Chapter 2
ADA
The training yard is a cleared basement two floors below the courtyard, shored up with steel beams and lit by solar strips that give everything a flat white glow.
The air down here is close—concrete dust, old sweat, the metallic tang of blades that have been sharpened too many times.
I've been running sessions here since my second year.
The floor is stained in places. Some of it is old rust from the rebar. Some of it isn't.
"Elbows in. If your elbow is wider than your ribs when you strike, you've given me a target. I will take it."
Six fighters in a semicircle. Three second-years, two thirds, and Petra. The second-years hold their blades like they might bite. Petra holds hers the way I taught her—loose grip, relaxed wrist, the blade an extension of her hand instead of something bolted to it.
"Renna, show me the disarm sequence."
Renna is eighteen, broad-shouldered, strong.
She has good instincts and bad footwork—the combination that gets people killed fastest, because the instincts put you where you need to be while the footwork takes you there a half-second too late.
She works through the sequence. The steel-on-steel sound of it rings off the basement walls and comes back doubled.
The pivot is wrong. Too wide, too slow, a full second where her knife hand is out of position. Anything with reach and speed will open her up from sternum to hip in that window.
"Again. Tighter pivot."
She does it again. Better. Still wide on the third step, but the timing has improved. She's closing the gap between what her body wants to do and what the technique requires. Another week.
I don't correct it a third time. She'll drill it on her own tonight. I know because she drilled the first two sequences unprompted, running them until her pivot was clean while the rest of the barracks slept.
Some fighters need to be pushed. Renna needs to be shown once and left alone with it. The trick is knowing which kind you're training.
"Pair up. Blade-to-blade, no striking. I want pressure—constant, forward, don't give ground. If your partner backs you to the wall, you've lost. Go."
They pair off. Their breathing fills the basement—sharp inhales on the forward press, controlled exhales on the hold. Boots scraping the stained concrete. The ring and slide of blade edges meeting. Petra takes Renna.
Smart. Petra is faster. Renna is stronger. They'll each learn the thing they don't have by fighting the person who does.
I watch them work. This is what I'm good at.
Not the council meetings, not the supply negotiations, not Dov's endless calculus of how much to give the Ordained to keep them from taking more. This. Bodies in motion. The geometry of violence. The way a wrist rotates when a strike is committed versus when it's probing.
I can read a fight the way I read territory markers. The information keeps people alive.
What we train for, in order: the canopy mutations first—the things the asteroid made of the animals that used to live here, the ones with too many legs or too much speed or the patience of something that has learned humans are predictable.
Then other humans—scavengers, rival settlements, the Ordained's enforcement teams when a settlement stops cooperating.
The Stained last, and rarely, and we hope rarely.
Partial mutations: humans who started the change and didn't finish it.
They have some of what the Shades have and none of the territorial structure that makes Shades readable.
A Shade follows its instincts. A Stained follows nothing.
We train for the Stained the way you train for a structural collapse—you hope you never need it, and you do it anyway, because dying surprised is still dying.
Petra catches Renna's wrist on the seventh exchange—a clean redirect that puts Renna off-balance for a fraction of a second, just enough for Petra to slide inside her guard. Renna recovers. Barely.
The exchange continues. I watch Petra's eyes—they're tracking Renna's hips, not her blade, which is exactly right, because the blade goes where the hips commit. I taught her that in her first month. The fact that it's second nature now is the best thing I've made in four years.
I dismiss them and climb the stairs to the main level.
New Reach at mid-morning runs on women. It has run on women for thirteen years—since the asteroid, since the mutation took every male between fifteen and forty-five and turned them into something else.
The older men survived. Some of them. The ones who were past the age where the mutation could take root, the ones whose bodies were already too set in what they were to become something new.
Dov is one of them—late sixties now, his hands shaking, his spine bent, his authority held together by habit and the fact that nobody else wants the job.
There are nine men left in New Reach. The youngest is fifty-eight.
They serve on the council, manage the solar array, handle the technical work that requires hands steady enough for circuit boards and wiring.
Dov runs the settlement because someone has to, because his voice still carries authority the way an old building still carries load—not because it's strong, but because the weight has settled into the structure over time.
The rest is us.
Women run the gate watch, the supply runs, the trading convoys that go south to barter with the coastal settlements.
Women maintain the walls, repair the generators, keep the solar array angled and clean.
Women grow what can be grown in the hydroponic bay on the fourth floor—lettuce, radish, a thin-leafed herb that tastes like nothing but contains enough iron to keep the anemia at bay.
Women butcher the canopy game when the hunting parties bring it in—the small mammals, the birds, the occasional thing with too many legs that tastes better than it looks.
I pass the textile building. The looms are running—three of them, repurposed from a museum exhibit that someone had the foresight to strip before the canopy swallowed the building.
The shuttle sound is steady, rhythmic, the heartbeat of the settlement's only export.
The weavers make a coarse fabric from the fibrous bark of canopy vines—not beautiful, but durable, and the southern settlements will trade food for it.
Keva is at the near loom, her hands moving in the automatic rhythm of someone who has done this work for years.
She's forty, broad-shouldered, with the kind of face that has decided what it thinks about everything and isn't interested in revisions.
Her daughter was taken by the Ordained eighteen months ago.
Keva doesn't talk about it. She weaves. The fabric comes out tight and even, every row identical, the quality of someone channeling something that has no other outlet.
"Morning, Ada."
"Morning. How's the batch?"
"Twelve bolts by end of week. Enough for the southern run."
I nod. Twelve bolts means six weeks of dried fish and grain from the coastal trade. The economy of New Reach runs on these exchanges—fabric for food, food for medicine, medicine for the time to make more fabric. Every link in the chain is a woman's hands.
The mess hall is serving breakfast. Porridge—the gray reconstituted grain that comes in compressed blocks from the southern trade, cooked to a paste that tastes like nothing if you're lucky and like the chemical preservatives if you're not.
There's dried fruit today, which means the last trade went well.
The mess runs on a rotation: five women in the kitchen, four-hour shifts, enough food for four hundred people produced from stores that are always running lower than the count requires.
I don't eat. I'll eat later, when the mess is quiet and I can sit in the corner with my back to the wall and my eyes on the door. Old habit. The kind of habit that keeps you alive long enough to develop new habits.
Through the mess hall window I can see the courtyard, the upper wall, the edge of the canopy beyond.
The morning light has gone from amber to the flat gray-white of a cloud moving across the sun.
Two women are crossing the courtyard with water jugs—the daily haul from the filtration cistern on the roof, where rainwater is collected, filtered, and stored in old plastic drums. The water tastes like the plastic. You stop noticing.
This is what four hundred people look like when they've decided to keep going.
Not thriving—surviving. The difference is in the eyes.
Thriving people look forward. Surviving people look at the next task.
The next meal. The next shift on the wall.
The horizon shrinks to the distance between you and the thing that might kill you, and you learn to live inside that distance because the alternative is to sit down.
The women of New Reach don't sit down. They weave, they fight, they run supplies through canopy routes that would terrify anyone who hasn't done it enough times to make the fear into furniture.
They do it without the men who used to share the weight—the fathers, the brothers, the husbands who changed overnight or across slow terrible weeks, who became something else while their families watched and couldn't stop it.
We don't talk about the men. Not the ones who changed and walked into the canopy.
Not the ones whose bodies tried to change and couldn't—who burned out mid-mutation, seized and went still while their families held them.
Not the ones who survived the first year and were killed in it anyway, by the things the canopy produced before we learned the rules.
There's nothing to say that the silence doesn't already hold.
After the session, I find Senna in the ceremony room. She's one of the two Dov named this morning.