Lira had never owned much, but she had never felt the smallness of her possessions until she tried to fit them into a bag.
The bag itself was borrowed. Tessa had produced it from somewhere in the omega barracks, a canvas sack with a leather strap that looked like it had been used to carry grain at some point in its previous life and had never fully recovered from the experience. It smelled like dust and old wheat and the particular mustiness of something that had been sitting in a forgotten corner for years waiting for someone to need it badly enough to dig it out.
Lira stood in her room and looked at what she owned: a spare shirt that was identical to the one she was wearing except for a small tear near the left cuff that she had never gotten around to mending, a comb with three missing
