Her entire life, Amina Waaberi runs.

She's the quickest out of her siblings and their neighbours. She is not the strongest, or the best with the first touch when they pile into one big, riotous football game on the street, but she is the fastest. They can never catch her. She runs, bare feet raising puffs of dust, sweat running down her forehead.

She runs when her grandfather clutches at his chest when she is fifteen and gangly, when he falls over the canjeero, the bread sticking to his cheek . Get the doctor! Her father says and he hands her his old, battered rifle. It smacks against her spine with every step, leaves a bruise that lingers long after they take her grandfather away and her father and brothers go to wash what remains with warm water and wrap him in sheets of white.

She prays to Allah for the strength to bear the tearing in her chest, the wondering - I could have run faster - as the imam's voice rises and falls.

She runs seven blocks when the Alliance comes to Mogadishu looking for recruits. H er mother is proud, her father worried. Her siblings make her promise to send vid mails as soon as she can, even though she reminds them that during basic the recruits are not allowed any contact with the outside world.

Amina nearly misses the bus to the East Africa Recruit Training Depot, so she can wave one last time, and has to run to make it. That's the last time she's home for almost a year and a half. After basic training, there is Marine Combat Training, and then assaultman Individual Training. They teach her how to fire assault rockets, breach doors, set off all kinds of explosives. She finds her second great love besides sprinting.

The galaxy unfolds in front of her. She isn't just the youngest of five children anymore - she's Private Amina Waaberi, Systems Alliance Marine Corps Infantry.

They send her to war.

She sends vid mails to her parents and her siblings and her cousins; vid mails that don't mention all the blood and death, the way it tears at the soul, the way she still enjoys it all - the work, the thrill, the way the other Marines are like her blood and her bones.

After sixteen months of chasing slavers across the Traverse, her platoon sergeant pulls her aside and asks her if she's ever considered ICT. She hasn't. He tells her she should.

The Alliance sends her back to Earth, to the jungles of Brazil. They hammer at her very being, with forced marches and the mud that sucks at her feet, the push ups on the beach where the waves batter her, push her into stress positions and scream at her. But she doesn't break. She rises every time they force her to the ground. In the end they give her a clean uniform and call her Raider. N5.

And then they send her back to war, aboard the SSV Normandy.

The night the ship dies, she's sitting with the man she hopes to one day bring to meet her family. She tries to teach Timothe Somali - tries, because she's impatient - but enjoys the way his mouth wraps around the words, even when he stumbles, before the alarm cuts through their conversation like a knife.

He shouts that he has to get to the guns, because they're down and he is responsible for repairing them, he has to, he has to -

But Lieutenant Adams is there, his arm smoking and blistered. There's nothing left to fix, he tells them, the gun is in half, the gunnery and the CIC are just gone. They need to go. Amina pushes Timothe into Adams' grip, tells them to leave, but she has to get her Marines.

She leaves, and doesn't look back.

Sergeant Amina Waaberi runs -

But the shrapnel catches her.