Ayla again

becuase I don't REALLY want Jesi to hate me...

.............

They killed my parents.
Killed them and took their skins and splashed that gorram death-ship with blood from keel to hull. War paint. In case anybody looking at that ship wouldn’t know what come for them.
And before they killed my family they did things to them – did things a girl could go crazy trying not to imagine.
Nobody on the core planets believes in Reavers. Just ignorant rim-lore, according to the Alliance. They won’t allow as there’s anything in the ‘verse they don’t have under their thumb. But you can’t make Reavers go away by shutting your eyes and chanting about tall-tails.
It was the neighbours found the bodies. What was left of them. Pieces of Ma spread all round the kitchen, Dad’s big frame draped over the fence.
I threw up when Antoinette told me, all over the clean white sink in the surgery room, and then I wiped my lips and went to pack my bag.
Alliance likes to talk like they ain’t – aren’t – so corrupt as all the rest of us. A fair government. Everyone equal. Everyone contributing to the whole of one great society.
The Alliance talks a whole lot of xiong mao niao, if you ask me.
All the money owing, all the money that was meant to go to paying for my med training, all that – gone. Government property in exchange for the lease of land that they say expired two years ago.
They drop my father on a gou shi moon circling a gou shi planet that hasn’t turned out anything worth eating since it’s been settled. They let him make it into a prime piece of farm land, and then when he dies treat him like he was a tenant.
That farm was his life.
There come days where I don’t know who to hate more; the Reavers for killing my family, or the Alliance for screwing them over after the fact.
I petitioned them too. In debt up to my eyeballs, not a living relative in the known worlds, I pleaded with them to waive the fees.
Not a hope.
Not a stroke of pity or fellow-feeling or fairness.
So it’s up to them what I’ve come to.
Them and the gorram Reavers.