The ship’s chrono bled into third shift, that quiet, haunted hour where the only souls awake were the doomed, the dedicated, and the chronically pained. I fell squarely into all three categories.

  The Grav gym was a cathedral of polished durasteel and humming machinery, empty and echoing, a sanctuary I had claimed with a promise of exquisite pain for any trooper foolish enough to violate its sanctity before fourth shift. The promise of a few sets of eighteen-point bodybuilders—a full-body calisthenics drill that was misery in normal G and pure torture in 2.5—tended to encourage patience.

  The air was thick, heavy with the ozone tang of overworked machinery and the recycled, sterile chill of ship’s atmosphere, now pressed down upon us by two and a half times the normal gravitational pull. Every breath was a conscious effort, a weight on the chest. The constant, sub-audible thrum of the Crow’s engines vibrated up through the deck plates and into the bones of my feet, a sensation usually lost in the background noise of life, but now amplified by the gym’s isolation and the oppressive Gs.

  I was dressed for the fight—a pair of sweat-soaked exercise shorts and scuffed gym shoes, and not much else. Shirts in 2.5 Gee were a special kind of hell; they became sodden, abrasive weights, chafing against skin already screaming under the strain. My body, a roadmap of old wars etched in scar tissue, was taut with the effort. The Adept Physical gift was a hell of a thing, a foundation and first evolution that put me solidly in the ‘can kick your face off’ category, but it didn’t make gravity any less of a tyrannical bastard. Under this kind of pressure, you had to keep moving. Stopping was an invitation for every muscle fiber to seize into a petrified, agonized knot.

  So I rowed. The machine whirred and clanked with each pull, the resistance set to a level that would have turned an unaugmented human’s spine to powder. My back and shoulders burned with a clean, fiery pain that was a welcome distraction from the deeper, necrotic ache of the thing buried in my chest. A welcome distraction, and a pretty audience. Not a bad way to spend third shift.

  Gabrielle provided the audience. She sat on a weight bench nearby, a picture of unsettling comfort amidst the punishing environment. She wore simple shorts and a loose, sleeveless top, and where I was drenched in sweat and strain, she seemed… placid. The high gravity didn’t appear to bother her in the slightest. Her unique physiology, a legacy of her creators' designs, apparently included a casual disregard for basic physics. She just watched, her head tilted, those large, luminous eyes taking in every scar, every corded muscle, every strained movement with an intensity that was part clinical analysis and part… something else entirely.

  I had to admit, a part of me I thought long atrophied was enjoying the attention. The way she was eyeing me was frank, appraising, and held a hunger that was utterly devoid of guile. It wasn’t the calculated look of a predator or the veiled interest of a crewmate; it was the open, innocent fascination of someone seeing a complex machine operate at its limit. And maybe a bit more. It made the latticework of old wounds across my torso and arms feel less like failures and more like… features. Proof of function. Still works. Mostly.

  “So,” I grunted between pulls, the word coming out as a strained exhale. “Tell me about the different bonds.”

  She nodded, as if she’d been waiting for the prompt. “Well, I don’t know if you know the history behind Maenads. It’s not exactly common knowledge.”

  I let the rowing machine’s handles click back into place and slid off the bench, my muscles protesting the shift. Keep moving. Always keep moving. I hit the deck and started into a set of push-ups, the extra weight making each descent a controlled fall and each push a Herculean effort. “Consider me ignorant,” I said, the words punctuated by sharp breaths. “Because I basically am. I think I may have heard the term mentioned once in ancient mythology classes. Right before I slept through them.”

  A small smile touched her lips. “Back during the Exodus, things got… really bad. The Fallouts were talking about pirate raids on Earth for women, and the backlash against the Utes was getting to the point where progs were getting burned and hanged in the streets.” Her voice took on a recitative quality, like she was quoting from a historical text she’d memorized but never truly lived. “The System was a big deal, and people were going a little crazy with the power, putting on costumes and shooting each other in the streets with mana balls, firechains… a lot of old scores that had festered for centuries were getting settled. And meanwhile, the Dryads were trying to take control for the multicorps.”

  “Utes?” I asked, pausing at the top of a push-up, my arms trembling slightly.

  “Progressive Utopians. They are called the Crazies now, I guess.”

  Ah. Those Crazies. I’d seen the historical vids. A bunch of wide-eyed idealists who thought the System would usher in a golden age of peace and understanding, instead of just giving everyone better tools to be bastards with. They were the first against the wall when things went sideways. I resumed my push-ups, a steady, grinding rhythm. “Makes sense. Go on.”

  “Anyway, to head it off, the Church created Maenads. Good idea, I think, but a bad implementation.” She said it with a chilling lack of bitterness, a simple statement of fact. “We were supposed to get married, support Church doctrine, and bond to become perfect wives for the Exodus, as well as increase affinity potential.”

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  She shrugged, a delicate motion. “But there were also hardliners. They demanded built-in guidelines to prevent another Enlightenment fiasco. No more coddling Crazies, no more consequence-free sex or fatherless children, none of that. So they built that into us. We were created to bond as perfectly as possible with males to reinforce whatever affinity was most prevalent. The males would be born of whatever race or hybrid, and the females would create more Maenads. We were all still human, after all, and the new culture was fine with men and women being different, especially with the System safeguards.”

  The clinical way she described her own origins as a designed product was more unsettling than any outburst of rage could have been. They didn’t just make a new race. They built in the plumbing and the politics.

  “We were created to be both adorable as babies and totally uninteresting sexually until we were old enough, and only among males we were not biologically related to.” Her nose wrinkled slightly. “That part was tricky, I’m told. The ‘uninteresting’ part. At that point, we would rapidly mature into marriageable adults.”

  I switched to sit-ups, the crushing gravity making my abdominal muscles feel like they were being torn from my pelvis. Each crunch was a minor victory. She watched my progress, her expression thoughtful.

  “Please bear in mind,” she added, “that this is history to me. So it might be tilted a little. What was supposed to happen was that the women who would leave Earth to make up for the shortfall would have enough power to protect themselves, but still be searching for the perfect man. The perfect complementary affinity set, personality set, to ensure happiness and productive lives, together. Especially the Delvers. We were supposed to be their shield, their totally loyal ally, their trusted backup, and their love. The bonded would be greater than the sum of its parts.”

  It sounded like a fairy tale. A horrifyingly pragmatic, genetically engineered fairy tale, but a fairy tale nonetheless. “This was during a time when even the Churches admitted that relationships could be flexible. Polygamy was pretty much the new normal, within limits. But…” Her voice hardened almost imperceptibly. “They wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just a new set of immorality, so they added a failsafe. We would force-bond to the first male that triggered our hormone, and uhh… took our virginity. It was pretty one-sided. But by the time the Church figured out what went wrong, we were already all over the place.”

  I stopped, sitting up and draping my arms over my knees, sucking in deep breaths of the heavy air. The pieces clicked into place with cold, brutal logic. “I could see what went wrong. So basically, forced bond is through sex, more or less. Voluntary or not. And it’s one-sided, whatever that means.”

  She nodded, a flicker of sadness in her eyes. “Yeah. One-sided meaning there was no complimentary auras or affinities. A man who force-bonded a Maenad would get a willing slave, but nothing else. No shared power, no synergy. Still, that was more than enough for a lot of men, even as they lost out on the real strength.”

  A willing slave. The phrase hung in the air between us, ugly and absolute. I looked at her, this girl who had been engineered for perfection and ended up a victim of its flawed execution. “And you don’t hate the Church for that?”

  The question seemed to genuinely surprise her. She shook her head, her choppy hair swaying. “No. It’s considered the price we pay for the chance to have a full bond, which is worth it. A full bond is not… exactly… marriage, but it’s close. It doesn’t HAVE to involve sex, but it makes forced bonding impossible. On my world, a bond is the same as marriage, although a lot of people prefer the ceremony. Vows are kind of pointless when they are already enforced by instinct.”

  Enforced by instinct. The ultimate pre-nup. I was fascinated and repelled in equal measure. “Okay, so what is a full bond, then? If it’s not just… that.”

  She smiled a little, a real one this time, and scooted closer on the bench. The movement was effortless, a reminder of her unnatural grace. The scent of her reached me—not perfume, but something cleaner, like ozone and warm stone after a rain. A technomancer’s scent. “Basically, it aligns our gift to each other, the same as if you had two complimentary gifts. It opens up traits, classes, and fun techniques for both of you as if you had each other’s affinities as well.” Her eyes took on a distant, dreamy quality. “If you have life affinity, and I have spiritual, for example, together we could gain traits like partial resurrection, reincarnation, and stuff like that. We’d be a complete circuit.”

  The potential was staggering. World-altering. No wonder the Timur family wanted to get their hooks in her. They wouldn’t just be getting a powerful asset; they’d be getting a key to a whole new tier of power.

  “The downside,” she said, the dreaminess vanishing, replaced by pragmatic caution, “is that the loyalty sort of goes both ways. If there’s a disagreement, the partner with the stronger spirit pretty much always dominates. It’s not about being right; it’s about whose will is stronger. Which is why you always have to find out who you are going to full bond with, especially if they are a higher stage than you are.”

  It sounded less like a marriage and more like a permanent psychic merger with a built-in dominance hierarchy. Terrifying.

  She must have seen the look on my face. “The System made sure there are loopholes. If you already have a strong mind, and you are raped or forced to have sex, you can fight off the involuntary bond. And we… if things get too bad, we can will ourselves to cease to exist.”

  I blinked. “Cease to exist?”

  “Die. Just like that. Instant suicide, no poison or high windows involved.” She said it with the same flat tone she’d used for the history lesson. “We are not suicidal, but there have been enough deviants… the era of the insane technomancer is long over, your stories are ancient history. If you bonded me, and went deviant, I wouldn’t live through it, and neither would you. The Church included that ability on purpose. It’s not considered suicide, but sacrifice, since we have a strong self-preservation instinct.”

  A kill-switch. They built in a kill-switch. The horror of her existence kept deepening. Designed to be the perfect companion, but with the soul-crushing potential for slavery and a built-in self-destruct button to be used if the former came to pass. It was the most brutally utilitarian thing I had ever heard.