If you have to take sides with the animals, won't you do it with one who is kind?
Born During Rain
She accidentally killed a man less than two hours after the ISV-Kran fell, for no other reason other than the fact that she wanted his gun and he wouldn't give it to her. She had waited until his back was turned and then had wound up and thrown her translator at him like a professional baseball player pitching a fastball. The crack that his skull made when the metal pulverized the back of his head spooked her so much that she had forgotten to check and see if the gun had any bullets in it. It didn't.
But that didn't bother her, because Norianna Cleaver never thought ahead. She didn't worry about what might happen to her if she didn't have any way of defending herself on this strange planet, a land of beautiful scenery and a dark undercurrent of something that made her skin crawl when she looked at the sky or stared down into a quiet river valley. She didn't worry that she was alone for most of her journey, and that she was probably going to spend her last days on this strange world. She never worried. She was incapable of imagining anything beyond the here and now.
Many of her personality traits were unremarkable, and they didn't develop when she realized that she was stranded. Her drive to survive was quiet, almost careless. She walked for three days eating leaves from a plant, she didn't know what kind, and drinking water that tasted like metal, or blood, or both. And since she never thought ahead, she never worried about what lied ahead.
Her days came and went, and each passing moment proved to be lucky or unlucky for her. What happened to her didn't seem to faze her. After hiking for a week, trying to scale a mountain, she took a misstep on a steep slope one day and slid back down, some eighty feet, slicing her hand open on a jagged rock in the process. Standing on solid ground again, she stared at the slope for a while, sucking on her injured hand, before deciding that she didn't want to go that way after all. Her hand became infected after a while and it was only the medical administrations of a Nali priest that saved the limb from amputation.
She wasn't the perfect survivor, but she survived, unassuming and reckless on a planet where the slightest misstep could cost her her life.
If she had been like all the other Terrans wandering on Na Pali's surface, she would have panicked. If she had known what was lying in wait for her, she would have never stirred from the hull of her fallen ship. If she had been younger, she would have cared.
But the Norianna that she used to be had been gone for a long, long time, warped and changed by the ebb and flow of events in her life. Her younger self wouldn't have even known her now. She had lost sight of who she had wanted to be when she got older, and now that she was older, she had long forgotten what she was looking for. She was sure that she wouldn't recognize it even if she was staring straight at it.
And so she had given up on herself and was depending on her surrounding circumstances to define who she was. She figured that she existed, and that she was existing for a reason, and that she had to keep existing until something happened to her that affirmed why she was still here. And here did not matter. Here was anywhere she was, even if it happened to be an alien planet gripped in the midst of a terrible interstellar genocide.
On Earth, she was a wanderer, never settling in one place for long, a lonely face among millions without a friend to her name. On the Kran, she was a half-interested medical technician, drifting on the currents of social life on the ship. And here, she was a life. Just that. But she had always felt that way. It was easier that way, to just be. That's why she didn't look ahead. There was nothing ahead to look forward to. She did not thrive in rain so much as she was born into it.
She was captured on a chill rainy morning and brought to a circular building roughly the size of a football field. As soon as she saw the shivering, skull-faced woman staring at her from the floor of the slaughterhouse arena, she felt a weight lift off her shoulders. Something had to happen to her here, she decided. She had to make a difference here. A life can't drift forever and not matter. Perhaps it was here that she had always been destined to go. Her life on Earth had been a wreck, but here she could rise above the sum of her failures and make herself worthy of having a name, a face.
She saw herself on the floor, scared and alone, bearing the weight of tedious years upon years of dreamless drifting on her body. That was her, young and vulnerable and lost all at once, so much so that sometimes she wondered why she didn't just end it by her own hands. That was her.
Norianna carried this woman's physical scars on her spirit, and all she could do was laugh and pretend that she didn't feel the pain. She could at least nurture this poor life, cut short, with nowhere to look but straight into the grave.
Upon meeting her cellmate, Norianna allowed herself one brief glimpse ahead, and saw light.
I've been having a rough time. Life is funny that way. Very last chapter of Lux. Say goodbye.