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. . . which was how she—she!—somehow managed to miss the exact moment when Eudo’s vaunted composure snapped like tinsel, propelling him forward; claws out to knuckle-length, eye-teeth hooked almost double, like a cobra’s. Leaping for her with all the accumulated rage of a mentor scorned one too many times, only to find Flynn (of all people)—

—but who else, really? Not Ulrike, not LIKELY—

—instantly, automatically, idiotically in his way.

At which Eudo hissed, drove his right-hand index and ring-fingers through Flynn’s eyes, his thumb through Flynn’s nose—like a particularly gory bowling accident—and ripped Flynn’s shaggy head neatly off, with one curt upward motion.

Flynn’s ashes broke over Elder as she turned: A hot grey wave, burning her eyes, filling her mouth; she coughed them out again, plunging her cane straight through Eudo’s shoulder-joint. Eudo’s arm fell almost instantly severed, Flynn’s skull still stuck fast to his fist, both crumbling to mingled dust on contact with the floor.

“El—” Eudo began. Elder kicked him in the jaw, round-house, and jumped as he spun. Knee to the small of his back, fingers sliding fast down his spine to rip through on either side, grabbing for the floating ribs—

Raising him, hugging him, cracking him. Drawing his beating lungs out through the holes her hands had made, wet as embryonic wings, while the rest of the Clave just watched, impassive.

“You know what the Vikings called this, don’t you, my monk?” She whispered, in Eudo’s agonized ear. “The blood-eagle. Nasty way to die, last I heard; nasty way to live, ‘specially if you live forever.”

So I guess you better get one of your Familiars to push ’em back in for you, before you heal this way.

“I’ll still be here,” Eudo hacked, bow-bent in uncontrollable spasm—no air left, without his lungs, to generate a voice anyone but another vampire could hear. “When you come back. Here . . . to watch you crawl.”

“Doubt it,” Elder replied. And dropped him.

Somewhere in the shadows behind them, she heard Grandmother Yau clap her hidden hands just once—a gentle sound, yet more than enough to send her ghosts scurrying off en masse in search of a dustpan, a bucket, a mop. Good help being always hard to find, as the old mantra went, and thus better ruled with an iron hand than a kind word, whether alive or dead. Or undead.

Grit under her heels as she moved towards Ulrike, now: Part of Eudo’s detritus, grinding even finer beneath her shoes’ soles? Part of Flynn’s?

Not that it really mattered, Elder supposed.

Taking her dumbfounded “daughter’s” hands in hers, meanwhile. And assuring her, aloud: “I leave you in charge, after the launch.”

An open-mouthed kiss, flavored with their mutual “elder’s” blood; Ulrike received it eagerly, as Elder had always known she would. Sighing in anticipation: Oh, power, at last. At last.

Ambitious little toy, Elder thought. And smiled, to herself, at the observation’s very . . . familiarity.

“We’ll wait,” Ulrike promised her, lying badly. “Your name will live forever.”

Elder smiled again. “Just act according to your nature, ‘Rike,” she replied, mildly. “And I’ll be satisfied.”

Then she stepped through the ashes which had once been Flynn—part of him, at least—

—and was gone.

* * *

Plasma stores wouldn’t last long, and after that, sleep would be the best option—the least painful, in the long run.

Until then, though, she planned on keeping her eyes . . . open.

And now, looking down, what did she feel, exactly—seeing the long drop lengthen, then Earth pull away below her? That frail blue shell, dimming to a sliver; homesickness, a kind of nostalgia, coring her with a quick and intimate pain. And in her mind’s eye, superimposed, a barefoot girl slogging upward along the dirt track outside of New Amsterdam, hem-deep in mud, and a carriage stopping—a door opening. The gape on her own silly bumpkin face, half-remembered, half-imagined, heartbreakingly empty of experience.

And no, she wanted to cry out, through time’s veil: No, don’t trust, don’t take that man’s smooth, pale, clean hand. Go back, go back—live out your little life, breed and die. Do nothing. BE nothing. Go nowhere. Lie easy in the earth, until you ARE earth.

But Eudo was always so calm and comely, in his suit of lace. And she, in her innocence, always accepted his offer.

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Things were as they were. They couldn’t be otherwise. And Elder, knowing this, sat back on her heels in the ship’s pod; alone once more, without even her own long-gone ghost left to keep her company.

Up and out, and out, and out. Farther and farther, from star to shining star—manifest destiny made ever more manifest. She was the Tricentennial Woman . . .Quadricentennial? Not that such distinctions mattered much, either now or for much longer . . .