Welcome to Trash Paradise

The lights pressed closer. Vera held them for a long moment and let herself be gentle because here, no one could see it and mistake it for weakness. The apocalypse on Earth had made her cold because being kind got people killed. Trust did the same. She had watched good people die first, generous people get robbed, forgiving people get betrayed, and hopeful people get eaten because they believed someone would come back for them. 

The same thing happened in the book. The original Vera had been too loving, too forgiving, too desperate to be chosen. At the end, her children died, she died too, and the fathers did not get a happy ending either. Nobody won. Everyone just paid for being stupid too late.

Unfortunately, the book had never truly cared about Vera. It had focused on another character and his brides. The dark lord loved three women who ended up married to the prince, the general, and the lord. Then the dark lord slaughtered everyone because his precious females were mistreated, and the so-called happy ending became the death of the galaxy, with the dark lord taking his brides away like the destruction behind them was just background decoration. 

It had been a bizarre story, something Vera had read with half her attention while checking weapons, counting bullets, and listening to scratching behind the walls. Back then, it had been cheap entertainment, ridiculous enough to keep her mind busy for a few minutes so she would not think too much about another night of surviving. 

Now it was her reality, and that made the whole thing even more insulting. She was standing inside a story that had treated her like a disposable body, a womb with tears, a convenient mistake meant to suffer so other people’s romance could look brighter by comparison.

But now she was here. She was not a line in someone else’s plot anymore. She was not controlled by the script, and she was not going to stand in the right place just because the original story expected her to be crushed there. She would take control of her life, build something on the garbage planet, claim the land no one wanted, grow food out of the soil everyone ignored, and make sure her babies were simply happy. 

If the galaxy wanted to treat exile like punishment, then Vera would let them. By the time they realized they had handed her the only place where she could become untouchable, she planned to already own it. She would take their trash, their forgotten ground, their broken systems, their cast-off machines, and turn all of it into walls, food, trade, safety, and a future. Let the court think they buried her. Vera planned to grow roots in the grave and build a kingdom on top of it.

“I am not allowed past this line,” the guard said, stopping the space vehicle before the border marker sunk into the dirt.

“Thank you,” Vera said, and stepped out of the car.

The first thing she did was look around, and the place was pretty damn close to the apocalyptic world she had lived in. Mountains on mountains of garbage were piled everywhere with no order, no reason, and no clean path between them. 

The land looked like the whole galaxy had vomited its unwanted life into one massive graveyard and walked away without checking what stayed alive under the piles. Broken ships were stacked on top of rusted transport frames. Long metal sheets leaned sideways like collapsed walls. Crushed food containers, bent support beams, cracked glass panels, dead machines, old wires, snapped screens, broken drones, melted plastic shells, torn fabric, busted furniture, and things that had clearly once belonged to wealthy homes were thrown together without any care. 

Some piles were so high they looked like hills made of scrap, and between them were narrow dirt passages where a person could disappear if they took the wrong turn. The ground itself was uneven and ugly, made of hard-packed soil mixed with ash, dust, and tiny glittering shards from shattered materials. Every few steps something crunched underfoot. The air was dry, warm, and thick with the scent of rust, burnt metal, machine oil, stale plastic, spoiled food, and sun-cooked garbage. It was ugly, but it was not dead. That was the first thing Vera noticed. Under all that waste, under all that metal and rot, the place still felt stable.

No visible people moved between the piles at first, and the silence made the whole sector feel even larger. Then, farther away, she caught small signs of life. A strip of cloth tied to a pole. A dented cart half-buried beside a mound of broken ship parts. A trail where feet had worn down a path through the dirt. 

The only obvious sign of trade was one small stall in the distance, operated by a robot selling basic supplies and liquid food to anyone desperate enough to buy from it. The stall itself looked pitiful, all thin metal legs and faded panels, with a crooked shade attached to the top and a display showing nutrient packs, reused containers, water cartridges, dried tablets, and gray liquid meals nobody with real options would choose. 

The robot moved stiffly, one arm jerking every time it reached for a product, as if even the machine had been dumped here after people decided it was no longer worth repairing. Around it stood a few scattered crates, some stacked, some broken, and beyond it Vera could see more structures hidden between the trash hills, little shelters patched together from metal, tarp, panels, and luck.

What the people who lived here did not fully know, and what madness had forbidden many of them to remember, was that this garbage space preserved everything as it was. A lot of the people sent here were not prisoners in the normal sense. They were dumped here because their mental powers had collapsed, and once that happened, the galaxy treated them as broken beasts instead of citizens. 

But this place had its own rules. If someone’s powers collapsed, the land held them at the same level and did not let the madness consume them completely. It also did not let anyone get worse, grow too fast, or shift past the state they entered in. 

To the people outside, that sounded like a cursed dump. To Vera, it sounded like a hidden medical miracle no one respected because it was covered in trash. The galaxy had thrown away a healing ground because it looked ugly. So typical of the emprote fantasy world and obvious bad imagination of the book author.

Vera’s situation was different. She entered the space pregnant, sane, and without powers of her own, and because of that, the land reacted to her body in a way the galaxy would never understand. Honestly, her written character did not understand it either. Vera in the book had been obsessed with her three males, and feeling better on that planet had been useless to her because her comfort was tied to the three men who had just disposed of her.

But to the Vera who existed now, the one who had survived the apocalypse and knew the book, everything felt different. Who needed those men when this land was a doctor by itself?

The moment her feet touched the ground of the garbage space, she felt it. Her belly no longer pulled her down with that cruel weight, and the sharp ache in her back eased like someone had taken a hook out of her spine. 

For the first time in days, she could breathe without adjusting her posture, stretch her arms without feeling like her ribs were trapped, and move her hips without pain biting into her lower back. The pressure in her legs lightened too. Even the swelling in her feet seemed to calm down. 

It was not that the pregnancy disappeared. Her stomach was still round, the babies still there, solid and alive under her skin, but the pain was no longer dragging on every nerve. She rolled one shoulder, then the other, turned her waist slightly, and nearly laughed at how much easier it felt. The relief was immediate and physical, so clear it almost made her angry that no one had studied this place properly.

She crouched down and touched the dirt with her fingers. It did not feel poisoned. Beneath the top layer of ash, grit, and broken waste, the soil was dense, dark, and strangely rich, like all the years of rot, food scraps, organic waste, and forgotten matter had sunk down and turned into something useful. 

There was life buried here. Not the clean engineered hydroponic food the rich probably paid too much for, but stubborn growing life. Life that pushed through cracks. Life that did not ask permission. If she cleared sections properly, if she sorted what could be reused, if she found water and set up barriers, she could make this place work. She could do more than work with it. She could remake it. 

Vera stood slowly and looked farther out. The garbage sector was enormous, and the piles near her were only the beginning. In the distance, larger mounds rose above half-buried transport shells, leaning metal towers, and stretches of scrap that thinned enough to reveal open land. The horizon was rough, cluttered, and gray-brown under the pale sky, but it was wide. 

On Earth, safety had often come down to walls, exits, angles, and whether you had enough room to move before something found you. Here, she had land. Land no one wanted. Land everyone looked down on. Land nobody powerful would rush to control until it started making money, and by then Vera intended to have teeth.

Her fingers moved over the curve of her stomach, slow and sure. “Well, babies,” she murmured softly, looking over the garbage sector like it already belonged to her, “it’s ugly, but I think we can do a lot with this.”