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he obeyed Ender's orders and watched over her in all the remaining battles, ready to cover for her if she collapsed again.
    Bean was the one she counted on when the Russians kidnapped her, the one she knew would get the message she hid in an email graphic. And when she was in Achilles's power, it was Bean who was her only hope of rescue. And he got her message, and he saved her from the beast.
    Bean might pretend, even to himself, that all he cared about was his own survival, but in fact he was the most perfectly loyal of friends. Far from acting selfishly, he was reckless with his own life when he had a cause he believed in. But he didn't understand this about himself. Since he thought himself completely unworthy of love, it took him the longest time to know that someone loved him. He had finally caught on about Sister Carlotta, long before she died. But he gave little sign that he recognized Petra's feelings toward him. Indeed, now that he was taller than her, he acted as though he thought of her as an annoying little sister
    And that really pissed her off.
    Yet she was determined not to leave him-and not because she depended on him for her own survival, either. She feared that the moment he was completely on his own, he would embark on some reckless plan to sacrifice his own life to put an end to Achilles's, and that would be an unbearable outcome, at least to Petra.
    Because she had already decided that Bean was wrong in his belief that he should never have children, that the genetic alterations that had made him such a genius should die with him when his uncontrolled growth finally killed him.
    On the contrary, Petra had every intention of bearing his children herself.
    Being in a holding pattern like this, watching him drive himself crazy with his constant busyness that accomplished nothing important while making him irritable and irritating, Petra was not so selfcontrolled as not to snap back at him. They genuinely liked each other, and so far they had kept their sniping at a level that both could pretend was only joking," but something had to change, and soon, or they really would have a fight that made it impossible to stay together and what would happen to her plans for making Bean's babies then? What finally got Bean to make a change was when Petra brought up Ender Wiggin.
    "What did he save the human race for?" she said in exasperation one day in the airport at Darwin. "So he could stop playing the stupid game.
    "It wasn't so Achilles could rule."
    "Someday Achilles will die. Caligula did."
    "With help from his friends," Petra pointed out.
    "And when he dies, maybe somebody better will succeed him. After Stalin, there was Khrushchev. After Caligula, there was Marcus Aurelius."
    "Not right after. And thirty million died while Stalin ruled."
    "So that made thirty million he didn't rule over any more," said Bean.
    Sometimes he could say the most terrible things. But she knew him well enough by now to know that he spoke with such callousness only when he was feeling depressed. At times like that he brooded about how he was not a member of the human species and the difference was killing him. It was not how he truly felt. "You're not that cold," she said.
    He used to argue when she tried to reassure him about his humanity. She liked to think maybe she was accomplishing something, but she feared that he had stopped answering because he no longer cared what she thought.
    "If I settle into one place," he said, "my chance of staying alive is nil!"
    It irked her that he still spoke of "my chance" instead of "ours".
    "You hate Achilles and you don't want him to rule the world and if you're going to have any chance of stopping him, you have to settle in one place and get to work."
    "All right, you're so smart, tell me where I'd be safe."
    "The Vatican," said Petra.
    "How many acres in that particular kingdom? How eager are all those cardinals to listen to an altar boy?"
    "All right then, somewhere within the borders of the