Over The Hills and Far Away

Ch 1

June 14, 2501. Sihnon. Apartment of Heron and Layla Serra.

Layla Serra was easy to pick out of a crowd. She has a certain air about her, a certain dignity that all the other women working in the factory lacked. It was more than the way she pulled her shoulders back and kept her back straight, more than way she kept her chin raised fifteen degrees at all times and never let her lips part unintentionally. Those were simply mannerisms she had picked up along the way. She was born glowing, radiating a light that only the soul can see, and as she grew older, that light only became brighter.

But it was doused in shadow. Living in Sihnon’s largest industrial city was not kind to anyone. Layla’s hands were coarse like a worker’s hands. Her eyes were rimmed with dark circles, her lips ornamented with lines of sadness. She was thirty-two years old, but she could have easily passed for forty, maybe older. She was sitting on the edge of her daughter’s bed, running her worn fingers through her daughter’s soft, dark curls (so much like hers once were before she cut her hair short), one stroke after another, after another.

“Mother.” The tone of Inara’s voice wasn’t threatening, wasn’t commanding, wasn’t whining, it wasn’t begging. It was barely anything – but it was something. For a moment, Layla hesitated. Already, Inara spoke like one of them. Already, there was so much of her mother in her.

“Did I ever tell you the story of how I met your father?” Layla asked gently.

“Yes. The two of you met while you were in school. You dropped out to marry him when you were seventeen,” Inara answered quickly. She pulled away, forcing Layla to pull away her fingers, and turned around to face her mother. “What’s the point of this?”

Layla’s features were a perfect mask. Her voice was a perfectly tuned note, soothing and but authoritative. Inara looked at her with analytic eyes. “Did I ever tell you what I was studying?”

Inara looked down a