She didn't even regret his absence. She still cared about him, had fond memories of him-even, perhaps, loved him in a vaguely-morethan-platonic way. But after Battle School, where he had been a brave rebel challenging the system, refusing to command an army in the battle room and joining her in helping Ender in his struggle against the teachers-after Battle School, they had worked together almost continuously, and perhaps came to know each other too well. The rebel pose was gone, and he stood revealed as a brilliant but cocky commander. And when she was shamed in front of Dink, when she was overcome by fatigue during a game that turned out to be real, it became a barrier between her and the others, but it was an unvaultable wall between her and fink.

Even when Ender's jeesh was kidnapped and confined together in Russia, she and fink bantered with each other just like old times, but she felt no spark.

Through all that time, she would have laughed if anyone suggested that she would fall in love with Bean, and a scant three years later would be married to him. Because if Dink had been the most likely candidate for her heart in Battle School, Bean had to be the least likely. She had helped him a bit, yes, as she had helped Ender when he first started out, but it was a patronizing kind of help, giving a hand up to an underdog.

In Command School, she had come to respect Bean, to see something of his struggle, how he never did anything to win the approval of others, but always gave whatever it took to help his friends. She came to understand him as one of the most deeply altruistic and loyal people she had ever seen-even though he did not see either of these traits in himself, but always found some reason why everything he did was entirely for his own benefit.

When Bean was the only one not kidnapped, she knew at once that he would try anything to save them. The others talked about trying to contact him on the outside, but gave up at once when they heard that he had been killed. Petra never gave up on him. She knew that Achilles could not possibly have killed him so easily. She knew that he would find a way to set her free.

And he had done it.

She didn't love him because he had saved her She loved him because, during all her months in captivity, constantly having to bear Achilles's looming presence with his leering threat of death entwined with his lust to own her, Bean was her dream of freedom. When she imagined life outside of captivity, she kept thinking of it as life with him. Not as man and wife, but simply: When I'm free, then we'll find some way to fight Achilles. We. We'll. And the "we" was always her and Bean.

Then she learned about his genetic difference. About the death that awaited him from overgrowing his body's ability to nurture itself. And she knew at once that she wanted to bear his children. Not because she wanted to have children who suffered from some freakish affliction that made them brilliant ephemera, butterflies catching the sunlight only for a single day, but because she did not want Bean's life to leave no child behind. She could not bear to lose him, and desperately wanted something of him to stay with her when he was gone.

She could never explain this to him. She could hardly explain it to herself.

But somehow things had come together better than she hoped. Her gambit of getting him to see Anton had persuaded him far more quickly than she had thought would be possible.

It led her to believe that he, too, without even realizing it, had come to love her in return. That just as she wanted him to live on in his children, he now wanted her to be the mother who cared for them after he died.

If that wasn't love, it would do.

They married in Spain, with Anton and his new bride looking on. It had been dangerous to stay there as long as they did, though they tried to take the curse off it by leaving frequently with all their bags and then returning to stay in a different town each time. Their favorite city was Barcelona, which was a fairyland of buildings that looked as if they had all been designed by Gaudi-or, perhaps, had sprung from Gaudi's dreams. They were married in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia. it was one of the few genuine Gaudis still standing, and the name made it the perfect place for a wedding. Of course the "sagrada familia" referred officially to the sacred family of Jesus. But that didn't mean it couldn't also apply to all families. Besides, weren't her children going to be immaculately conceived?

The honeymoon, such as it was-a week together, island-hopping through the Balearics, enjoying the Mediterranean Sea and the African breezes-was still a week longer than she had hoped for. After knowing Bean's character about as well as one person ever gets to know another person, Petra had been rather shy about getting to know his body, and letting him know hers. But here Darwin helped them, for the passions that made species survive helped them to forgive each other's awkwardness and foolishness and ignorance and hunger.

She was already taking pills to regulate her ovulation and more pills to stimulate as many eggs as possible to come to maturity. There was no possibility of their conceiving a baby naturally before they began the in vitro fertilization process. But she wished for it all the same, and twice she woke from dreams in which a kindly doctor told them, "I'm sorry, I can't implant embryos, because you're already pregnant."

But she reffised to let it trouble her. She would have his baby soon enough.

Now they were here in Rotterdam, getting down to business. Looking, not for the kindly doctor of her dream, but for the mass murderer who only spared Bean's life by accident to provide them with a child who would not die as a giant by the age of twenty.

"If we wait long enough," said Bean, "they'll close the office."

"No," said Petra. "Volescu will wait all night to see you. You're his experiment that succeeded despite his cowardice."

"I thought it was my success, not his."

She pressed herself against his arm. "It was my success," she said.

"Yours? How?"

"It must have been. I'm the one who ended up with all the prizes."

"If you had ever said things like that in Battle School, you would have been the laughingstock of all the armies."

"That's because the armies were all composed of prepubescent children. Grownups don't think such things are embarrassing."

"Actually, they do," said Bean. "There's only this brief window of adolescence where extravagantly romantic remarks are taken for poetry."

"Such is the power of hormones that we absolutely understand the biological causes of our feelings, and yet we still feel them."

"Let's not go inside," said Bean. "Let's go back to the inn and have some more feelings."

She kissed him. "Let's go inside and make a baby."

"Try for a baby," said Bean. "Because I won't let you have one in which Anton's Key is turned."

"I know," she said.

"And I have your promise that embryos with Anton's Key will all be discarded."

"Of course," she said. That satisfied him, though she was sure that he would notice that she had never actually said the words. Maybe he did, unconsciously, and that was why he kept asking.

It was hypocritical and dishonest of her, of course, and she almost felt bad about it sometimes, but what happened after he died would be none of his business.

"All right then," he said.

"All right then," she answered. "Time to go meet the baby killer,

"I don't suppose we should call him that to his face, though, right?"

"Since when are you the one who worries about good manners?"

Volescu was a weasel, just as Petra knew he would be. He was all business, playing the role of Mr. Scientist, but Petra knew well what lay behind the mask. She could see the way he couldn't keep his eyes off Bean, the mental measurements he was making. She wanted to make some snide remark about how prison seemed to have done him good, he was carrying some extra weight, needed to walk that off... but they were here to have the man choose them a baby, and it would serve no purpose to irritate him.