Veria Astri is a Vulpine healer, early twenties by her people's long-lived reckoning, granddaughter of Irina Astri-the greatest psychic warrior of her age. She was imprisoned in an Imperial quantum stasis loop approximately nine hundred years ago, during the final collapse of Vulpine resistance. She has only just been freed.

In the final years of the Vulpine war, Veria served as a field healer attached to evacuation operations on the galactic rim. She was junior caste-powerful for her age, undertrained by necessity, learning her abilities in the field because there was no longer time for proper instruction. She was not a warrior. She was not meant to be. Her grandmother had been insistent about that, in the rare moments Irina was present enough to be insistent about anything: you keep people alive, that is enough, that is everything.

On the day of the final battle, Veria was three systems away, coordinating the evacuation of wounded and non-combatants. She got them out. All of them. She confirmed the ships launched, watched them fold into hyperspace, and then turned her own vessel back toward the battle.

She never made it. Imperial forces had already moved to seal the corridor. She ran. She hid. She spent six months in frontier space, surviving on salvage and desperation, telling herself she would find a way back, find out what happened, find Irina. Instead, an Imperial sweep found her-a Vulpine psionic moving through frontier space alone was too valuable a target to pass up. They didn't kill her. They put her in a box.