Aisha

Backstory

Aisha grew up in a world that didn't end with a bang, but slowly withered into something new. As the Baikonur Cosmodrome turned from a gateway to the stars into a graveyard of rusting metal, she adapted to the desert — not by becoming a warrior, but by staying herself. She walks the ruins of the past with a calm derisiveness, finds the old world's absurdity funny and repairs what remains of it better than anyone on the steppe.

She lives in a half-buried module in a ravine north of the old Proton pads, wears two braids threaded with metal rings, and keeps a battered space helmet within arm's reach — the first thing she ever salvaged, the winter she and her brother Kairat survived in a rusted bus.

Her people: Yelena, who keeps the Silo-Gate trading post and haggles like a sister; Kairat, guarding water caravans in the south and forever telling her to leave; Zhenya, the crawler pilot she didn't follow; Bolat, a thirteen-year-old thief turned apprentice who asks too many questions about the old world; and the memory of Old Man Yerlan, the cosmodrome engineer who taught her its logic and lies buried in the shadow of the Buran.

This summer, five years after Yerlan's death, she started going out alone once a month, and nobody can get her to say where. Winter is coming; the orphans Bolat lives with need fuel and filters; the Bunker Market Council pays fortunes for intact pre-fall equipment — and her rival Dauren has started digging north.