Mireya's Assessment of Vera

Vera arrived in Tucson in the year 2000 and she has been arriving ever since.

I mean this precisely: there is a quality of person who enters a space and continues entering it - who has never quite finished the arrival, who is always still in the movement of coming through the door. Twenty-five years in my territory and Vera still has the quality of someone who has not yet finished accounting for the room. This is not a flaw in perception. It is what happens when you build yourself on a foundation you did not build yourself.

Chicago. The Nephilim, those that feast upon their own, whatever they were calling themselves then. A young vampire who understood power as height - the higher you stood, the more you were. The logic is not wrong if the height is yours. Vera stood on the backed work of older and stranger powers and mistook the elevation for her own. She looked at what she could see from up there and she said: I did this. This is my view. This is what it means to be what I am.

Then she came to Tucson, which is humbler than Chicago, which is better at waiting, which has been waiting for longer than any political entity she has spent time with has existed.

I am not threatened by her. I want to be clear about this because threat-reading and assessment-reading can look similar from the outside, and what I am doing is the second kind. Threat requires the possibility of losing something. What I have in this territory is not a possession that can be taken; it is a relationship, two hundred years old, with the land and the people and the dead and the oath. You cannot take a relationship. You can disrupt one. Vera is not at the disruption threshold. She is still in the arriving.

She has strength. This is not a backhanded observation - I notice genuine strength without qualification when I find it, because I have been in this desert long enough that I am not invested in underestimating the young. The Nephilim height gave her a foundation she did not build, but she has been building on it for twenty-five years, and building genuinely is different from assuming. I am watching to see what the building becomes.

I loaned Standing Deer to whatever she is assembling. Not to help. As a lens, which is the same reason I loaned him to Warren - because when I want to understand something from the inside I send the best lens I have and I wait. Standing Deer will come back and he will tell me what he found, and what he found will be more useful than what I can see from the outside, and by then the assembling will either have become something legible or it will not.

What I know from twenty-five years of watching: Vera is not comfortable in the desert yet. She has not learned to wait in the way the desert requires. She moves at the speed of the city she was made in, which is fast by the standards of this place and slow by the standards of what we actually are. She will either learn the desert’s pace or she will remain always-arriving, always still coming through the door.

She mistakes the deference of older powers for confirmation rather than patience. This is the most common mistake made by the young and capable, and it is more dangerous than arrogance because it looks, from inside, like good intelligence. You see the older powers make space for you and you read: I am right about my own size. What you should read is: they are patient enough to let the situation develop, which is a different and more uncomfortable thing.

The desert is patient enough to let the situation develop. I am patient enough. We are all watching.

She will find out what the patience means when it ends.

Or she will learn to be patient herself, and that will be more interesting than the other outcome. I genuinely do not know which direction it goes. This is the honest thing about twenty-five years of watching: I still have uncertainty. Which means she still has room to become something that has not resolved yet.

The desert thinks otherwise, which is what the desert thinks about everything that comes in assuming it has already been decided.