Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci Read Free Book Online Page A

life there. My imagination swelled at the thought of all of that land. I pictured a house built on what I supposed was a desert. I pictured the sky, filled with colors I could only pretend to know. I imagined cooling myself in the waters that I saw cut across the expanse. But in the end, I always had to return to my sorry state of being stuck on this station. And whenever my thoughts returned to the here and now, the loneliness was too much to bear. My reverie would end when the station rotated away, showing only space.
    Then I would return to the underguts a little smaller. And I gladly suffered through any one of Heckleck’s myriad conspiracy theories and reminiscences just to hear someone’s voice.
    “Why doesn’t anyone live down there now?” I asked.
    “No one can live down there,” he said.
    “But they did at one time,” I said.
    “Yes. But once everything got taken, miners moved on to the next place there was a rush for. And those that couldn’t had the misfortune to be stuck here on the station. There were some who stayed and lived down there for a while. Hangers on. But even they eventually gave up when supplies became so short as to make living unlivable.”
    “But why not make a go of it?” I said. “Why not try to make the planet flourish?”
    “There are many places that are not made for staying,” Heckleck said. “They are too harsh, too hard, and too far away from whatever you call home. You don’t root where you don’t have to, unless you’re unlucky.”
    It was true. One of the most remarkable things that I noticed about the Yertina Feray was the lack of children. No one wanted to breed in such a lost place. The few that were here were likely to never see their own home worlds. They grew up deprived of anything but frontier culture.
    “But a person could live there,” I said.
    “You could. But the land is so depleted from the stripping of the planet that not much grows,” he said. “Some insects and organisms. But even the animals left that place.”
    “Except alin flowers,” I said. “On the Dren Line. I looked it up.”
    The flower was the only bright thing in my bin. I’d learned everything on how to care for it. It was a difficult task because the alin was not an easy plant to keep alive. I’d even been forced to give a cutting of it back to Tournour in order to get a bit of soil to help it thrive. I had been surprised to discover that it was a rare plant and had some interesting and potent medicinal uses, especially its pollen.
    “Yes, but not enough of them to distill their pollen into any real use,” Heckleck said. “That would be worth something.”
    I could see Heckleck calculating the value of an abundance of alin flowers and then sighing at the impossibility of it ever happening.
    “If it were easy to settle on any planet and make it a home, then there would be more than Five Major Species,” Heckleck said. “The map is always changing.”
    I liked when Heckleck said that. It was comforting. It was as though you could accidentally find yourself in the right place, if it was the right time. The Yertina Feray had been on the good side of the map once, and nothing meant that it wouldn’t be again.
    I put my hand on the metal of the floor and thought about Quint. The Yertina Feray, Quint, and I all had something in common. We’d been left behind.
    “The Yertina Feray is lucky to be at a good crossroads in the known galaxy. It’s a useful transfer point for light skips between the fringe of the Central Systems and the farthest Outer Rim systems. But other than that, we’re a pretty useless place to be now,” Heckleck said.
    Which meant that there was a steady enough flow of people on the station for it to be safe. It would survive even in the leanest of times. I had heard tales of other space stations that were not so fortunate when the planets they surrounded had been stripped to nothing. Those stations had been abandoned, and the people on them had been left to