AGE FIFTEEN

She is the top student in her class and has already been accepted to Starfleet Academy. She has skipped three years and does not mind leaving her classmates behind each time, as she has never made a real friend in her life.

He wants her to call him Dad, but the owner of the Hand is not her father. And in one of the few acts of rebellion she has ever permitted herself to display, the girl refuses to use the term. He is merely her mother’s husband, and she has learned to turn her fear into hatred. It is a powerful shield, hatred, and she does not quite realize that it does as much damage to her soul as her stepfather has done over the years to her body.

Her body has no scars. They are all inside. All the wounds have been turned inward, where they fester like an invisible cancer.

She enters data on her padd, lost in the [164] mathematical equation, buoyed briefly by a reality that is solid and provable and beyond dispute. It is a rock to cling to in the stormy ocean that is her life, a storm that no one else knows of or can even glimpse.

The door to her bedroom hisses open, and she tenses. Nausea roils inside her. She pretends she does not hear. The owner of the Hand, her mother’s husband, comes behind her. She can smell the alcohol on his breath and she shivers. He mistakes her shudder for one of passion. This is not the first time he has come to her room, drunk and swirling with a dark desire.

He reaches for her, groping, hurting. The Hand. She despises the Hand. She imagines herself jumping to her feet, her clothing ripped and the bruises and fluids still evident on her body, screaming for her mother, for justice, for an end to something she knows deep inside is dreadfully wrong, dreadfully evil.

But the words cannot get past the cold lump in her throat, and her body will not move. And the Hands continue their assault.