How many hours had it been? Curled up completely shrouded by a blanket except for her face, Klaudia hadn’t moved. Her body was still cold even under the sheets, which could’ve been attributed to an adjustment back to the conditions of Titan. But that didn’t explain why she hadn’t gotten up from bed, why she hadn’t taken a moment to get up and stretch her legs.
The truth was, she was unsure of what to do with herself. She had returned to the family she loved so dearly--the reason she lived alongside the Terrans for over a year. Eating the same food as them, sleeping in the same quarters, singing the same song with little to no accent. The lessons of her parents came a long way. Until she was about 14 years of age, all she knew were the songs of labour her parents and their fellow slaves sung. Chipping away at the purple ore to the same rhythm, everything seemed so routine. Yet she knew that she could not endure this forever. Her discontentment with the life she was made to live grew and grew. Anger and rage were a part of her every day. She’d often lash out at her fellow slaves simply to blow steam off, barraging words that cut as deep as the wounds on their hands from the continuous labour. Only the watchful eyes of the mine foremen could do anything to prevent her from going as far as murdering one of them. Not even her parents could stop her.
So when a man from the military arrived at their secluded worksite one day, looking for teenaged boys and girls to recruit for the military, they knew what to do. They agreed to sign her up, despite knowing that they could’ve used her for anything they wished. That was why despite there being thousands of children grinding away throughout the mines, only she went through the process of joining their military.
After a year of rigorous, brutal training, she was finally ready to be deployed to Terra. She was chosen alongside Meinrad due to both her medical expertise—a consequence of treating her injured fellow slaves at the behest of her parents—and her knack for being able to seamlessly fit into any role she was put into.
From a slave, she became a soldier, and from a soldier, she made herself into a civilian who wished for the betterment of a world she had never lived on. She had an incredibly hard time trying to control her violent impulses, but acting in the capacity of a medic? She did that. She healed people she would later kill, cure people she would later maim.
Yet why did her heart feel heavier with each bullet she shot and each blade she swung? That day in Shargara, she only wanted to go home. Well, that would've been true, had she not allowed people to enter her heart beforehand. She never thought she could’ve become friends with a bright, sweet girl like Anwen. She was someone she had no reason knowing. From two completely different backgrounds, both in trade and in ethnic origin. What did a northern girl born and raised in the merciless mines of Titan have in common with a southerner girl brought up in an abandoned warehouse by a Titanian man? Maybe it was simply that they were both girls in places they had no reason to be in.
But what of Detlef? The gentle, honourable young man from the Glacial Lands, who had been keeping an eye on her ever since she and Meinrad enlisted with the Black Shield, to which she pretended not to notice? His selflessness and kindness was second to none. He had offered to cover for her and Meinrad when the latter disobeyed orders to watch both her and Stefan, despite not knowing of their true intentions. What they did was none of his business, yet he did it because he cared for them. That was only the tip of the iceberg. Staying near her even when he was afraid of her, making sure she could do her job as a medic properly, always asking if she need anything to work with, offering to fix her up a second plate of Jay’s monthly feasts. Detlef was kind, but he didn’t treat everyone to that extent. He did it because she had a special place in his heart from the moment he saw her. Months and months of this behaviour rubbed off on Klaudia. She began to feel the same way, but she kept it within. It didn’t feel unnatural when she pushed herself to confront him hours before the Shargara Conference and admit her feelings. Detlef was going to be one hurt the most out of everyone. In his eyes, what she did would be an act of betrayal, but that wouldn’t discount what he felt before. Klaudia knew he would call himself a traitor’s lover. The only variables that prevented his reputation within the Black Shield from souring was that only Meinrad and likely Leon too were aware of his sentiments, and that the act she shared with Detlef was done with no one else around.
She would be redeployed to Terra, and the possibility of having to see Detlef, Anwen and even Stefan and Leon were high. How would she face them? She was someone who had broken their trust, and no mercy would be shown to her. But she had to survive and move on. The stipulation for the emancipation of the Frei Squad and their families were that they had to serve five years—it would end when they completed their service, either by death or to the end. If one were to fall in battle before the end of their term, their family would be sent back to the mines from which they came.
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No matter how much she wished to convince herself that her time on Terra was completely and utterly an act, one thing would remain. Her family still needed her.
Pushing the blanket off of her head, her feet touched the ground below her levitating bed, the floor cool on her skin. Her room was not as simple as her quarters at either the Solich Palace or the Black Shield Base. Her bed was situated in front of a window. To its left against the wall was an armoire and on the right wall was a desk, kept clear of excessive belongings or clutter. Opposite the wall was a wide closet beside the door.
She was a clean freak of the highest order and made sure it stayed that way wherever she went. Besides her inactivated communicator and a pile of textbooks, the only object on the desk that seemed out of the ordinary was a cup of Titanian moss tea that her mother had brewed before she left with her father and sister to Meinrad’s home.
Bringing the cup to her lips, she spluttered as the pungency of the liquid touched her tongue.
“I’ll never get used to this…” she whispered to herself. “And it’s cold. Great.”
She took the cup with her to the family kitchen, where a microwave awaited her presence. Popping open its door, she was about to place the liquid-filled receptacle onto the rotating dish inside, but a thought came to her.
Reheat it, and the bitterness will worsen, she remembered. She pulled her hand out with the cup and placed it on the counter. Her eyes were drawn to her own reflection on the surface of the yellow-green liquid.
But if I don’t heat it up, would it still be tea?
Klaudia was a master at military tactics, quick to react to what the other side did. She would respond with full force with no hesitation. There were reasons why she had been selected as Meinrad’s righthand woman for the mission to Terra. Yet why was she hesitating over a trivial cup of tea?
Her train of thoughts were interrupted as the sliding doors that allowed access into her family’s apartment moved smoothly. The sight of her parents and sister brought an instant smile to her face.
“You guys are back early.” she asked.
“And shouldn’t you be resting, young lady?” her father furrowed his brows at her, arms crossed.
“I… yeah, I guess I should,” she stumbled on her words. At home, Ignaas Nordskov seldom showed open affection to his elder daughter. In his defense, it was so that she could withstand the emotionally and physically enduring conditions of the mines. His tough love was hard to comprehend, but certainly rubbed off on her.
“Ignaas, honey, you know she can stretch her legs every now and then, right?” Gemma intervened. Her style of parenting was not the same as her husband’s, however this was an exception to her normal agreement to his behaviour.
“I know,” Ignaas sighed. “Just… go back to your room soon. Gemma, I’ll be in our room.”
“Alright,” she acknowledged, watching Ignaas trudging through the doorway of their bedroom before closing the door behind him. Once she knew he wouldn’t hear her voice from the drawing room, she turned to face her elder daughter. “I know we weren’t supposed to return so soon, but something came up that made us do so.”
“What happened?” Klaudia asked. She was puzzled. All the Terran residents of the Frei Squad housing complex were very friendly with one another, to the point that they were practically family. What could’ve happened? Nothing too bad, surely. Otherwise, Gemma’s demeanour would’ve been much more tense.
“It’s Meinrad. A few of us asked him what he saw and experienced on Terra. We didn’t want him to go too much into detail because we know you only just came back but he decided to go on a rant that ended up hurting your Aunty Esfir’s feelings.”
“Meinrad… did he really say something that would hurt her?”
“No, no. I’m sure it wasn’t his intention, but out of everyone, Aunty Esfir is the one who’s still very attached to Earth. What he said wasn’t… favorable of it.”
A frown came about Klaudia’s face, both out of sympathy for Malin’s mother and pity for her dear friend. She knew how hard it was especially for Mrs. Schenk, having had to raise her daughter mostly on her own and on top of that, the same daughter expressing indifferent and uncaring emotions towards the home her mother grew up on. However, she never realised in the years that she had known Meinrad that he could harbor such misery that prompted such a reaction from a grown adult.
“It was my fault…” a young girl’s voice trembled. Klaudia took a peek behind her mother to see her little sister, a girl who was nine years junior to her 17, hiding her face in the back of her mother’s blouse. “I… I asked Meinrad if you made any friends and…”
“Evie, sweetie, it isn’t your fault,” Gemma turned her upper body 90 degrees to comfort her younger daughter, stroking the top of her brown scalp—a characteristic she shared with her sister and mother. “No one thinks it’s your fault.”
Klaudia’s hands curled into fists for a few brief seconds, enraged that the girl triggered such an upsetting scene. But then she relaxed them. This was her precious little sister. How could she be mad at her?
“Ev, I know Meinrad the most out of everyone,” Klaudia circled around her mother and pulled Eveline away from her. She rested her hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. “I think all that happened is that he just… got a little carried away. That’s all. It’s not his fault or yours. We’re all people, aren’t we? So, how about this. Once I feel a little better, I can tell you all about what I saw there.”
“R-Really? You can do that?” Eveline asked her elder sister.
“Yeah,” Klaudia said, bending over so that her lips were next to Eveline’s ear. “Just don’t tell Daddy.”
Gemma smiled as she allowed her two girls catch up after two years apart. Passing the kitchen, she noticed the cup Klaudia had left on the counter. She wondered what it was doing there, still almost full.