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placed in her arms, and then led her out once more and down a short passageway.
    It was immediately apparent when he led her into the next room that the showers were indeed of the primitive variety. Amaryllis was so surprised, so caught up in nostalgia, that she merely stood stock still as Dante took the supplies from her, settled them on a bench and removed the bandages.
    After explaining how the showers were operated, he took up a position near the door. She studied him in silence for several moments, but she wasn’t the least surprised that she would not have any privacy. “You could guard me from outside the door just as well,” she pointed out coolly.
    “I could, but I won’t.”
    Her lips tightened. Finally, she moved to the bench and found what she needed.
    There was heated water. Within moments of submerging herself in it, Amaryllis had almost completely dismissed the cyborg, Dante, from her mind. Those who’d grown up on Earth and Earth’s well established colonies seemed revolted by the very thought of having water on their skin, but she’d known nothing else until she’d left her own world.
    She knew that the particle baths were not only more hygienic but almost as importantly, they conserved a precious resource, but she found them very unsatisfactory.
    This was almost pure heaven and brought memories of her family crowding into her mind.
    She hadn’t actually seen her parents but once since she’d decided on a career as a soldier. Her parents had been horrified by her choice and she had been so reluctant to face their disapproval that she’d pretty much cut herself off from them.
    She supposed she could see their point. They’d scrimped and saved for years just to earn the credits needed to make her ‘normal’. They loved her, and she knew they’d done it out of love, but there was also the unspoken and unacknowledged obligation of debt--that they considered she couldn’t possibly appreciate their sacrifice properly if she was willing to risk throwing it away by her choice of career.
    Maybe that had played a part in her choice. Maybe, deep down, there’d been some resentment on her part toward her parents. The decision had been far more complicated than that, however.
    A large part of it had been because she wanted to show everyone that had ever looked at her with pity, revulsion, or fear that she was just as normal as anyone--better even because her cybernetics allowed her to do things they could never do. Some of it had been sheer desperation to escape the world and people that had represented as much misery to her as love, and some a desperation to fully live life, if she had to do it on the edge, because she’d missed out on so much of life when she had been confined by the limitations of her defective body.
    Some of it had been anger, and the need to find a release for her pent up frustrations.
    She’d hated the reproach in her family’s eyes, though, and except for that one, uncomfortable trip home on leave, she’d avoided them.
    She wished now that she hadn’t. She might never see them again and she wanted them to know that her choice had been a celebration of the gift they’d given her, not a reproach for the birth defects and the hell she’d been through because of them. She wanted them to know that she didn’t blame them for something they could not have prevented short of not conceiving her at all.
    “Enough!”

    The sharp command jerked Amaryllis out of her abstraction and back to the present. “What?” she asked blankly, trying to think how long she’d been in the shower.
    It didn’t seem to her that she could possibly have used that much water, but then she had no idea what sort of rationing they had.
    Dante, she saw uneasily, had strode across the room toward her and was standing no more than two feet from her now, an angry scowl on his face.
    Amaryllis’ lips tightened in irritation. If he’d given her a specific length of time, she would have complied. His anger