29

 

Her great-grandparents had arrived in Elle during the second and third waves of migration from Earth, so Truly could never have been mistaken for Divine, even on her mother’s side. 

The same could be said of each of the handful of interviewers standing in front of her in a conference room at the Founders’ Inn, a structure which none of them had ancestral claim to.

At 29, all eight of Truly’s parents’ parents’ parents had navigated a nascent system on an old planet that they’d had no knowledge of a decade before their arrivals. They had left behind the terrorized world they had known for a blank page promising them a new hope.

At 29, Truly’s current concern was how to move this polite conversation with her potential future employers closer to the buffet table, while making them think it was their idea.