The Children of the Sun by Christopher Buecheler Read Free Book Online Page B

fights?”
    Jakob shrugged. “She’s right-handed. Certainly she’s lost a few maneuvers by not being able to switch hands, but then again, she no longer has to worry about protecting her left arm, either.”
    Two shook her head in admiration. “If I only had one hand, I’d be like ‘no thanks, I’m going to learn to crochet.’”
    “Crotchet requires two hands,” Jakob said in an odd, gentle voice. For a moment there was silence, and then Two burst out laughing, covering her mouth with her hands.
    “That was the dumbest thing I’ve ever said!”
    “Oh, if only …” Theroen murmured, and Two whirled on him, still laughing.
    “What did you just say?!”
    “It must have been the wind,” Theroen replied, and Two punched him in the shoulder. Jakob was watching them, smiling.
    “Sasha has been fighting for more than a century. It’s what she likes to do. She’d probably find a way to keep doing it even if she lost both arms. Besides, the speed at which prosthetics are advancing is truly remarkable. She may well be back to dual-handed fighting before long.”
    Two nodded. Sasha’s prosthetic arm, which she wore most of the time, was a far cry from a piece of wood with a hook at the end. A myoelectric device, it contained a core made of steel rods and cables, and was covered by layers of carbon fiber and silicone. The fingers on the hand were individually jointed, and Sasha could bend the arm at the elbow, close the fingers into a fist, and perform other actions by flexing different muscles in her upper arm. It was not quite a sci-fi bionic limb, but it wasn’t so far away, either.
    “Can we stay and watch her, Theroen?” Two asked.
    “We can stay as long as you would like,” he replied.
    “She’s very good,” Jakob said. “After the injury there was a string of challengers who had no business stepping into the ring with her. I suppose they thought that the loss of the arm would give them an edge. They were quite wrong.’
    “Cool. You must be proud of her.”
    “Sasha has always made me proud,” Jakob said. “We have few women here, and yet she has integrated herself so well that few of our members even think about her gender anymore.”
    There were four women there that night, including Two. The Ay’Araf were largely male, in part because so many of them placed such emphasis on physical combat and competition. Just as in human sports, male physiology presented more inherent advantages. Less acknowledged was a sort of quiet discrimination: most Ay’Araf vampires never even considered women as fledglings.
    Jakob had made Sasha his fledgling only after living with her for several years, becoming more and more certain that the hardships she had suffered had forged within her an indomitable will and work ethic. Like Two, she had endured a brutal training regimen and come out on the other side even more determined to be a fighter. When he had seen this, Jakob had given her the blood, and Two knew he had never regretted doing so.
    Often cold and direct, Sasha sometimes seemed to Two more like a machine than a person. Two wouldn’t have believed the woman capable of empathy if not for Sasha’s relationship with Two’s friend Molly Thompson. Molly had ended up in Sasha’s care when a group of Burilgi vampires had kidnapped both Jakob and Molly’s adoptive parents, Rhes and Sarah. Over the course of that time, Sasha and Molly had become close friends.
    Sasha still kept in touch with the girl, who was now almost seventeen, mostly via email but occasionally in person. Several times in the past two and a half years, Molly had been in serious danger of relapsing into her heroin addiction. Like any sixteen-year-old girl, she was undergoing extensive changes not only in her outer life, but in her body chemistry as well. Unlike most sixteen-year-old girls, she had also been subject to a great deal of neglect and abuse, falling into prostitution and drugs before her twelfth birthday. Her life had been stable