Chewing Vacuum

Chapter Two: Siblings

Packing her neatly rolled uniform into the large canvas duffle, Jahenna folded the bag closed and firmly tightened the string clasp. She looked around the barracks room she'd spent the last six months in, and allowed herself a brief moment of farewell.

She'd changed so much here...

Between the rows of bunks so awkwardly far away from the windows and cabinets that served as both divider and wardrobe for each bunk "bay," it was not a place she wanted to stay in anymore...

...but after being called "home" for half a year, she couldn't leave without at least saying goodbye to it. It felt silly, but it also felt right.

That was just the way she was.

With her hand faintly running along the bare mattress on the bottom bunk, she scooped up the canvas duffle by its handle, and slung the strap over her right shoulder. "So long, Bay Twenty-Two," she mumbled, giving one last glance over her little corner of hell.

"And may I never see you again."

Duffel over her shoulder, Jahenna maneuvered out of the barracks and into the open sunlight of an afternoon Proxima sun.

She wore the best approximation of civilian clothing she could find at the PX: an athletic slate gray shirt branded "Espatier Corps," with the Sword and Sextant emblem on the front, and a pair of black shorts. It wasn't what she'd normally wear, but it would do the job while she traveled.

For the next Three hundred, thirty-six hours, she was on liberty; a vacation. It was a chance to seriously recover from all of the hell and torment from Espatier training, and a chance to heal wounds that had only been bandaged and patched up rather than allowed to fully mend.

For two whole standard weeks, she could go where she pleased, wearing what she wanted, while eating whatever she liked...after that, it was on to Bar-Hassan Station, where she'd begin the next phase of her training: Light Orbital Mechanized Infantry Training, or "LOMIT school," as everyone called it.

Back to uniforms and a rote hierarchal organization.

Back to stale air and bland food.

Back...to the Espatiers.

She'd endure being a soldier; she'd live the life and the experience, and be better for it, she had decided...but she also recognized how it would change her. Had changed her. She was a different person now than she was six months ago, and although she still had the same sense of wonder and curiosity about the alien ruins and fossils here on Proxima Prime, everything seemed so...distant now.

This wasn't what she wanted to do.

Yet, here she was doing it anyway.

The ends never justify the means, as the saying went.

It was going to be a long bus ride to the small hamlet she was spending her liberty. Harrow's Landing may have been nothing more than a town with a beach, but it was also only an hour away; if she was going to be spending the majority of the next six years stuck aboard ships or trapped on a space station, she wanted to soak up as much sunlight and open sky as she could.

She was halfway to the Recruitment Depot's transport station when a semi-familiar voice called out to her from behind: "Jahenna? Is that you?"

She turned to look, then nearly fell backwards.

Rence Malnix, her older brother, walked briskly to catch up her from behind. He wore a crisp white button-down shirt with an open collar, and wore dark, pressed slacks with shined shoes. His dark brown hair was still styled into spikes with frosted blonde tips, and his skin looked somehow more uncomfortably pale than she remembered him.