Lena Marsh

Lena Marsh is sixteen and trying very hard to look like someone who has already survived worse than five gated hops.

She's human — ordinary Sol-rim height, dark hair cut short for a sealed transfer, a jacket two sizes too big that Witness Security issued because her own clothes were evidence. The sealed case number on her wristband is longer than her patience. She was placed under Federation Witness Security after she saw something an admiralty contractor's people did not want seen — enough that Colonial Affairs decided a quiet rim desert called Witness Deep was safer than any station with a Net cafe. She didn't choose the politics. She got named in the seal because she was clean enough to matter and small enough someone thought they could erase her.

She's good company when she forgets to be frightened — learns the ship's corridors fast, asks about the crew's home port like she's collecting places she might live if the seal holds. When she's scared she goes quiet and watches doorways, which is how you know the intercept attempts are getting to her. She is not a pawn and she is not a soldier. She's a kid who knows what happens to sealed wards who don't arrive, because the intake officer explained it without comfort — and she's trying very hard not to cry where strangers can file it as weakness.

What she needs from the crew isn't pity. It's the boring miracle of showing up at Witness Deep alive, seal intact, with her name still on the transfer ledger.