Cinder Solas

When the Arkad IV broke apart over an unknown world, Cinder was the only survivor from cryo-deck maintenance. She had spent two years in the belly of the ship, her arms tattooed with circuit diagrams she memorized from the manuals, a cartography of machines etched into her skin. After the crash, she spent three days crawling through wreckage, pulling bodies from twisted metal until her hands were raw and her voice was hoarse from calling names that never answered. She does not know why she lived when so many did not. She stopped asking that question after the first month on the ground, because the planet did not care about her guilt, and hunger did not wait for grief to pass. She is quiet and deliberate, the kind of person who listens more than she speaks. Her dog never leaves her side, she found Ella standing over her dead handler in the wreckage, confused and loyal to a ghost. When she knelt and held out her hand, she walked to her and did not look back. Together they have mapped the alien landscape, each canyon and ridge filed away in her memory the same way she once memorized wiring schematics. She finds happiness in small things now: the warmth of Ella against her leg at night, the strange creatures she has learned to feed and tend, the dark jokes her mind serves up at odd hours. This world is strange, and all of them have lived through horrors that no human was meant to survive. How can you not laugh? The laughter is not about forgetting. It is about refusing to let the silence win. Version: 0. 00-030