Rowena runs the House, a place for homeless Sky veterans. The House, open only to the women who compose the Elite Squad, has only a few rules: No names, no details, no weapons. The problem? Anything can become a weapon—even a toilet bowl scrubber. Even a word. Especially a word. A word that could destroy both Rowena and her House.
“Elites,” by Hugo Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers.
Elites
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The fight started over cleaning the toilet.
It’s an old-fashioned porcelain job, swirling water, environmentally unsound. Grandfathered in because the building’s ancient, kept in place because we’re poor, we’re a nonprofit, and we get the government to look the other way.
A self-cleaner costs twice our monthly budget. A self-cleaner that doesn’t use water costs four times that.
I don’t know how often I have to explain that to the troops. Not quite every day, even though someone has toilet duty every day, but damn close. Every time a new recruit stumbles into the House, I find myself discussing toilets, old-fashioned plumbing, and even older stoves.
I lead this group of misfits. I’m a vet myself. Two tours each in two different wars. Sixteen medals, give or take, all lost or tossed, and at least that many wounds.
The scars remain.
I found that even though the military gives you memory blocks for the post-traumatic stress, PTSD still finds a way to rear its ugly head. Only worse than the olden days.
Now you don’t know what it is you’re reliving.
It’s scary as hell.
The House is a remodeled Victorian monstrosity. Once upon a time, it housed a single family. A single, very wealthy family. Then it became a duplex, then a series of apartments, then college housing, then an abandoned mess. It had been condemned when I found it about fifteen years ago.
I had the bright idea that restoring the thing would restore my sanity. I managed to buy it, discovered two vets living inside it already—squatting being the more accurate term—and together we ripped and tore and demolished, learning it was easier to tear down than to build. It took us a day to remove a wall and three weeks to build one right.
By the end of the first month, we were actually friends. By the middle of the second, we started to talk about our nightmares. By the end of the third, we finally learned each other’s full names.
Names are a big thing. You can be traced by name. Someone can look up your identity card, find your family, send you home.
We don’t do that here. Privacy is an issue for our vets. Even when the government tried to tie that last grant to the House’s records, we fought.
We went to court.
We actually won.
Which has nothing to do with the toilet battle. Zoomer gets me to stop that. She’s six-one, going to fat, with a long scar that runs from her left breast to her navel, a scar she refused to fix. She goes shirtless half the time, shocks the hell out of the boys who come in for the annual code inspections—fire, insects, population. We always give those boys numbers, never give ’em names. Hell, one year, we weren’t even gonna give them the names of the bugs.
Zoomer stands on the balls of her toes, leaning into my office, but never entering. My office is the former front parlor, divided in half. The front half has my desk and my book collection, the back half my bed and the e-readers I really use to consume literature. I sneak back there in the dark, turn on the screen light, and read text myself rather than have the reader do it for me. I feel like I’m on the front, in the only safe place out there, my bunker, deep within the ground.
The shrink says I gotta get past that. I plan to—someday.
“Wena,” Zoomer says, “they’re at it again.”
Zoomer’s the only one who calls me Wena. Everyone else calls me Boss. My real name is Rowena, but no one uses that unless they don’t know me. It’s a good double-check.
“Toilet or stove?” I ask.
“Toilet,” she says. “Suzanne’s using the scrubber like a stick.”
“Fuck.” I stand up quickly. No one considers the germs—and you’d think they would, especially the Sky Vets. The Sky Vets fought our first space war in the Moon colonies, and biological agents became a big factor. How big we’ll never know because that’s classified, but the Sky Vets who came all the way home have some interesting diseases.
The government says everyone allowed back to Earth was quarantined, tested, and found clean.
Yeah, right.
The toilet in question is in the back of the House, in what used to be the entry to the kitchen. I know this without asking; if there’s ever a fight about cleaning, it happens in that tiny hallway or worse yet, in that mean little room that never quite loses the smell of piss.
I could’ve followed the sounds. The closer I get, the louder voices grow—yelling obscenities, cheering, clapping in approval.
These women love fights.
I used to let them do it too, without interference, until the repair bills got too much. Then the House shrink told me about the added toll of repeated trauma—the fights would often replicate something that happened Out There—and I realized that no matter how much steam got blown off, the fights weren’t worth the expense.
Still, I wished for those old days sometimes.
Like right now, as I push my way past women bunched up three together across the hallway. The place smells of grease, sweat, and old blood. The closer I get, the more those smells get replaced with the stench of backed-up sewer.
I see the toilet scrubber before I see the fighters. It flails through the air like a tree branch in a windstorm. Women are leaning forward, urging their candidate on. The sounds slowly die as I make my way to the front.
Suzanne is bent over her victim, a new recruit—Darla, Dopa, Demmi—some dumb “D” name. The recruit’s curled up in the fetal, her face spattered with what I hope is water. She’s whimpering.
I wade in, shove Suzanne against the wall, and wrench the scrubber from her. “You want to tell me what this is about?”
Suzanne’s height matches my five-five, but she has broader shoulders and a powerful mean streak. Not as powerful as mine, though. When I get me an anger on, no one in the House can take me, not even the big girls.
“Bitch shoved my face in the john,” Suzanne says.
That’s when I realize the front part of her hair is wet. The back part isn’t. I’d blamed that on sweat initially, but the smell tells me otherwise.
“Why’d she do that?” I ask.
Suzanne shrugs. “Ask her.”
I glance over my shoulder. Debbie or Danni or Diane is still whimpering on the floor. I’m not even sure she knows the fight is over.
I turn back to Suzanne. “I’m asking you.”
Suzanne’s lips thin. She’s pressing them together hard, and I know she’s not answering any of my questions any time soon.
“Suzanne’s been taking her ration cards.”
I can’t identify the voice, but it comes from behind me. All of the women are staring at us, as if they haven’t heard a thing.
“Is that true?” I ask.
Suzanne’s dark eyes meet mine. “I been denied.”
Ration cards buy a lot of things: medication, clothing, the occasional outside meal. Most of the troops don’t use them, though, because it marks the bearer as former military, and that’s not the most popular thing these days.
“So?” I say. “Someone can loan you theirs.”
“Thought that’s what she was doing,” Suzanne says.
“But that’s not the case, huh?”
Suzanne shrugs. I want to hold those shoulders down, just so that Suzanne won’t have the nonchalant option.
“Ask her,” she says again.
“I will,” I say. “When the shrink’s done with her.”
Then I hand the scrubber back to Suzanne. “When you finish this john, do the second and third floor johns. You can do the showers too. Make sure you take one when you’re through.”
“Hey,” Suzanne says. “The rules say no more than one toilet a week.”
“The rules also say no violence in the House.”
“She dunked me.”
“And you should’ve reported her, not beat her.” I take Suzanne by those misbehaving shoulders and push her toward that horrible half bath. “Get busy.”
Suzanne scowls, but knows better than to argue. No one fights with me. They don’t raise their voices to me or their scrub brushes. They know they’re here on my suffrage.
This is my House and I run it as I see fit. I’ve tossed women on the street before.
Other vet’s houses, they try to accommodate everyone. But I treat all the troops in this place like the military they once were. If they don’t measure up, they get kicked down a rank. If they still don’t do the work, they get my equivalent of a Dishonorable Discharge—my boot in their ass, my hand in their pocket as I take their key, my voice in their ear as I tell them never to darken my doorway again.
Every once in a while, some Important Person gives me a citation or a key to a city or some other kind of Important Recognition for the “good work” that I’m doing. No one else rehabs vets like I do. No one else has as high a success rate. No one else really tries.
What shocks all the regular folk is that I’m working with the Hardcore. They’re called Elites in the recruitment vids, and when you get to Basic, you get told only the best qualify for the Elite Squad.
They don’t tell you what the best is, though. The best isn’t the smartest or even the strongest. The best is the fiercest—the biggest do-or-die in the entire camp, the person who gets such a mad-on that she will slaughter fifteen enemy before she realizes she’s even activated her weapon.
The Elites get chosen for the last bastion of war, the only part that resembles what our ancestors knew of battle—hands-on combat. Most of the battles nowadays are fought at great distances—heat-seeking weapons, smart drones, bot warriors. But for cleanup and delivery, for reconnaissance and ground-clearance, nothing beats troops on the ground.
Those troops on the ground gotta be tough. Tough, indestructible and fucking ruthless.
Once upon a time, seems the human race used men for that. Seems too that that turned out to be a mistake.
Here’s how it was explained to me:
Several generations ago, the military let women join up. Women were non-coms at first; everyone was afraid their delicate sensibilities couldn’t handle the violence of war.
Then warfare tech made a lot of things equal—equal weapon strength, equal machinery—and someone assumed the women could handle some combat.
But it was the biologists who changed everything. They found a way to enhance the natural self-defense reaction so that the soldiers in the thick of things became even more violent, even more determined to survive.
That still would’ve kept the men in the forefront if it weren’t for some dog—or so the story goes—who went all feral defending her puppies. The scientist who saw it had this theory that mother-love made women even more ferocious than men in defense mode.
The scientist raised some hormone levels, altered adrenaline responses, made a few other alterations in the soldiers who volunteered for the experiments and, the rumors go, the men didn’t survive.
The women ripped them to shreds.
Literally.
I’ve never seen the literature, though I’ve looked. I’ve never seen the studies, even though I’ve been searching for them for years.
What I do know is that ever since I got my booster when they approved me for the Elites, my emotions are stronger than they ever were before. And the darker the emotion, the more it controls me.
In the early days, I couldn’t have broken up a fight, not without breaking the fighters. I somehow saw them as a threat not just to me, but to everything I held dear.
Hence all the medals and all the tours. Whenever I came home, I’d react “inappropriately” to “minor stimuli.”
Then I got too old to re-enlist. The best thing to do, I figured, was stay on the streets, get uninvolved in life.
There’re lots of Elites just like me out there. Some who actually went home and then went berserk over a “minor infraction” like the cat from next door digging in the flower bed. Most held off the reaction (the few who didn’t are serving time now) and lit out for the cities, places where they wouldn’t ever feel at home.
That’s why there’s so many of us on the streets.
But I found the House and two more Elites who lived the same way I did, and we began to realize that there was more to living than survival, and more to survival than violence.
It took us a while, but eventually we figured the way the Elites survive in the field is simple: they have structure and discipline.
No Elite goes kamikaze on her squad because she knows that she’s safe. She’s given a protected hole in the ground, told she’d be called on when she was needed, and pointed in the right direction when the time came.
And that was how it worked.
Took me years to figure out why.
Command was scared of us. They had created monsters, managed to hold us on a short leash, but knew if that leash ever broke, the only ones who survived would be the small, enhanced women of childbearing years.
That leash works—not just for them. But for me.
***
The D Girl’s name is Davi. I’m not sure if it’s her real name, but it’s the name she gave when she arrived two days ago. Her entrance interview was mostly about her service—Sky Squad, Elite (of course), tattoos to prove it—three years on the streets, hints that her family might’ve thrown her out, might even be dead.
Hard to tell with Elites until they’re ready to tell you. Sometimes they never do. Sometimes only the shrink gets in, and then we never hear what the real deal is.
We do group sessions, mostly encounter stuff, trying to pull the PTSD memories out of the block. We’ve had some luck with that. It gets rid of an Elite’s hair-trigger.
We’ve gotten some funding to reduce hormone levels, try to undo the biological changes, but we’ve had almost no success with that. That’s like trying to make the body forget motherhood. It don’t happen. The changes are too profound.
So in addition to the blocks and the group stuff, we do a lot of self-control work, and sometimes that’s enough to reintegrate a woman back into society.
The thing about Davi is I get the sense I’ve seen her before.
Zoomer cleaned her up. Anti-bacterials on her skin and clothes, a super-hot shower, and a clean robe from my stash. Zoomer left her sleeping in my office, partly because Zoomer knew Davi’s my responsibility now, partly because we don’t dare let her back into her room—not until we’re sure Suzanne’s gonna stay calm.
Davi’s still asleep, still whimpering, and I sit at my desk watching her, wondering if I should call the shrink. We actually have two: a soft-hearted, soft-handed, sensitive male straight out of shrink school, and Carla.
Carla’s the best. She’s former Elite, and part-owner of the House. She’s one of the original three. She’s the one who led our discussions, and realized that the PTSD blockers just blocked the memory, not the response. Years later, she made her career on that—some series of papers in the right venues, talks all over the Earth and in Moon Base too—and now she’s working on a real cure for PTSD—not blocks, not memory removal (which doesn’t work anyway—the brain rebuilds the neural links, unless too much is removed and then there’s no real brain left), not drug therapy.
But she still comes here, she says because she needs the contact for her research, but mostly because she’s wired as tight as the rest of us, and only here does she remember that, and manage to hold on.
She’s taken our toughest cases, and brought them back to society.
She’s a goddamn miracle worker, and the House wouldn’t be such a success without her.
But we have a deal. She comes in twice a week, generally Tuesdays and Wednesdays (leaving the other five days for travel and research and teaching the occasional class), and I only call her for emergencies when they merit her special skills.
That whimpering says Carla to me.
But I know Carla. She’ll yell if I don’t try the other shrink first.
***
The other shrink’s name is Robbie. He’s not bad. In fact, he’s good for a lot of these women, especially the younger ones who got out before the anger and violence hardened them into something not quite human. Some of them see him as a son, some as a husband, others as a nebbish father figure—all in desperate need of defense.
In those women, he brings up the good emotions: love and warmth and gentleness, the emotions that supposedly need defending, the ones that get forgotten in years of Elite work.
But for the hardcore, he’s just one more victim waiting to be chewed.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rushed into his office, and pulled him out just as the blood starts flying.
I don’t know why he comes back. I can’t ask him. I’m one of the hardcore. I see him as a victim. Every time he walks into a room, I shake my head and hope that he manages to walk out alive.
Carla explained his dynamic to me. She explained why he’s so damn important to the House, and why she needs him as much as the recruits do.
She can’t do the soft stuff.
I get all that. I probably would’ve gotten it eventually on my own. I just don’t know what he gets out of it, and even though both he and Carla have tried to explain it to me, it doesn’t stick.
The shrink—my shrink, who isn’t on the premises, who’s at the V.A. and has been my hand-holder since before I bought the House—says it won’t stick because it means something to me, something deep, something that may be buried in one of my blocks.
Sounds like babble to me.
But I don’t have to understand everything here so long as it all works and our boy Robbie, he works. So I call him in for Davi, and when he gets here, about a half an hour later, I let Zoomer brief him. Zoomer likes him.
She thinks he’s cute.
When the briefing’s done, Robbie comes into my office. Davi’s still on the couch, still whimpering, arms wrapped around a pillow, knees drawn up, body tight. Not quite fetal, but close enough.
Robbie’s short, round, and flabby. He wears glasses because eye enhancements scare him, and his skin has that pasty quality of old glue. He stares at Davi for a minute, then says to me,
“I don’t think we should move her.”
I sigh. “You want me to vacate?”
“Sorry,” he says, but he isn’t. I like to think I run the place, but the House wouldn’t be the House without the shrinks. We all know that, and I worry about the day that Robbie and Carla burn out.
I step out of the office and head down the hallway. The smell of burnt toast comes from the kitchen, and my stomach rumbles. Forgot to eat for the second—third?—day in a row. It’s part of my pathology. Food is comfort to me, and I rarely think I deserve it. So I’m rope-thin, hyped up on vitamins and nutri-supplements, and a little too shaky for my own good.
I sit at the table. Amber, the third partner, slides a bowl of chili toward me, along with some homemade cornbread. Three other women are enjoying the meal. At the end of the table, Suzanne is eating the charred toast, staring at the plate as if it holds the secrets to the universe.
“You check in Davi?” I ask Amber.
She nods.
“She come in before?”
A lot of time the women walk in, then turn around. Sometimes they get dragged in by friends and family, and they’re just not ready. Sometimes the idea of healing—even a little bit—scares the piss out of them. They don’t want to keep living on the streets, but it’s what they know.
“She’s been in three times, maybe four,” Amber says. “I talked her into staying this time.”
She shoots a glance at Suzanne, and the glance is filled with anger. I resist the urge to sit between them, but the air crackles with a potential fight.
“Think she’s gonna regret it?” I ask.
Amber shrugs. “That’s Robbie’s problem.”
Suzanne breaks the toast, sets the crust on her plate, then shoves the plate away. There’s black crumbs around her mouth.
“I didn’t mean to scare the bitch,” Suzanne says. “She hit me first.”
“So you say.” I can’t quite keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Suzanne likes picking fights. She even likes staging them. But she is making progress and I’m not quite willing to send her away.
“Look,” Suzanne says, “I’m sorry about the ration card. I was just trying to teach her a lesson.”
“About what?” Amber asks, sounding curious. I know she spoke up before I did. Amber’s better at the subtle stuff which is why she gets the door. She can wheedle and charm and manipulate. Me, I go right through people, and usually don’t care.
“About sharing,” Suzanne says. “This House is about sharing, right?”
“You hit her in home,” I say, even though it’s a guess.
Suzanne flushes. Hitting someone in home means that you whacked the protect button, found their weak point, and made them go all berserker on you.
“Didn’t mean to,” she says, but her words tell me she knows it.
“You got the bathrooms cleaned?” I ask.
She nods.
“Next time Carla’s in, you talk to her,” I say.
Suzanne nods again. Then she picks up her plate and disappears into the kitchen.
“That’s her fifth infraction,” Amber says. “You usually toss them out on three.”
“I know,” I say.
“You’re thinking potential again, aren’t you?” Amber asks.
We all got weaknesses. Potential is mine. Sometimes I can see what these women would be if we can just control their demons, if we can tame them just enough to return to society.
The problem is the smart ones are the toughest to mold. Their minds have already rebelled, and won’t take much more. They’re usually my lost causes.
“I didn’t say potential.” I sound petulant and I know it.
Amber grins. “But you’re thinking it.”
I nod. The other women eat in silence, their spoons clanking on the bowls. The peppery scent of the chili makes my stomach rumble, but I don’t reach for the food.
That too is part of my bizarre discipline. We can learn to function again, but we never really become whole.
“One more infraction, we’ll have to have a House vote,” Amber says.
I grab the cornbread, rip it up like Suzanne ripped up her toast. House votes always end badly. The recruits don’t get along. They’re team players in combat, but outside of it, they’ve become such rugged individualists that they don’t get along with anyone.
The votes always reflect that. My candidates always lose.
Zoomer creeps into the dining room.
“Wena,” she says, “Robbie needs you.”
***
He’s not, like I expect, in my office with Davi. He’s in his office, a little box of a room—probably a coat closet in the House’s first incarnation—and he’s behind his desk.
This is serious, then.
“We need to send for Carla,” he says as soon as I close the door.
“Davi’s that damaged?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think she’s military.”
I let out a small breath of disbelief. “She’s got the tattoos, the quirks. She’s tried to enter three times, failed, and had to be coaxed inside.”
“This isn’t PTSD,” Robbie says. “I’d stake my career on it. And that girl’s not violent. I’d stake my career on that too.”
I don’t understand. “Then what’s she doing here? A wannabe?”
I’d heard of them: women who pretended to be macho, pretended to have had service just to get the benefits—benefits none of the rest of us willingly claim. Or some just do it for the glory, using the various media outlets to tell their made-up stories. Sometimes doing it to get a lover—usually male—who’s attracted to a woman with a violent, but sanctioned, past.
“I don’t think she’s a wannabe,” he says.
“What then?” I ask.
He shakes his head ever so slightly. “I’d rather have Carla answer that.”
“I’m not calling her,” I say. “She’s really clear about her hours, and I’m not hearing anything that convinces me she’s needed.”
“This Davi,” he says, “I did the usual blood tests, ran them through my handheld, twice as a matter of fact.”
He slides the handheld toward me. I see numbers, a few graphs, nothing I can read.
“I didn’t know you took blood,” I say to cover my ignorance. I shove the handheld back at him.
“We always have to rule out the organic cause first,” he says. “Blood, temperature, a few other things. A lot of things cause violent and/or irrational behavior, from a high fever to certain kinds of drugs.”
“And what’s she got?”
“Nothing,” he says, frowning at me.
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“She’s clean,” he says.
I stare at him.
“She’s a Sky Vet,” he says. “If nothing else, she should have antibodies to just about every known disease. She doesn’t. I think she’s gonna get sick from that—plunger, was it?”
“Scrubber,” I say, trying to assess what he’s telling me. “You’re saying she wasn’t on the front lines?”
“I’m saying she hasn’t been off-planet. She’s not inoculated for anything remotely Moon-based.”
“So she’s a wannabe,” I say.
“With official tattoos? A great cover?” He shakes his head.
I’m cold. “What do you think she is?”
“I think Carla should decide.”
I can feel it, building, that insane desire to rip out his spleen just to get him to talk faster. I clench my fists.
“Sometimes Carla isn’t the most rational person,” I say.
He nods, and something in his gaze tells me he understands that I’m getting angry.
“I think she’s government,” he says. “I found this on her as well.”
He throws a bag at me. It’s filled with more bags. Each one holds small items—a toothbrush, strands of hair, a scab.
DNA.
“Son of a bitch,” I say, and fight the urge to stick my fist through the wall. “What the hell are they doing?”
“Trying to identify everyone,” he says. “They requested it with the last grant.”
“And we fought them,” I say. “We won.”
“Still,” he says. “They’re not letting Sky Vets back to Earth any more. They’re talking about rounding up street people. Haven’t you been listening?”
I don’t pay attention to media. It betrayed me years ago. It got me all fired up about that first war, and it turns out that the battles I thought I was fighting weren’t the ones I really fought.
“So?” I say.
“So the anonymity is what’s bothering them,” he says. “They want to know where all the vets are, particularly the Elites. I thought you knew this.”
“I worry about the House,” I mumble. And that’s partly true. The other part is that I can’t deal with the government. It makes me crazy.
Still.
“You were right,” I say. “Call Carla. It’s time for a meeting of the principles.”
“I thought you were going to—”
“Just do it!” I snap, and let myself out of the room.
***
I play by the rules because I ask my people to play by the rules. If you want to return to society, I tell them, you have to understand that the rules exist for a reason: They exist so that we can all get along, live together in close quarters, and not kill each other.
I actually believe that.
The rules here at the House are simple:
Names aren’t necessary.
Details aren’t necessary.
A willingness to work is essential.
A willingness to follow the daily rules of living—clean yourself, your room, your assigned area—also essential.
Heal at your own pace.
Learn non-violent ways to resolve disputes.
No weapons allowed.
The rules here have no particular order because they’re all important. And in some ways, none of them are important. Because the House changes depending on its makeup. Sometimes we let recruits get violent. Sometimes we let them slack off work. Sometimes we let them go weeks without bathing.
But we never ever ask names. It’s safer to talk to people who think they know you rather than people who have read an official history and assume they do.
***
The next thing I know, I’m back in my office, Davi’s off the couch, and shoved against the wall, my hand against her throat. She’s flailing, and there’s fear in her eyes.
She’s trembling.
I’m not.
“Boss,” someone says behind me. “Put her down.”
I squeeze a little tighter. Bitch has messed with my House. Bitch has invaded my territory, threatened my people, trespassed in my world.
“Boss.” The voice sounds a little panicked.
Maybe it reflects Davi’s eyes. They’re bugging out. Her skin’s turning purple.
“Wena!” Zoomer has her hands on my shoulders. She’s trying to pull me away.
“Rowena, stop.” And that voice, official and barking, belongs to Carla.
But dammit all, I respond to official. I respond to barking. It goes deep into the training, activates the controls, and I open my hand.
The bitch drops like a dirty blanket.
Zoomer’s got her, takes her away from me, does something for the neck. Robbie helps, his soft hands trying to sooth that imposter as if she’s someone important.
Carla takes me back into my bunker. Amber follows.
The principles.
Carla makes me put my head down, take deep breaths, calm, calm, calm. I’ve seen her use this technique before on someone who’s lost it, on someone who’s one step away from leaving, on someone who might not be rehabbed.
“She’s a fucking invader,” I finally say.
“She’s probably not the first,” Carla says.
“Son of a bitch.” This time, my hand does connect with the wall. But I reinforced those fuckers myself. My hand bangs back toward me, bruised; the wall isn’t damaged at all.
“We expected it, remember?” Amber says. “You even mentioned it.”
“We said we’d keep privacy. They didn’t get to know which one of us heals and which one doesn’t. If it’s the worst of us, then they’ll use it as an excuse. They’ll keep doing this, they’ll keep creating Elites, and—
“And maybe they’ll have a program to get us back into society.” Carla’s voice is soft. “That’s all they want, Wena. They want something that works. They think you have the secret and aren’t willing to share.”
She and Amber are staring at me.
“We’ve been in existence ten years,” Amber says. “Do you know how many people have reintegrated? How many women we’ve helped return to their lives?”
“No.” I clutch my throbbing hand with my other one. “We’re not supposed to know, remember. Government keeps statistics. Facts, figures, we’re not about that. We’re about healing.”
“So why not let people know the system. We can patent it or whatever so that they have to follow our rules. Let them know, so others can be helped.” Amber says this as if she’s just thought of it.
But I know Carla’s set her up to say it. Amber used to support me. Carla’s been the advocate for letting the House’s systems out. Carla thinks we can save the world.
“No,” I say, and turn my back to them.
They sit in silence for a long time. We’re good at silence.
Finally, Carla says, “This girl, she hit you in home.”
I let out a small breath. “I don’t have a home any more.”
“We all do,” Carla says. “I just thought yours was House. And I thought you had remarkable control. Every time a recruit infracts, I thought how impressive it was that you didn’t kamikaze all over her. But you just did. Home to you isn’t the House. It’s the method. You think we’re the only ones who can do this. Maybe you’re the only one. Don’t you?”
I reach for her before I even have a chance to think. Amber restrains me. She’s strong. Not as strong as I am, but I’m not entirely gone. I let her hold me back.
I’m shaking this time.
“I should’ve seen it,” Carla says, more to herself than to me. “I should’ve realized it was the method, not the building.”
“Have you ever thought that I’m right?” My voice sounds harsher than I want it to.
“About what?” Carla asks. She’s using her shrink voice. I hate that voice, all reasonable and calm and mommy-like.
“About the method. What if we are the only ones?”
“Then other experiments’ll prove it,” she says. “I think it is a mixture of personalities that makes this work. But I have to remind you, Wena. Our culture’s good at personalities now. That’s how they found us in the first place. Maybe we should give in. Maybe they’ll use this for good.”
I shake myself free of Amber. She cringes.
So does Carla.
But I’m calm again. I have finally understood what I’m protecting.
“Yeah, they’re good at personalities,” I say. “And for a while, government facilities’ll use our methods. Then they’ll find other uses. Our good work’ll get twisted. We’ll have created new kinds of monsters.”
“We won’t,” Amber says.
“We need to keep something pure,” I say. “Just one thing. We have to hold one thing sacred. If we don’t…”
They’re staring at me, but I can’t finish. The words—those words—I said them just before I led my troop—my real troop—into the worst fight of our lives. The purity I was referring to then was our friendship, which I had thought to protect, because the training was that deep—I had to pick something, something to protect, something that elicited that deep, violent response…
“Shit,” I whisper, and put down my head.
They’re right. Carla and Amber are right. I’ve been hit at home, and I’m not rational.
But it feels like I am.
And that’s the scary part.
***
We can agree on a few things: We’re going to press charges against Davi and whoever’s behind her. We’re going to keep identities in the House private. And we’re going to find someone to replace me, for a week, six months, a year.
As long as Carla can convince me to stay away.
She thinks it’s not healthy for me to remain. The House has helped others, she says, but then I insist that they leave. They grow outside, and become real people.
I never have.
I’m not sure she’s right, but the only way to prove her wrong is to step out into the world. And not for short ceremonies or speeches at VA Hospitals.
For some significant time. On my own.
The idea scares me, and exhilarates me all at the same time. And my shrink—my original shrink who approves of Carla’s ideas—says those emotions are normal.
But I don’t like normal. And I think Carla’s wrong about a few things. I’m not protecting the method. I’m believing in our uniqueness.
I don’t think anyone else can create the right environment. I don’t think anyone else would know when to break the rules and when to enforce them.
I don’t think anyone else can nurture like we do.
Only I don’t admit that to Carla. She’d say I’ve got a mother complex which is part of the Elites distinctive psychology. She’d say I have to get it repaired.
I’m open-minded enough to think that she might be right. But I’m wary enough to know that if she’s wrong, we lose everything.
The House, our home, our community. The women we’ve been helping and the ones we haven’t helped yet.
Fifteen years of success, based in part on my own particular pathology.
And I keep thinking the House has gone beyond potential. I’m not fighting for what might be.
I’m fighting for what is.
It’s our last stand—and I seem to be the only one who knows it.
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Women of War, edited by Tanya Huff and Alexander Potter, Daw Books, 2005
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Agsandrew/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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