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beautiful, looming over me. I hated her.
    I needed her.
    Cutter dropped to one knee, her face dangerously close to mine. She moved her hand suddenly toward my face and I flinched. But the blow never came. She gently smoothed back the strands of black hair that stuck to the sides of my sweaty face.
    She kissed my forehead.
    "Here's your first lesson, little Wraith." She paused long enough to capture my gaze in hers. Our eyes locked and my heart pounded.
    "This is a war."

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    We stayed in that room for slow, endless, days while the healcast worked its magic. Cutter practically force fed me meat, insisting it would give me what I needed to regrow tissue. Sometimes we talked.
    Mostly I slept.
    She told me about two raids – the Merchant Princes were sending out soldiers — no word about operatives from the Mandate. They were looking for a girl, a kidnapped highborn. They even trotted out weeping parents to plead for her safe return.
    Cutter and I lay in the dim light of the room and waited. To pass the time, or maybe to clear her conscience, she told me about the Wraiths — and the Mandate.
    Marajo Lift is governed by a family descended from the line that ruled South America for most of the 23 rd Century. At least in public, they're devout adherents of the Catholic Revival that emerged in the wake of the American Caliphate's collapse after the Water Wars.
    The Mandate of St. Nicolo was their creation. It's a Revived Catholic order devoted to the teachings of the greatest of the New Canon and the patron saint of the Merchant Princes. The Mandate is devoted to statecraft, and controlling the masses, all seven billion of them, and keeping those in power where they belong — in power. The Mandate is a careful organization. Secrecy is ruthlessly maintained and the Consiglio Camerlengo, the council of cardinals who run the order are even more powerful than the princes they advise. The Wraiths are their instruments of policy — ambassadors, soldier and of course spies.
    On the second day, Cutter decided I needed a name. I guess she was tired of calling me 'Stupid Girl'. I asked her where she got hers. She gave me that look again and then unwrapped the bandage on her wrist. There was a small cross, the double-barred style the Mandate favored, carved into the soft skin just below the heel of her hand.
    "To remind me of my roots," she quipped. "There are others. Do you want to see?"
    I did.
    She unzipped her black jumpsuit, emerging in an unconsciously delicate pirouette of pale flesh like some fabulous creature shedding its cocoon. She wore nothing underneath and her body was as beautiful as her face. My eyes moved over her with a will of their own. They grazed the landscape of her smooth white skin, every prominence, every hollow, every crease.
    She was taller than me and much of the difference was in her long, athletic legs. I traced her thighs, noting automatically the development of her quadriceps. Dancer's legs. Her belly showed the faint pattern of rigorously developed abdominals. Like all Wraiths, she had tiny breasts, little mounds peaked by pale nipples which stood erect despite the warmth of the room.
    There were scars. Everywhere. A few might have been the marks of combat. There was a pink seam running along the fifth rib of her left side that must have come from a blade — a big one. A little divot, no more than a few millimeters across punctuated her right shoulder, just below her collarbone. I could see the X shape clearly. Flechette.
    But the others, and there were dozens of them, were something else entirely. Cutter's body was a gallery of images gouged and sliced into her perfect skin. Many were simple glyphs, like the cross on her wrist. But some of them were far more elaborate — masterful illustrations drawn in blood and pain.
    My eyes flitted from one vignette to another, reading Cutter's soul in the scars on her skin.
    All I could think to say was, "Why?"
    "They took my soul and my life and left me