Generation Warriors Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself to balance her spine properly. "I would like to think it is the many times in coldsleep—the long times, when I spent years in one position. Supposedly there's no aging, but there's such stiffness on waking. Perhaps it does something, some residual loss of flexibility."
    The instructor said nothing for a long moment, her eyes half-closed. Lunzie relaxed, letting her sore muscles take the most comfortable length.
    "For the unwillingness, you must speak to the Venerable Master," said the instructor finally. "For the body's resistance, you may be right—it may be the repeated coldsleep. We will try another approach on that, for a few days, and see what comes of it."
    Another approach meant hours in hot and cold pools, swimming against artificial currents. Lunzie could feel her body stretching, loosening, then re-knitting itself into the confident, capable body she remembered, almost as if it had been a broken bone. Her conditioning included gymnastics, running, climbing, music, and finally—after several long conferences with the Venerable Master—renewed work with unarmed combat.
    She would never be a figure of the Warrior, he had told her, but each aspect of Discipline had its place in every Adept, and she must accept the need to cause injury and even death, when failure meant the deaths of others.
    But her dislike of conflict was not all they discussed. He had lived the years she had spent exiled in coldsleep; he remembered both her as she had been, and all she had missed of those years. He let her talk at length of her distress at the estrangements in her family, the guilt she felt for disliking some of her descendants and resenting their attitudes. About the pain of losing a lover, the fear that no relationship could ever be sustained. She told him about meeting Sassinak, and about the strains between them.
    "She's the older one, really—she even said so—" her voice broke for an instant, and he insisted on hearing the whole conversation, every detail.
    "That hurt you," he said afterwards. "You are older, you feel, and you want the respect naturally due to elders..." He let that trail away in a neutral tone.
    "But I don't feel like an elder, either," Lunzie said, consciously relaxing her hands, which wanted to clamp into fists. "I feel... I don't know what I feel. I can't be young, it seems, or old: I'm suspended in life now just as much as when I was in coldsleep. I don't even know which child she is—did I see her and forget her? Is she one they never mentioned?"
    "The leaf torn from the branch by wind," he said softly, smiling a little.
    "Exactly."
    "You must come to believe that the branch was no more yours than the wind is; you must come to see that we are each, in each moment, in the right place, the place from which all action and reflection come, and to which they go." He cocked his head, much like a bird. "What will you do if you must enter coldsleep again?"
    She had not let herself think of that, forcing away the panic it brought with all the Discipline she could bring to bear. How had he known that she woke sweating some nights, sure that the terrifying numbness was once more spreading through her?
    "I—I can't." She held her breath, stiff in every muscle, looking down and away from him. She heard the faintest sigh of breath.
    "You cannot know that it will never happen." His voice was neutral.
    "Not again —" It was as much plea as promise to herself; all the days of retraining might have been nothing for the rush of that emotion.
    "I had hoped this would heal of itself," his voice said, musing. "But since it has not, we must confront it." A pause so long she almost looked up, and then he snapped, "Adept Lunzie!" and her eyes met his. "This is not beyond your strength or ability: this you will conquer. We cannot send you out still subject to such fears."
    She wanted to protest, but knew it would do no good. The next several days tested her strength of will and body both: intense sessions of