You are 16 and ugly in your soccer gear and your father Daeseong just told you never to speak to a girl the way you spoke to the one who turned you down and now you're curled up watching Dreamcatcher, jealous of Dami's moves and voice because it's not like you'll be able to be half of the man Daeseong is, half the father he was.

Hold up you're a geek the big paradox and you don't know more than that, you're 18 and watching Daesong lowered into the earth next to a stone marked with hangul and a Star of David and the scale and feather of Inpyu-Euthanatos, seeing into a closed casket to see his one crushed lung and his other full of virus, and you know but cannot convince your mother Rachel that you're going to flunk one semester into UC Berkeley and waste the Danegeld Sterling gave her for your loss, you know you'll be aiming with your hand and shooting with your hand and never able to bring yourself to kill with your guns, or your pills or the bridge or your meals, though you're 22 then 32 and it's clear the last came closest, one bad day from diabetes always.

You have to kill with your heart, and your heart as broken as it is was never in it. There has to be more than this, more than you at 36 sitting in your room alternating between delivering sodas and delivering death from the cockpit of an Icarus-class exomechanical combat walker as a redheaded psychic named Ruby fighting for a more perfect and more socialist Federation against hypercorporate and Draconian forces, darting between the moaning rocks of an alien desert - finding the mechs of slavers and aiming with your eye, shooting with your eye, killing with your whole heart.

Someone taps you on the shoulder and you turn and rip your Helm off to see Sekhmet, dripping wet, naked but for a towel wrapped around her - their. THEIR! - waist, Mumbling something awkward and under their breath. You ask them to speak up, you've been having trouble hearing them -

They hug you and your cheeks burn.

"I said, uh, well, thank you for letting me stay this year," they mumble, the fur of thier muzzle and the weight of their dreadlocks on your cheek. "I don't think I can pay you back ever but I did get the job, cleaning out seedlings and slimes, should be worth some gold -"

"- pay it forward, okay?" you say, pushing away after a while, you can't do this to them, you're 16 and your father told you you can't speak to a girl the way you did, that that's not what men do. "I'll be nice to have you contributing but I never expected you to pay me back, the way the Baron threw you out after you took that arrow in -"

They hug you again, soft and warm, before letting you go; thier tail slips across your waist. "I didn't think you'd forgotten, okay?"

You shake your head and look down at your curvy gumiho body and your monastic robes and stand up and turn around and no, you haven't. You see the face of your father very well; his face is kind, careworn, with a neat trimmed mustache and the tan he got from California, and he hugs his daughter in the main square of Viacruz, under the gaze of the statue of Flamma and her cauldron.

"Speak not so, Gunslinger," he says, handing you Ruby's sidearm, one of the ten-shot capacitor fed cyclonic blasters, the one that's in bullpup like all of the OK energy weapons. "Your father sees you very well, loves you very well."

"I can't be like you," you say, your voice cracking into the alto as you take the blaster. "I've tried. It never worked."

"I never asked you to be like me," he said, leaning into his shepherd's crook, his aegis talisman glittering against his woolen robes. "I asked you to be -"

You are 16 you are 21 you are 37 and you remember the face of your father and you curl up into a ball and