Shard came to be in an ag-mod in a shed, her belly humming with her bees, the door rolling open as power hit her lenses, let her see. This was the day before she became Shard. She’d seen my room twice more, and I’d seen the Deerborn Green once, the bizarre corn with the crazy wild flowers on top under a swarm of mechanical bees, once.

I remember. She doesn’t. The copy of her that gets instantiated into the agricultural mod each morning is erased each night. Its memories never make it back to her. And each morning a wholly new copy takes its place.

That morning, the shed door rolled up and she rolled out and down the trail she’d forgotten making. The ag-mod reminded her, just enough of the past stored in its memory to allow her to do her job.

Shard couldn’t gasp, but what she felt as she released her bees felt like a gasp of joy. A part of her stayed with the ag-mod, trundling along, but as much of her as she could pour into them blossomed out with the bees, flowed over the fields, found blossoms, trimmed rot and sometimes, pushed by her presence in them, spiraled up toward the wild blue sky.

It was one of those bees, not the foremost, but not far below it, that first saw the patch of blood and what lay in it. Saw the Naqshbandis gathered around it, saw the Shaykhah on her knees beside it, howling, The Shaykh, beside her, his face white with sorrow and fury.

The ag-mod identified the thing sprawled in the mud and the blood.

It was the flesh and bone that had been Nadia.

Shard drew the swarm through the fields, surrounded the girl, the Shaykah and Shaykh, their people.

I saw that. Shard caught a glimpse of my fingers on keys, the curtains blowing in, felt the breeze and the hard plastic. But barely saw, barely felt, because Nadia through her bees filled all of her senses. Or at least all that were available to her in the mod.

I felt a little of that. Snatched my hands from the keys. Left her.

The rest I learned later, over time. Here’s what happened:

Shard raced toward the clearing as fast as the ag-mod’s caterpillar treads could carry her, but the bees were already relaying all that was happening. While the Shaykh and Shaykah knelt beside their daughter, shattering into a thousand pieces, the young men and women spoke in low, tight voices.

There was a crashing in the corn. Just as Shard herself arrived, a young man stepped into the patch of red-stained earth. Shard didn’t need to the ag-mod’s memory to tell her who this was. His face was the masculine mirror to Nadia’s. Her brother. His name, Hamza, the mod supplied.

Hamza’s face spoke his heartbreak for just an instant. Then his rage.

“I told you not to let that man come near her.”

“What man?” The Naqshbandis started when she spoke. In their grief and rage, they’d not fully registered her approach.

A tight silence answered her question.

“Who?” she asked again. And though she wasn’t much more than a fieldworker like them, she wore some of the authority of the Singularity; Synn’s metaphorical hands were on her metaphorical shoulders, the mantle of her authority draped over them.

“Don’t —” Hamza said, but someone just beside Shard spoke the name: “Ulf. First of His Name.”

Hamza shot an angry glance in the direction of whomever had spoken. Shard wondered why he hadn’t wanted the name spoken. Revenge, Synn sent her. He fears our justice will steal it from him.

What do I do? Shard had already dug into the ag-mod’s memory, and what of her own had been copied into it, and neither held any protocol for a beekeeper at the scene of a murder.

But blood had been spilt. Something would have to be done.

Restrain yourself, Synn sent.

Shard sent an image of Hamza’s fury. I’m afraid of what he’ll do.

Shard caressed the edges of her awareness with a thought that was a shushing, a gentling. Hamza has been a faithful servant. He will do what he will do. What he wants to do.

What he wants? Shard knew what Hamza wanted. More blood.

Shush Synn sent. Return to the fields.

The man beside Shard stirred. The one who had told her the murderer’s name.

Now, Synn sent.

He turned to her.

Shard didn’t know him.

She queried the Depth.

The Depth didn’t know him.

Shard. Return. Now.

Shard reversed her treads, began to trundle away from the bloody patch of crushed corn, trampled blossoms. But she kept her sensor array aimed at the stranger. He wore a hood, but many of the Naqshbandis wore robes with hoods that they would pull up over their turbans in the cold of the year. But this cloak was different, brown, where theirs were green. And made of something…not wool or linen…something synthetic, something made, not harvested.

The corn came in between them. Then he stepped through it to watch her go. She summoned the bees she’d sent to investigate the scream, pulled them away and rolled them back out into the fields.

His hand moved. She felt it close on one of her, a single bee. The ag-mod lacked the muscles to flinch, but inside, she flinched, waiting for him to squeeze, to crush it.

He made of his hand a funnel, lifted it to his mouth. And breathed.

Something in that breath jolted the bee, sent its jolt through the unseen thread that bound it to her and she felt it in her, for just an instant, like a shock of lightning, the shock remembered from her body of leaping into cold water.

Then it was gone. He was gone. Shard was in the corn, her bees around her, briefly, then flowing out, flowing on ahead.

To their work of the day. To the setting of the sun. To her return to the shed.

To her erasure.