Aphasia Wye.

  She had found him quite by accident, an outcast and recluse living at the edge of the teeming, squalid hovels that encircled the city of Dechtera. She had been in the last year of her service with the Federation, a big, strong woman with little fear and a burning ambition. Her introduction to Aphasia Wye came about because she was looking for a certain deserter from the army, a man she knew well enough to dislike and stay clear of in other circumstances. But a rumor of his presence in the tenement sections of the city having surfaced, she was assigned to find and bring him back. She was given no choice in the matter.

  Aphasia Wye, however, had found him first. A street child of unknown origins, Aphasia had grown up as something of a legend to those who populated the dark undersurface of Dechtera. At some point in his early life, he had been badly disfigured, but not before he had been so severely mistreated that the damage to his physical appearance could not begin to approach the damage to his psyche. Emotionally and psychologically, he dwelled in a realm few others had ever occupied, dark and soulless and empty of feeling. If he had a code of conduct, Shadea had never been able to figure out what it was. That it involved killing as a ritual cleansing was something she learned when she went looking for the deserter. That it was quixotic and arbitrary became clear when she discovered that Aphasia felt an unexpected connection to her.

  His attraction to her might have had something to do with their similar backgrounds as orphans and children of the street, outcasts who had been forced to make their own way in the world. It might have had something to do with their mutual acceptance of violence as a way of life. When she found out what he had done to the deserter, her only response had been to ask for a piece of the man to prove that he was dead. She had not sought an explanation of the circumstances. She had neither approved nor disapproved of the act. That might have impressed him.