Book One – Chapter Eleven

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Carolina Novak was Carolina Bueren before the migration to Neo Sombra. She was nineteen years old when she and her older brother, Rex, were evacuated off Shadow. Their parents stayed behind.

The two of them managed to stay on Harvest Moon for over a year, living the best they could manage, and trying to forget everything they could about their homeworld. Just like the rest of Shadow’s former populace. Harvest, being a planet not unlike Shadow, had several opportunities for a farmer like Rex Bueren, but he, not unlike most of Shadow, was unsatisfied with their forced living situations and was unwilling to give up on his planet. Young and stubborn he made a decision, and he brought his sister along with him.

The two Bueren siblings kept their hands off of their reparation accounts, while scrimping and saving every cent they could to pay their passage to a Core Planet, ending up on Ariel, the closest they could get. It was their intention to approach a Parliamentary representative with the unheard of notion of purchasing an exclusively terraformed planet, a feat that had never been considered, especially by two Border Planet hillbillies like Rex and Carolina Bueren. Their only two chances lay with the fact that there were about five more planets and moons on the Outer Rim that had yet to be fully terraformed (and the Alliance generally didn’t care about their fate so much), and with the belief that what little money the survivors of Shadow had, they could pay their way through not only the terraforming, but the legalities of bureaucracy that would be inevitable.

However, as luck would have it, a young man from Shadow named James Novak found the Beurens on Ariel. Though they didn’t know it at the time, James was on the Core Planet for an entirely different reason.

Of course, having the rare similarity of being from the same Border Planet, James and the Buerens instantly connected. As they talked and trade