Acari Odo'mae

Acari has never left the ground.

When Odo'Mae finally climbs through the skyfires that have burned above her clan for longer than anyone can count, she learns during a single ascent that they were never fire. They are wreckage. Two vessels went before hers carrying two others who bore her name, and both of them failed, and nobody had told her there was a first.

Forty-nine light years take no time at all. Her father left seven thousand four hundred and ninety-six destinations in the navigational baseline and no explanation for any of them, so she picks one, and arrives, and her arrival destroys two ships that were only there to meet her.

The species she has just fired upon forgives her before she can apologize. Luran Wanaru of Haiduen has no eyes and no face and speaks a syntax that turns out to be Greek, and when Deama takes Acari's hands and leads her through Rima, the peace-rite her clan has kept for a thousand years, Luran watches, and recognizes it, and performs it back at her. His people sat in a circle with human beings six thousand years ago and taught them how to pray.

Deama is not interested in the aliens. Deama is interested in what Acari has been carrying since the caves, and sets about drawing it out of her, one breath at a time, because that is what a clan mother does.

Centuries away, on a world her survivors' descendants were sold into, a war is being argued over by men who will not be the ones to fight it. Beneath the Persian Gulf in 1957, two men who are the same man step out of a pod and are welcomed home by a third.

And beneath all of it, walled off from the vessel she now shares a mind with, Acari is keeping something.

Odo'Mae has begun asking her to take the partition down. It asks patiently, and often, and its reasoning is sound every time. She refuses, and tells it the refusal is a kindness, and cannot say with certainty whether that is true.

The Mothers Genesis is the third book of the Acari Odo'Mae Origins Saga. The first asked what Acari is. The second asked what she is for. This one asks what she is willing to become, and whether the answer belongs to her at all.