The Campus

"The Campus" was the nickname given to the Child Refugee Center in Cambora, Luyten by Abigail. By 2537, the Campus occupied a collective eighteen square kilometers across the city's southern districts and was divided into three discontinuous regions. The Campus was located near the city's southern freight hub, and was considered an eyesore by local residents despite its attempts to seamlessly incorporate itself into the surrounding architecture.
The Campus, initially built only a quarter of the size, was designed to provide housing, education, and other services to children displaced from their homes and families during conflicts such as the . It saw rapid expansion during the early 2530s in response to the influx of orphans during the . While the CAA made efforts to distribute child refugees to orphanages across all of the colonies to manage workload and hide the true scale of planetary losses from the public eye, it was not uncommon for those same children to be redistributed to more centralized locations such as the Campus as worlds continued to fall.
The Campus housed children from infancy to adulthood. If a child did not find a suitable family by the age of eighteen, they were directed to the for recruitment. This was overwhelmingly the most common outcome for children at the Campus during the war, as the number of children significantly outnumbered the number of families seeking to adopt from the center. Children unfit for military use were instead sent to other refugee facilities on Luyten with little direction.
The recruited children from the Campus for the . While Alpha Company only received a handful of their recruits from the Campus, Beta, Gamma, and Delta Companies drew from the Campus in increasing numbers as planets continued to fall. Erin McAlister, one of the residents of the Campus, was recruited into Beta Company after spending no more than two years at the facility.
Many children at the Campus, due to arriving at a young age, do not remember their homeworlds, family, names, or other features of their identity. These children are assigned information by the Campus for record keeping purposes, but these records are generally never shared with the children. Notably, Abigail never knew what surname she was assigned during her eleven years at the Campus, nor celebrated a particular day to represent her date of birth. Erin McAlister's surname was assigned by the Campus and appears on her post-war record.
Many children, including Abigail, would sneak out from the Campus and explore the city. While this was in violation of the Campus rules and regulations, only extreme cases that involved police action resulted in any punishment due to the lack of staff.