Nucleus

Callisto's arms were folded up against her chest, partly for warmth, partly so she could cradle the splinted arm. She buried her face in the miserly heap of straw that served as a bed, whimpering. There was no point in disturbing the others. No one was going to give her anything for the pain.

Earlier in the day, she had reached the limits of her tolerance for an older boy she worked with. Those of the same age and younger already knew to leave her be. That one's crazy, they whispered. But the older children, one in particular, seemed to delight in her suffering. When Leon laid hands on her, she had punched him in the face and received a broken arm for her efforts.

That was why her good hand now clutched a small paring knife beneath her blanket, the battered steel warm against her flesh. If he struck in the night, the girls dozing mere feet away would not help her, any more than the other boys had helped when Leon broke her arm. The throb clawing its way up to rattle around in her skull was a constant reminder that she would get no sleep tonight anyway. It might as well be replaced with vigilance.

When hunger had finally driven Callisto from the black bones of Cirra, she had at first taken up begging in a nearly identical hamlet, but that was never destined to last long. The frequent running and hiding from irate merchants, barely scraping together enough to survive, the disgusted looks from "respectable" citizens- it was hard to say which part of those weeks was the most unendurable. They were banished to the forest outskirts after dark, and if a a fellow beggar hadn't showed her how to cover herself with a patchwork quilt of sod, she might have frozen or been torn apart by wild animals that first night. Still, of all of them, she was the most careful to conceal herself well. The most dangerous wolves walked on two legs.

Was it any wonder that when she had spied a familiar face, a survivor of Cirra, she had thrown herself at the woman and begged to go home? The wrinkles around her eyes had crinkled in recognition and pity as she'd looked down at the wretched girl. Before someone could clout Callisto upside the head for harassing people, the woman had taken her aside and explained that she was arranging a place for the homeless to go, a place where they could all earn an honest living.

Her timing, as it turned out, was impeccable. The village became the latest to fall only days after they left. That was how Callisto ended up in this port city, by far the largest human settlement she had ever seen. It was so big, she had been here for four months and still didn't recognize every face she saw. Their mother used to make Callisto and her sister work the fields, saying that if they knew how to farm, they could always feed themselves. That was an outrageous lie, but it did get her harvest work in a local orchard.

It was a surprisingly idyllic interlude, climbing trees, chatting with other girls as they tossed plums and pomegranates into baskets that smelled like ripe grass, learning how to balance the loaded baskets atop her head. No one ever understood why she didn't wanted to be there. They didn't understand that those who could hunt, who could take what they needed, were the ones who could always feed themselves. In the silty scrying pool of her memory, the faint curiosity with which she had watched the Cirran boys carry their bows into the forest had fully turned to envy. How she had grown to hate those fields... but she was, after all, only a girl. So it was that when the end of the harvest had taken her employment with it, she had sought work on the fishermans' wharfs, where she might actually learn something useful.

The difference was shocking. Whereas mostly young girls had worked the grove, there were only a handful on the wharfs, none above the age of fourteen. None were allowed on fishing sorties either. The girls did the most menial of work: scraping and gutting, disposing of fishheads, swabbing the wharfs. She had been told this would be true, but the reality still had bite. Then there were the boys.

They weren't all like Leon, of course. One her own age had taught her what she was there to learn in the first place- how to fish. When she had asked what she would do if she didn't have a line or a net, he had even showed her how to sharpen a stick into a spear and fish with that. Callisto had been told she was pretty. Perhaps this explained his willingness to make time for her. Regardless, her catch had supplemented her porridge rations well enough to put some flesh back on her bones and color into her cheeks. As Leon had noticed.

The thought of Leon brought her out of what she realized was a feverish reverie. Panic spiked as it occurred to her that she didn't know what she was going to do with the knife if she had to use it. Was the blade too short for stabbing? It didn't much matter- she wouldn't know where to stab. How much blood would there be if she cut his throat? Thinking felt like trying to push through thick rushes. Pain, exhaustion and freezing sweat smothered her brain.

Here, as in so many places, legends about the Warrior Princess were legion, but the one that most intrigued Callisto was the story of why she was said to be undefeated in single combat. At some point, so the legend went, she had trained somewhere in the Far East, mysterious lands possessing combat arts superior to any found in Greece.

Superior. What must that feel like, to never have to know fear? The only thing stronger than Callisto's fear was her hate. Maybe that was why she spent so much time nursing it. Right next to the chilly pebble of terror lodged in her chest was a bitter heat longing to blaze forth at anyone who would wrong her.

She fed that flame, fanned it, coiled her tortured body around it until the last flake of what she could see now was weakness shriveled and floated away. By the time dawn light peeked through the chinks in the wall, Callisto knew exactly what she had to do. Her entire life stretched out in front of her more clearly than it had even with her family, when, in spite of their outcast status, there was never any doubt that she would live and die just like generations of rural Greeks before her.

She sat up, ignoring the twinge in her arm with imperfect success, and ran her fingers through sweat-damp locks to make herself minimally presentable. There was no place to hide the paring knife in her shift, so she slipped it into her sling. The burlap had already pricked and inflamed her skin- what was a little sharpened metal?

Callisto ate as much porridge as she could stomach, seated on a long backless bench with a row of people who couldn't care less what she or anyone else did, salt-sanded faces staring vacantly into their own private worlds. Then she raced out of the flophouse, down one street and up another. As the porridge, whose sole virtue was that it was hot, cooled in her stomach, she let the nip of autumn counteract its doughy mass, counteract her fever, spur on her steps. If she hurried, she could reach Leon before he left for the wharfs.

Leon, as he never tired of reminding the other children, had his own cabin on the waterfront. Approaching, it was clear that the "cabin" was really more of a rickety shack, smaller than her family's hut back in Cirra, but at least it was all his. Even more importantly, it harbored treasure. He had showed them a jeweled necklace stolen from a woman in the wealthy part of town and insisted that as soon as he could sell it, that would be the last they'd ever see of him. At the time, she couldn't wait. But he was still here, which meant so was the necklace.

"You must have a death wish." Leon squinted perplexedly down at Callisto from a foot and half above her own head.

"I have a buyer for that necklace, is what-"

He yanked her inside, thankfully not by her broken arm, but roughly enough to make it squeal in protest. "Don't talk about that here!" The glare turned to a mocking smirk. "Though I sure don't believe you found a fence. What're you up to, little girl?"

She suppressed the urge to scream, to lash out at him with her fist, simply maintaining the flippant pout the wharfs had taught her. "My uncle's passing through. He sells all kinds of things. Steals them too. He wants to see the necklace so he can tell you how much it's worth."

"I thought you was an orphan."

"I am, dimwit." Leon made a threatening gesture and she forced herself not to flinch. "He's my uncle, not my father. Now go get it and I'll take you to him."

"Forget it. Just tell me where he is and I'll take it to him myself."

"Can't. He won't talk if I don't bring you, and I want to make sure I get my cut."

His habitual suspicion melted slightly. "Circle of trust, huh?"

She nodded. Why not?

"This wouldn't be some beetle-brained scheme to get me back for this, would it?" He tapped her sling. "Your mysterious uncle wouldn't be a city guard, would he?"

Callisto shrugged. "Suit yourself. But my uncle's sailing to meet with the King of Thieves tomorrow, so..." She turned as if to leave. Being ignored was the one thing Leon could least stand.

He drew her back. "Fine. Whatever." The boy leaned down until she could feel his putrid breath on her face. "I know where you live anyway."

Turning his back, he bent and scraped at the dirt floor under the only table. The shack was so cramped that his bed took up most of the space. She hopped up onto the frame. Her arm pulsed in time with her rapidly accelerating heart as she pulled the knife from her sling. The handle felt slick in her fingers- her palms were sweating. Strange. Her body was reacting as she would expect, yet she didn't feel any of it. No fear, no guilt, not even anger. She was floating above it in a numb, dream-like mist. Not an unpleasant change.

Callisto wiped her hand on her shift and regripped the stained cork. He straightened, shaking the dirt off his freshly unburied treasure... She pulled the blade back for a slash...

And his hand locked onto her wrist with the point inches from his throat. In a bewildering flurry of vertigo, she found herself bouncing off the wall of the shack, ancient boards bending under the force, and landing on the bed. At least a last minute twist to the side saved her from landing on her broken bone, but Callisto was unquestionably feeling pain and fear now.

A pair of rough, strong hands- a day laborer's hands- pressed her down into the mattress, choking off air saturated with moldy kelp and fish at the back of her throat. "Harpy!" he spat. "Bitch!"

Callisto instinctively clawed at his eyes, his lips, but her arm wasn't even long enough to reach his face. Pathetic. Useless. Powerless. She might as well have burned with her family.

As her vision became red-tinted and fuzzy, she looked away, not wanting his face to be the last thing she saw... and the comforting strength of rage flared bright alongside hope. The gods had not saved her when Xena fixed her covetous gaze on Cirra. Her wits had. They would, must save her again... them and the splinter she spied jutting from the decrepit bedframe.

She grabbed Leon's pinky and yanked it sideways with a vicious pop and a howl. Callisto rolled for the splinter, adrenaline damming up a fresh wave of agony, and came away with a pointy chunk of wood well-positioned to sink right into his eye socket on the backswing.

Instantly, the acid burn in her throat surged past his hands as they released her. Leon staggered back against the opposite wall, screaming so loudly it echoed in her teeth. Now she could see her paring knife against the darkness of the dirt floor. One bound delivered it into her hand and a second launched her across the rest of the tiny space with a high, full-throated scream of her own. Legs strengthened by hundreds of miles walked and hundreds of trees climbed wrapped around his waist, lifting her up to face-level so she could plunge the tip of the blade into his neck.

It was much harder than she'd anticipated to pierce flesh with the dulled edge of a well used but poorly maintained kitchen tool. She grunted with the effort of shoving it through meat and sinew, then unclenched her thighs and let her weight, scant as it was, open a slit from puncture to collarbone.

More blood than she had ever imagined the human body could contain showered onto Callisto. She blinked and sputtered through it, backing away as he lurched forward. He bumped blindly into the bed and toppled onto it.

And then it was suddenly all over. Leon, her tormentor of these past few months, was dead. Callisto had taken her first life. She felt... light. Almost dizzy. Like some pressure inside her that she could no longer remember being without had abated.

She drifted to the wash basin on the table and stared into her own reflection. It took a few moments to realize that the red shimmering on the surface was not in the water, but on her face. Callisto looked down at herself, confirming that the entire front of her body was drenched, her shift far beyond cleaning. Walking out the door was out of the question. Why hadn't she planned for that?

City guards could be on their way at this moment too. People in this part of town weren't likely to stick their necks out, but the Tartarus she'd just raised might be too much even for them to ignore. She swallowed acid bile as her eyes fixed on a single shutter in the back wall. Stowing the necklace she had come here for in her sling, Callisto unlatched the shutter and clambered through a window too small for an adult into an alley sandwiched between two rows of shacks.

As she crept toward the waterfront, hunched over to pass beneath the rear windows, the serene satisfaction of the kill completely faded, fresh rage crowding in to take its place. She had never actually seen Xena in action. The face in her nightmares had shown itself to her in the flesh only once, washed in the glare of Cirra's destruction as it watched from atop a palomino war horse. Still, she was quite sure that monster would never have to cower down an alley reeking of piss and rot, even over the brine from the sea. She would march through the streets, blood and all, and cut down anyone who tried to stop her. This was the mark of a victim- which, in her experience, often ended in death anyway.

She ground her teeth and snatched some unlucky child's dress off a clothesline, moving a bit faster. Her plan would remedy everything in time, but not if she was caught here, on the precipice of freedom.

The path terminated at the waterfront, but where glittering expanses of white sand beach graced the city's finer homes, this was an abrupt, rocky drop-off with a number of hollows carved out by the relentless press of waves. Perfect. Callisto scooted under an overhang, completely hidden from shore, and tried not to think about what drained into the sea from countless similar city capillaries as she stashed her blood-soaked shift, her "new" dress and, most importantly, her precious loot on a natural shelf. She hissed as skin met frigid water. Tendrils of steam actually curled up off of it and she imagined herself as a young dragon whose body couldn't contain the smoke from a small but unquenchable furnace somewhere deep inside. Scrub. She dunked her head and scoured her face, scalp and neck with fistfuls of sand until she resembled a boiled shrimp, until it almost felt good. The saltwater sting harmonized with, more than covered, the throb in her arm.

The tiny fleck of pink and yellow lost in an expanse of Aegean blue flung back her head with a spray of sea foam, adding its erosion to each breaker that smashed over the ancient stone behind her. Looking down at a body that was starting to lose sensation, it was plain that only time would remove the blood now dying the tips of her hair pink, but aside from that, she was cleaner than she had been in months.

Callisto boldly stepped out far enough to let one of the last balmy breezes of autumn soothe her and turned to look at the mast forest marking the trade port, far enough down the coast from the fishermen's wharfs to shield it from their stink. Somewhere in that thicket was a mast belonging to a merchant vessel bound for the little-known territory of Chin. There, she would find someone to teach her how to fight like Xena. No, better. The necklace would more than pay her way. A ship on a journey that far would also have its own healer, ensuring her arm would be properly healed by the time she set foot on Chinese soil. She decided in that very moment to refuse anything for the pain, though. If pain was all life had to offer, then she would find her own meaning in it.

There was no way Callisto could know, stepping from the ocean with heedlessly dripping hem, any of the things she would learn years later. That the Warrior Princess would sack this city not much more than a week after she set sail. That the legend of the Warrior Princess would become the nightmare of the Destroyer of Nations over the coming years, then the fairy tale of The Good Xena. It would be almost enough to make Callisto believe the Fates wanted her and her nemesis to meet as equals. But one thing she did already know: when she returned, Greece would learn to fear a Warrior Queen.