“How can you be so calm?” Miara demanded, her voice high. Ahsoka suspected that the bread was a bit stale and that focusing on chewing it was keeping the girl from full-on hysterics. “Where are you from?”
“Don’t bug her,” Kaeden said. Her voice was shaky. “Finish that, and we’ll go home.”
Kaeden wrestled the crokin board back onto the table. While Miara chewed obediently, Kaeden started firing pieces slowly, hitting the center target over and over again, even though that wasn’t how the game went. Ahsoka figured it gave her something to focus on.
“You have to take a piece if it’s there,” Ahsoka mused, looking at the board.
“What?” Kaeden said.
“In crokin,” Ahsoka clarified. “You don’t just get to take the shots you want. You have to shoot at your opponent’s pieces. So let’s do that.”
“Shoot with what?” Miara asked, her mouth full. “We don’t have a lot of blasters.”
“No,” Ahsoka said. “Not like that. The Imperials want a fast crop. So what you do is slow it down.”
“How?” Kaeden said. Both sisters looked better now. Ahsoka had successfully distracted them.
“I have no idea,” Ahsoka said. “I’m not a farmer. But Vartan will know, or one of the other crew leads. You still talk to each other in the fields, right? And it’s more difficult for the Imperials to overhear you there. You can organize yourselves that way. The crew leads will meet to discuss information and then pass it off to their crews.”
“That’s very smart,” Kaeden said. “And it doesn’t even break the rules. We’re allowed to meet with our crews.”
“I know. That’s what makes it such a good plan,” Ahsoka said with a wink.
“What are you going to do?” Miara asked. She swallowed the last mouthful of bread. “There’s a space in our crew if you want it, because Malat’s gone.”
Ahsoka considered it — she’d be a terrible farmer, and that would surely slow them down plenty — but then she had a better idea.
“No,” she said. “I’m going to stay a mechanic for now, but I’m going to stop being such a good one. If equipment can’t be fixed, that will only slow you down more.”
“We have to get moving,” Kaeden said. “It’s almost curfew and we have a bit of a walk.”
It wasn’t quite that late yet, but Ahsoka hardly needed to press the issue.
“Be safe,” Ahsoka told them. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Be careful when you tell Vartan my suggestion, but let him run with it if he agrees.”
The sisters nodded and headed for the door. Miara took the long way around the cantina floor to avoid stepping on the place where Tibbola had fallen, and Ahsoka watched as Kaeden let her. Then Ahsoka made her way to the bar. She should be going, too, but she wanted to have a word with Selda before she did. She sat on one of the stools before realizing she didn’t even know what she wanted to talk to him about.
“That was quick thinking, making sure the girls didn’t see,” Selda said. “I have a feeling you’ve seen too much, yourself.”
“No argument there,” Ahsoka told him wearily.
“Be careful, little one,” he said. Ahsoka started to protest, but he raised his real hand and she stopped. “Even if you’re not so little, you’re littler than me.”
She gave him a smile. It felt absurdly nice to be taken care of. Maybe that was what she needed, even if she didn’t need it very often. Before, when she’d faced death, she’d had Anakin to talk it over with afterward. She’d handled it on her own since then, of course, but that didn’t mean she liked it.
Selda poured all the leftovers into a container and passed it to her. The seal wasn’t as good as the one on the ration packs, but the food would still keep for several days. Ahsoka walked home quickly, calculating how much food she could lay her hands on and how long it would last, depending on whom she shared it with. She was still doing variations of the equation when she fell asleep.
Chapter 10
ONE WEEK BECAME TWO, and the crops grew slowly. The new Imperial overseers extended the shifts again so the farmers were in the fields for nearly the entirety of Raada’s daylight. They did not increase the food rations or the number of breaks, though they did allow for more water intake. Imperial efficiency at its finest.
Ahsoka spent her days smuggling food, medical supplies, and water recyclers out to the caves. She had found a networked set in the hills between her original base and where she’d hidden her ship. Selda was her chief supplier in town, though she knew other vendors must have been pitching in, too. She didn’t need to know all the details. She just had to do her part.
It had taken Vartan and the other experienced hands a while to identify what they were growing. They’d stalled the planting for as long as they possibly could. The plows all broke, and the mechanic was nowhere to be found, but then the Imperials had withheld food altogether and the farmers had gone back to work. The seeds were planted and watered, and now shoots could be seen sticking up from the soil. It was then that Vartan figured out what they were growing.
“It’s not even real food,” he said, his voice a disgusted whisper as they huddled around the crokin board at Selda’s. “It’s for their wretched nutritional supplements, you know, those things they make the military eat because they’re tasteless and bland but have all the things you need to live in them.”
“I don’t see why you find that so offensive,” Neera said. “Why do you care what Imperials eat?”
“Because this particular plant leeches everything from the soil it grows in,” Vartan said. “By the time we harvest, the fields will all be useless dirt. Nothing will grow for seasons, and it’s not like they’re going to pay us anything we can use to buy fertilizer with. The whole moon will be ruined.”
Kaeden and Miara exchanged worried glances. Raada was the only home they’d ever known, and they had no one else in the galaxy to look out for them. They had nowhere else to go.
“Are there other fields?” Ahsoka asked, her voice as low and calm as she could make it.
“No,” Vartan said. “The whole of Raada is nearly useless to begin with. That’s why there was never a Hutt presence or anything like that. We just had the overseers, and they were mostly reasonable, but I think the Empire scared them and they abandoned us.”
“I can understand that,” Neera said. Hoban glared at her. “I’m not saying I like it, but I understand it. Most of them have families, like Malat. Do you hate her for leaving?”
Hoban said nothing for a moment, and Ahsoka knew he was trying to stay angry, because the only other option he saw was hopelessness.
“Can we blow things up yet?” he asked, at last.
“Did you have something particular in mind?” Ahsoka asked.
“Do you?” Hoban demanded.
Ahsoka sighed, and decided it was time to lay all her cards on the table. Or at least most of her cards. If she kept holding out, it was only a matter of time before Hoban did something stupid, and that might put Kaeden and Miara in harm’s way.
“There are caves out in the hills,” she said. She took a crokin disc off the top of the pile and flicked it toward the center of the board. It landed neatly behind one of the pegs, blocking it from an opponent’s shot.
“Everyone knows that,” Hoban said. “There are too many to map effectively, and nothing grows out there, so no one goes there.”
“I go there,” Ahsoka said. “And I take all kinds of interesting things with me.”
“You’ve been setting up camps?” Kaeden said. “Without telling anyone?”
“Selda knows,” Neera said. Ahsoka raised an eyebrow and Neera shrugged. “Selda knows everything, and he’s the one who’d be supplying your food, I imagine.”