The patterns are arbitrary and of little consequence; it is in the perception and the interpretation that meaning makes itself known.”

“Ohm-m-mm,” Cordelia said by way of reply.

The two women sat in silence while Kari studied Cordelia’s hand. “As I expected, a great deal is masked,” she said. “It would seem that part of your destiny is to have forces interfere with that destiny, which of course clouds the glass. But there will be moments when you can choose; and upon some of those choices, much will revolve.”

“Right, ’cause there’s nothing at all vague about that.” Cordelia started to withdraw her hand. “If you’re done —”

Kari held it fast. “There is one thing more.”

“Tall, dark stranger?” Cordelia said. “We’ve met. I was underwhelmed.”

“Not a prediction,” Kari replied. “A promise. A warning. A riddle. I do not understand it, but I see it clearly.” She looked to Cordelia. “Death is your gift.”

“ ‘Death is my gift’,” Cordelia repeated. “So … is there a return policy?”

* * *

It was like 3D ratio changes. Though this had hardly been her focus, Cordelia had seen the principle explained in one of her math classes, back at SHS, and been intrigued by it.

Take a one-inch square. That’s what you have: a one-inch square, one square inch.

Double its linear dimensions, so that it now measures two inches to a side. Two square inches? Nope; that two-inch square contains four one-inch squares, making it four square inches. Double it again, it’s a four-inch square containing sixteen square inches. Every time you double the size, you square the volume.

Now make it a cube. A one-inch cube contains one cubic inch. But a two-inch cube — 2"×2"×2" — is eight cubic inches, and a four-inch cube holds sixty-four cubic inches. For three dimensions, when the linear measurements are doubled, the volume is cubed. Each increase is multiplicative (exponential, actually) rather than just increments of addition.

Cordelia’s world had been reduced to dimensions of her and one other person. Then Mandy had been added, expanding it substantially. Then Sam, and her field of existence was sixteen times greater. Now Kari, and Roxeim, and her knowledge and the area in which she could move and grow felt enormous.

Because it wasn’t simply numbers of people. The addition of Sam had given her much greater range than had her introduction to Mandy; more individuals meant more personalities, more interactions and interrelations, and more different ways she could tie separate sets of knowledge together. Firearms and grappling training from Sam had interlaced with hand-to-hand and edged/ impact weapons training from Lynn to give her a wider appreciation of individual combat than either of them alone could have provided. By the same token, what she had learned from Mandy about explosives handling and electronics just seemed to click! with Sam’s lessons in the tactical use of claymore mines, and she suspected that she could have shown both women a wrinkle or two that hadn’t occurred to them.

Now, in her meditative times with Kari, Cordelia found other linkages making themselves known to her. The “inner pool of calm” that Kari was teaching her to find, coupled with the yoga practices she had already instituted under Sam’s tutelage, steadied and relaxed her concentration, broadened her awareness and understanding. She was sensitive to nuances that would have escaped her before … and here, nuance was everything.

Likewise, her physical skills benefited. She shot straighter, quicker; she fought with alert serenity; she could take in a circuit board or wiring diagram at a glance, and complete or reconfigure the connections with sure, unhurried deftness.

And — though this didn’t show, and Cordelia exercised care to ensure that it remained unseen — her continuing growth in various aspects of combative arts lent an added dimension to her mental discipline that went well beyond calming herself.

Kari taught her the techniques, explained the focusing imagery, led her in the routines, and sometimes seemed to join her in a … not communion, exactly, more a synchronization of concentration and relaxation. The two women would sit facing one another in the interior garden, immobile in a modified lotus position, fingertips touching: breathing in concert, unspeaking, unseeing, following the path to nothing that opened them to all. Or Kari would have her follow the branching traceries on the surface of a leaf, or submerge herself in the scent of blossoms, or let herself become one with the sound of water trickling from the outlets of some intricate, hidden irrigation system.

Sometimes she said things.

She would drop words like small pebbles into the surface of Cordelia’s consciousness, where they should be neither heard nor deflected. The aim was that they should slide through without making a ripple, gradually merging with her to be integrated into the totality of her understanding, there to be considered or disregarded, as she chose, upon her return from that vault of timeless unbeing. This was far more difficult than it sounded — to be untouched by something without shutting it out, to receive and incorporate it without noticing it — and made more so by the nature of the statements Kari would use to test the waters.

“Truth has no dominion over him.”

“The heart always is hidden, especially from itself.”

“You are the aim. You will be the end. You are death and deliverance; your fate will free you, in chains you will never escape.”

“Seek the inner spark. The light is to be found in the spark.”

“Do not trust. Embrace all; accept nothing.”

Fortune-cookie axioms, lines from the Magic 8-Ball; but in Cordelia’s open, uncritical state, they could be deeply unsettling. While Kari looked Central European, she seemed to have (or have acquired) a thoroughly Asiatic fatalism. Certainly the things she was teaching Cordelia were more like Zen mysticism than like anything else that suggested itself for comparison.

Cordelia learned, and considered, and kept her own counsel.

* * *

Where her new association with Kari increased the scope of possibilities in ways she couldn’t have anticipated, and would have had difficulty describing, Cordelia was not at all sure how to categorize the time she now found herself spending with Roxeim. He was the power here, he had held himself aloof for weeks or months; now he had made himself known, had explained his fundamental reason for taking and holding her, and begun to bring her into his company once or twice a week. This should have been a priceless opportunity … but Cordelia was suspicious of appearances, even more suspicious of her captor, and unwilling to take anything for granted.

Truth has no dominion over him, Kari had said. And Do not trust. Embrace all, accept nothing. Cordelia was not overly prone to trust anyhow, and further disinclined to lower her guard to someone who had rescued her (if that part could be believed) solely in order to imprison her; the warning from her psychic tutor was hardly necessary, but still not to be forgotten. Roxeim seemed to want to take her into his confidence, now that they were nearing his goal, or perhaps wished to reassure himself of her approval and cooperation. To Cordelia’s mind, if he wanted something from her, that might be an indication that she shouldn’t be giving it to him; while, at the same time, not openly refusing to do so.

Sometimes they met for meals, usually spreads of various delicacies that didn’t always suit Cordelia’s tastes. (Escargot she liked, and caviar of the proper pedigree; pâté de foie gras she could take or leave; calamari, sure, with the right sauce. Rocky Mountain oysters, overrated. Fugu, just plain dumb. Boiled sheep’s eyes, forget it.) Sometimes it was music, of bewildering origins and vintages; sometimes (speaking of vintages) it was wine, which she sampled carefully in light of the training regimen still ongoing. Sometimes he had works of art for her to examine: many exquisite, some incomprehensible, a few that she found familiar. (One in particular: she had never seen it before, but it had to be a Vermeer; and another — also a painting — that captured the play of light as only Watteau had ever done.) They ate from dishes of beaten gold and translucent china, sipped from bubble-thin crystal and thick flasks of a glass so blue as to be almost luminous. He seemed determined, in a casual, offhand way, to impress her; and, even more, to learn about her, to get a deeper sense of what was to be found in her.

He didn’t have a chance. Cordelia had been playing a role for a third of her life, and polished it to an impermeable gloss. She accepted his overtures as if they were a deference to which she was both accustomed and entitled; she responded to his showcase of possessions with a careless superficial interest that betrayed no flicker of awe or excitement. More and more it was coming to seem that her good opinion was important to him; and so, rather than withhold it, she granted him a measure of it, with a reserve that made it clear she was far from won.

“I chose you well,” he told her when she had shrugged acceptance of his latest offering, an orchestral rendition of such heart-rending power and pathos that it raised gooseflesh on her arms. (How he stored and played the music, she couldn’t say; there was no evidence either of high-fidelity stereo equipment or of magical means of reproduction, he simply got what he wished when he wished it.) “You meet hardships without flinching, like a champion, but are equally unmoved by luxury. The more I see, the more certain I become of your fated success in our common venture.”

“I was always strong,” she replied evenly. “You put an edge on it, but the steel was there already.”

Please, pretentious much? But he ate it up; apparently megalomaniacs didn’t respect you unless you were equally egotistical.

Garbage, he had said. Property. Poor material. Forgotten. He might not remember, but she kept those words always at the forefront of her attention. His goals might or might not be what he claimed; hers were diamond-hard in their invariance.

To be free, owned and controlled by no one.

To be recognized, accorded the respect that she deserved.

And to have a suitable reckoning of anyone who had attempted to make her less.

* * *

Cordelia wondered sometimes what Kari told Roxeim about their sessions, her progress. Probably the truth. It wasn’t that Cordelia considered the other woman to be incapable of deception; in her current situation she wasn’t about to make that assumption of anyone. It just seemed to her that Kari, in her adjustment to being a prisoner, had reached a level of indifference regarding her own fate that would make it somehow satisfying to report that it was just as she had said before: her abilities had become so stunted that she had nothing to teach Cordelia, so they just passed the time in meditation.

The funny part was, that wasn’t the whole truth at all.

Her first inquiry to Mandy about locks, so long ago now, had been a none-too-subtle ploy at acquiring skills that might allow her to escape her imprisonment; or even simply to reduce it, being able to move and explore beyond the boundaries set for her. This was before she had come to understand that her current sphere of existence was — until she might contrive passage elsewhere — her only refuge in an infinity of emptiness. More to the point, it was before she had realized, on accompanying Lynn to Sam’s quarters, that the doors which had been barred to her were opening, not to a key or a code, but to an approved person, and that the approval had been extended to include her in each expansion of her still-circumscribed movements. This wasn’t mechanical or even electronic security; the doors were sealed by some form of magic, and no lock-picking skills would avail her against that.

Except …

Though Kari was guiding her only in the forms of expanded awareness accessible to purely human senses, the limits of such senses were perhaps not so narrow as might be supposed. Cordelia could not detect or recognize or analyze mystical energies, not directly; but as she became more and more fully conscious of the self within her and the world around her, the very limits of that consciousness came to have unexpected meaning.

One afternoon with Kari, after more than an hour in a deep trance state, Cordelia made the soft transition back to normal thought and understanding. She stretched, opened her eyes and looked around … and stopped, her expression sharpening even as her gaze lost focus, questing with the inward eye.

“Yes,” Kari said.

The word brought Cordelia back to her. “There’s something here,” she said to her instructor. “Something that’s … that isn’t …”

“You and I are of one material,” Kari told her. “The plants, the water and air, they all are woven of that same fabric. You have come to know and accept this; and today, for the first time, you feel it truly, enough to be aware also of the other.”

“Other,” Cordelia repeated, a little vaguely.

“He is other,” Kari went on. “His realm is other. Those objects that He brings here become gradually suffused with it, and persons as well, though more slowly. I was going mad, feeling myself inexorably permeated by that force and absorbed into it. It is only here, surrounded by life and growth and the flourishing of a nature that did not originate here, that I can retain the vestiges of what I was.”

“So what I’m feeling,” Cordelia said, considering the words as she spoke them, “what’s … out there … is the thing that’s not made of the same stuff as you and me?”

Kari smiled. “Not quite. To a mind not schooled in such things, the traces are far more subtle. What you sense is the pattern I wove into the green around us, using the last of the energies left to me, to make this place a haven. You have seen my handiwork, done in the final moments that I was still more than a … navel gazer.”

A haven. A … shield, of some kind? Remembering the few minutes Roxeim had left her alone in the chambers of their first full audience, just before bringing her to these gardens, Cordelia said, “You’ve shut him out. He can’t see in here, reach into here, can he?”

“He could,” Kari said. “But not without rending it beyond repair. He allows it to remain because it sustains me, and I am still of some small use to him. So long as He respects the barrier I set, we are unseen and untouched here. Our actions are secret, our voices private, and our will … remains our own.”

That last was not at all a welcome thought; it sounded a whole lot like she was referring to mind control. “My ‘will’ has never belonged to anybody but me,” Cordelia asserted, with a shade more tartness than necessary. “Here, there, wherever, I’m the one calling the shots inside my own head.” Except for the Bezoar incident … No, squash that.

Kari’s expression was one that Cordelia had felt many times around her own face: it was what you put on to keep anyone from seeing that you weren’t letting them see what you were thinking. “Then you have been fortunate,” she said simply.

Back in her rooms, unwilling just yet to consider the implications of that final exchange, Cordelia thought instead about this sudden addition to her awareness. The other of which Kari had spoken, the barrier she claimed to have created … Cordelia hadn’t so much sensed that as realized the presence of something she couldn’t sense, a “presence of absence”. She didn’t think Kari quite understood what had happened; as a mystic, she tended to think in terms of mysticism.

Cordelia was more practical than that.

She looked at the door that opened out into the corridor. It was a door. She closed her eyes, calmed her breathing, allowed her awareness to relax and open.

Nope. Still a door.

She kept herself centered, her concentration diffused, and went out into the corridor. The hall lighting was on — she had never seen it extinguished — but the other women seemed to follow the same sleep-wake cycle she did, so she could hope they had retired to their own quarters. Roxeim’s habits were as unknown, and therefore unpredictable, as his nature; he could be anywhere, doing anything, could be aware of everything that moved within these walls. The fact of Kari’s self-protective barrier seemed to imply the latter. If that was so, then it might be that he didn’t keep his feelers out every minute of every day. She just had to gamble; the alternative was to do nothing, and when you stopped taking chances because of threats that might be there, you were most of the way to beaten.

Softly as a ghost, she moved through the empty halls toward the workshop where she practiced with Mandy. Her mental detachment served two purposes: with luck, it would keep her below the activation threshold of any psychic sensors Roxeim had in place, and it allowed her to assess the doors she passed. By the time she reached the workshop, her first intuition had been confirmed; she selected a few simple tools and moved on in the direction of the areas Roxeim frequented.

She had been right about passage through the various doors being allowed or denied by magical means … but the magic, the trace of person-recognition that made it work, touched only the locks. Magic didn’t lock the doors, it told the locks when to close. And the locks themselves she could easily manage with what she had brought from the workshop.

Danger increased as she neared the suites where she had met with Roxeim. There was no way to avoid it, so the task was how to deal with it. Within the lowest depths of consciousness that she still allowed to operate, Cordelia formulated a rationale to explain her movements if she were caught: she was testing herself against the inner defenses, on the assumption that success against Roxeim’s watchers and wards would mean that she was ready to face the forces protecting her doppelgänger in the outside world. Yeah, she could sell that.

She wanted the chamber to which he had first summoned her; she had already decided that if she couldn’t find it directly, she would backtrace the route they had followed from there to Kari’s garden. It wasn’t necessary. The room was just as she remembered it; she could even pick out the spot where she had sat while Roxeim went (presumably) to arrange her introduction to Kari. That memory — that he had found it necessary to communicate with the woman by some direct, physical means — encouraged Cordelia’s hope that her own ‘shields’ would protect her from his notice.

The small chest, too, was just where she had left it. Cordelia knelt before it, composing herself yet further and allowing the refinement of her senses to respond to and note every facet of the forces contained therein. Yes, it was definitely there, a seething coil of otherness that revealed itself by its very opacity. When she had learned all she could from that remove, she took the etched artifact from its silk covering and held it as she had before: totally open, unresisting, to the elements of its influence.

She gave it five minutes, then rewrapped the artifact and returned it to the chest. She had reached the limits of her discernment where the object was concerned, and no new forces had surged forth from within her. This thought had lain in the background for weeks, awaiting the opportunity she had at last created for herself; now it had been realized, explored, and yielded no profit.

Well, those were the breaks.

Back in her rooms, Cordelia meditated further, imprinting what she had learned into that core of her mind which would consider those things while she slept. Then she prepared herself for bed. She checked herself for disappointment; there was none. She had taken a step, and there were other paths still to explore.

Seek the inner spark, Kari had said during one of their sessions. The light is to be found in the spark. Cordelia had hoped that, with the growth she had undergone since her first exposure, Roxeim’s enhancement lattice might activate that spark. Apparently not.

So, maybe the ‘inner spark’ was something else. Cordelia had learned herself, had learned all she could of her surroundings. Maybe it was time to start actively learning about the other women here; what kind of inner spark they possessed.


Part VI

“He reaches us by despair,” Kari said.

Cordelia had once been a creature of impulse, but months of hardship and craftiness had hammered that out of her. After her secret reconnaissance, and the fruitless testing of the enhancement lattice, she had spent the following day studying her instructors, renewing her assessment of their characters and calculating the best individual approach. None of them had noticed, Cordelia had been hiding her agenda for so long that concealment was her normal face now …

… until her session with Kari. The observation had come after half an hour of deep sinking-into-self; and, as her training with Kari had prepared her to do, she let it become a part of who she was without giving it the notice that would have allowed it to distract her. When she returned to the world of mundane thought, her uncluttered mind had already placed the knowledge into its proper slot, so that she looked to the other woman now and said, “That’s interesting.”

“I am no longer what I once was,” Kari said to her. “But I remember some of the things I learned when my sight was deeper. Your eyes have turned outward; you would understand us. That is the key.”

Cordelia thought about it. “Despair. To bring us here, or to control us once we’ve arrived?”

“He and this plane of being are one, as you have been told,” Kari answered. “Once we are here, his power over us is absolute. But for his purposes He has sought those with a certain … force of personality. That force must be dimmed before He can bear them past the veil that separates our worlds from his. It is at our lowest ebb that He can reach us.”

That made sense. Cordelia had lost everything, and then been further crushed when she sought to make her own way. Lying in a vampire crack-crib, a near-comatose meatsnack for any passing minion to use for his next suck-high … Even through the huge blank in her memory, she knew that must have been her own personal rock-bottom; no wonder she had been vulnerable to a mystical grab. Still, “Sounds to me like you lost all your hope after you came here,” Cordelia pointed out.

“It may be that He made mistakes with me,” Kari said. “But we will not speak of that now. Despair is how He took us; find the source of despair, for each of us, and that is how you will understand us.”

“I don’t see how,” Cordelia objected. “You just said you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Not at this time, no. Come to me again after you have seen the others.” Which was how the next day’s schedule would go, anyhow. Cordelia stood, ready to depart, and Kari said, “Ask, but do not trust them.” And then, after a beat: “Trust none of us. We all are under his hand.”

Right. Nothing at all foreboding about that.

That evening had one of her command appearances with Roxeim. It was a distraction, for she didn’t consider herself ready to deal with him, and Kari’s recent statements had given her a lot to think about. When the master wanted her company, however, her own preferences didn’t figure into it. She dealt with it by being as aloof as always, unresponsive to his blandishments and unimpressed by his demonstrations of wealth, culture, and endless supply of collectibles.

This time it was blades: Toledo, Damascus, Masamune, thin and massive, straight and curved, basket hilts and sharkskin grips, sometimes in sets (katana and wakizashi, scimitar and dagger, espada y daga). Many of them gleamed with pristine, unmarked luster, others showed the wear of long and bloody use, though all were clean and unrusted. It really was a remarkable assemblage; and Cordelia, studying a miniature, jewel-encrusted poniard suitable for a dainty murder in a lady’s boudoir, ostentatiously smothered a yawn and asked, “Am I supposed to use any of these? Because, in the modern world, full-auto is a girl’s best friend.”

“Hence your education in the employment of such robust implements,” Roxeim replied urbanely. “No, I keep these in appreciation of their beauty.”

The parallel was so obvious that Cordelia didn’t bother to comment on it, saying instead, “If I’m being prepped for special ops, the Museum Shopping Network isn’t going to have a lot of appeal for me. Show me Kevlar and some night-vision goggles and you’ll have my attention.”

That brought a smile. “You are so eager to see combat? Do you, then, believe yourself to be ready for the trial before you?”

She gave him a scornful shrug. “How should I know? You haven’t been big on information about my special mission, it’s all been you deciding when I’m ready. If I am, then what are we waiting for? If I’m not, then what’s next?”

He regarded her at some length, still smiling, before he spoke again. “You continue to be a source of fresh delights. Those I appointed as your tutors are extraordinary, all of them, yet I knew and understood them within a short time of their arrival. You, in contrast, remain ever a surprise.”

High school on the Hellmouth will do that for a girl, Cordelia thought. Aloud she said, “I’m an original. You can’t slot an original into a category.”

“I respect value,” Roxeim returned. “And you have a value that has yet to be plumbed.” He looked to her with a seeming seriousness that he had never shown before. “Soon, sooner perhaps than you can realize, it will be time for you to undertake the task I have set you. I am more than ever confident that you will prevail; and when that moment comes, you will be free, to order your life thereafter as you will. And your success, by its nature, will free me.” He paused, reflected for a slow moment, and then said, “It has been long since I walked in the world of men … since I could be, simply, a man. That world has changed greatly. I will not be poor, but I recognize that my reacclimation to humanity will not come quickly.” His eyes held hers. “I would be … pleased … if, when we both are free, you would favor me with your guidance and your companionship.”

Characteristically, Cordelia’s expression revealed nothing. “Didn’t see that one coming,” she said at last. “And, okay, I’m having trouble getting used to it. Up to now, you haven’t exactly been much for asking, it’s been more an I-could-have-you-flogged type of thing, so excuse me if I wonder.”

“Here I command,” Roxeim said. “Here I must. When we leave, however — as we shall — I will have no hold over you, nor desire it. You will grant me what I wish only if you so choose. I admit as well, it will have no worth to me unless it is given freely. And so I ask.”

This was new, and new was promising and perilous. “I’ll think about it,” Cordelia told him. “No guarantees … but, because you ask, I’ll think about it.”

“I am encouraged,” Roxeim said. “I have not, I think, been cruel as a master. You would find me grateful and generous as a friend.”

Now Cordelia smiled, too, but there was a hard chill in the amusement it held. “Oh, you’d better be.”

* * *

Looking back to the beginning, Cordelia could see no evidence that Lynn had ever failed to be honest with her. Honest in her impatience and disdain, honest in her surprise when her pupil at last showed progress, honest in her lack of apology when Cordelia reached the status of equal. Mindful of Kari’s admonition against trusting, Cordelia still felt that Lynn’s personality would have her respond best to a direct approach. And so, as they sparred the following morning (they had taken to mixing weapons; this time Cordelia was using the jo while Lynn wielded a PR-24 baton in each hand), she asked her abruptly, “How did you wind up here?”

Lynn’s reply was accompanied by a blizzard of attacking strikes. “Believe it or not, it was because of a guy.”

For a moment Cordelia was too preoccupied to inquire further. She could see why Lynn liked the jo so much — it was a beautifully versatile weapon — but it still was one weapon against Lynn’s two, and only its greater reach allowed Cordelia to hold her own against multiple strikes. Then she caught an opening, and as Lynn stepped back into a defensive stance, knuckles bloody where she had been a fraction of a second too slow, Cordelia said, “A guy? And did he manage to get away without you cutting off something important?”

“ ‘Get away?’ ” Lynn scoffed, and struck high and low simultaneously. It was a risky move — it left her wide open — but Cordelia couldn’t block both at once, took a crack on the thigh to protect her head. As was her habit when hit, she counterattacked instantly; Lynn jerked her head back, the end of the jo whizzed past her chin with a couple of millimeters to spare, and she continued unconcernedly. “I never saw it coming. You know these guys who are so gorgeous, you just lose all your sense when one of ’em smiles at you?”

“I know the type,” Cordelia said; broke and spun and fired out a series of lightning jabs, the last of which clipped Lynn’s ribs. “They look great next to you in yearbook photos, but you don’t want to trust them anywhere near second base.”

“Exactly.” Lynn’s next words came during retreat; Cordelia had learned, defense against the double-batons was too chancy, they had to be pre-empted by attack. “Gals like you and me, we’re not impressed by the pretty boys, we know the ego that goes along with it.” Another double-strike, with a shin-kick flashing in behind it, but Cordelia had read it coming, opened enough distance to allow a working margin, and tapped the knee of the kicking leg. “Ow, crap. So tell me, what type does slide past our guard?”

The thought triggered a burst of fury that Cordelia used as fuel, so that she was able to tag the woman three more times in the next ten seconds (none of them major hits, though the cumulative effect would soon begin to matter), but she spoke impassively enough. “The type that doesn’t set off any alarms: all big eyes and puppy-dog grin, kind of helpless, you want to take him home and pick out a new wardrobe for him. You let him in because he’s not a threat, and then he cuts your legs out from under you.”

“Got it in one, Princess. Well, except for the wardrobe part.” Lynn had been shifting out to Cordelia’s side, forcing her to adjust her orientation and using each change of angle to get her just a little closer, and for a few moments Cordelia was back on defense. “The guy I’m talking about was as close to zero-threat as you could imagine. Good brain, if you go for the grad-student nerdy-boy type, and more guts than he had any idea what to do with, but past that he was just pathetic.” Another quick flurry, and then she faded back away from darting probes from the jo. “We met on a job; at least, I was on a job, I was sent to get something from him and he didn’t want to give it, so I had to work on him for awhile. I kicked the crap out of him, and then he beat me; lucky shot, plus the guts I mentioned.”

Cordelia had the rhythm now; every few seconds she was able to tap one target or another, wearing down her opponent in increments that mattered only in the inevitable aggregate, and Lynn couldn’t prevent it, even temporarily, except by expending energy while Cordelia conserved her own. Eventually she wouldn’t be able to maintain the pace. Both of them knew it. This particular match was won; Cordelia scaled back just a fraction, asking, “You landed here in limbo because of one fight? Not following the logic.”

“It wasn’t the fight, it was the guy.” Lynn seemed content to allow the sparring to settle back to a less intense level; they continued testing one another, but not so forcefully. “Job still wasn’t finished, so I went back after him. Fought him twice more, and he beat me twice more, and every time it was by a fluke. That was years ago, and I still don’t know how he did it. I can tell when I’m outclassed, and that’s not what was going on. This twerp barely knew the first thing about hand-to-hand; I was faster, better, meaner, almost as strong, and I kept losing. It made me crazy. And then he just vanished.”

Block-jab-sweep. “So? Problem solved.”

“I hate to lose.” Lynn began to strike with one baton while blocking with the other, alternating sides. More energy used up. “Don’t much care for it now, and back then I couldn’t stand it. I spent two years tracking this guy down, finally found him a couple states over, and went after him ready for the final showdown.” She laughed nastily. “It was final, all right.”

“Really? How?” Cordelia duplicated the off-tangent evasions Lynn had used earlier, deflecting the other woman’s probes with easy, economical moves. “He’d been practicing and working out all the time you were hunting him?”

“No. Well, maybe, I don’t know, ’cause it didn’t matter.” Lynn tried the high-low simultaneous attack that had scored earlier, lost her breath with a whoof! as Cordelia faded back outside baton range and caught her in the belly with a direct thrust of the jo. It was a minute or so before she could speak again, at which point she continued as before. “Soon as he saw me, he gave up, threw up his hands and said, ‘You win.’ I wasn’t having it, I wanted satisfaction, but he talked fast and smiled a lot and jollied me out of it. He said he knew he’d got off easy, he’d just been glad to come out of it alive, and he didn’t want to push his luck any farther.”

“Right,” Cordelia said. “And then he nailed you as soon as you turned your back on him.”

“Oh, he nailed me, all right, but we were face-to-face when it happened. Through most of it, anyway.” The amusement in her tone made the innuendo clear, and she smirked at Cordelia’s expression. “You know how charming the nerd-boys can be, all aw-shucks and eager to do whatever they can for you. We went out drinking and dancing — he sucked at dancing, but he knew it and laughed at himself — and then back to his place for Round Two.” Lynn sighed, looked vexed. “Not that much skill in the sack, but plenty of stamina, and dedication you wouldn’t believe. He showed me one of the better nights of my life, damn his treacherous black heart.”

Yet again she tried the double-strike, to shin and ribs, but she was a little too far out and Cordelia had her mouth open to frame a question when one of the batons flew over the parrying jo, Lynn had thrown it with a flicking reversal of her wrist, and as it smacked against Cordelia’s face Lynn dived inside her guard, turned a handspring into a flying scissors that slammed Cordelia to the floor. Then the other woman was on top of her, locking one arm with her legs and immobilizing the other with the remaining PR-24, her forearm across Cordelia’s throat. No escape, no motion allowed, absolutely nothing Cordelia could do from that position except recognize defeat.

“So tell me,” Lynn said. “How did you lose that?”

“I wasn’t ready for the throw,” Cordelia admitted. “I should have been; would have, if you’d been using sai. Next time I’ll know to watch.”

“Bullshit,” Lynn said, and emphasized it by cranking extra pressure onto Cordelia’s arm with the handle of the baton. “Throwing was a desperation move, I never woulda tried it if I’d had any other chance. You lost because you didn’t take me down when you could. You backed off, let me keep working and thinking, and you got your ass handed to you.” She let go, stood up and stood back, watching as Cordelia did the same. “You don’t win by being better than your opponent. You don’t win by having a better weapon, or being in a better position. You win by winning.”

The anger was disproportionate to the situation, but Cordelia thought she knew its source. “Like you should have with this guy of yours,” she said. “So what’d he do to you?”

“Screwed me silly, just like I told you.” Lynn’s expression was unreadable. “And the next morning I wake up lying out in the middle of a prairie, bare as a goddamn Chihuahua, and ringed around me are seven guys with turbans and sabers, sitting on some kind of long-eared antelopes with reins that ran through a nose-ring, looking me over like Christmas just came early and who gets first grabs?”

Know the feeling, Cordelia thought, and said, “So what did you do?”

“Story for another day,” Lynn said. “Right now you’re due for your class with G.I. Jane. Just remember: you got somebody on the ropes, finish ’em. Never leave an enemy standing.”

* * *

What Cordelia had learned from Lynn gave her considerably less than a complete picture; but it was a beginning, and Lynn had implied (or at least not ruled out) that more might be forthcoming at some later time. Meanwhile there were other subjects for exploration. Her time with Sam today was devoted to magazine care: how to disassemble and clean them, how often to rotate them so that the internal spring wouldn’t lose tension under constant pressure, how to inspect the lips for warpage or irregularities that might hinder cartridge feed, how to insert short nylon loops (from something Sam called “550” cord, though she didn’t explain why) beneath the bottom plates so the magazines could be more quickly and readily withdrawn from the pouches on a tactical vest. It was basic, undemanding information, easily grasped, so Cordelia let her fingers move through the proper practices automatically as she asked, “How did you wind up here, anyway?”

So far today the byplay between them had been light, comfortable, occasionally teasing; the depth of their relationship had not increased, but it remained pleasant. Now some shadow passed behind Sam’s eyes, and she said, “You needed a combat arms instructor, so I was brought in.”

“Really?” Cordelia said. “What kind of bonus do you get for a tour in the Phantom Zone?”

“It isn’t about choice,” Sam said. “You know what the choices are, here: none.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.” Cordelia shook her head. “Okay, let’s try it this way: what were you doing before you were brought here? Right then, right at that time?”

“Why do you want to know?” Sam asked her. “Why does it matter?”

“I’m just trying to understand,” Cordelia said, with the plaintive note she only used for purposes of persuasion. “Where I am, what I’m doing. Who I’m with.”

Sam looked away. “Right then,” she said, echoing Cordelia’s words. “Right at that time.” She turned back to face Cordelia. “At the moment I got snatched up and pulled here, I was hiding in a field latrine. Crying. I hate crying.”

“Why?” Cordelia asked.

“Why was I crying, or why do I hate it?” Sam shook away her own question. “I was in the training program for a special unit, and I was about to wash out, and it felt like my whole life was over.”

Not able to measure up to the heavy hitters in a combat squad? That brushed uncomfortably close to Cordelia’s own memories, but she had no intention of saying so. “Why was it so important?”

“I don’t fail at things,” Sam said. “I never have. I lettered in every sport I ever tried, I did a stint in the Marines, when I joined the Peace Corps I was at the top of the class they gave us on basic medicine. We went to Honduras. I loved it. Then our clinic was attacked. By demons, dozens of them.”

She looked to see how that was taken — she had made references before, but never used the word directly — but Cordelia was already nodding. “Yes, I know about demons. Been there, done that, got the impalement scar to show for it. Go on.”

“They killed everybody,” Sam said. “Wiped us out. All the people I’d worked with, some locals we had in the infirmary, even the children. I tried, I tried, I fought with, God, anything I could grab: fire, broken glass, I killed one with a garden hoe and the next with the splintered handle. I took out four of them, just pure berserker crazy, but I wasn’t able to save anybody else.

“That’s when Graham’s squad showed up. They cleaned out the things that had attacked us, killed the last one while it was still trying to tear my leg off. They hauled me off for quarantine and debrief — wanted to make sure I hadn’t been infected with anything, and see how cooperative I’d be in repeating their cover story about what had happened — but once they saw my service record, they came back with a different offer.”

“See the world,” Cordelia supplied for her. “Visit foreign countries, observe fascinating local life-forms, and then hose them down with napalm.”

“Napalm’s too broad-spectrum,” Sam corrected her. “Not target-specific enough. But you’ve got the idea.”

“So what was the problem?” Cordelia asked. “You’d already done the military deal, and they’d seen you kill four demons on your own, without even decent weapons. They should’ve been glad to have you.”

“They should have been,” Sam agreed. “And I know Graham thought so, he’s the sweetest man but he never cut me any slack … Their detachment commander, though, he’s the most iron-headed hard-ass you could imagine, everything has to be exactly by the book, no deviations. Every time I showed the least bit of initiative, he cracked down on me. Kept saying it was a team effort, everybody depended on each other, no room for mavericks. I know that, I always covered my lane and held up my end, but it was never good enough for him. On our last exercise I took a shot, technically it was outside the effective range for my weapon but I made the shot, and he hit the ceiling and said I’d broken protocol for the last time.”

“And from there to the ladies’ room for some private weepy-time,” Cordelia said. “All because you were better than he wanted you to be. Don’t you just hate men?”

“Not men,” Sam said. “Him. All the time I’ve been training you, I’ve worked at keeping up my own skills. I didn’t ask to come here, but I’m making use of the time, and when I get back to The World, I’m going to find Major Holier-than-thou Finn and shove that counseling statement up his fifth point of contact.” Her mouth was set hard, her eyes savage. “While I was fighting, all I could think about was staying alive and killing the things coming at me. When it was over, though, and I was lying up with an armed guard at the door and every antibiotic known to science being cycled through me, I remembered the people who died. People I couldn’t help. I don’t fail at things, but I failed them. Getting into the unit, having a chance to make it right … It was the only thing I cared about, and he was about to take it all away from me because I hadn’t done it his way. I’ve never felt such, such —”

“Despair,” Cordelia said.

The word hung in the air, and the two women regarded one another with understanding. “It looks like The Man Upstairs thinks I’m almost ready,” Cordelia said. “I think so, too. Once I carry out his mission, this should all be over. You can go back.”

“I’m just aquiver with anticipation,” Sam said; then, seeming to hear the bitterness in her own voice, she sighed. “Sorry, you didn’t deserve that. Not your fault.”

“I raked over old hurts,” Cordelia said. “No one has ever accused me of being Miss Considerate, but I know how that feels. I’m sorry I put you through it.”

“It’s not that,” Sam said. “I’ve come to terms with all that. It’s …” She seemed to struggle with herself, and then gave in. “It’s all this. It’s being here. It’s you.”

“Me?” Cordelia said, perplexed.

“It’s not your fault,” Sam told her. “I know that. You can’t help it, you weren’t given any more choice than the rest of us … but you’ve had a lot better deal since you got here than you realize.”

“I’m property,” Cordelia said evenly. “That’s been made abundantly clear to me. The training’s been tough — some of it — but I haven’t actually been treated badly. Believe me, I know it could have been a lot worse than it has been.”

“Do you? Do you really?” Sam looked to her again. “I was a soldier. Now I’m a harem girl, and you’re our lord and master’s pet project. You didn’t do any of this to us, but you’re the reason it’s being done.” She drew a sharp breath. “Do you have any idea how hard it is, sometimes, to not hate you?”

For the first time it occurred to Cordelia that the distance that had grown between them — unspoken by her, and she had believed it unknown to Sam — might have some cause other than her own secret reticence. “I hadn’t exactly thought of it that way,” she heard herself say.

“Like I said, it’s not your fault.” Sam still wouldn’t look at her. “Is it okay if we call an early stop today? I’m feeling tired all of a sudden.”

There was nothing to say to that. Cordelia rose and left, closing the door behind her.

* * *

What she had learned from Lynn was intriguing, and Sam’s revelations had been unexpectedly disturbing. Cordelia wasn’t truly interested in anything Mandy might have to say; but information was information, and Mandy’s story, though unimportant in itself, could possibly provide context and meaning to things that did matter. And so, during another and deeper review of systems Cordelia already knew thoroughly, she asked the older woman, “What were you doing before you came here?”

Mandy directed a warm smile at her, obviously pleased at this unprecedented quasi-personal inquiry. “I was free-lance,” she told Cordelia. “High-level, hush-hush; not official, but that kind of thing. I only did one or two jobs a year, but they paid well.”

Well, there went the possibility of Mandy being a hooker, her overall sluttiness notwithstanding; no working girl could command that kind of price, and any that came close would want to maximize the cash flow while they still had their looks. Besides, Cordelia had long since decided that few hookers would need such in-depth knowledge of alarms and explosives. Espionage, top-dollar high-tech theft? Many possibilities. “I could have used work like that,” she said. “But what I meant was, what were you doing, right when he pulled you in.” At Mandy’s look, she let herself go flustered and said, “It’s a personal curiosity thing, okay? I’ve been, you know, talking to some of the others. One was locked in a bathroom crying over problems at work. One was in bed with a guy, after a night out on the town. Me, I’d been kidnapped by some low-lifes —” (Un-lifes, actually.) “— and locked in the back of an inner-city shooting gallery: drugged, maybe raped, I’m really not sure. I just wondered. About you, I mean.”

Mandy’s quizzical expression faded into introspection. “I had just finished one of the jobs I was telling you about,” she said after some moments. “I had another one set up for the summer — I hadn’t planned to take it, sometimes you just have to move with events — but I had some time on my hands and didn’t really know what to do with it.”

She had given nothing away by face or voice, but Cordelia knew she was looking for despair — something negative, anyhow — so she said, “You sounded … I don’t know, kind of sad, just then.”

The other woman studied her, eyes pensive and intent and brimming with emotion (or the appearance of it, Cordelia reminded herself; Mandy had considerable control over what she revealed or hid), and said, “I’d had plans. The job had taken time to set up, and I already knew what I wanted to do when it was finished. There was somebody … We were supposed to go away together, afterward. We’d been talking about it for months, everything was going to be perfect. Then … she died.”

Right, personal confidence and manipulative overture bundled together; though it had been obvious by context from the beginning, this was the closest Mandy had come to specifically indicating her preferences. Cordelia widened her eyes and breathed, “Oh, that’s awful.”

“I was with her,” Mandy said. “She was standing next to me, I was holding her hand … and then, just like that, she was gone. There was nothing I could do.”

“How?” Cordelia asked, maintaining the same tone of tremulous awe. “What happened?”

“Heart failure,” Mandy said. “She dropped right where she stood. Never knew what hit her.”

That was not the best phrasing she could have used, but Cordelia showed none of her suspicions. “Did you … were you in love with her?”

“I felt like I was the one who had died,” Mandy said, and for just that moment she actually seemed to be telling the truth, though Cordelia was dubious about the rest of it. Someone’s heart will definitely fail if you put a knife through it; or a bullet, that would fit better with ‘dropped right where she stood’ —

There was no time to give the matter further thought just then, because Mandy was kissing her.

Cordelia had been anticipating something like this for weeks, as her visible independence continued to grow and Mandy’s attempts to establish a personal connection became increasingly less subtle. She had known it was coming, considered all the likely attendant factors and made an advance decision as to how she would act when the time came. She would back away, of course, but first she would respond: pull Mandy to her, clutch her close, throw herself into the kiss and then withdraw, leaving her would-be seductress with an even keener hunger and still hanging onto the ragged edges of hope. She hadn’t expected it at this precise moment, but she wasn’t surprised, she went with it just as she had planned out —

— only something was happening, something stirred inside her that she had never felt before, urgent and electric and demanding, Mandy’s lips were soft and her breath was warm and sweet and the desire that flared inside Cordelia was intoxicating and terrifying and she wanted MORE —!!

She broke away, gasping, and Mandy sagged, her mouth still partly open, her eyes wide with raw yearning. “You felt it,” she whispered. “I knew, I knew it was there in you but I was afraid you’d never let yourself see it. I knew, I always knew.”

“Oh my God.” Cordelia stared at the other woman; she started to raise her hand to her mouth, let it fall again. “Oh, my God.”

“It’s okay,” Mandy said. “It’s all right, baby, I know you’re scared, you wondered but you weren’t sure.” She moved to Cordelia, reached for her. “Now you know. It’s all right, we both felt it, it’s all right —”

“I can’t.” Cordelia backed away, her heart still pounding with need, and for once she made no attempt to conceal how shaken she was. “I can’t, I don’t understand … I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And, heedless of her dignity, she fled.

She sat in her rooms for twenty minutes, unmoving, thinking hard and furiously. She replayed every moment of the kiss, everything she could remember of what had sprung up within her as their lips met, looked back to other memories and compared them to this new, insistent hunger.

Then she stood, checked in the mirror to be sure she was presentable, and went to see Sam.

When Sam answered the door, she was less than presentable. No red eyes or tear-stained cheeks, but her usual buoyant cheerfulness was nowhere in evidence, and her face was drawn. “What is it?” she asked.

“Can I come in for a minute?” Cordelia asked in turn.

Without replying, Sam moved back to let her step inside. It was so familiar (allowing entry without actually offering invitation) that Cordelia had already crossed the threshold before she remembered that Sunnydale practices might not be so common elsewhere. Did Sam get that from her new unit? or was she an SHS alum, off with the Marines before Cordelia arrived on the social scene?

It wasn’t important. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said to Sam. “There’s something I need to find out. It’ll only take a moment.”

“Look, I don’t want to be rude, but this isn’t a good time,” Sam told her. “If you’ll just —”

No. She couldn’t wait. She stepped close to Sam, took her face in her hands, and kissed her.

Cordelia had been ready for Mandy. Sam wasn’t ready for this. She stood stiff, frozen, shocked and unresponsive. Cordelia didn’t care, she was looking inside herself.

Yes, it was there; yes, it was real. It hadn’t been a fluke or a misunderstanding. She didn’t want to stop. She had to stop.

She let go and pulled away. It had only been a few seconds. Sam stared at her, very slightly swaying where she stood, high spots of color on her cheeks. “What was that supposed to be for?” she demanded.

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “I’m sorry. I had to know.”

“All you needed to do was ask,” Sam said. Her eyes were hard and angry. “I don’t go that way, I could have told you that up-front.”

“It wasn’t you,” Cordelia said. “It wasn’t about you. That wasn’t what I had to know.”

She turned and left. Sam didn’t call after her. She went back to her rooms and sat on the edge of her bed, studying herself in the mirror. Thinking, considering, assessing the new heat that pulsed through her. Trying to understand what had happened to her, work it into a shape that made some kind of sense.

What it meant. What it might mean.

What she was going to do now.


Part VII

She had worked hard, learned well. The turmoil within her felt like a volcano that had to vent or erupt; but, once she found herself again in Kari’s garden, the discipline she had learned fell over her once more like a comfortable blanket, and she let herself settle into a still, perfectly ordered balance. It helped; and more than that, she would need control and clarity in dealing with the young gypsy mystic.

Gypsy? Now where had that come from? Cordelia allowed a tiny portion of her mind to examine that thought, comparing Kari’s face to her memories of Jenny Calendar’s. If they had any defining ethnic characteristics in common, Cordelia couldn’t see them, yet she decided to accept the seemingly baseless intuition. It might mean something, and was unlikely to be harmful.

Kari spoke, but Cordelia let the words flow through her. This was not the time for thought; the rational mind worked more clearly and powerfully when it could be buried, sealed from distractions and irrelevancies. Be, and then come back pure and whole from that rarified state of being.

She came back, gently and without hurry. Yes, this had been good for her. It would not have been good for her to attempt decisions when she was out of equilibrium. She was centered again now.

Death is your gift. Its flowering will be nectar to you, bitter in its sweetness.

Hmm. That one was a puzzler. Maybe she would ask, maybe she would save it for later. No need to decide just yet. Without looking, she said to Kari, “I’ve talked with the others already. Interesting stuff. What’s the source of your despair?”

Kari answered with the same floating detachment. “Once, I lived among champions. Titans, with power the gods of Asgard and Olympus would have envied. Their deeds shook the earth, and people thrilled to the tales that surrounded them.

“Two of them loved me, each in his turn, and I loved them as well. They served different aspects of the same power, and their love was as mighty as their courage. I loved them both, and forsook them both — though this was not my wish — and lost them both. In the end, I forsook each for the other, and in the end I had nothing.

“It seems a small thing now, but this was my despair. I was young, and in an agony of loss, and so He reached me. Even their memory fades now, here where is no brightness of day nor blackness of night; but this garden is my link to them, its verdure and cleanness minding me of the light by which and for which they once fought.”

That didn’t really tell her a lot, but here and now it was easier for Cordelia to remember that meaning didn’t always come from facts. Besides, Kari had earlier all but confirmed Cordelia’s impression that, for her, the greatest despair had come after (and from) her captivity. That, taken in conjunction with what Sam had said this afternoon … “Exactly what services does he demand from you?” she asked Kari. “Roxeim, I mean.”

“He takes what He wishes, as He wishes,” Kari said in answer. “Of us all.”

Discipline kept the black coil of anger tucked into its place, but Cordelia could not keep all the harshness from her voice. “Does what he wishes generally include pillow service?”

They were still speaking without looking at one another, attuning their moods (so much as possible) to the cool greenness around them. “He long ago tired of me,” Kari replied evenly. “I could not say when I was last … favored, with his attentions.”

Cordelia let that pass through her. Green. Discipline. Calm. At last she said, “Was there anything at all voluntary about this? I mean, I know I’m reaching, but I want to be clear. Were you given any choice at all?”

“None,” Kari said. “It is as I told you: we are all of us under his hand. We may not resist, or even object, except as He allows it. I have never known him to allow it.”

Cordelia maintained composure. Rage was for battle; for scheming you wanted control. She considered all the elements with a dispassion that was scarcely human. How would she react to forced sex, in this timeless place? Cordelia thought she could handle that, if she had to; she suspected she could deal with just about anything, as long as she still had the power to plot vengeance, and Lynn seemed to her to have the same hardness of spirit. She didn’t particularly care how often Mandy got pinned to the mattress (actually, her apparent preferences notwithstanding, Mandy was exactly the type to use bedroom performance as a way to leverage greater advantage for herself), but helpless victimization must eat away at Sam’s soul; and Kari, with her gentle unworldliness … all of them, subjected to a form of slavery from which Cordelia’s special status exempted her …

No. She wouldn’t feel guilty. Guilt would weaken her. She could not afford weakness now.

After a time that she didn’t bother to try to measure, Cordelia said, “You keep telling me that death is my gift. Do you have any better idea what that means? because right now, I need all the hints I can get.”

“I am sorry,” Kari said. “That still is hidden from me. But … I think you will understand, when it is time.”

Unfortunately, time didn’t seem to mean anything here.

Green. Calm. Discipline.

Wait.

* * *

When Cordelia opened her eyes the following morning, she knew.

No sleepless nights for her. She had gone through plenty of those when Xander cast her aside for Amy, and the ache hadn’t lessened as she watched him slough off Amy, too, in her turn, and go through Sunnydale’s mystical women like a snowplow; even Miss Perfect, Buffy herself, got the patented Xander Harris pump-’em-and-dump-’em treatment. But Cordelia had cried herself dry long before graduation, and since coming here she had been too drugged-out (at the beginning), bruised and sore (once she started training with Lynn), tired and satisfied (as her fitness and accomplishments mounted), or firm in her self-mastery (from Kari’s tutelage) for insomnia ever to touch her.

She was ready. Individual combat skills from Lynn. Small arms and field tactics from Sam. Organization from Mandy, along with some useful techniques. Clarity and self-knowledge from Kari. Purpose and focus from Roxeim. Every person here had made a contribution to the now-that-was-Cordelia, and while she slept, the sleepless consciousness she had learned from Kari had evaluated the situation, sorted through all the facts and issues, and brought her to a conclusion. She considered that now, studying it from different angles, adding certain minor refinements and triple-checking to be sure nothing had been overlooked.

Somewhere — years ago, she could no longer remember the source — she had seen a phrase in some book or poem: “the wrath that is slow to rise.” Sudden anger burned out quickly, but the type of fury that built up gradually had a different kind of power and persistence. That was what she possessed now, and she kept it banked low, controlled and contained but ready for release. She had the will. She had the reason. She had the means. She had the plan.

It was time.

She left her rooms, shrouded (she hoped) in the same detachment she had utilized the evening she slipped into Roxeim’s lounging-room. It was half an hour before she needed to meet Lynn in their training area. More than enough. In the section where she worked with Sam, she quickly collected certain items; returned them to her rooms, and then went to the day’s first class.

Shinai, today. Though Lynn favored the jo, she actually did better with Cordelia when she used the bamboo swords; she still had greater natural speed, and the precision required to properly use the shinai suited her perfectly. This time it didn’t matter; Cordelia’s disinterest was absolute and perfect, rendering her immune to distraction. She saw and understood every motion from Lynn even as it began, countered every attack well before it arrived, and her own attacks had no warning cues because she wasn’t truly involved in any of it. Practice with the shinai wasn’t as punishing as with other weapons; you could hit hard with the bamboo swords, but it wasn’t proper, they were meant to simulate live blades and a katana was for skill-work, not hacking. Even so, after twenty minutes of one-sided contest, Lynn stood back and said, “Whoa, girl, you are hot today. What’s got into you?”

Cordelia shrugged. “I guess it all just came together.”

Lynn shook her head. “Whatever it is, you’ve shifted into a gear I can’t match. We’re wasting our time here, I’m not teaching you anything.” She pondered a moment. “Maybe we ought to call in your leatherneck girlfriend and try a little two-on-one. Hell, give a staff to Miss Pouty-Lips and have you take on all three of us.”

“It’s your call,” Cordelia said. “But I think it might not be a good idea.”

Lynn eyed Cordelia, her thoughts unreadable. “Why not?”

“They could get hurt,” Cordelia said flatly.

A nod. It was true. At last Lynn said, “Two weeks, max. I still have a few more things I can show you, but after that we’ll just be repeating. You left me in the dust awhile back; I stopped being serious competition, concentrated on coaching. Now you’re about to outgrow me on that, too.” She tilted her head to one side. “I’ll have to tell him.”

“Your call,” Cordelia said again.

“Okay, now you’re starting to get scary.” Lynn gestured toward the door. “I’m not doing you any good here, and I need to think about some things. Might as well knock off for the day.”

Cordelia nodded, replaced the shinai on the weapons rack, and left the training area.

Back to her own rooms, settled herself into what she had to trust was psychic invisibility, and then she went to the electronics workshop. As she had anticipated, Mandy wasn’t there, just as Sam had been absent from the arms room earlier today; their routine was well enough established that (except, of course, for Kari) none of Cordelia’s instructors had much reason to be in their respective teaching areas when Cordelia wasn’t. Again she swiftly chose the small tools and components she needed, again returned to her rooms and concealed her acquisitions in an out-of-the-way spot. Then she waited, running different things through her head until it was time for her session with Sam.

Immediately upon her arrival, Cordelia told Sam, “I’m sorry about yesterday.”

Sam’s answer was brusque. “We don’t need to be talking about that.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Cordelia said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

They worked together almost wordlessly, Cordelia demonstrating the facility she had acquired. Field-strip. Reassemble. Function check. Check the sights. Set the sights for greater ranges, then re-set to standard. Adjust the sling for long march, for patrol carry, for instant access. Clear simulated jam or misfeed. Drop a magazine, insert a new one, reacquire target. Speed drills, reaction drills, advance while firing. Triple-tap for single targets: two in the chest, one to the head. One each for multiple targets, repeat as needed.

Unlike Lynn, Sam was still Cordelia’s better in her subject of instruction; but, just as with Lynn, Cordelia had already learned all she could. She would improve her small-arms skills, with further repetitive drill, but she no longer needed a teacher. This had been so for some time. Given a wider environment, Cordelia could have learned a lot from Sam about combat fieldcraft; as it was, for weeks she had drawn her greatest benefit from the comradeship they still shared. Now that, too, was gone.

Price worth paying. Cordelia missed it all the same.

She watched for any sign that Sam noticed the absence of the things Cordelia had taken that morning; not much chance of that — she had made her selections carefully, and left everything in good order — but it wasn’t to be taken for granted. There were no such warnings. Sam focused solely on the review, Cordelia performed all tasks without flaw; they spoke only when necessary, and at the end of the session Cordelia left without parting words.

Lunch back in her rooms. A small one; Cordelia hadn’t done anything to work up an appetite. Then on to Mandy.

As she had expected, Mandy jumped up as she entered, rushing to embrace her. Cordelia held up her hand. “Don’t.”

The older woman was radiant today, she might have spent the whole morning in a hormone hot-tub. She stopped, but her smile still brimmed with confidence. “We both know what happened yesterday,” she said.

“You’re right,” Cordelia said. “I won’t try to pretend it didn’t happen. We both felt it. But I wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.” Cordelia looked to Mandy. “I need time. This is new, and scary, and I have a lot to think about. Don’t push me. I mean it. If you push right now, the answer will be no.”

Mandy’s eyes were lit with tenderness and triumph. “Take all the time you need, baby. We have forever. No hurry at all.”

She was as good as her word, and they worked together without unwelcome incident, but the other woman’s manner was fond and smug, an ever-present irritation. Cordelia couldn’t help reflecting, irony much? The one she actually cared about was freezing her out, the one she couldn’t stand was falling harder by the moment, and neither of them came close to understanding her.

Fine. If they didn’t know what was actually inside her, they wouldn’t have cause to try and stop her.

When it was over, she had time before she was to go see Kari. She used it to good effect. In the hours with Kari herself, neither of them spoke; they did the twin lotus, fingertips touching, breathing in the same rhythm, separate in every other way. Cordelia was sealed within herself. She needed it: the focus, the purity. She hated it, shutting herself away from someone she had come to value. She gave herself to it, wrapped her solitude around herself in bands of soft iron.

She came out of it, and waited. Kari allowed the silence to hold — she did that sometimes — and Cordelia didn’t break it. This might be the last chance they would ever have to speak to one another. Cordelia said nothing. At last she stood and left. Without a word or nod.

Nothing at all. The farewell that wasn’t.

She was to see Roxeim tonight.

Cordelia made ready.

* * *

When he had first begun to entertain her on a steady basis, Roxeim had shown Cordelia to rooms containing women’s clothing of every type and every era, and given her leave to make free with them. She had scorned the selection at first; not because clothes didn’t matter to her (anything but!) but because she wasn’t about to be bought off. Later she had begun to dip into the wardrobes to some extent, but she varied her choices as if by whim; one time she would arrive in jeans and t-shirt (Jordache and Gucci, but still), the next in flapper’s garb, complete with beads and feathered cap, and then in the black tactical wear that she used for exercises with Sam. Lace, satin, leather, denim, she alternated them without any pattern in a manner calculated to demonstrate her utter indifference to fashion as a whole.

For this evening’s events she wore Japanese silk, geisha-style, and put her hair up to match the theme, though she didn’t bother with makeup and wore running shoes instead of geta. Roxeim favored her with the usual smiles and compliments, and they dined on quail, exquisitely prepared, a sassy red wine (Cordelia preferred blush), a Greek salad delicately seasoned in a way she hadn’t encountered before, and a selection of aged brie (so last year’s news). During the meal there was chamber music, which bored Cordelia to desperation even when she knew it was being done well, and afterward Roxeim displayed his latest attempt to impress her: Fabergé eggs, five of them, an arrangement of gems and precious metals and brilliant design that absolutely had to be worth millions.

Cordelia nodded lackluster approval, and observed, “You said you wouldn’t be poor once you made the jump back to Planet Earth. Does that mean you’ll be taking all your pretties with you?”

“Some things I will retain, for sheer pride of ownership.” Roxeim indicated the jeweled eggs. “These, for example, I could not bear to part with them. But such as that will not be the source of my wealth; works of that type would attract far too much attention. I have stores of lesser items for the purpose, raw gold and more common jewels, not top quality but of sufficient worth to keep me in comfort. Have you, then, considered my offer of closer friendship, when we leave this plane and return to mundane paths?”

“Just wondering how it’s all going to work,” Cordelia said. “You have a unique setup here; packing up and relocating to earthbound digs has to involve some headaches.” She gave him a glance of controlled inquiry. “Just as a for-instance, what happens to the others when we leave?”

“Others?” Roxeim said. “Those I brought to instruct you? Once you vanquish your imposter and bring her to me, and I work upon her the rituals that allow my departure, their purpose will have been fulfilled. I will of course return them to the niches from which they were plucked.”

“All righty,” Cordelia said. “But you know, I think it would be really nice if you would turn them loose before you send me out. Sort of an expression of confidence in me, once you think I’m ready to lay some payback on the demon chippy who’s been strolling around with my face.”

“That would be premature,” Roxeim said. “Would you, in a task of utmost importance, discard a valuable tool when there might still be need for it?”

“Well, see, that’s where we start having a difference of opinion.” Cordelia’s expression was cool, and her voice held the first hint of challenge. “They’re not exactly tools, and they weren’t exactly volunteers. Neither was I, but I’ll let you slide on that since, you know, you pulled me away from a nameless degrading death and got me ready to grab my life back. For the others, though, I’d kind of like to see some better guarantee than your smiling promises.”

Roxeim wasn’t smiling now; he hadn’t quite descended to a glower, but Mister Happy had definitely left the building. “Do you question my word?” he asked, with ominous softness.

Right, this was where she was supposed to realize her peril and back away babbling apologies. Not gonna happen. “The thing with that is, do what I ask and your word doesn’t come into it. It’s only if you refuse, demand that I trust you … then I have to decide whether you can be trusted, or not.” She held her eyes steady with his. “I’m not saying send them home right now. I just want a demonstration of good faith before I go tripping away to do your bidding. Too much to ask?”

“Far too much,” Roxeim told her firmly. “You overreach yourself. The subject is closed.”

“I kind of thought it might be.” Cordelia turned away from him; then, seconds later, swung back to face him again. “So now all the options change. Now I am saying send them back, right away, right now, or you can find someone else to be your personal-demon-shopper.”

Roxeim loomed over her, and the smile he wore now was far from pleasant. “Empty words from an empty head. Do you truly believe you can dictate to me, serve me an ultimatum? I rule here. I am law, the only law. I am as a god. You have been pampered far more than you know. Now you will learn better.”

He took a menacing step toward her. She did not give ground. “You really, truly want to think twice about trying anything, Rocky-boy. I didn’t come here unprepared … and you have a hell of a lot more to lose than I do.”

That brought him up short for a moment, but his confidence was unshaken. “I do not rule merely by words,” he told her, his tone so self-satisfied as to qualify as gloating. “This is what you thought to defy.” And then the dark force of his mind surged over her.

This was the greatest danger, she had known that from the moment her decision was made. She had set measures to come into play, in case of defeat, but this gamble had been unavoidable. Cordelia had reasons to hope he wouldn’t be able to dominate her, but none that would have justified trust. So this was it: she won or lost, right here.

She didn’t lose. It hadn’t been a sure thing; she had to summon up all the willfulness she had cultivated for a third of her life and the anger that had been rising in her for years, concentrated and regulated by the control Kari had taught her, and she suspected there was more to it than that. The storm of his psychic assault lashed at her defenses, and they trembled, groaned … and held.

Barely. Barely was enough. “Is that it?” she demanded disdainfully. “I thought you might at least make me sweat for a second.” She laughed at his expression. “What did you expect? I’m a Sunnydale girl, we brush off demon possession with our morning coffee!”

Before he could get ideas, or gather himself for a second attempt, she reached inside the folds of the Japanese robe. “You’ve got no idea what a close call you just had, jerkweed.” Her hand came out clasping a fragmentation grenade. “I had this taped to my ribs, where I could hold the spoon in place with arm-pressure, and I pulled the pin before we started our little face-off. If you had managed to take me over, we’d have both gone boom the moment you shifted me an inch. And, oh yeah, same thing happens if you try it again.”

Roxeim stood motionless, eyes riveted on the grenade in her hand, and he seemed to be having trouble getting his mouth to work. At last he said, “Are you mad?”

“And getting madder every second.” Cordelia held up the detached ring-pin with her other hand, and made a show of dropping it down her cleavage. “I’m gonna talk, and you’re gonna listen, and we’re gonna work out a deal we can both live with, ’cause otherwise we both die.”

“You know that my life is inextricably linked with the small nodule holding us,” Roxeim said, still eyeing her grip on the grenade. “You know that it will vanish without me to sustain it. If you kill me, you kill those as well on whose behalf you were pleading only a moment ago.”

“Okay, newsflash. First, I don’t plead. I asked very nicely, and you came back all macho, and so I’m not nice anymore. Second, I’d rather take you to hell with me than stay here as your play-toy, and I’ll bet they’d say the same thing if your mind-mojo gave them any choice. It doesn’t, so I’m deciding for them. If any of them disagree, I’ll apologize to them later.”

“There is no need,” Roxeim said, and all his smug assurance had returned. “You can present the issue to them now.” He glanced over Cordelia’s shoulder. “Inform her of your presence, if you would.”

She already knew it wasn’t a bluff, but any possibility of doubt was banished by the noises behind her: a hammer drawn back to full-cock, and a few feet over someone snicked off a weapon safety. Cordelia turned slowly, keeping Roxeim in her peripheral vision and still controlling the grenade. This could be seriously not of the good —

It was. They were all there: Sam was covering her with an M-4, the shorter carbine version of the M-16; off to her left, Mandy was braced in a two-handed stance with a small automatic pistol, a .32 from the apparent bore size. Lynn stood well clear of them with a pair of sai, one angled for a throw. Even Kari held a weapon, a short metal bar of indeterminate function. Roxeim must have mentally summoned them from their living quarters, with the command to come on the run with whatever they could grab …

Oh, God. Kari’s barrier, she had said Roxeim couldn’t reach through it without irreparably destroying it. Cordelia looked to the woman who had shielded her, warned her, nurtured her growth in ways she would never be able to put into words; saw the anguish in those eyes, and felt fury harden into hate.

“It is as I told you,” Kari said. She was poised to attack, but she spoke in the voice Cordelia knew from hours of patient guidance. “We are all of us under his hand. You alone are free.”

Was that supposed to be a message? If Roxeim had been speaking through her, Cordelia had to believe he would have framed it differently; maybe his control wasn’t as total as he liked to think, or maybe four at once was right at the edge of his capabilities.

“Well?” Roxeim said. “They are here now. Are you still prepared to end their lives along with mine? Not even as the price of your freedom, but from simple spite at being denied?”

“Stifle it,” Cordelia told him. To the others she said, “Okay, everybody maintain cool. This thing —” She nodded toward the grenade. “— is all set to go bang. I have to get the pin back.” Making no quick motions, she reached down the front of her robe, groped around for a few seconds, and withdrew her hand, displaying the ring-pin. “See? We’re doing fine here, just stay steady.” She had to turn her hand slightly to line up the pin with the aperture in the neck of the grenade; she did it carefully, slowly, and let her breath out with a whoosh. “There. We’re good. All safe now.” Still without making any sudden moves, she tossed the grenade to Sam, underhand.

And, while Mandy’s eyes followed its arc, and Sam let the M-4 muzzle drop as she reached out to catch it, Cordelia reached inside her robe, found the controller she had moved to a position of readier access, and blew the lights.

It was by its nature a compromise measure, she hadn’t had the time beforehand to plant charges in as many places as she wanted, or the time now to key any but the nearest, but it would have to do. She was in motion even as the wall junction went with a satisfying bamm!, launching herself to the side as Mandy snapped off a shot in what was either panic or unnervingly quick reaction. Most of the lights went out but not all, again it would have to do, Sam had the automatic carbine so she was the most dangerous, Cordelia darted behind Roxeim to make Sam hold fire and pulled a sai from the inner sash of her robe, and as she cleared Roxeim she hurled it across the room, and the butt struck Sam squarely in the forehead, dropping her on the spot.

Cordelia was among the others while Sam was still falling, obedient to the Marine maxim Sam herself had taught her: when surprised by superior numbers, attack! She would have gone for Lynn next, judging her the greater threat even without a firearm, but instant unthought decision sent her at Mandy instead, using a forward roll in the semi-darkness to carry her beneath the other woman’s vision. She came up inside Mandy’s guard, a bladed outward block struck the gun-arm aside and she felled Mandy with an elbow-smash to the face, moving again before her most recent opponent could begin to fall or the others could center on her. In the near-absence of light they needed an extra moment to be sure who was who, but for Cordelia everyone was an enemy, and she stabbed Lynn in shoulder and knee with the second sai she had hidden away (had to use the sleeve of the robe to block Lynn’s strokes, she had disregarded the advice about carrying a third sai as a spare), then she had whirled away while Lynn yelped and cursed behind her. Kari tried to reach her with a swing of the metal bar; Cordelia slipped out of its path and didn’t even bother to counterstrike, Roxeim had made a break for the door and Cordelia brought him down with a leaping kick she never would have dared try against Lynn or even Sam.

She hauled him up onto his knees, bracing him with her thigh on one side and a single-nelson on the other, the point of the sai set below his ear. “What’s the rush, Rocky? The party just got started, and we still haven’t settled on what kind of presents you’re gonna give me.”

Roxeim hissed from pain, but he spoke with the same bluster as before. “Nothing. I grant you nothing. The situation is unchanged. While I live, I rule, and if I die, so do all these whose welfare so concerns you. Submit; you have no other choice.”

“Wrong, ass-breath.” Cordelia increased pressure with the sai. “Get it through your head before I put this through your head: I’m not playing by your rules. Whatever else happens, we won’t stay here as slaves. Send us home, free, and you live. Don’t, and you die. It’s just that simple.”

“You will not strike.” Even though she couldn’t see his face from her position behind him, Cordelia could hear the sneer. “I have observed you with them: friend, mentor, sister, lover. They are too important to you, you will not sacrifice them. By caring for them, you have made them my hostages. I would be a fool to relinquish such potent leverage.”

“So,” Cordelia said. “Your best deal is, no deal. Is that your final offer?”

“You must submit,” Roxeim told her. “I will never do so.”

“Then I guess you were right,” Cordelia said. “I have no other choice.” She released the trapped arm, withdrew the sai; and as he began to stand, she stepped around to face him, pulled him to her, and kissed him.

He laughed, bringing his hands up to shove her away; then he stiffened as she pulled him tighter and deepened the kiss; then he began to scream. Cordelia heard someone cry out wordlessly, Mandy or Kari, and she swung to keep his body between her and them and there was a shot and then a choking sound and it didn’t matter she didn’t care she yes yes yesss.

This was what had awakened within her when she first touched the enhancement lattice (though she had betrayed no sign of it), and then lain unresponsive when she tried to nudge it further. This was what had stirred and risen when Mandy kissed her, and again when she tested it by kissing Sam. There had been a risk — that it wouldn’t be powerful enough, that Roxeim would be immune, even that it would only work on women — but she had known, known, that this would be her hidden ace. Now it howled in triumph, tore into its prey and drank greedily, and Roxeim’s screams faded into moans, and then whimpers, and then nothing.

Cordelia let him fall, his face ashen and eyes vacant: lifeless and empty, without a mark on him anywhere. His power thrummed inside her, and she turned to face the four women … but there were only three now. Mandy lay dead, the small pistol inches from her fingers and Lynn’s sai buried in her throat. Sam was on hands and knees, still more than half-stunned. Lynn leaned against the wall, favoring the knee Cordelia had wounded, but she grinned approval, and said happily, “Princess, you rock.”

Kari stood stiff, voiceless. She looked to Roxeim, and then to Cordelia. What did she see? Cordelia didn’t know, and feared to guess. Cordelia stepped away from the self-proclaimed god-man she had drained dry, but she wouldn’t let herself lower her eyes from Kari’s. At last the other woman looked away; but not before Cordelia had seen understanding, and sorrow … and relief.

Death is your gift.


Part VIII

Neither of Sam’s pupils was blown, so Cordelia allowed herself to hope there was no concussion. A disabling strike to the head always posed the danger of brain damage, but there had been no time for fastidiousness; throwing the sai to strike with butt rather than point was as gentle as Cordelia had been able to manage. As Sam was helped to her feet, she looked around and said, “I don’t want to jinx it by saying this out loud, but I couldn’t help noticing that we’re still alive.”

“Most of us,” Cordelia noted, with a sharp glance at Lynn, who just shrugged.

“No loss,” Sam said. “But I’m serious. Am I the only one who cares that we’re alive?”

“She drew his power into herself,” Kari said. “She is master now. Over all this domain.” She looked to Cordelia. “Over us, if she wishes.”

“Okay, first of all, no,” Cordelia said. “Second, hell, no. That’s not what this was about.”

“Not hearing any arguments from me,” Lynn said cheerily. “So, do we have champagne around here?”

“It is not a time for levity,” Kari said. “She has freed us, but at a cost.”

“Her?” Lynn said, with a contemptuous nod toward Mandy’s body. “Piss on her. And I’m not just saying that ’cause I’m the one shanked her. Anybody here who didn’t want to do the same?”

“That was not my meaning,” Kari reproved. “But it is so that she carried a terrible weight of karma.” To Cordelia she said, “The strictures that He placed on me are gone, and I see much that was long closed to me. I would have given you stronger warning, had I known. I am deeply sorry.”

“Warning about what? About her?” Lynn wouldn’t be suppressed. “Tell me more about that bad karma she was carrying.”

Was her insistence a counter-reaction to what she had done? Cordelia had just performed her own first killing, and was still adjusting, however necessary the act had been; maybe Lynn was more rattled than she wanted anyone to see. As if aware of the same possibility, Kari said to Lynn, “I knew from the first that her soul was scarred, but I did not see the true depths. She carried the echoes of her past here with her … She was on a plane, a passenger liner, and then she was not, and the plane exploded. It was not even her true target; she murdered hundreds, merely to cover her trail. That is what you killed.”

Lynn blinked. “Whoa. Really? Well, good on me.”

Great, Cordelia thought. Evil, dead lesbian. Cliché much?

“Are you going to send us home?” Sam asked. The others looked to her, and she continued, “If you took all his power, then you should be able to do what He could do. So, can you send us back to where we belong?”

“I’m pretty sure I can,” Cordelia said; that, too, had been a gamble. “But I don’t exactly know how. It may take awhile to work out that part of it.”

“In this I can help you.” That from Kari, and Cordelia felt a surge of relief. “I was here for many years, longer even than she —” A nod to Lynn. “— and I learned more than He ever knew I knew.”

“Good,” Sam said. “That’s good. So you two get together, iron out the kinks, and there we are. Next stop, Earth.”

“Right,” Lynn said, with a derisive laugh. “Good luck on that.”

Cordelia was beginning to feel overwhelmed; this was, she realized, the first time in months she had been required (or even able, usually) to talk with more than one person at a time. To Lynn she said, “Do you know something we don’t?”

Lynn’s smile had a mocking edge. “Just that there are a hell of a lot of different Earths, and I wouldn’t lay great odds that we’re all from the same one. Maybe not even any two of us.”

“That poses less difficulty than you might think,” Kari said, intervening with firm authority. “It is so, He reached across time, as well as into the past, to draw in the riches and supplies and individuals He desired for his service. But in the world of my home, the principles of crosstime travel are not unknown. All that is, carries a link to the reality where it originated. With his power, she can follow that link back to its source.”

“Good, then,” Sam said. “Let’s do that.”

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia broke in. “Can we talk somewhere else? Maybe I’m being picky here, but we’re standing in a room with two dead bodies. People we killed ourselves. I’m having trouble acting casual about that.”

They left Roxeim’s chamber, and moved toward the training area where she and Lynn had fought so often. On the way, she found the opportunity to quietly tell Kari, “I’m sorry about your garden.”

“That is of no moment,” Kari said. “I have no more need of it.” She smiled suddenly. “I am free, after so long … ‘You are death and deliverance.’ I spoke more truly than I could then understand.”

Cordelia did not return the smile. “Yay, me.”

When they reached the training room, they stood facing one another; there were no chairs, she and Lynn had always been either on their feet or on the floor. “So,” Cordelia said. “I’m supposed to tune in on everybody and trace your lifeline back to the point where you got snatched up. How’s that work, exactly?”

“Time has a curious nature here,” Kari said. “You have seen that we heal quickly; however, we age not at all. Yet time does continue to flow, in a sense. He could delve into the past, as I said, of many different realities, but the future was closed to him, except as it unfolded in its own due course. His forward reach could go no farther than what is ‘the present’ outside this sphere. You were drawn from the year of 1999. She —” Kari indicated Sam. “— came here from 2001. He had hoped to have you prepared for a time in 2003; but now, outside, it is 2004.”

“You’re not serious,” Cordelia said. “You’re telling me I’ve spent five years in limbo? No way; a year, tops.”

Kari smiled, as if at some private amusement. “You would be, I think, correct. Though He retrieved you from 1999, the time then in the outer realities would have been spring of 2003, so you have been here just less than a year. If you will seek within yourself, you should be able to sense the means of following our lines back to where we began; a different matter, though no more difficult, is the matter of returning us to our original time. And … there is more, besides.”

“Always a catch,” Lynn observed. “Okay, Moonbeam, lay it on us, we’re all big girls.”

“We are not the first He brought here for profit or amusement,” Kari said. “I have seen others — as have you —” (this to Lynn) “— and I do not doubt that there were many before them. His power over those He held here was deep and broad, and that power still applies to us.” To Cordelia she said, “You have choices to make, or to offer us. You can return each of us to her own reality, or to some other. You can place us in the time from which we came, or in another. And you can allow us to keep the memory of our time here, or remove it from us. This is yours to decide.”

“Hold on,” Sam said. “She can do that? Put us back where we came from, when we came from, and us not even remember it? Wipe it away like it never happened?”

Cordelia looked inside herself, felt the new energy there, stretched her senses to cover the others. “She’s right,” she told them. “It’s actually pretty simple. I wouldn’t do anything like that, not unless you wanted me to, but I definitely know how.”

“I’m in,” Sam said promptly. “I don’t want to take back any of the things that happened to me here. Beam me back, Scotty, and no thanks for the memories.”

“I, too, would return where I was, when I was, as I was,” Kari said. “My experiences here have … marked me, in ways that I do not wish to carry.” She looked to Cordelia. “I regret that I will forget you as well, but you have grown past need of what I can offer. Better that I allow what transpired here, to remain here.”

“Well, don’t anybody look at me,” Lynn said. “What, land back in the Ozarks in 1981? I don’t think so. Sure, I could clean up on Microsoft and Chrysler stock, but then I’d have to wait twenty years for DVDs to come back around. As for memories, I’ve taken some hard bumps but it all went to making me me. I don’t throw that away.”

“Okay, then,” Cordelia said. “Glad we cleared that up.” She turned back to Sam. “You would be the easiest, I can tell. Your time is close to this one, and your world … it wants you back. And I won’t have to clear your memory, you lose that unless I tell it not to. We could do it right now.”

Sam gave her an open-palmed shrug. “So do it.”

Cordelia reached out to touch Sam’s forehead, where the handle of the sai had struck. “You might wait a day or so, let that heal a bit —”

“I had bruises when I came here,” Sam said, shaking it away. “Commando training is rough, nobody’ll care about one more. Just send me home.” Something must have shown in Cordelia’s eyes, because Sam’s expression softened. “Look, every morning I got up and put on my cheery-face, and every day I wondered if He’d call me in for his regular dose of droit du seigneur, and every night I thought about getting in the bathtub and opening up my wrists. I’m ready to be gone from this place, ready to have all that scrubbed out of my head. It’s not personal.”

“I understand,” Cordelia said. “How were you dressed when he brought you here?”

Sam glanced down at what she was wearing. “Something like this. I don’t really remember, but this should be close enough.”

“Okay, then.” Cordelia felt herself, felt Sam, let the power move between them. “This’ll just take a second —”

“I’m sorry I freaked out over the kiss,” Sam said abruptly. “I apologize for that.”

“You weren’t anywhere near as freaked as you should have been,” Cordelia answered her. “I apologize for using you as a lab mouse.”

“You kissed her?” Lynn asked.

“It’s there,” Cordelia said to Sam. “All you have to do is say the word.”

“Thanks,” Sam said. “For everything.” Then: “Hit it.”

“Goodbye.” Blink. Gone.

Lynn shook her head. “I can’t believe you kissed her.”

Cordelia sighed with exasperation. “Sorry I didn’t get video for you. Look, can we have a minute here?”

“Sure,” Lynn said. “I’ll be right over there. Don’t mind me.”

When she had withdrawn, Cordelia and Kari faced each other. Kari was first to speak. “What you took from him, you will relinquish that if you leave this — your — domain. The other, however, the faint heritage He awoke from within you … that will be with you always. I did not know, then, but still I feel shame that I helped him lead you to such a thing.”

“Let’s not start comparing notes on shame,” Cordelia said. She closed her eyes briefly. “First there was what he was doing to you, to all of you, while I was building up my muscles and feeling all put-upon. Now there’s this.” She ran a fingertip across her lips. “I used to help fight vampires. Now I’m a vampire myself, sort of. Talk about karma.”

“It is that, perhaps, but not in the way you mean.” Kari’s words were gentle. “In at least two realities that I can see, other versions of you drew power from a kiss, and each became a champion. For your sisters, it was a single incident; in you, this ability was strengthened, but that was not your doing. Nor, I think, is it your destiny.”

“You don’t know,” Cordelia said. “How it feels, how much I like it, how much it wants to get out. It loves to drink power, and life along with it. Too much is never enough, and that’s what I am now.”

“It is part of you,” Kari said. “It is not all of you. You are the one who chooses, and I do not fear your choice.”

“You don’t know,” Cordelia repeated.

“I trust,” Kari said, and stepped close to her.

Cordelia saw it coming this time, she could have backed away; but she wanted this, needed to believe. The kiss was slow and soft, and the force inside her leapt up eagerly. She held it in its place, let it move but not take hold, and it subsided a little sulkily, and the kiss remained simply a kiss.

“That was … kind of nice, actually,” Cordelia said when the other woman pulled away at last.

“It can be that, without having to be more.” Kari smiled. “You see? You will need to remain watchful, but you need not be always fearful.”

“Thanks for that,” Cordelia said. “But … it was just to help me, right? I mean, you’re strictly into guys?”

Again the hint of amusement, as if Kari knew some joke hidden from Cordelia. “One,” she said. “One ‘guy’.”

They had no need to say more. Cordelia let Roxeim’s power reach out again, and Kari felt it and nodded assent, and a moment later she, too, was gone.

In the new silence, Lynn’s voice came clearly. “And then there was one.”

Cordelia looked around. “Sorry. Forgot you were there.”

“Yeah, I could see you were kinda preoccupied.” Lynn hobbled over to join her, still favoring the wounded leg. “So what’s it gonna be? Gushing gratitude? Deathmatch? Or is it my turn to get macked on?”

“Try ‘D, None of the above.’ ” Cordelia studied her with cool eyes. “I don’t gush. I’ve already filled today’s quota for girl-girl action. And we both know there’s no way you could fight me now. I was just wondering about a few things.”

“Uh-huh. Such as?”

“Such as, why did you kill Mandy?”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time. You had the boss-man on the ropes, Mandy was about to yank off another shot, and I didn’t want to take a chance on what damage she might do.” She raised a challenging eyebrow. “Maybe I was afraid she’d kill you. Maybe I was afraid she’d kill him. Maybe I just figured, what the hell, I never liked the bitch anyway. What d’you think?”

“I never know what to make of you,” Cordelia said. “You could be the most honest person here … but I know, ’cause I patented it, that being an up-front bitch doesn’t mean there’s nothing else going on behind the attitude.”

Lynn gave her a hard-edged grin. “So? You got a point?”

“I don’t know.” Cordelia shook her head. “I understood the others, but I can’t get a grip on you. Right now, I see three basic possibilities, and two of them don’t make you look very good.” She counted them off. “You were under his thumb like the rest of us. You were a prisoner, but you collaborated with him. Or the two of you were in it together. So, which is it?”

“Problem with that is, you got no evidence points one way or the other.” Lynn gave a little laugh. “And, like you said, I could be making up whatever I tell you. There’s one thing you might want to think about, though.”

“I’m listening.”

“The whole collaborator deal is a sliding scale. Every one of us here handled things the best way we could; so where’s the line between playing along, and selling out? If any of the rest of us coulda pulled off your little palace coup, you might be facing some hard questions yourself right now. Special clothes. Special training. Cozy little dinners with Mister Big. You’d look pretty guilty.”

“I played the hand I was dealt, worked with whatever I had.” Cordelia studied Lynn narrowly. “You’re saying that’s what you did?”

“I’m saying if you wanta understand me, check in the mirror.”

Cordelia snorted at that. “Right, because I look like Urban-Blight Xena.”

“See, that’s what I thought.” Lynn laughed. “You were every girl I ever hated in high school, and I got a total charge out of beating you to the floor every single day. Except you kept coming back for more; took your lumps, worked what I taught you, never backed down, never whined … some crying at first, the occasional scream, but you just wouldn’t quit.” Lynn favored her with the lopsided smile she had shown the first time Cordelia landed a blow in sparring. “We may be from different sides of the tracks, Princess, but you’ve got the same grit that’s all I ever had. So there you are.”

Cordelia thought about it, sighed. “I’ll never know for sure, will I?”

The answer was another shrug. “Sucks to be you.”

“Okay, I give up,” Cordelia said. “But I still want to know one thing: what did you do, when you woke up naked out on the prairie?”

“Ah. Right, that. I could see I wasn’t in Kansas, so I decided to play the goddess-fallen-from-the-sky routine; stood up and started giving ’em orders. They weren’t impressed, it works a lot better if you actually speak the language. They went to slap me down, I dropped a couple of ’em, and that got them to wondering. After they talked it over for awhile, they pointed toward their village and led the way, treating me respectfully in case I had some juice they didn’t know about. I walked maybe five miles on rough ground, barefoot — hell, barefoot to the neck — head up and haughty, never showed how much it was hurting.” Lynn’s smile was reminiscent and not a bit nice. “Took some time, and it was ninety percent bluff, but I wound up running the tribe.”

“And Roxeim pulled you from there?” Cordelia asked.

“He didn’t, actually.” Lynn looked embarrassed. “I shoulda just lied about this, ’cause the truth’s gonna sound like something I’m making up. See, after awhile I found out I could feel the thin spots between worlds, even push my way through ’em. By then I wasn’t having fun with the Sherit anymore — winter on the plains is no damn joke without central heat — so I set off looking for home. A few more years down the road, I landed in this place by accident: fell through the cracks, couldn’t get back ’cause there was nowhere to get back from — we’re kinda outside the shipping lanes here — so I struck up the best arrangement I could with the Big Cheese.”

“Arrangement?” Cordelia asked. “What kind of arrangement?”

“I got to live,” Lynn said crisply. “Meanwhile, I helped him plan and push along his special project, and worked hard at being his dream girl between the sheets.”

“O-o-kay,” Cordelia said. “And — right after eww — can I ask how this isn’t the collaborating I was talking about, a little while back?”

“How about the part where, whenever He was romping with me, He wasn’t bothering anybody else?” Lynn spoke evenly, but her expression was defiant. “Plus, I’m the one convinced him He’d have a better chance at talking you over to his side if He left you out of his bedroom rotation.”

“And once again with the eww.” Cordelia shook her head. “So I guess I’m supposed to feel grateful to you for that?”

Lynn planted her fists on her hips and said, “Feel whatever you want. You did what you had to to survive, and plotted to break loose. I did the same thing. You got there first. Deal with it.”

There was a lot Cordelia wanted to say to that, but she didn’t know how: how to put it into words, or how to say it without sounding preachy. Because Lynn had been right, it was hard to mark the division between compliance and complicity …

No, not that hard. The difference came when it hurt others, when you gained your advantage by preying on someone else. There was no way of knowing whether Lynn had ever done that, but Cordelia drew satisfaction from the knowledge that she never had, and never would.

“Okay,” Cordelia said. “If giving yourself some leeway to operate meant boinking the boss, I guess that was your choice to make, however barfsome it might be. But if I ever find out it went past that, we’ll be having a different kind of conversation.” She looked to the other woman. “For now, though, I’m just terminally tired of this whole scene. All right, let’s see about getting you home.”

* * *

To her consternation, she couldn’t get a reading on Lynn. The other woman was vexed, but didn’t seem surprised. “I was afraid of something like that,” she said. “I passed through a lotta different Earths before I landed here, and that was almost twenty years ago. I guess my trail’s gone cold.”

“We’ll think of something,” Cordelia said. “If you want, I can take you with me when I go back; there are some people I know who might be able to put together a seeking spell, give you a better idea which direction to look —”

“Hold up there,” Lynn said. “Backtrack a second. You can leave? you’re not stuck here, the way He was?”

“Hmm? Oh, sure.” Cordelia nodded positively. “I don’t know what was the deal with him, exactly, but I can tell: I’m not tied here any stronger than you are.”

Lynn said nothing to that. After a few minutes of thought, she commented, “You know, that might make sense of some things I wondered about. Our late host’s story didn’t always add up, and He was too full of himself to work very hard at keeping it straight. Tell me, what happens to this place when you leave?”

“Oh, it’s gone,” Cordelia said. “It’ll collapse right in on itself without an over-mind to maintain it. But what does it matter, once we’re out?”

“It mattered to him,” Lynn insisted. “Think about it: He had whatever loot He could reach, total power over anybody He brought here … not to mention immortality, He didn’t go into details but I think He may have been here since da Vinci was the hot young thing in all the galleries. What if He did figure out how to leave, but didn’t want to give this up? What if this demon gal we were priming you to snatch was just gonna be a placeholder, so He could take a little walkabout every now and then, blow off some steam, and then tuck back here where He was the next thing to God? You gotta admit, that’d be a hell of a setup.”

“And why exactly am I supposed to care about any of this?” Cordelia wanted to know.

Lynn shrugged. “I don’t know. You could do the same thing, maybe.”

“As if.” Cordelia sniffed at the thought. “I want people to worship me because I’m so wonderful, not because I’m some backwater tinpot faux-goddess. And if I cared about immortality, I could have waited outside the Bronze every night till some pulseless wonder put the moves on me. Besides, what’s in it for you if I become the next She-who-must-be-obeyed?”

“Nothing.” Lynn was studying her with another of those odd smiles. “I just wondered, maybe ’cause I wonder what I’d do with the same choice.” She grinned suddenly. “I probably shoulda thought about it before flapping my mouth; if you’d got tempted, you mighta decided it’d be a good idea to keep me here, too. Glad you’re incorruptible. So, what kinda goodies should we take with us when we make the hop?”

Cordelia considered, assessing what she could feel with Roxeim’s power. “I’m thinking, nothing,” she said. “There are all kinds of links running through the stuff he collected here. I don’t understand exactly how it works, and I’m not sure about the backlash we’ll get when this place pops. You especially need to be careful, your source-line is snarled enough already.”

“Nothing?” Lynn protested. “We have to jump empty-handed? That’s a rip.”

“Worse than naked in a wasteland?” Cordelia pointed out. “Our clothes are safe, they’re mostly tied to us, so it’ll be an improvement on your first trip offworld. Give me a minute to change into something practical, and I’ll be ready to go.”

“Empty-handed,” Lynn groused as Cordelia started to her rooms for what should be the last time. “Not even a little sack of diamonds. Friggin’ spoilsport …”

Lynn was waiting when Cordelia returned ten minutes later; she had bandaged the wounds inflicted by the sai, but was otherwise as Cordelia had left her. “So, we’re set?” Lynn said.

“No little extras stowed away,” Cordelia warned. “I’m serious, I’ll be able to tell, and even if you slip something by me, it could do icky things to your innards.”

“Don’t worry, I’m clean.” Lynn’s expression was sour, but she spoke resignedly. “Just get us out of here before I start crying.”

Cordelia closed her eyes, extended her senses …

She looked to Lynn. “Small problem,” she announced.

“Shit! Now what?”

“I can’t focus on myself to follow my source-line back to its base,” Cordelia explained. “It’s like putting on makeup without a mirror; you can do it, but it takes practice, and I haven’t had any.”

“Fine,” Lynn said. “Just take us anywhere that isn’t here, I’m not particular.”

“Please,” Cordelia scoffed. “I want my life back. You expect me to leap blind? I am so not going to be the Sam Beckett of the hot-babe set.”

“Right, welcome to what I’ve been living since Jimmy Carter left the White House.” Lynn thought for a moment. “Did our glorious patron ever show you something from a little chest, wrapped in cloth, looked kinda like Aztec art?”

“I think I know the one you mean,” Cordelia said. “And if we’re talking about the same item, I know where we should be able to find it.”

“Good deal. Okay, gimme a minute, I’m trying to remember.” Lynn frowned. “Something He said once … Yeah, that’s right, I’m sure of it; that doodad comes from the same place He was planning to send you. So if we dig it out —”

“I can follow its source-line back to where I belong.” Cordelia smiled. “Good thinking.”

“Let’s don’t count any chickens yet,” Lynn said. “But if this works the way you say it will, we should be locked on course.”

It did.

They were.

Sort of.


Epilogue

She had been shaped and tempered for almost a year, as much by the path she had chosen as by the circumstances imposed upon her. More than weapons, or schematics, more than her body or even her mind: she had mastered herself, learned to control impulse and anger and desire and impatience. So when she set herself to find and overcome the creature now impersonating her, she moved deliberately and without haste.

The artifact’s line had taken her to Chicago. Good enough. After the Big Apple, major cities did not intimidate Cordelia, though finding herself once again among great masses of people had required some adjustment. Lynn bade her cheerful farewell within minutes of their arrival, and Cordelia voiced no objection to her departure; after nearly a year of near-constant contact, they were, without any resentment, thoroughly sick of one another. That left Cordelia alone in her quest, and she was by now serenely comfortable relying on none but herself.

She did not go to Sunnydale. She did not contact anyone from her former life. Though she was only a year older, almost five years had gone by here since she had turned her back on the small-town scene. There was no telling what had happened, what had changed, which alliances had shifted and which new ones formed during that time. She would do nothing to give premature warning.

She needed information. She went to a public library. Google had evolved remarkably in four years and change. “Cordelia Chase” yielded multiple results. The ones that mattered pointed to Los Angeles.

She needed money. She had no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no identification of any kind, and no inclination to labor for pennies while she built up a bankroll. So she mugged drug dealers, one of whom — to her brief surprise — proved to be a vampire, himself surprised when he attempted to turn the tables on her. His ‘life’ energy tasted utterly horrible, and as Cordelia staggered away from the settling ashes, fighting nausea, she resolved to do that again sometime shortly after never. Aside from the single bobble, her acquisition of funds proceeded without undue incident, and money in turn solved the ID problem.

She needed transportation. She was neither too proud nor in too great a hurry to take a relay of buses to L.A. Once there, she did a brief reconnaissance (more cash, more battered, semiconscious men, this time mostly pimps) and rented a motel room, slightly overpriced but acceptably clean and private, to serve as a base of operation.

No hurry, but neither had she unnecessarily wasted time. She had reached Los Angeles eight days after touching down in Chicago. Working quietly and carefully, limiting herself primarily to public information sources and supplementing those with precision forays into no-trace burglary, she devoted another eleven days to locating the Cordelia-who-wasn’t.

A clinic. A private clinic, with low-profile but comprehensive funding from a number of no-doubt-prestigious companies, not that she cared. Security was respectable but not remotely adequate to cause her the slightest inconvenience. She strolled in during shift-change, needing only a fraction of her attention to avoid notice or challenge, and found the room that held her quarry.

The woman in the bed was not in good condition. She had received quality care, that much was easy to see, but the human body was not designed to lie passive for months. Her limbs were flaccid with disuse, her fingers settling into a permanent curl; her face was slightly puffed from fluid retention, and the angle of her head on the pillow allowed a line of saliva to run from the corner of her mouth to her ear.

Cordelia looked down with faint disgust but no pity. This was the thing that had banished her to hell, stolen her life, and then wasted it. For months she had anticipated the time when she found it, fought it, vanquished it, reclaimed what was hers; but there would be no more satisfaction in this than in stepping on a cockroach.

It didn’t matter. Checkout time, bitch, she thought venomously, and bent to place a kiss on the dry, cracked lips.

The contact hurled her back with unexpected, stunning force, and Cordelia gasped as a scorching series of images slammed through her brain, she couldn’t stop it she wasn’t ready and and and and and and and

— symbols painted on a door —
— again, the same symbols, no, tattoo not paint —
— a man, doubling over in pain, his face his face she knew that face —
more
more
more
more

Then the rest of it flowed into her mind, and she knew instantly that she had made a ghastly mistake.

* * *

In the first awful moments of realization Cordelia wildly thought she had gotten it totally backward, she was the demon brainwashed to replace the real Cordelia and oh God Xander had made her watch a Deep Space Nine episode with exactly this plot twist —

No. No, it wasn’t that. But it was almost that terrible.

This wasn’t her world. She had come to the wrong reality. Roxeim had needed Cordelia, this Cordelia, so he had reached across time to take a different Cordelia and shape her into a willing agent to capture the one he couldn’t touch. It wasn’t just that the woman in the bed believed, knew she was Cordelia Chase; that could be delusion, imprinted memories just like the replicated Miles O’Brien, but no, those memories matched this world and it was the wrong world. Angel, this woman loved Angel, he was a champion here (but Buffy killed him at the Crawford Street mansion); Amy somehow trapped in rat form (no, she deserted the Slayerettes to throw in her lot with the Mayor) and oh! giant snake at graduation! Harmony, vamped but never souled, just as stupid and petty as ever but — here — blithely, incompetently evil; herself impaled by a length of rebar instead of a demon, and what was she doing at the factory? (Buffy, it was Buffy who caught Willow and Xander in THE ACT, and ran away from Sunnydale two months later, with Oz following her.) Would-be actress in L.A. instead of failed model in New York, and a hollow-cheeked man with bright blue eyes and, yes, power that was passed through a kiss —

More, years more of it, and all wrong.

No. This wasn’t the wrong world. She herself was the wrong Cordelia.

And, because she had come to where she didn’t belong, struck at the wrong target, the ‘real’ one was dying.

She felt the memories settle into her (not her memories, no, not hers), and the life slowly but inexorably oozing out of the woman in the bed; and more than that, felt the warning her other self had so desperately struggled to voice (Angel, help Angel, save Angel!), and the prophetic power that had brought the message …

That power wasn’t hers, either. She didn’t deserve it, and she couldn’t keep it. But she could pass along at least part of it, and she could work to save the man the dying woman loved.

It wasn’t enough. But it was all she could do.

She went out into the hall and dialed a number (the Hyperion, she had never been there but it was vivid in her looted memories), heard it transfer twice before anyone answered. She spoke a few terse words, and hung up.

Then she shut herself into the bathroom and wept.

* * *

They arrived more quickly than she would have believed, she had just shed her clothes and gotten into the hospital gown when she heard Angel speak her name (no, not hers), his voice shaky with hope and disbelief. She had wiped away her tears minutes before, so she answered quickly and stepped out of the bathroom, face composed and unlined over the black lie it covered. They were too close to the bed, Angel and Wesley — she could remember kissing Wesley, wouldn’t Harmony just die! — so she stepped up to pull the privacy curtain closed, observing, “This chick’s in rough shape.” (Worse than rough, she wouldn’t last out the day.) She was still talking, falling into character, assuming the role that was the only thing she could give them.

Angel hugged her, and Wesley, and she smiled at them and spoke glibly, sick with shame at what she had become. She steered them away from the bed, steeling herself to see this through to the end. She would convey the final message, and carry out the final mission, and deliver the final gift of the woman she had killed. Then she would vanish; and perhaps, someday, when she had come to terms with the anguish and guilt, she might manage to find herself again.

There was no link between them (nothing left to link to, she had taken it all), but still she sent her thoughts back to the still figure she was leaving, hoping that some part of her murdered other self, somewhere, would understand:

I’m sorry.

I’ll take care of him, I promise.

Forgive me.

 

~Fin