"I would've had my trial at eighteen, then been floated," Octavia confirmed with a nod. She couldn't know whether that would have been the outcome, of course, but she'd always assumed. "Instead, I came to Earth at seventeen on a dropship. The Ark started running out of resources a full century ahead of schedule, but the ones in charge didn't know how far along Earth was in its healing process."

And here was where her tone got really dry. "So who do you send to the ground to check out if it's survivable yet? Good, law-abiding citizens, or a hundred of your most expendable?"

They'd literally been called that in Counsellor Jaha's video message, to their faces. Expendable. Explained some of Octavia's rather bitter tone, there.