I’ll call her Shard even though that won’t be her name for another 39 days. Her real name — the one that Synn gave her and the one her bees call her was given her by a randomized key generator. You won’t remember it. If I wrote it, you probably wouldn’t even read it — your eye would touch it, maybe look at the first character, the last, and then move on.

Shard settled at the edge of Deerborn Green. Her bees flickered from blossom to blossom in the ringfield beyond the Naqshbandi Millet, and most of her was with them. But angry voices had drawn her here, the ag-mod she wore a familiar enough sight, if a little out of place inside the village perimeter, not to attract anything more than a curious glance or two.

Synn tickled the back of her thoughts, and she showed her the bees. Content Shard was where she should be, Synn withdrew.

The Militia had the Shaykhah down on her knees. The old woman’s grandson was already on the ground, not dead, because the Militia knew that Synn’s tolerance for violence ended at the spilling of blood.

They’re like Clerics in the original Dungeons and Dragons. Maces and flails. Only with them it’s clubs and bo staves.

The thought strayed through Shard’s consciousness like a zeppelin passing over a bombed out landscape. As did that image — the sky sepia with smoke and the lights of all the fires burning on the ground. Neither attached to any memory she could identify as hers. At least no memory she’d carried with her into the mod.

Synn pushed against the edges of Shard’s mind, so she thought the bees, turned her receptors towards the Shaykhah, the Militia.

Synn roiled back away from her like smoke, like smoke flowing across the canvas skin of a zeppelin.

“…choke it out of her,” the Militiaman said, the one who was standing just behind her, his hands on her shoulders but his fingers twitching, like they could already feel the sagging softness around her neck.

Shard tapped the stream, identified him. Knud Tenth of His Name. The one standing over the Shaykhah’s son, baton lifted, Troels Fifth of his name. And the one hanging back and eying Shard’s mod, eying the fields where the young men and women of the Naqshbandi millet had gone to work (she could feel them in her like warm spots in her breath, wherever her bees flowed over them). That was Ulf First of His Name.

The stream showed her at least a dozen other Ulf’s that had lived and died in the Militia Millet. But it had been a generation since the last, and the memories of the millet folk were shallow.

Knud and Troels and Ulf should have been working their millet’s ringfield. Their beekeeper would be missing them, but, like Shard, she would be restricted to letting Synn know they were gone. Synn would take action or not.

Synn had been notified of the angry voices, of the Militiamen beating the Shaykah and her daughter’s son, who had the red pox and would be out of the fields for a week. Synn had acknowledge the message, rewarded Shard with a flicker of joy, then withdrawn.

Knud’s fingers pounced, and the Shaykhah’s face went red as he squeezed.

“Jedda! No!” The boy on the ground wriggled and the man with his foot on his head pressed down and the boy went still.

The mod lacked the endocrine system that might have filled Shard with alarm, with anger, with sympathy for the old woman and her son, for the other children and elders hanging back around the green. But she knew what she would feel had she been her in herself, and that was enough.

She couldn’t intervene. Synn wouldn’t stand for it. The most she could do was remind them of the Law, of what Synn could do if she chose to intervene.

She pushed the mod forward on its tracks, just a foot. Just enough to draw their eye. She kept most of herself with the bees, hoping Synn would see her there.

Ulf glanced her way. Knud kept squeezing.

Shard thrummed through her bees, and they thrummed in response. The ringfields vibrated with the bass throb of their voices, and the Naqshbandis working among the bees looked up.

As did Knud, as did Troels. As did Ulf.

“Knud. That’s enough for now.” Ulf crossed the green to stand in front of the Shaykhah, his working leathers silent but his contraband chainshirt rattling. “Next time you have it set aside. Understand?”

It was the miel, the millet’s allotment of the honey made from the gatherings of their fields.

The flower-tipped corn stalks rippled, and the Militiamen were gone. The Shaykh stepped into the Green just as Ulf passed out of it.

Synn tapped her with an interrogative. Shard sank into the bees, trundled back on her tracks, out of the green, into the corn where she belonged.

At day’s end she directed the mod back to its shed, the bees pouring back in through its open vents, having dropped their loads, having ensured the fertility of the crop. As she waited to be closed out, she focused her receptors at the sky. The clouds had been heavy all day, but now they cracked, and the red sunset poured in.

Synn sent the signal, and the mod was wiped.