 Where did Mia grow up?
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! I The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship. My name is Mia Havero. The last contact the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was almost 150 years ago. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested hills. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird, and in just a moment it was gone. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach if it's really going to come back.
 a space ship
 Earth  a space ship  Tintera  The Third Level