Naysha was a different person now from the girl who had lost her parents. She knew it, and she did not think it was entirely a bad thing.
She was harder than she had been, and more tired, and quieter. She had watched people die, and she had killed, and she had learned to sleep through alarms and to eat whatever was put in front of her and to stop expecting anything to go the way she planned.
But she was also very, very good at what she did.
She left her quarters and made her way through the station's narrow corridors toward the mess hall, nodding to the pilots and technicians she passed. Most of them nodded back. A few of the newer pilots stood a little straighter when they saw her.
The mess hall was half full when she arrived. She collected a tray of the same gray, salty stew the station had served every morning for three years and sat down at a table near the window, where she could see Jalun's surface below.
