No, none of them had a choice.  Not really -- not one that mattered.  She'd had no say in what happened to her, what she'd become.  "I follow no creeds."  Words she would never had uttered at the Seminary sprang unbidden to her lips.  "I have one thing in this godsforsaken world that no one can touch, and they may shape me as they see fit and against my wishes but they cannot make me believe."  Ziotea looked down at the child, not so much shorter than she herself, and the wolf's grin returned, this time with a wild gleam in her eye.  "If my strength failed me I would die.  Or someone else would.  We are all of us destined for death in the end.  And I will go fighting with my last breath, because I can no longer remember how to flee."  She tilted her head.  "I could die for my warband.  If you have the strength to languish in an ether factory on the behalf of your friends, then you are braver than I -- and far more cruel."

The girl's last question was unexpected and unpleasant, and the thought of her spying made Ziotea angrier still.  The air around her shuddered.  "Omestrian eyes are a curse on the street.  Omestrian hair, all the more so.  I am only half Omestrian, yet I am marked more than most.  If not for the power that keeps me from feeling chill, I would have perished as a child.  It might have been better that way.  Certainly it would have been simpler."  She scowled.  "The factories are full of Omestrians suspended in agony.  The stories are [i]nothing[/i] compared to the real thing.  And where is their god?  I told you.  I will not believe, not when it is not deserved."  Her anger roiled within her, seeking something to destroy.

"You asked what would happen if I made a mistake and my warsiblings paid the price?  I have made many, and nearly always, they were the ones to pay for it."  She tossed her spear aside and shrugged her shield onto her shoulder, a precise burst of force pushing the steel box from under the bed.  "I was [i]never[/i] strong enough.  I was only stubborn.  Stubborn and destructive."  Hardly a thought and the steel shattered, showering the room in jagged fragments.  Her instructors would have let the younger girl fend for herself, but Ziotea remembered how that had been.  She sheltered them both with shield and paling.  "I destroy whatever comes near.  Friend, foe, it doesn't matter.  That is what Omestris means to me.  Do you understand?  Abandonment and destruction.  I will give no loyalty to something like that."