The Only One

a handful of bomb fuses she'd been cutting. Her heart thumped against her ribs. She aimed her good ear in the direction of the nearest passageway, but hissing burners and bubbling beakers on her worktable and walls of solid rock drowned out everything but the roar of her pulse.
    By now, fear and curiosity would have sent the others rushing to the Big Room at the front of the cave.
    Every nerve ending in her body screamed for her to drop what she was doing and follow. But Taj didn't feel like pasting charred strips of her quivering flesh all over the walls of her lab.
    No, thanks. Not tonight. It wasn't exactly her idea of redecorating.
    Taj glared at the fuses in her hand and threw them into their box. Cooling in an ice bath on her worktable was a glass beaker filled with a solution of radic acid. She lifted it and poured a thin stream of the solution into a large spun-glass funnel filter. Delicate yellowish-white crystals collected at the bottom: a lethal harvest.
    Her skin prickled with sweat. Radites. In this state the compound was extremely unstable. If it contacted anything but glass— boom! That little idiosyncrasy had killed her predecessor. Taj knew—she'd had to clean up the mess Pasha made. The mess Pasha became.
    It had been four years since the old bombmaker had made that error and killed himself. But he might have killed someone else. That would have been worse.
    Sweat gelled on her skin, suddenly icy cold. Five men were topside tonight, honored raiders all.
    Her hand shook. Setting the beaker on its stand and wiping her knuckles across her brow, she swallowed thickly. The raiders had taken along her new shaped charges, miniature pipe bombs a hundred times more powerful than their bigger brothers. The men loved the idea: a minimum amount of explosive for a maximum amount of damage. "More bang for the buck," went the ancient saying that wasn't as outdated as most thought. Currency might no longer be in use but explosives surely were.
    Yet the new shaped charges hadn't been tested. The explosive crammed in those tiny cylindrical casings could breach the strongest armor, including—Taj winced—the skyport's fuel storage facility: hardened underground fuel reservoirs. The explosion she'd heard could have been those reservoirs blowing sky high.
    Had they gone off at the wrong time in the wrong place? Had she combined ingredients in the wrong proportions, or had the booster charges malfunctioned due to some error she'd made? Great Mother! Had she made a blunder that killed someone? Why had she let those explosives be taken before they'd received more lab testing?
    Her mind clouded with possibilities, scenarios. All the errors she'd ever made returned to haunt her.
    She was mostly deaf in her left ear, her eyelashes and brows had been singed off a half-dozen times, and once, the year before, she'd been flash-blind for a week. Consequences of honing her art. If one could call mass destruction an art.
    She, the legendary taskmaster for reducing accidents, had screwed up in that quest more than anyone knew. But the only one she'd ever injured was herself. People trusted her. Had her precarious track record just blown up in her face?
    Taj stared at the sweat glistening on the back of her hand but saw bones poking out of scorched flesh, bloody fluid oozing from a socket where an eye used to be, violent convulsions driven by a fatally swelling brain, accompanied by the last hoarse screams of agony before death silenced the suffering.
    Her mother had died silently, Taj was told, but the woman's battle with blood cancer, a disease curable in the long-ago days of tech and medical miracles, had gone on for the better part of a year. Taj had been two.
    Her father—he'd died valiantly, too, his fight to survive far shorter but no less heart-wrenching. Taj had been fifteen when it happened, and his pointless death had changed her life forever.
    Joren had been a raider—"the best of the best" according to Romjha B'kah, the current raider commander who had been then only a cocky recruit. The man's brisk, gruff statement at the death vigil had bemused Taj. All that had been required of him as a raider was to pay his silent respects to Joren's kin. But as a boy Romjha had idolized her father more than most, and so he must have felt obligated to console her.
    The community had reached out to Taj, too, but their wealth of kind words had only exacerbated her awareness of her loss.
    Grief. She hated it. More than that, she