[Lauchenoiria]

Unknown Location, Shen
Saturday 30th November

Sun Yafang sat shivering in her concrete cube, curled up in a ball. She was uncertain how much time had passed, the constant darkness, the discomfort and the cold were messing with her perception of it. She supposed that was the idea. She had been trained to cope with horrible situations for a long time, but she had one disadvantage that her teachers back in the Aurora Centre had not factored in. Her love for her children.

Auroras weren’t meant to have children, in general, although it wasn’t strictly forbidden. In some countries, children were expected of women - a fact that Kerlile used to justify targeting those countries, of course. Shen was one such country, and in order to deepen her cover, she had married and become pregnant. Unfortunately for her, she had fallen in love with her husband. She deeply cared for him, in spite of all her training that warned her not to.

Her love for her husband had nothing on her love for her daughter though. She loved all her children, even her sons, but her daughter was special. Yafang had tried to give her daughter the best life she could - the childhood she herself had never had. As a result, her daughter had grown up rather spoiled, as had all her children. And while she was trained to cope with painful and uncomfortable situations for long periods of time, she doubted if her children could.

If Yafang had still been a young woman, when she had first arrived in Shen, idealistic and ferociously loyal to only the Matriarchy, she would have lasted far longer. Yet she wasn’t. She had grown older, and weaker, and her loyalties were now split between her country and her family. And all she could think about in her cube was not the cold, or the hard ground, or the darkness and quiet, or the indignity of having to eat her first meal in captivity off the floor after it was dumped out of a tube. It was her family.

She let out a sob. This had not been the first time she had cried since her capture, of course. She did not weep for herself, though. This had been her job, her risk. She wept for her daughter, who she was terrified for. She did not know for certain if they really had put her children in a labour camp, but she found it all too believable. She thought of how her daughter would cope in such a place. She would not do well.

She couldn’t let this happen. While her time in Shen had not completely stamped out her Kerlian ideology, it had become increasingly subdued. The passion she’d had when she was first deployed had faded somewhat over the years, and the split loyalties with her family made it worse. She now faced a choice. She could only be loyal to one - the Matriarchy, or her family. And she’d made her choice.

“I…” she spoke aloud through her sobs for the first time since she had entered the cube. She paused, uncertain, the sound of her voice strange after her indeterminate time in the dark. “I want to confess to being an agent of the Matriarchy of Kerlile,” she said and then began to sob even more. “Just please, please don’t hurt my family any more.”

When they opened the door to her cell, she had to close her eyes because of the brightness of the light. After so long in the dark - days? A week? She thought it had been about half a week, but she was uncertain - her eyes took a moment to adjust to being able to see anything without a little pain. She felt more relief than she had expected to be outside of the cube.

Well, she thought to herself, wiping the tears from her eyes before they took her out of her cell in order to take her for processing, I am about to betray the Matriarchy. Goddess have mercy on my soul.