The dust fell like ash from some Biblical judgment, each particle carrying the weight of thirty-seven dinners that would never be finished. Through this gray shroud stepped two figures: one small, still tender-hearted, still unprepared for the arithmetic of souls that war demands; the other processing heat signatures and bio-readings with mechanical precision, yet unable to quantify the variable walking beside him—a human woman, his friend, whose capacity for both salvation and destruction remained maddeningly unpredictable.
The buildings were gone. Just gone. And in their absence lay the first lesson of a warzone: this was where good intentions came to die.
Fiona looked at the crater where walls and windows had stood, where laughter and conversation had lived an hour ago, and felt something break inside her chest. The dust clung to her lips, tasting of concrete and things she dared not name. Around them, silence pressed down like a second sky, so heavy it seemed to smother even thought.
Dision's sensors flickered once, then dimmed. He said nothing. There was nothing to say about thirty-seven people who had been hiding—and having dinner—only an hour ago.
The silence after the blast was not silence at all. It was broken sobs, the scraping of nails against stone, the half-choked syllables of names flung into a void that gave nothing back. Fiona's throat tightened. She had seen aftermaths before, but not like this—not with the dust still warm, not with mothers clawing as though their fingernails might succeed where gods had failed them.
She wanted to fall to her knees beside them, to be only a woman grieving, but something in her blood refused her that release. She was no mere mourner here. She was a force, a vessel of strength, cursed and blessed alike. And that strength demanded a price: Action and precision.
Among the shattered stones, mothers knelt as they had for ten thousand years—fingers bleeding, voices raw with names that might never answer. Yet Fiona knew that one rash act, one surge of reckless power, would kill as surely as the bombs had. Her gift was not a hammer to drive against the world, but a scalpel poised on the edge of trembling hands.
The debris mocked her. Every slab rested on another, each mass demanding respect for the cold arithmetic of collapse. She forced herself to study, to breathe, to summon from memory Newtonian6's patient teachings: cataloguing stress points, weighing distributions, remembering that the laws of physics did not bend even for grief.
The largest slab rested upon two stones. Remove them wrongly, and three tons of concrete would fall. But if she could lift along the edges, bear the strain across a wider frame, perhaps a breath of space might return to those trapped below.
Fiona's fingers trembled as she reached forward—a child's life might balance on the difference between angle and impulse, between salvation and annihilation.
Behind her, an old woman wept over a shoe no larger than her palm. Fiona stared at it a moment too long. The dust on its laces was the same dust that gritted against her tongue, the same dust that choked her lungs. Physics would not comfort this woman. But physics, if she mastered it, might give her back the small beating heart that once filled that shoe.
And so Fiona steadied herself, every tendon in her body drawn taut as prayer.
The mathematics of leverage proved true: six contact points, pressure distributed across enhanced bone and sinew, and the concrete former wall rose like a drawbridge surrendering to siege. From beneath emerged first a small hand, then a dirt-streaked face, then a boy who scrambled toward his mother with the desperate velocity of planets seeking their sun. Fiona released her grip with infinite care—even in triumph, physics demanded respect—and watched the reunion unfold with that peculiar ache of witnessing love survive ruin.
In that embrace she saw a reflection of herself in the mother's trembling arms, and Camila in the boy's desperate clutch. She longed to hold her daughter with such ferocity, to remind her that beyond the cold aisles of a supermarket and the silence of estrangement, her mother still existed—and existed for her. Yet Camila, somewhere far away, likely thought of Fiona as little more than a shadow. Perhaps even despised her. The thought hollowed her victory, turning the rescue into a mirror that cut both ways: salvation for another, reminder of absence for herself.
The blue helmets worked among the wreckage with the methodical courage of those who measure duty not in glory but in small mercies extracted from great catastrophe. They could not bend steel or lift stone as she could, yet they cleared pathways where her strength would have been clumsy, tended wounds where her hands might tremble. There was a democracy in disaster that humbled even the genetically enhanced—each according to their gifts, all according to need.
But in the distance, servo-motors hummed their mechanical hymn of approach. The machines came in formation, sensors sweeping, weapons primed—a calculus of destruction as precise as her own had been of preservation. Time contracted around them all like a closing fist.
And there, half-buried beneath a photographer's final composition of rubble and rebar, lay the camera. Its recording light pulsed once, twice, then died—taking with it not just a man's last breath but the very possibility of witness. He had chosen the frame that would save rather than the one that would tell, trading truth for time, voice for lives.
Already she felt the fissures spreading within her chest, the unbearable arithmetic of choosing.
"How can I choose who to save?" she whispered, watching the blue helmets work while the machines drew closer.
"Every life be its own vast cosmos," Dision replied. "But many a cosmos sinks beneath the black tide o' the end."
"There!" The building that rose like hope itself against the smoke-stained sky, its windows broken but walls still upright. Fiona's arm swept toward it with the authority of Moses parting seas, and they ran—blue helmets carrying wounded, Palestinian fighters supporting elders, survivors clutching children—all flowing toward what seemed like sanctuary while she and Dision turned to face the approaching storm of steel.
The Goliath that emerged from the mechanical ranks moved with the terrible patience of an avalanche, each step a seismic pronouncement of superiority. Fiona inhaled, and with that breath whispered to herself: Let me be worthy tonight—if not as a warrior, then at least as a mother. Let me earn that word, even once.
When its charge came, she met it with restraint carved into fury. Her enhanced fists struck to disable—joints, not cores; ligaments, not hearts. She fought with precision instead of vengeance, mercy burning through every blow. She fought like a mother defending cubs—fierce but never cruel, deadly but never malicious.
Yet mercy had no place in the equations of war. The sound that mathematics could not calculate nor redemption prevent came anyway: the staccato percussion of kinetic rounds finding flesh, the wet arithmetic of bodies yielding to steel. From the building she had blessed with her pointing finger came screams cut short—the sanctuary collapsing into ambush, hope resolved in blood.
The Goliath's blade descended in that instant of horror, and Fiona faltered. What good is this body, this cursed gift, if I cannot even protect them? Her despair almost froze her where she stood—until Dision's arm intercepted destiny itself, metal meeting metal in a spray of sparks that carved temporary constellations in the smoke. The impact hurled Fiona through air and masonry, her body carving a wound into the building's second story.
From that accidental throne of rubble, she saw the cruelest truth. The mother she had lifted from the concrete lay broken, her hands still reaching for a child she could no longer hold. And the boy—his small hand stretched once toward stars he would never name. In his eyes, before they dimmed, she saw Camilla. Her Camilla. And when his tiny fingers finally fell limp into the sand, Fiona broke. Entirely.
Her anima surged uselessly inside her, a storm trapped in glass. What good were enhancements, what good was the anima, if she could not transcend the violence of the world? What good was being more than human if she could not even be a mother?
Above, the moon hung full and silver—yet where she cowered in shadow, its light would not fall. As if the cosmos itself had withdrawn its benediction from one who had dared to play warrior but learned too late that redemption cannot be claimed with fists.
"I don't deserve your light anymore," she whispered, and the moon kept its ancient silence, bearing witness as Fiona, with all her strength, all her power, discovered she was only, ever, heartbreakingly human.
In the darkness of her failure, Fiona became a study in ruin—suit cracked, helmet fractured, the soft luminescence of her enhanced biology bleeding through fissures like starlight through a shattered cathedral. She had sought to be salvation and become catastrophe, had reached for warriorhood and grasped only ash. The weight of small bodies pressed upon her conscience with the gravity of collapsed stars.
Beyond her sanctuary of shadow, Dision danced his pirate's ballet among the mechanical squad—movements fluid as quicksilver, unpredictable as storm winds. He was a paradox made metal: machine yet man, familiar yet alien. Their targeting matrices spun in electronic disarray, struggling to reconcile one of their own who fought with the defiant chaos of mortal will. Steel sang against steel while the night itself became an orchestra of violence, its music carrying like a siren's call to every patrol within miles.
Yet in the rubble of the ambush, life endured with the audacity that marks all living things. Beneath the twisted chassis of a truck, another journalist raised his battered camera, capturing fragments of the impossible—frames etched in silver and shadow. Beside him, a child no older than seven summers stared through dust and fire at the broken figure in the dark. And in her eyes was no fear, only recognition. Here, at last, was the validation of her grandmother's tales—the protector who wore mortal flesh as disguise. That Fiona had failed mattered less than that she had fought; that she wept proved her humanity rather than denied it.
And then the heavens shifted.
The moon—the eternal witness—shed her silver skin and bled into crimson. Slowly, inexorably, the eclipse painted the sky in prophecy, blood seeping across the night like grief across water. Through the blur of her tears, Fiona beheld the transformation, and in its light, something ancient stirred in her veins. The Muisca blood of Bacatá's children burned like molten gold, summoning the inheritance of the Andes—the fury of mountains that pierce heaven, the patience of peaks that had watched empires rise and fall to mist.
In the crimson glow, Zipa Nemequene appeared once more, his voice both thunder and river:
The Stregarians called you daughter of the yellow sun. I call you daughter of mountains. Mercy without strength is weakness. Compassion without steel is cowardice. The jaguar does not apologize to the deer; the condor does not ask permission of the wind.
And in that revelation, she understood. To save the innocent, she must be willing to spill the blood of the guilty. To defend the defenseless, she must become terrible to their oppressors. Love demanded violence as surely as light demanded shadow.
The moon bled, and so must she.
Dision, his blade glinting in the red eclipse, stood amid the storm of sparks and steel. His voice, rough and lilting like the sea, carried through the chaos:
"That moon be turnin' red, aye. And I grant ye, there be sorrow in her glow. But mark me—this storm? This be but the prelude. The true tempest be comin', and she'll grant ye no more mercy, no more quarter."
The battle slowed, as if the world itself drew a breath.
Her helmet cracked open under the flames, revealing not a titan of war, not a saint nor a sorceress, but a middle-aged woman from Latin America, face streaked with blood and sweat.
From the rubble of her own making, she rose—not with the swift vengeance of legend, but with the deliberate weight of mountains learning to walk. Each movement was a negotiation between flesh and gravity, between the woman who had knelt in darkness and the force she was choosing to become. The debris fell from her shoulders like a coronation robe discarded, and where her broken helmet leaked light, the anima blazed with the fury of solar winds made manifest.
The journalist's finger found the shutter by instinct, capturing not a moment but an epoch—the precise instant when mercy died and judgment was born. Through his lens, history would remember her thus: the cracked visor revealing one eye that wept for the children while blazing with the wrath of stars, the alien armor rent and bloodied yet radiating light that challenged even the eclipse's crimson dominion. Here was no goddess descended from Olympus, but something far more terrible—a mother who had counted the cost and found it acceptable.
Her chin dropped first, acknowledging the weight of what she carried—the dead children, the failed rescues, the mathematics of her own inadequacy. But as the Goliath's sensors locked upon her rising form, as Dision's blade sang its pirate hymn against lesser steel, something ancestral stirred in the gold of Bacatá that flowed through her veins.
Then her chin rose.
Devoid of defiance—defiance was for those who still hoped for mercy from the universe. This was assertion, pure and absolute. The bearing of one whose forebears had ruled from Bogotá's sacred heights, who had commanded the emerald realm before foreign gods had ever dreamed of conquest. The Zipa's blood remembered what dominion meant: not the right to rule, but the responsibility to stand between one's people and the consuming dark.
The Goliath's targeting systems registered the change—threat assessment climbing from negligible to terminal as her anima blazed brighter, no longer the gentle luminescence of protection but the smokeless fire of judgment itself. She looked upon the machine that had orchestrated slaughter with the gaze of mountains regarding mist—patient, eternal.
The journalist's lens shook in his trembling hands. He had expected to record carnage, yet here was something stranger—humanity reborn in fire. He whispered to his recorder, his voice breaking:
"History will not understand this. They will see a soldier. They will see a woman. But what I see… is the axis of the age."
The journalist lowered his camera, his hands trembling. Through the cracks of her shattered helmet he no longer saw a combatant but a middle-aged woman from Latin America—lines of exhaustion carved into her face, and yet a fire that refused to dim. He whispered to himself, almost in disbelief: this is no soldier out of a file or a broadcast… this is a mother.
The child, crouched in terror moments before, now looked up with wide eyes. In Fiona's stance she saw not just flesh and armor but the jinn of her grandmother's stories—the smokeless fire made flesh, not as destroyer but as protector. A being who stood between the world and the dark. It was the first time she had seen one with her own eyes, not in myth, not in screens, but alive, breathing, bleeding.
The machines scanned her form in silence. Their sensors measured her heat signature, her fractured biometrics, the ragged draw of her breath. But where the numbers told of weakness, their algorithms recoiled in paradox. Retreat signals pulsed through their networks. Circuits bled errors, unable to reconcile the anomaly before them: a human whose light defied reduction.
To the Muisca, her ancestors, this would have been no mystery at all. They would have named her strength the fury of the mountains, the patience of peaks, the warrior-spirit rising from the Andes. The earth itself, remembered in her bones.
But here, in Palestine, the people had no frame for this. What they would see was a woman whose biology glowed with impossible luminance, whose movements cut through smoke and fire with a rhythm not entirely human. They would see something new, something that history had no words for.
And then, in the hush between gunfire and breath, Dision's voice carried—calm, steady, undeniable:
"And ye'll come to know what it means to face the fury o' a human soul."