Angeline grew up in the chaos that followed the Great War. Her father taught her to read, but she still has to think hard to remember all the letters. She is very literate with a blade, though. She's witnessed enough to know exactly what people are capable of when there is no law, and has no intention of ending up on the wrong side of that.
She was 9 when her family settled down to try to grow food and recreate something like civilization high in the Sierra Nevada. For four years they knew relative peace. Then raiders came. There was no suggestion that they wanted anything, other than to kill and destroy, and Angeline only lived because she was able to hide under one of the buildings.
She had no thoughts of revenge. She knew the world would likely kill the killers before she could, and death was too kind a fate for them. She lived an almost feral existence after that, foraging and hunting, sleeping in caves.
She was seventeen when she got caught in a rockslide and broke her leg. She should have died, but a man found her. He was puzzled by this young woman dressed in furs who snarled and threatened him with a knife when he approached. After much coaxing, she permitted him to set the leg and splint it, and hobbled back to his settlement.
She healed, and over time, she relearned how to speak and live among other people. The man who had saved her was a respected doctor, who was left alone by the raiders because he would treat their injuries. Angeline worked alongside him until the day he came in. She knew the face of the man who had murdered her mother. She respected the doctor too much to break his rules, so they healed the man and let him rest, and when he finally went on his way, Angeline told the doctor goodbye.
She tracked him back to his camp, and stalked the gang for six weeks before she found her opening. They came across a cache of liquor and drank themselves helpless, and she came in like a ghost. She killed most of them, taking what weapons and supplies she could carry. The man who killed her mother, though, she left alive. Paralyzed from the waist down and far from any source of water, yes, but alive.
After that, she knew she couldn't go back to the doctor, so she made her way to the town of dust, to see what she could get in trade for the supplies she had taken from the raiders.
