Naysha Flores woke three minutes before her alarm, as she always did now.
She lay still for a moment in the narrow bunk, staring up at the dull gray ceiling of her quarters and listening to the low, constant hum of the station around her. It was the sound of air recyclers and power conduits and the distant rumble of engines warming in the hangars below.
After three years, it had become so familiar that she barely heard it anymore. On the rare occasions she returned to Truimal on leave, the silence of a planet-side room kept her awake at night.
When the alarm finally sounded, she switched it off before the second tone, sat up, and reached for the helmet resting on its charging stand beside the bunk.
She was twenty years old now.
It did not feel like it. Some mornings, she felt much older, and some mornings, she felt as though she were still the girl standing in a street in Gornshu City, arguing with four soldiers over a broken helmet, with no idea what was about to change.
