In which Val Con and Miri are troubled by old memories.

Miri remembers the first time she took a life, acting in self-defense. The event has previously been mentioned in “Fighting Chance”, the story about Miri signing on as a merc — it naturally touching on several questions a mercenary commander might want to ask a potential recruit — but not in much detail.

Val Con remembers Daria dea’Luziam, whom he loved and lost when they were both trainee Scouts. “To Cut an Edge”, the story about Val Con meeting Edger, is set not long after her death, and Val Con’s memories of her surface several times through it. I remember thinking when I re-read “To Cut an Edge” that there was something not quite all there about the way Daria’s tale is given in that story, as if there were a telling detail that hadn’t made it in. I think now that perhaps that telling detail is in this chapter; considering publication orders and so on, the authors might reasonably have expected anyone reading “To Cut an Edge” to have read Agent of Change already.

Or maybe it’s just me.

It’s interesting to reflect on why Val Con and Miri are remembering these particular memories, what it says about what each of them got out of their recent conversation, and what it says about each of them that they’ve had lives which produced such memories in the first place.