"You do a good imitation of a piece of animated garden statuary, filth. Will you fight or are you the classic coward portrayed by those monuments?"

Aidan shrugged. The shrug was a calculated insult, a wordless response to Joanna's words. Any hint of defiance infuriated her. She flicked out the weapon again, but this time Aidan was prepared. Acting instinctively, he brought up his whip, tabbed the button and allowed the thong to entangle with Joanna's and divert it away from its target, apparently the middle of his body. She cursed under her breath and tugged the whip backward. Because her whip was tied up with Aidan's, she was almost able to yank Aidan's whip out of his grip, but he, gaining quickly in knowledge of the whip's controls, released its contact with Joanna's and drew it back toward him. It settled about his feet in a symmetrical coil. There was no time to take another moment to learn, Aidan realized. He must attack before she did, even if he was unsure how to manipulate the weapon. Drawing up the handle so that it was virtually aimed at Joanna, he pressed the button while thrusting forward. The whip thong sailed across the gap between them. Though slightly overshot and slightly too high, it nevertheless made contact with the side of Joanna's forehead, rocking her sideways. She brought her own whip around, snapping her arm with the same fierceness as the whip's own snap. Its thong wrapped around his neck and jerked him forward. At the same time, she used her free hand to catch the thong of his whip as it descended toward her. It was an astonishing move, one Aidan could admire even while in the midst of being strangled by a narrow strip of the finest leather available to a warrior for anything other than a uniform.

Though Joanna had obviously relaxed her grip on her whip, the pressure of the thong itself did not diminish. It slowly squeezed tighter. Aidan felt his eyes begin to bulge out. Everything around him was taking on a firmer definition, a more pronounced outline. Outside the Circle, the sibko appeared to share the same frightened expression. He sensed Marthe tensing, wanting to rush into the Circle, but the sanctity of the Circle would hold her back. Ter Roshak studied the fight intently, but his gaze was cold as ever.

Aidan found himself consciously trying to force his tongue backward as though, in some mysterious way, it could intrude itself into his slowly closing throat and somehow reverse the impending strangulation.

As Joanna walked toward him, her grip on the whip loose except for the tight hold her thumb kept on the control button, her eyes were icy. The offer of death was in them, with no promise of mourning. And why should she mourn? She had often said she could see a cadet die in a trial or combat within the Circle of Equals without caring one iota about the corpse's former skills, potential, or training achievements. It only took one loss, one mistake, one flaw, one irritable, murderous training officer to mark the end of a cadet or at least flush him or her out.

Aidan was surprised by how coolly he was perceiving his situation, even as the bright sun above him seemed to be slowly going out. He tried to find some air someplace, but there was none.

"Stop this, Joanna!" someone cried. Her eyes became fierce and it was apparent she would happily arrange the speaker's demise next. Aidan had enough presence of mind to look down at the whip handle, where she still held onto the button. The flesh around her thumbnail was very white so that the natural color of the skin around it was like a dark frame.

At that moment, the world seemed about to blink out as Aidan began to lose his sight.

Then the pressure stopped and he felt the thong recoil off his shoulder as it fell away. Eyes closed now, he felt his knees buckle and an overwhelming need to fall came over him. He resisted it. He could not fall at Falconer Joanna's feet. That would please her too much. Somehow, straining leg muscles, overtaxing back muscles, obtaining some strength from the sheer fantasy of the effort, he remained standing.

As he gradually opened his eyes, he heard the speaker again and recognized the voice as Falconer Ellis': "You kill too easily, Joanna. It is not right, not for this one. This one will surpass us all."

Ellis now stood beside Joanna, his hand on her wrist. The whip, apparently forced out of her hands by him, lay like a docile snake at his feet. It was a surprising move on his part, a violation of Circle procedure and Clan protocol. Nobody was allowed to enter the Circle during a battle, except for Falconer Commander Ter Roshak.

The two training officers seemed to go out of focus for Aidan. He could barely concentrate on them. But he had to. If he looked away, he might lose consciousness and wind up on the ground, his body coiled as ignominiously as the fallen whip.

Suddenly someone grabbed his arm. His head turned sideways laboriously, as if his neck muscles had gone rusty. He looked into the badly sculptured face of Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. Glancing down, Aidan saw that his arm was being clutched by Ter Roshak's false hand. That might explain the pain that was now surging through his arm, unless of course it was simple weakness that would have suffered from the least grip. In a way, Aidan was glad it was Ter Roshak's prosthetic hand that held him. He would have had to try to wriggle out of anyone else's grip; with Ter Roshak, it was a clear impossibility so Aidan could relax in his bondage and merely wait to see what would happen next.

What happened next was that Joanna wheeled upon Ellis, in her eyes and voice a hatred so intense that even Aidan, groggy as he was, could see that the emotion was not born at just this moment. It had been building up for some time.

"An honor duel then, Falconer Ellis?" Joanna said. "It does not have to be."

Ellis' response was mere ritual, the offer of an opportunity to settle a dispute without conflict. This allowed a warrior who was either under the influence of an overwhelming emotion, a bad substance, or a mistaken notion to withdraw honorably from the issue of the duel. Warriors, however, rarely took a step back, and Joanna had always made it clear that a weak act of honor was to her an act of dishonor, whatever the Clan codes said.

"An honor duel then?" she said.

"Honor duel," Ellis responded, nodding.

"Mechs fully armed."

"No. The woods, a single weapon, your choice."

"No. No weapons. Just you and me. Here. Now. To the death."

There was a slight hesitation on Ellis' part before he said, in a voice louder and firmer than hers, "To the death."

"Well bargained and done."

"Well bargained and done."

Aidan had never heard the bidding process spoken so rapidly, concluded so easily. There had been no sense of strategy, just offers from instinct.

"See what you have done, cadet?" Ter Roshak whispered. "Fate allows fools like you to precipitate events that end in futile catastrophe."

Aidan wanted to protest that he had not precipitated anything, that Joanna had wrenched him out of a classroom for her sport. But it would be his head to address the Falconer Commander, especially when Ter Roshak was in such a foul mood.

"Fool!" Ter Roshak cried. He tightened his grasp of Aidan's arm, then lifted him off the ground and hurled him away, over the line of the Circle of Equals, into the midst of his fellow sibkin, who now backed away from him as if he were suddenly diseased. Even Marthe kept her distance, her feet shuffling nervously as though she could not decide whether to direct them toward Aidan or away from him. He hated that. Before, she would never have considered away.