Chapter Eight
I
Madison had changed.
Or maybe she had. Kafari shrugged her pack into a more comfortable position and adjusted the straps, then set out across campus. The library, with its all-important SWIFT transmitter, was nearly three kilometers from her little cubicle. She didn’t mind the walk, most days, although the weather was sometimes unpleasant and she was often achingly tired.
“Don’t worry about the fatigue,” the doctor had told her, “it’s just a byproduct of your body’s effort to repair the damage. Take it slowly and be patient. It’ll pass, soon enough, and you’ll feel more like yourself, again.”
Kafari wasn’t sure, any longer, what “feeling like herself” actually felt like. She didn’t know herself, any longer, didn’t recognize the girl who lived inside her skin, these days. She peered into the mirror, sometimes, trying to find herself, and saw only a girl with eyes like flint who sometimes, for reasons Kafari didn’t completely understand, made older, ostensibly stronger men shudder. She had lost herself, somewhere, in the smoke and the shooting and the killing.
Compared to others, Kafari had lost very little. She was far luckier than most of her friends, lucky in so many ways it was hard to count them all. Her parents had survived. They’d gone, that morning, to Grandma and Grandpa Soteris’ farm, tucked back into a corner of Seorsa Gorge. Chakula Ranch was gone, and two of her brothers with it, but everyone else in her immediate family had survived, including most of her aunts and uncles and cousins.
They had come to the hospital in Madison to cheer her up. They’d all come to Madison again, just three weeks later, when President Lendan bestowed Jefferson’s highest honors on those who had fought and, in many cases, died. Kafari’s Uncle Jasper, Commander of Jefferson’s Ground Defense Forces, had been one of thousands of soldiers killed in battle, trying to defend the northwestern portion of Madison. He had earned a Presidential Gold Medallion, which Abraham Lendan presented posthumously to Aunt Rheta and her son, Kafari’s cousin Geordi. Aunt Rheta cried the whole time. So did Kafari.
And then President Lendan had called her name, as well as Dinny and Aisha Ghamal’s. Stunned, Kafari joined Aisha and her son at the steps leading to the podium, where President Lendan waited. Kafari and Aisha clasped hands as they climbed up.
“For courage under extreme fire,” the president was saying while film crews and reporters trained their cameras on them and transmitted the images to the entire world, “for brilliant battlefield decisions that saved lives, including my own, and for the determination to keep fighting against incredible odds, it is my humble honor to award these Gold Presidential Medallions to Kafari Camar, to Aisha Ghamal, and to Dinny Ghamal. But for them, I would not be here today.”
The applause from the Joint Chamber floor washed across them as Abraham Lendan slipped the ribbon holding the medallion around her neck. As he shook her hand, he murmured for her ears alone, “Well done, my courageous captain. Very well done, indeed.”
She touched the medallion with numb fingers, watched Aisha and Dinny receive theirs, then watched Simon Khrustinov accept two medals, one for himself and one for the Bolo. Her fingers kept stroking the heavy medallion around her own neck, as though trying to convince themselves that it was really there. She hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected anything like it. Her eyes stung as she descended the steps and returned to her seat, engulfed by warm hugs and tearful congratulations from her entire family.
She didn’t display the medallion at her tiny apartment. It was too precious to leave it there, where locks were flimsy enough that a child of two could break the door open just by leaning on it. She’d asked her father to store it in the family’s lock-box, which they had recovered from the wreckage of their house. Her parents were gradually rebuilding Chakula Ranch and Kafari helped as much as she could. She’d felt so guilty over running off to Madison for classes, she’d almost cancelled her plans.
Her mother had taken one look at Kafari’s face after reaching that decision and stepped in, fast. “You’re not going to sell your dreams or your future short, my girl. You need that degree. And Jefferson needs psychotronic technicians and engineers. We’re a long way from the Central Worlds, out here, and we don’t have much to offer that would tempt high-tech specialists into relocating. Besides,” she winked, “your husband may decide to foot the bill for the rest of your education.”
“Husband?” Kafari echoed, voice squeaking in suprise. “Mother! I’m not even dating! Who is it, you had in mind for me to marry?” Kafari was running through a mental list of men her mother might consider suitable, weighing it against a list of men Kafari thought she could tolerate, at least. She realized with a slight flutter of panic that those two lists did not converge anywhere.
Her mother only smiled in that mysterious and maddening way she had and refused to say anything further about it. Not that Kafari minded in the slightest. She was so grateful to still have her mother alive, tears threatened again. Kafari blinked and gently pushed those feelings aside, paying attention, instead, to the path she followed across campus.
Riverside University was a beautiful school, nearly a century and a quarter old. Native sandstone caught the late, westering sun in a glow like a faded echo of the sunsets that blazed across Klameth Canyon’s high cliffs. The campus stretched two full kilometers along the south bank of the Adero River, with promenades and pathways and shade trees interspersed between lecture halls, research labs, sports facilities, and dormitories. Riverside’s geographical setting provided beautiful views across the river and plenty of inviting, picturesque places to gather with friends or indulge a spot of romantic trysting.
Not that Kafari’d had much time for the latter. There were plenty of boys who’d shown interest, but Kafari wasn’t particularly interested in them. Somehow, she just couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for some barely post-pubescent kid whose sole interests were scoring on a sports field or in some girl’s bed. She had more in common with the professors than with students her own age and sometimes felt that even the professors didn’t really understand her. It was proving far harder than she’d thought, fitting back into an ordinary world, again.
Mostly, Kafari was determined to finish her degree in the shortest amount of time possible. She wanted to start earning money to support her family, rather than costing them money to support her. Thanks to the scholarship from Vishnu and the assistance she’d received as part of the new Educational Surety Loans — which helped students whose families and livelihoods had been adversely affected by the war — Kafari’s only real expenses were room and board. She’d done a lot of searching, to find the cheapest possible place in which to live, no easy feat in war-scarred Madison, where the cost of housing had nearly quadrupled. Food prices had soared six to ten times their prewar averages, which made her job at a dorm kitchen esstential, since the dorm fed her twice a day in lieu of cash wages.
As she walked, listening to the river and the wind in the trees and the snarl of traffic beyond the edge of campus, a nameless, uneasy feeling she had experienced all too often, of late, crept across her, like shadows of the advancing evening. She couldn’t identify any particular threat, but the carrying sound of voices from little gatherings scattered here and there set her teeth on edge, somehow.