When people recounted the actions of A-4dm4—“Adama;” when they became free and names were no longer dashes and numbers, they would call her Adama—they would call her a hero. A woman who held her Sigmure, the parasite that fed on her, until it curled and burst in her fist.

Not that she would know that as attendees pulled her out of “her” Bathing.

No: history would leave out that she was wet and her dark-brown skin was slick from unwashed soap and riddled with goose flesh. And it wouldn’t say her legs were numb from the waist down. And that on her own, the world was no longer a haze: muted colors, sounds that once registered secondhand—voices, noises, the hum of machinery, the smell of medicine. And that as she looked down at her hand and saw that the Sigmure was a sticky, rainbow-colored mass of nothing in her hand, she threw up right into her lap.

No, only that she had done what humanity had almost forgotten they were capable of doing in the years since the Sigmure had begged for when they had first asked for sanctuary and then hosts: fight back.