Kisho was soft-spoken, but hardly at peace. His demeanor was like the pleasant calm on the morning of a great storm, when animals skittered about nervously and birdsong held a nervous edge. She sensed a great deal of anger within him. And anger was rooted in either fear or ignorance. Did he fear her name? Or was he an outcast by choice, unwilling to create a bridge to the other young warriors in the entourage?

“No,” she said, choosing to answer his question literally. “You are not my enemy. But I have lived with my own fears for too long to set them aside easily, Kisho Nova Cat.” She brushed her fall of thick hair back behind her ears. “Three assassination attempts before I was sixteen years of age. Did you know this?”

“I can imagine.” He smiled bitterly. “Mystics have wonderful imaginations.”

“I thought the Nova Cat mystics trusted to visions and portents. Not flights of fancy.”

“Some might say there is no difference between the two.”

“Some” meaning himself? A mystic who debunked his own abilities? Yori had a basic idea of the training such men underwent, and the role they played inside Nova Cat society. Mystics were the keepers of their Clan’s futures. It was the Nova Cat visions that had led the Clan into abandoning their homeworlds, uprooting themselves seventy years past to seek sanctuary within the Draconis Combine. She had never heard one—or heard of one—doubt himself before.

Fear and ignorance. Yes. Kisho Nova Cat would be a very angry man.

“So you have never read a vision?” she asked, probing lightly. She set aside her own problems as she offered a hand to the entourage’s other outcast.

Kisho shrugged. A pair of small petals tumbled down his brow. One caught in his long eyelashes for a moment, until he blinked it away. “Have you ever guessed at something about to happen?” he asked. “A relationship that would break up? Two men you knew would eventually come to blows—be it days or weeks, but it would happen?”

“I would think so,” Yori said.

Kisho spread his hands out of his lap, as if she had answered her own question.

“We observe,” he reminded her. “We allow ourselves to think about what we see and experience. It is nothing more than that.”

“Nothing more?” Yori asked, uncertain if he believed it himself.

“Nothing!”

She almost left him then. Isolation was nearly preferable to his reined anger. Nearly. “So you are here to observe,” she said, as if explaining his presence away with so simple a statement. She did not mean for it to sound belittling.

“That is enough.” His tone was short. Obviously, he had read more into her words than she had meant. “But what are you here for?”

The blunt question caught her off guard. Especially as Yori had wondered the same thing many, many times since leaving Luthien. “I believe I may be here for the opposite reason. To be seen. Or not, as the case may be.” She plucked up a complete cherry blossom that had fallen into her lap. Twirled it back and forth like a tiny umbrella. “Most of the others look away from me. The coordinator, he stares right through me, as if I do not exist.”

“And Warlord Toranaga?” Kisho asked.

“He sees something in me that might be worthwhile. Whatever my grandfather’s transgressions, he overlooks them. I can only try to be worthy of his attention.”

It was a difficult admission, especially to a near-stranger. But Yori felt she owed something to the mystic, who twice now had come forward to involve himself with her affairs when it was not required. Such people were rare in her life. She often had to fight the inclination to push them away. She did not push him, because she knew he had no power to hurt her.

For his part, Kisho simply thought about her comment a moment. Then he uncoiled, rising to a kneeling position to face her at an even height. “Everyone sees you, Kurita Yori– san. What they see you as, that is the question you should ask yourself.”

She felt a hesitant tug at the corner of her mouth and nearly smiled. Might have, if his words hadn’t sounded so sad. Pity, she did not need. “Is that a vision?” she asked pertly.

Kisho shook his head. “An observation. And now I observe it will be dark soon. I will go eat.”

He rose to his feet in one fluid motion, looming above her, then ducked out from beneath the cherry trees without another word. Blossom petals trailed down from his hair and shoulders. His shoes scuffed the first few stones. He had been sitting for at least as long as Yori had been walking. His gait was stiff and awkward, but loosened up fast.

“Kisho!”

Her call stopped him only three or four strides down the flagstone path. It pulled him around slowly, as if against his will. Very nearly she did not ask. She wanted to know, but then didn’t at the same time. It was the kind of question that might allow him to hurt her. But how often did you get the chance to ask outright?

“What do you see me as?” she asked.

Kisho held her gaze evenly, staring back along the path and beneath the fall of blossoms. “As whatever you would like to be,” he said. Clipping off the words as if talking to a stranger.

Then he turned and walked off.

Some mystic he was. Ready with overtures of friendship but too caught up in his own problems, really, to make much more than a hesitant offer. What did he really know of her life? Only as much as she had told him, and while more than most others had bothered to learn it was still hardly anything at all. And it still explained nothing of the fluke of birth that had brought her to Terra as part of the coordinator’s entourage.

Yori shook her head.

Whatever she would like to be…

“As opposed to what?” she called after him. Expecting no answer.

Receiving none.

Terra

Republic of the Sphere

19 April 3135

Conner Rhys-Monroe stalked his Rifleman across what was left of Basel’s southernmost bridge across the Rhein, following the one hoverbike that was all he had left of his personal lance. They’d been caught halfway across by overlapping artillery barrages, pinned down inside a hellish nightmare of flame and shrapnel and twisted steel. He’d watched an APC ripped apart from a direct hit, sides bulging as a shell gutted the interior. A Legionnaire had disappeared through a sudden rent in the paved surface, swallowed by the deep waters far, far below.

Now the fire-scorched bridge structure groaned and buckled under his BattleMech’s sixty tons. It shifted on a broken support column, shaking him with a small quake as he labored through each careful step. Pieces of superstructure crashed down around him. One girder smashed into his shoulder, crushing armor and clanging down his side in sharp, angry peals.

Conner swallowed dryly, his hands sweat-slick on his controls.

“Striker Team… is Able-three.” His comms system crackled to life with a clear, strong voice broken up by a wash of static that could only be caused by particle cannon discharge. “We have gained the northern bank. Two down, one dead. Pressed …the river.”

Conner edged carefully around another rent in the bridge’s paved surface, coming close to the western side. “Copy that,” he said. But his team wasn’t out of this yet.

Below, skimming over the river, were a number of Republic hovercraft dancing across the Rhein’s wide waters. Two Regulators hammered down the river, strafing the northern shore with their gauss rifles. A pair of Fulcrum heavy hovertanks trusted their gunners less and their armor more. They trailed lazily back and forth, working over the loyalist’s entrenched positions with scarlet lances of laserfire and flight after flight of long-range missiles.