Chapter 1: Hannah

First memories are slippery things; people tell you about events you half remember something ... all combine to make such things fuzzy at best. Hannah’s first memory was standing at a low counter, a tall, seriously overweight woman pointing to her and saying, “Dearie, set the diaper just there; smooth it out, no wrinkles.” Hannah remembered doing so; memory was silent about whether or not she’d done it correctly. Certainly if not then, then the ten thousand other times she’d done the same thing.

Another memory was being taken in a bus with other kids from the orphanage to a park well away from the city; a volcano had erupted fifty years before, with great loss of life. She’d wandered away from the adults; something she was doing more and more often even then and found a small playground. Other kids were running up and down hills, sliding down a slide, having a good time. Hannah saw a young man grip a set of inclined rails and walk along them using his arms pressing down, up to the top, then swing lithely off.

She wanted to do that, but when she tried, she found her arms barely reached the bars, much less able to press down and walk along them. After a few inches, her feet no longer touched the ground. She looked up, seeing the little platform the boy had decamped on earlier, so high, so far.

She swung her legs and hitched forward a few inches. She found a rhythm that let her advance three or four inches at a time; after five minutes, she swung her legs particularly hard and clambered up onto the platform. Hannah looked back down and grinned to herself. Yes, she could!

One of the teachers appeared. “You should have seen yourself! Legs every which way! And your dress!” She sniffed, “Your dress! You could see anything you wanted! Not ladylike at all, missy!”

Back at the orphanage, Hannah had looked at herself in a mirror. A horrid pink dress, too small, too short. The dress was dirty, really dirty. Her face was dirty, her hands were dirty; she was dirty. With a start, Hannah realized that most people she saw every day didn’t look like this. The biggest difference was the dirt. That and the awful pink dress.

That night she went to the shower and scrubbed and scrubbed. Her hair was soaked and she’d tried combing it and it was a nightmare. Hannah’s first instinct was that which had stood her in such good stead before: leave it for later. This time, she decided that the fault was hers, she had to fix it now, and did so. When she finished her hair was neat and clean ... and much shorter.

One thing she couldn’t easily fix, though, was the dress. She quickly grew to hate dresses; up until then she hadn’t paid any attention to what someone else had chosen for her to wear. She quickly became picky, then quite picky, about her clothes. But never dresses, never again. Nothing pink, ever again.

Two more events marked her earliest formative years. She’d been taken to school and exposed to all sorts of things. Hannah found a classroom with some dull teacher droning on, boring. She turned to the things she found in the classrooms: books and computers; she read the books, wrote stories and played games on the computers. Hannah pushed the limits of the spell checker on vocabulary she shouldn’t know yet, but demonstrably did. She read voraciously, every spare moment, and late into the night as well.

The last event was when some biddy from the orphanage had told the little ones they wouldn’t get desserts for an infraction of one of the others, a boy, had done. Hannah objected, and the woman had shaken a finger at her. “Little missy, just because you were lucky twice, don’t go with that mouth on me!”

“Lucky twice?” She’d asked, unsure what the woman meant.

“Lucky getting off Lasker’s, lucky after. Now, shut your mouth! No dessert for you either!”

It was something you didn’t talk about at the orphanage: how you came to be there. She’d heard occasional references to Lasker’s before, but she’d never understood. That evening, she had presented herself to the head mistress, someone Hannah had spent years avoiding, and asked what the woman had meant.

The head mistress was old, pale, and thin. She sat at her desk, looking at Hannah, her pale blue eyes sunken into her head. “Lucky once: the Dracha came to Lasker’s World. Nearly a billion people lived at Lasker’s when the Dracha came. There weren’t many shuttles; we managed to get a quarter of a million off; mostly older babies.”

Her eyes were bleaker and more haunted than ever Hannah could remember. “Less work; they didn’t need as many adults, the bare minimum to care for that many. Your transport was unlucky -- it was hit by debris as we fled.” Her eyes dwelled on Hannah. “My sister was there, the head nurse. She got six of you into escape sacks before she died. Two of the six have died since; two of the others are blind, the other is deaf and blind. You were the only one mostly unhurt. Out of three hundred.”

The head mistress looked at her steadily. “The nurse’s station took the hit, dead on. We had no idea who you were. You were wrapped in a crib blanket, the one you still have. Just the name ‘Hannah’ embroidered on the edge; it was the only record left. So, since you are at the Sawyer orphanage, thus Hannah Sawyer. A name of pride, since the start of the war.”

Hannah had read a little about the war. Eight-year-olds don’t understand war very well. Even stories about your namesake, who was killed saving humanity during the darkest days of the war. There had been a lot of people killed, she knew. And in the end, mankind had killed most of the aliens and pacified the survivors. She ran her hands over the old quilt, the one thing she’d had over the years that was truly hers. Light blue, with dark blue embroidery with her name. Hannah.

After that, she stopped using Sawyer, even when the people at the orphanage insisted. She didn’t care; if her parents had loved her enough to give her the name, but hadn’t bothered to give her a last name, that was fine with her. And Hannah Sawyer meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people, but Hannah knew she wasn’t that person.