The Hedging Methods of Powerful Families

Though they had received extensive education, the harshness in the English spoken by those Slavic girls was still unmistakable. If they were still in school, it would have been the sort of mistake that got them whipped on the backside with a riding crop by the ladies until they wailed in tears—though most of the time, they would cry beforehand to avoid the beating. But this was not school. This was the cabin of an Assault Transport, and they had already graduated. Here, the ladies could not be bothered correcting their accents, because the girls were about to prove what they had learned with the weapons in their hands.

When the hatch closed, the cabin darkened. Blinding LED lights above their heads illuminated their helmets and shoulder armor. The girls chirped away through their helmets' encrypted squad comms, occasionally glancing at the Yankee who had boarded the Assault Transport with them.

No one was willing to speak to him.

It was not that discipline forbade it. The large United States flag emblem on the Yankee's body had helped the girls identify him. No matter how tightly they clustered together, they refused to approach him. Every bit of their body language conveyed the same emotion. They had studied world history and politics. They fully understood why their homeland had become what it was, and why they had suffered. If the man standing in the corner of the Yankee's cabin had made a different choice, perhaps many tragedies would never have happened. Yet they also knew that such thoughts were utterly unreasonable, so they expressed their disgust in the most restrained way possible.

Steve Rogers said nothing. He noticed the girls' small gestures.

He gave no response, merely standing there like a lifeless stone. He was thinking. He wondered whether, if he