Julian Shepard, her enlistment paperwork says, Earthborn, never knew her parents, ran with the 10th Street Reds until enlistment at age 18, survived a Thresher Maw attack by the skin of her teeth. It's more true than not, but by a small margin. To begin with, her mother had named her Yu Lin. She hated that name; it was only one tone and one character off from the word 'rainforest', which had, of course, become her instant and everlasting nickname as soon as they'd learned the word in first grade.
She knew her mother - a tired, pinch-faced woman with too much work and not enough joy in her life - but her father had always been nothing more than a careworn photograph of a smiling man in Alliance dress blues, 'Shepard' blazoned across his chest. Her mother wouldn't talk about him, so little Yu Lin spent hours staring at his photo, making up stories in her head where he'd come for her and know her because there wasn't another girl in all of Tainan with looks like hers. Most of her was her mother - high cheekbones, wide flat nose, slanted eyes that pinched almost closed when she smiled - but her rich mocha skin, coarse hair, and green eyes were all his. Her mother spoke only Chinese and Taiwanese, of course, but Yu Lin wanted to be like her father. Even in first grade she studied her English diligently, writing her ABCs and spelling words until her hands ached, reading every word in her books until she could have recited its entire contents from memory. She was determined to be able to speak to her father if he ever came for her.
He didn't, of course.
And then one day when she was nine, just before summer vacation started, her mother didn't wake up. She had no idea what to do, and in the end she didn't do anything special. She cooked herself breakfast as usual, dressed herself, shouldered her backpack, and went to school. She took her tests, came home, made dinner, did her homework, and went to sleep. She kept this up for nearly a week, until at last the school term was over. Then she ran away. With nothing but clothes, food, and her English books on her back, Zhang Yu Lin snuck onto a train - a series of them, actually - and emerged in New Taipei City as Julian Shepard, the English name her teacher had given her and the one from her father's photo, which she'd left behind.
Her first week there was a blur of rain and more rain - she'd unwittingly chosen the rainy season to run away in - and picking through trash cans after the old folks had searched them thoroughly for any valuable recycling. Then Mary found her, and little Julian was smitten. She'd have followed those clear blue eyes and thick, fluffy brown hair into hell. She did follow them into the 10th Street Reds.
It was years before she realized that they were a gang, and by then she didn't care; the Reds had become her family, her home, her life. They were all foreigners and the children of foreigners, they came in every shape and colour and size, and they accepted her without question and taught her everything they knew. By the time she was twelve she could pick pockets and hack with the best of them, spoke English almost like a native, and had given up on ever seeing her father. By fifteen, she was the best knife fighter in the gang and had more ATM hackings to her name than hugs. Her sixteenth year changed that, when she fell for - and into bed with - one of her gang's runners. Jill was a tough, angry young woman for whom Julian couldn't distinguish her respect from her desire. It was from Jill that she learned both the heights of pleasure and the depths of despair, not to mention the dirty seething underbelly of her own family.
She'd always known, in a distant intellectual way, that the Reds were into more than just petty theft, but that had never been her beat - she was young and quick and light-fingered enough to stick to stealing and sneaking, and that had always been fine with her. That wasn't Jill's life, though. She was up-and-coming, a rising star in the Reds' rapidly expanding drug ring, and she dragged her new girlfriend along with her as she rose to preside in luxury over a red sand trade that did the gang's name proud. Julian didn't know what to do. She didn't like drugs, didn't like that her gang was running them, didn't like that people were ending up dead for them…and she absolutely hated that Jill, who was so tender with her in private, not only commanded it but took pleasure in it.
It was all about the power, Jill told her once, all about having it when those around you did not, about being alive when those around you died. In the end, she'd said, surviving was the greatest triumph, the greatest 'fuck you' to those who wanted you dead or ground underfoot. And she, Jill, was going to be the greatest, most powerful drug lord in all of Taiwan if she had to drown her enemies in a river of blood to get there.
The sick light in her lover's eyes had been enough to drive Shepard out into the coursing rain, not even bothering with an umbrella as the heavy water soaked her down to her skin in seconds. Whatever Jill was offering, she didn't want. She already chafed at the bonds that kept her by her lover's side, the trophy girl that Jill showed off to flaunt her power, the quality of her belongings. Julian Shepard was not apossession, she was not a trophy for display, and she was not - absolutely, unequivocally not - a drug runner.
In the end it was a billboard that decided her fate: a massive, new, almost blinding blue billboard. 'The Alliance Navy: Your Portal to the Galaxy', it read, and there in the middle was a man so like her father that her heart stopped for one long second. His eyes were wrong, dark where her father's were an even lighter green than her own, but otherwise…
She was the first person into the recruiter's office the next morning. "Julian Shepard," she lied coolly, "Eighteen years old last week. No family."