Sarya has to do the most dangerous thing she can think of, the thing that multiple proverbs specifically warn never to do.
Wake a sleeping Widow.
This is why Sarya is barely moving at all by the time she comes in sight of her apartment. Her breath is coming in short gasps, and her heart is thumping in her ears. The hatch is orange, danger-colored, unlike every other residential hatch in the corridor. If she still had her Network unit—goddess damn you, Hood, by the way—she would see a large, high-contrast warning scrolling over the door. It would tell her, in extremely graphic terms, exactly what her mother is not responsible for should anyone be fool enough to open this door. This door and that warning are two of the concessions that a Widow must make, should she wish to reside in the company of other species. It’s not the Widow’s fault, after all, that her species has spent a billion years evolving into the fearsome hunters that they are. She can’t be blamed for possessing built-in weapons capable of killing any prey within ten meters within a fraction of a second. She is allowed to mingle with Network society because, like any other evolved complex individual, she is in control of her instincts. She has evolved higher brain function that keeps that sort of thing from happening unintentionally. But, of course, that only applies when the Widow is conscious. When that same Widow is sleeping, that higher brain function is dormant. It’s busy dreaming, fantasizing about hunts and battles and goddess knows what else while leaving the killer instincts in charge in its absence.
Which is why tragic accidental murders are a staple of Widow literature.
Thus, the last few steps to her apartment door are each, sequentially and respectively, the bravest thing Sarya has ever done. The few intelligences passing by steer around her and move on, and she would swear some of them move faster after they’ve seen her than before. They may be speaking to her, for all she knows, but without a Network unit she has no idea. Anyway, there is no room in her head for anything but what lies in her immediate future. And finally she is there, standing in front of the orange door, practically blind and mute. If a walking trash pile weren’t after her, she would turn around now. She would hide in the backstage areas, ride around in carts until the end of time or until she is sure her mother was awake, whichever comes first—
And then she shrieks and falls over backward when the door hisses open in her face. A nightmare crouches in a black room, every blade extended, razor mandibles a chittering blur.
“Oh,” says Sarya weakly, from the floor. “You’re awake.”
Shenya the Widow’s blades do not relax when she sees who is at her door. “You,” she hisses softly, pointing one at her daughter. “Room.”
It is the shortest possible command, the remnants of a ruthlessly butchered longer sentence. Some deep instinct has apparently awakened Shenya the Widow—which is better than Sarya doing it, and yet still bad news for someone. Sarya does not say another word, and not for a millisecond does she consider disobeying. She stumbles to her feet, then edges her way into the dark common room with her head bowed. She gives those trembling blades wide berth, then nearly runs the last few steps to the safety of her own room. She gropes in the darkness for the manual controls, not daring to say anything aloud in her mother’s hearing. And finally, the door hisses shut and she is alone.
“Helper,” she murmurs, collapsing against it. “Lights, for the goddess’s sake.”
“Hi, best friend!” blasts Helper’s voice from her ceiling. Her room lights erupt into their maximum intensity. “Good to be home, huh?”
Sarya cannot even respond to this. She lives in a world where coming home means almost dying at the front door. No, better: she lives in a world where nearly being murdered—at the blades and blind instincts of her own mother, no less—is not the greatest of her worries. No, right now she is actually thankful for those instincts. They’re out there now, protecting her against Hood. They must have awakened her mother, somehow informing her that her daughter was in danger from halfway across the station. Yes, thank the goddess for Widow instincts. If not for them, it would be worse. Not that it could be much worse, but still.
“I lit out as