There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world. In a long series of such places, Anita Vendraste was speed-raised like a mutant hothouse orchid flourishing under the glow of a thousand Buy'n'Fly security spotlights.

All of these places were basically the same, with the same franchise ghettos, the same strip joints, and even the same people -- she kept running into school chums she'd known years before, other Army brats who happened to wind up at the same base at the same time.

Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military.

That wasn't her words. It was from a book - some sci-fi thing a nerdy guy she kissed in eighth grade liked. The main character was like them, but smart, escaped the traps a lot of them fell into. And then he saved the world, which Anita honestly thought was less interesting even if it was probably important to do if you had the opportunity. Jack cared a lot more about the book than she did, which was why he remembered the name and she didn't.

She remembered it long after he tried to get her to read it because she and Jack made a pact: they weren't going to be like their parents. Out of the service, out of the base towns, do something with their lives. Jack waffled sometimes about maybe being a flyboy was far enough but she didn't.

Her first try was police academy, but she neglected to consider that in Arizona, her skin color mattered a lot more to them than it did to her (as did her gender, but that part she'd expected). Also, it turned out she hated most of the men in the academy, though the instructors were mostly alright. She pushed through the pressure for nine months to prove she could, but ditched it after she passed a major hurdle and no one could claim she was washing out.

It helped that Dad was reassigned and now she sort of counted as Californian and could apply to the UC schools and maybe afford them. Her grades had actually been pretty good and 'why I'm not a police trainee anymore' was something admissions people ate up so she got into Cal Berkeley and booked a confused schedule of Business, history, and visiting three different martial arts dojos twice a week each. (One of them contained a wiry redhead who demolished her in sparring, repeatedly, and eventually offered her "a ride home", and thus did Anita discover kissing girls, which was almost as distracting as the sparring.)

She really wasn't cut out for academic classes. History wasn't so bad, particularly when it was focusing on how physical changes in technology and environments affected what people did and believed, but most things were so incredibly removed from the actual world of bodies and objects. She dropped Business, tried Chemistry, considered swapping to the engineering school but found it was basically impossible, and kept spending as much time in the dojo as the classroom.