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Anna leaves a diminished Earth for Eudoxia, where she plans to help a fragile colony build the institutions and gentleness that can make a world livable.
Anna Volovodov endured the Free Navy's devastation on Earth while trying to keep her wife Namono and daughter Nami humane amid scarcity and fear. In the aftermath, her family joins a colonist transport rather than remaining in Abuja, accepting that Earth's smaller needs and a new settlement's larger possibilities have changed what home can mean.
Aboard the Abdel Rahman Badawi, Anna reads Tolstoy, prepares sermons, debates kindly with the ship's Humanist Society, and watches the first shape of a community form in cramped shared life. She and Nono expect to spend the rest of their lives on Eudoxia, helping the new population establish the first university, hospital, cathedral, and other institutions that could influence the world for generations. She mourns the lost future she imagined for Nami in Abuja, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, but sees that enough small departures from Earth can make a difference in a strained world.
Anna practices the patience trauma has taught her when Nami brings home Saladin, a bereaved classmate. Listening later to her daughter explain that the children must be gentle because they will spend their lives together, Anna finds the core of her next sermon. History may be made by vast forces, technologies, and particular people, but every scattered human community still has the choice to treat its neighbors carefully.
A middle-aged Europan pastor with a warm, attentive face and practical civilian clothes suited to low-gravity ship life; her specific hair and coloring are not described in this chapter.
Anna is a moral builder of the postwar diaspora, carrying her faith and attention to ordinary people into a new colony where community will be survival.
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