Jack of Harts

Reina Ono told everyone she signed up for military service on her eighteenth birthday. The problem is that computer records were messed up pretty bad the day the Shang attacked. And what was left could be easily massaged to say what anyone wanted it to say. Many people started new lives, or walked away from lives they didn’t like, in the days after The War began. Reina could have been fifteen for all I knew the day I met her on Sunnydale. I personally think she was sixteen or seventeen, but that didn’t matter much at the time. A lot of people grew up quick when The War came for us. I knew how many friends all of us had lost. Who was I tell her some calendar was going to deny her the right to fight for them? So that’s how Reina became the first Neko in the Cowboys. She told us she was eighteen, a legal adult with the right to sign her life away on the dotted line, and everybody from the recruiting officer on up to Major Wolf pretended to believe her. That’s the day she became part of our family.

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