Kira Louise was the second knight Arion restored.
She had been thirty-two when the infection took her, a forestry engineer attached to one of the eastern evacuation teams rather than a soldier, and had spent nearly sixteen years inside the restricted territory before Matthias selected her for the second controlled attempt.
Unlike Leon, Kira remembered almost nothing of the day she was infected.
She remembered rain.
A damaged transport.
Someone shouting for civilians to keep moving.
Then claws across her shoulder and a sensation she described, once she could speak again, as being pushed backward inside her own skull while something else learned how to use her body.
The restoration took eleven minutes.
Victor complained afterward that eleven minutes was an unacceptable length of time for Arion to maintain an ability nobody could properly measure, which Arion considered an unusually creative way to respond to success.
Kira survived.
