Her Celestial Farm on the Scrapyard Planet (by Kay Lucas) novel Chapter 617

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Chapter 617 The Veteran at the Slum Door

He pressed the call button. It rang twice before a hoarse voice came through. “Hello? Who’s this?”

“Dale, it’s me. Cyrus.” He paused. “You home? I’d like to come by and see you.”

Cyrus got into a hovercar and gave an address.

He knew the place, out on the far edge of Centria Planet, in the old district, close to the waste- processing plant.

The people who lived there were the low-income kind. The rent was cheap, the surroundings grim, and the air always carried a sour, rotten smell you couldn’t quite place.

The hover car drove for nearly two hours, the scenery outside growing bleaker the whole way.

The high-rises gradually gave way to low, run-down apartment blocks. Fewer and fewer people on the streets, most of the roadside shops shuttered, their roll-down gates layered thick with dust.

A faint odor began to seep into the air, rotting garbage or something else, hard to say, but the kind that makes you reach to cover your nose on instinct.

The hover car stopped at the mouth of a narrow alley, and the driver glanced back at him with something odd in his eyes.

Probably couldn’t fathom why anyone would come to a place like this on purpose.

Cyrus paid and got out.

He stood at the mouth of the alley and looked around.

The alley was narrow, the plaster peeling off the walls on both sides to bare the gray brick underneath.

The ground was pitted and uneven, puddles of dirty water pooling in the dips.

He was about to head in when something at the far end of the alley caught the corner of his

eye.

A figure with its back to him, bent at the waist, digging through a trash bin.

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Chapter 617 The Veteran at the Slum Door

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Two children crouched beside it, one around seven or eight, the other five or six, picking up the cardboard and plastic bottles that had fallen by the bin and carefully tucking them into a battered woven sack.

Cyrus stopped in his tracks.

He recognized that stooped, digging back.

The man had gotten a lot thinner, and his back had a bit of a hunch to it now, but the breadth of his shoulders was still there; the frame was still there.

Dale Cliff. He’d lived up to the name, once tall and solid as a mountain, and charging on the battlefield, he could hold off the fire of three Swarmborn all on his own.

Back then, his shoulders were thick as a wall, and his arms were heavy enough to hoist a piece of heavy equipment one-handed.

But now that faded old jacket hung off him, empty, like it had been draped over a coat rack.

His back was bent, his whole body shrunk in on itself, a mountain of a man turned into a thin figure picking bottles out of a trash bin.

Cyrus didn’t step up to greet him.

He stood at the mouth of the alley and looked at that back for a long, long time.

It felt like a wad of cotton was lodged in his throat, impossible to swallow down or cough back

He took out his device and dialed Dale’s number.

The figure in the alley straightened up, fished the device out of his pocket, and pressed it a little clumsily. “Hello? Cyrus? You here?”

Cyrus pressed down the tremor in his voice. “I-I’m here, just got out of the car… T-Think I’m a little lost, though. Send me your location, would you?”

Dale answered, then turned his head and said something in a low voice to the two children.

The kids immediately gathered up the scrap off the ground, packed it into the sack, and fell in behind Dale, hurrying off toward the far end of the alley.

Cyrus watched that thin figure and the two children duck into an even narrower alley, and only then did he start walking, following at a distance.

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He kept his pace slow and held the gap, making sure Dale wouldn’t notice him, but close enough to catch his every move.

They walked maybe five minutes before turning into the stairwell of a run-down apartment block.

The stairs were narrow and steep, the walls covered in dark grime and graffiti.

Dale climbed one step at a time, the sack in one hand, the two children by the other.

His legs didn’t look too steady. He had to pause on every step, as if his knees couldn’t bear the weight of his own body.

The two kids walked ahead, not rushing him, just waiting quietly, and the little one even reached back to tug at the hem of his shirt, like she was helping him keep his balance.

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