A note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:

As promised, meet V, Lord Inquisitor Mordekai's apprentice before Ellie's mother was even born. She's been mentioned a couple of times in both Of Worth and by Gavin in Doctor Trixie's story, so now seemed like a fairly good time for you all to get the answer to Ellie's curiosity regarding his last apprentice. V's bound to show up in Of Worth sooner or later (hint: it's sooner than Gavin will, at least), so here's a glimpse of what inspired Pieter to take her in.

All the best,

-G

Burning Bridges

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

My name is Amelia Verda; I am fourteen years old. It's been ten years to the day since I last saw my sister. Today is our birthday. I hope that wherever she is, she knows that I'm thinking about her, about how I lost her, about how I miss her...

Happy birthday, 'Annie.

'Leave it, 'Annie!' I thought it as harsh and sharp as I could. With the sound of traffic from the ever-busy Terran market street at the end of the alley, I knew it was too late to say – or even yell – anything out loud. I didn't have to, though. 'Annie always knew what I was thinking. She was under the impression that because we were twins, we were exactly the same. She wouldn't believe me when I told her I didn't know what was going on in her head. She thought I just wasn't listening hard enough, and that always hurt her a little. So I'd gotten good at figuring out how she felt from just a glimpse.

I didn't have to read minds to know that I was being ignored.

"That's OURS," 'Annie said in a flat, unfriendly voice (I remember I hated when she used that voice). She was standing ominously over the group of five boys, all bigger than we were – maybe six or seven years old, who had ripped the simple data slate we'd gotten for our birthday out of my hands. 'Annie hadn't even been playing with it – she was off playing Corporal in an ongoing game of Guards versus 'Nids with a dozen other children. But she knew the second there was a problem. She tore down the street towards me and took in the situation with one glance, setting herself between me and the group of boys. Then she approached the circle they'd formed, crouching around the slate, poking the screen too hard and trying to load programs they shouldn't. I was afraid they were going to break it. Funny, the things that matter when you're four.

"Go play in traffic, Verda," Carter, the ringleader, drawled over his shoulder.

"Yeah, Verda," Larson, the meatiest boy, parroted.

They couldn't tell the difference between 'Annie and me – then again, neither could our parents or our brother Matteo. To be fair, even now if I look at a pict of us together, I can't tell who's who. But I wouldn't have been caught dead standing up to a group of boys twice my size. 'Annie didn't back down from anything if she thought it would protect me. She took after our father like that: a fearless little Imperial Guard Drill Instructor in training. Carter, on the other hand, wasn't the biggest of the boys – or the oldest, or the toughest – but he was the smartest, and the others automatically deferred to him.

"Give it back, Carter," 'Annie barked in a voice that sounded just like Master Sergeant Dorian Verda. I think he would have been proud.

"Not bloody likely," the leader turned around and leaned too close into my twin's face. She didn't flinch.

"I said," she used a deceptively mild voice, enunciating and emphasizing each word, "Give. It. Back." Carter looked like he was about to come up with a snappy little line, but then she hissed, "Now," and his face blanched. His entire body began shuddering like he was fighting some force – internal, external, I couldn't say – that had wrestled his body into submission and lifted the arm holding the slate. Then, with a quaking hand, he pressed it into 'Annie's slim fingers.

As soon as our birthday present was safely in her hands, Carter slumped forward and took a gasp like he'd just run up ten flights of stairs. All I could see was the back of Annie's head, but I'd bet my allowance for a year that her wide, exotic, slate-gray eyes were boring into the boy as she softly offered, "Thank you."

She turned back to me, letting a devilish little smile touch the corner of her mouth, and she held the present out to me. My brain barely had time to register that there was danger, but that must've been enough of a warning for her. She dropped into a crouch just as the meaty kid's fist whistled by where her head had just been. She passed off the gadget with a soft, underhand toss that fell right into my grasp, even though I'm pants at catching things. And then our mirror-image eyes locked. There was a message in hers. 'Run,' her expression ordered, 'hide.' She didn't want me getting hurt.

I sprinted around a corner, ducking beneath a vending cart, certain that she was right behind me. She wasn't, though. I crawled to the edge to peek at what was happening and my heart wrenched in a vice. Two of the boys were holding her arms while the biggest one hit her in the belly, over and over. She was crying and trying to wrench herself free. I wanted to run out and make them stop. I was going to run out and make them stop. And then she spotted me with wet eyes, and she stood straighter, frowned, shook her head subtly. 'Don't,' she as good as said, 'they'd do the same to you.'

"Whatcha learn, Verda?" Carter demanded when the other stopped punching her.

She coughed a wheezing gasp and then spat a gob of blood and spittle that landed on the boy's cheek. She cried out, "We don't take what's not ours," as one of the others grabbed her long, sleek black hair and pulled hard, holding her in place while Carter punched her in the mouth. I didn't move. I couldn't move. I still feel like a coward – maybe if I'd done something she'd still be here.

She screamed once as her mouth welled with blood, and then she sprayed crimson and teeth in one of the lanky little lackey's faces. His hands reflexively dropped her right arm, coming up to wipe the red sting from his eyes. I could only look on dumbly as her smooth, slightly chubby arm turned into something that belonged on a grown man. Her face changed, too, something terrible twisting her features just beneath the surface.

I had never, ever been afraid of 'Annie. She was the one person that I knew – that knew me – in ways that no one else could ever understand. But in that second I was terrified. It took everything in me to not run away.

The boys around her let out gasps of fear, some of them falling back a step. The boy with her blood on his face even ran away, right past my hiding space. She swung that too-big arm around, clocking the boy holding her left side in the temple with a vicious snarl and sending him sprawling to the ground. And then whatever had changed her face passed, and she rounded on the boy that had grabbed her hair. She swung at him twice – faster than I'd seen anyone move in all my life, until then or since – and contacted a blow once in the stomach and once in the throat. He, too, crumpled in a heap.

She turned on Carter, taking a running start and hurling herself at his legs, knocking him over. She crawled up to pin him, rearing up and whaling methodically, rhythmically, at his soft spots – his belly, his neck, then under his arms when he raised them to hit her back frantically anywhere he could reach. Somewhere in the fray he gasped out, "Larson!" and the boy shambled over. When he found he couldn't yank my sister off his friend, he started kicking and stomping at her unprotected lower back.

And that was when I saw him. The enormous, bald man with a glowing red eye wearing black and gold power armor came striding down the street right towards us, with a purpose in his steps like he knew exactly where he was headed. He paused as he came abreast of the alley and turned his head, exposing a jagged scar across his throat while his one normal eye narrowed. His shadow fell across the three of them, interlocked and panting with wet, wheezy gasps.

'Annie noticed. Her face lifted to the man and after a heartbeat it mutated with this expression… I've never seen anything else like it: intense, focused, determined, desperately yearning intent that lit up her eyes. If I could have heard what she was thinking then, I think I would have known I'd already lost her.

Her moment of distraction was rewarded by Larson kicking her so hard that she fell forward onto Carter, and then Carter's forehead slammed into the side of her face with a crack that convinced me she had a broken face bone. Something dry and blue like electricity sparked in 'Annie's eyes and then at her shoulder and her arm before the armored man's chin lifted a few degrees. Three small, bloodied bodies were jerked into the air, separated and spread-eagled, hovering almost a man's height off the ground.

He strode forward, again with purpose, directly toward 'Annie, and stopped maybe two feet from her. Their faces were level now, and his deep, rumbling voice announced, "That will be quite enough."

He inspected her, then, taking his time, looking her over like our father might look over a recruit for defects. He completely ignored the two boys hovering on either side of her. After a moment, he slowly lowered her to the ground. Halfway through her descent she gave a choked cry of pain, coughed on impact, and then wiped her bloody mouth with the back of her hand before drawing herself up to attention. He stepped to one side, and I saw that the crushed bone on the side of her face and the black eye had all but vanished, and the terrible noises she'd been making while breathing were gone, like she'd been completely healed in the time it took to float down five or so feet.

The man said nothing for a long time – too long, it seemed, and that entire time his uneven gaze was spearing through 'Annie like he was appraising everything about her. I would've fidgeted uncomfortably under that scrutiny, but she welcomed it. Finding, it seemed, whatever he was looking for, his eyes snapped over to the two felled boys, and a subtle shift of his gauntleted fingers drew them up to hang mid-air next to Carter and Larson. They both groaned as they came around, then panic overtook their features.

"It seems," the man with a voice like thunder growled at the boys, "that you have no problem with big people hurting small people. So I'm sure you won't mind…" Larson's arm twisted a bit and he squealed. The man looked down directly at 'Annie and offered almost graciously, "Shall I?"

Her face was stoic, and she swallowed carefully before replying, "No, Sir, thank you."

"No?" The eyebrow over his augmentic eye lifted like he didn't quite believe her, and with a flex of his hand, the floating boys yelped in pain, their arms and legs stretching out agonizingly like they were on the rack. "Mercy for those who harmed you?" His eyes flicked up to them and then back to her, his tone heavy with, "Tell me why."

"They stole, Sir," she answered clearly, "and I made them give it back. They hit me. I hit back. They've stopped," she paused, taking the opportunity to look up at the floating boys, "I stop. That's all I wanted."

That last part wasn't true and I knew it. Making them stop was her second priority. She wanted it because she wanted to make sure they wouldn't hurt me. As if to confirm what I was thinking, her eyes swept over to me on their way back to center. 'Stay there,' they said, 'wait.'

The boys continued to whimper for a moment and they, too, dropped back down, though not quite as gently as she had. The minute they were on the ground they righted themselves and scrabbled away, completely oblivious that I was hiding not a meter from where they passed. Once it was clear I crawled out of my hiding place, standing just at the corner and peering around it.

The man was looming over her. "Tell me your name, little soldier," he ordered.

"Verda, Sir," she answered crisply.

There was almost a bite of impatience in his timbre when he clarified, "Your full name, child."

"Dorianna Verda, Sir," she amended.

"Do you know what I am, Dorianna?" even though she was standing stock-still I could see the flinch from the use of her name at her nose and the corner of her mouth. She hated 'Dorianna.'

She let it go, though, as she inspected the heraldry and insignia on his armor and mantle, the 'I' everywhere in black and gold. I knew, but she must not've recognized it, because she replied with a completely sober, "Important, Sir."

He gave a short, mirthless, rumbling chuckle and explained, "I am an Inquisitor Lord."

Lifting her chin, she queried, "Am I in trouble, sir?"

"Not right now." He took a knee (even with that he towered over her) and explained, "You have a talent, Dorianna, one that needs training."

"How I made Carter give back our present, Sir?" she wanted specifics.

"And how you knocked those boys out even though they were bigger than you," he offered.

'And how you always know what I'm thinking,' I thought.

She looked past the Inquisitor to me and asked in a sad sort of voice, "But you don't?"

"Yes," he replied, "I do – which is why –" He paused and followed her gaze over his shoulder to me. He only glanced at first, and then he took a longer look, turned to 'Annie, then back to me. We were used to the double-take. His wasn't funny at all, though. After a second or so he answered, "No, I'm afraid she doesn't." She swallowed hard, frowning as he finished, "Which is why you need to come with me."

"I don't want this talent, Sir," she said it like it was a medal or a mission she could just turn down.

"If you don't control it," he answered with subtle impatience, "it will control you. That is how you get in trouble." When she said nothing, he used one finger to lift her chin with gentle practicality, "People with strength and talent, like you – like me, we don't get much choice. The Throne needs us to serve – to keep mankind safe – like you've kept your sister safe. Without people like us, people like her get hurt. Do you understand?"

She nodded with a shuddering breath. I understood, too. He was going to take her away. I couldn't help it; I started to cry.

"Good," he said. "Now go. Say your goodbyes. I can't promise that you'll ever see her again."

'Annie ran to me with her arms out, folded me up in them, and pet my hair. "Shh," she whispered, "don't… Don't cry, 'Lia, it'll be okay. You know I'll always be listening." I sniffed hard and tried to be strong like her. She held me tighter and murmured, "I'll always be right here. I won't let anything bad happen to you. Not ever." She brushed my cheeks dry with her thumbs, blood caked in the creases of her knuckles, and she kissed me.

He touched her shoulder and she turned away, her hand lingering for as long as she could before he bid her, "Come. And don't look back."

I watched her as long as I could, until they rounded a corner and slipped out of sight, my heart breaking the entire time.

Dorianna Verda woke with a start, bolting up in her bed aboard the Litany of Flame and placing her scarred right hand flat over her racing heart. She leaned forward, taking deep breaths, and then her fingers curled in tightly, bunching up the fabric of her undershirt. She glanced at the chrono on the nightstand. She was fourteen. It had been ten years. She fell back, closing her eyes while her head contacted the headboard with a 'whump.'

And even though no one was there, she sighed and whispered into the darkness, "Happy birthday, 'Lia."