It got easier, of course. Within weeks he found himself strong enough to stay up and eat with the rest of the crew. Shadow kept pushing him hard, no longer simply sitting and watching him, but doing the same exercises her was and challenging him to beat her. His competitive nature kicked in, and he found himself competing against her. She beat him every time, but did it so good-naturedly he found himself laughing over his losses.
Other times, after he had mastered control of his mental filing system, they would sit on the floor of the gym and talk. She would tell him about Zion, and life on the ship, and the war. He would listen, drinking in everything she told him greedily, struggling to acclimatize himself to this strange new life.
"What were you before you got unplugged?' he asked her once.
She smiled faintly. She rarely used her blank mask on him anymore. "Just a kid. A stupid scared kid looking for an out…" Her face didn't go blank – quite – but became still and reflective, remembering time past. "I was from what social surveys call a broken home. Mom was dead, Dad was a drunken asshole. Used to beat me around pretty good. I'd sit up in my room and just tell myself, it's not real, it's not real, over and over again."
Her voice was distant, just reciting the facts, no emotional connection. "What happened then?" he pressed gently.
"Dad came up to my room one night and crawled onto my bed, calling me Mary-Anne. That was my mom's name. I crawled out the other side and hid under the bed - he was too fat to get under, even if he was smart enough to think of it – until he fell asleep. Then I got up, packed a bag and left. I knew I couldn't stay. Not if he was going to start that."
"Jesus," Allan breathed, shocked. "How old were you?"
"Seven," she replied absently.
"Then what?"
"I lived on the streets for a while. Learned to pick pockets and where to hang out to get free feeds. Sometimes I'd go into buffet places and stuff as much food under my clothes as I could." She fell silent, remembering darker times. "I'd sleep anywhere – porches, trucks, treehouses, sometimes those bins they have to put clothes in for charity. Warmer in there. You could score some pretty sweet stuff, too." She shook her head sharply, as if trying to clear a fog. "Anyway, after about a month of that, social services came and picked me up, took me back to my dad's. I stole his wallet and took off again that night before he could start on me again. Took out enough cash to keep me in style for a couple of months before he cancelled the cards." She smiled faintly. "That was a good couple of months. Do you know, nobody ever bothers to rob little girls? It's always assumed that they don't have any money. So I got mostly left alone."
She sighed and leaned her head against the wall, rolling it from side to side as if her neck was stiff. Allan pulled his legs up to his chest and watched her patiently. She would continue when she was ready.
"Anyway, I got dragged back to Dad's again. He smacked me around pretty bad and locked me in a closet. Somebody knocked on the door… I heard some thumping and Dad talking a bit, and then the closet door opened. I was thinking, Oh, god, this is it… but it wasn't my dad, it was Morpheus."
"Wait, Captain Morpheus?"
She nodded, smiling now. "Dad was unconscious on the floor behind him. He just stood there looking down at me – god, he was huge, I could barely see his face it was that far up…"
"Still couldn't," jibed Allan, very gently.
She glared. "Very funny. Anyway, he crouched down to look at me. There were bruises all over my face, just at that nice blackish-purple stage. He looked at me and said, Do you want to go now? And I looked up at him and said, It isn't real, is it."
She sighed and stretched out her legs in front of her, leaning down to touch her toes with a casualness that still surprised him.
"So, I got pulled out. I was on the Neb for a while, but they can't keep kids on the ships for too long – something about anti-social behaviour. So I got transferred onto the Dauntless, which would get me back to Zion quicker than the Neb, which was outward bound. I was put in the orphanage. Then, when I was old enough, I joined up."
He looked at her, stretched out on the floor. "Regrets?" he asked.
"Not a one," she replied cheerfully enough, then paused thoughtfully. "No, just one. That I didn't kick my father in the face on my way out the door."
Allan smiled at the attempt to lighten the mood. "Damn hard life, girl."
She shrugged. "I survived. Can't have been that bad."
Allan didn't believe that for a moment. "Did it make it easier to adjust, getting out?" he asked curiously.
She frowned. "I think so. There are lots of different factors in that. Young children have a tenuous grasp of reality at the best of times, so they react well. People who come from dysfunctional or abusive backgrounds, people given to metal illness, people who have nothing to live for. They all do well. The older you are, the more grounded you are in reality, the materialistic people don't do so well."
That made sense. Then a thought occurred to him. "Hey, how old are you meant to be to join a crew?"
"Sixteen."
"But you said you got those scars from releasing Twitch when you were twelve."
She
grinned. "Would you believe me if I
said I stowed away?"
"I believe they would have locked you in your room for doing that."
She laughed. "Nah. We're supposed to do something like work experience, go out on a ship for a couple of weeks. He wasn't meant to be a high-risk case. It was supposed to be textbook unplugging."
"Didn't turn out that way?"
"Coulda been worse," she said dismissively.
Another thought occurred. He was on a roll today. "Well, why did you unplug me? I don't fit any of those criteria. I'm not from an abusive or dysfunctional background. I don't have mental illnesses or depression. And I'm – I was very materialistic."
She looked at him, her eyes half-closed. It made her look secretive, sly. "I thought you had potential."
He looked at her skeptically. "And you managed to convince the whole crew of that."
She waved a hand, her face still sly. "Nah. Just Munin. He trusts my judgement."
"Seriously, though, why?"
'I told you, I thought you had potential."
"Define potential."
She sighed. "The ability to deal with the truth without losing your mind."
"And you based this on what?" Allan knew he was pushing, but he was itching to know.
She gave him a flat stare. "Women's intuition."
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Fine, don't share. I just wanted to know what you were basing the decision on that changed my whole life."
She shook her head. "Half the time this shit's guesswork anyway. You can't really predict how one person will react. You can say that a certain group of people tend to react a certain way, but you can't tell for any individual, not really." She smiled at him gently, like you'd smile at a child. "Let's just say I played a hunch."
