“Yes,” Ahsoka said. “But it’s not just food. There are several water recyclers and whatever medical supplies I could scrounge. There’s also a lot of junked-up equipment. You know, sharp blades and circuits you have to be careful not to overload, because they might blow up on you.”
“But you still want us to wait,” Hoban said. “While our home dies underneath us.”
“I want you to think,” Ahsoka said.
“Lay off, Hoban. She’s right,” Neera said. She turned to the board and tried firing a crokin disc. It missed, bouncing off the peg that concealed Ahsoka’s piece.
“What do you want us to do?” Vartan asked. “We can’t slow down in the fields much more than we already are. The Imperials will notice and start withholding food again.”
“Can you spare Miara and Kaeden for a few days?” Ahsoka asked. “I’d like to take them with me. Miara can start building those bigger locks you talked about, and Kaeden and I can organize the rest of our potential gear. I can fix a machine well enough, but Kaeden’s more familiar with the local geography. She can help me decide where to put it.”
Vartan looked at the girls and nodded.
“We’ll tell the Imperials you’re sick, if they ask,” he said. “And we’ll mysteriously forget where you live so they can’t check on you themselves. It’s not much of a cover story, but it’s the best we can do.”
“It’ll be fine,” Ahsoka said. “We only need a few days to get organized, and then we’ll be able to check in with you again. In the meantime, keep your heads down. We’re all in enough danger as it is.”
Miara’s gaze turned to the spot on the floor where Tibbola had been gunned down, but Hoban only glared at Ahsoka. If he had any protests to make, he didn’t voice them. Instead, Selda arrived at the table with what passed for a hot dinner under the new Imperial restrictions, and soon everyone was too busy eating to talk.
Jenneth Pilar sat in his new temporary office and scrolled through the numbers. It was therapeutic, seeing his calculations add up the way he wanted them to, over and over and over again. He was encouraged by the scarcity of errors and the smallness of the margins. He had everything figured out perfectly. Here, in this bare little room on this soon-to-be-bare world, he had calculated life and death and gotten paid for it. Not bad work, all things considered, though the food was terrible.
Raada was a tedious little place, but it would serve its purpose. The Empire would get what it wanted and then be on its way. The farmers would have their freedom again, for all the good it would do them. They really should have thought of the risks before they became farmers. Jenneth turned a blind eye to his part in their incipient suffering, a privilege that came with never really having suffered.
He looked out the window at the ordered rows in the fields and then the grasslands beyond them, where nothing useful could grow. Beyond that were the low-lying hills that made up the rest of the moon’s surface — rocky, useless, and probably cold once the sun went down. But something about them niggled at Jenneth’s sense of order. He hadn’t included the hills in his calculations, because the planetary scans he’d studied had assured him they were barren. At the same time, their mere existence should merit their inclusion in his formula. He hated unbalanced equations.
In the morning he would commandeer a ship and take a closer look. He couldn’t go now, as much as he suddenly wished to, because it was too late in the day. It was nearly curfew, with the sun setting and the last poor ragged souls stumbling home after a hard day of near slavery in service of the Empire. If only they knew what awaited them.
Jenneth looked with great distaste at his dinner, a tube of pure nutrition that left his insides feeling somehow cheated, and counted the days until he was away from this moon. It couldn’t come soon enough. He pulled up his calculations again and let the running tally of labor, production, yield, and destruction wash over him. Not bad work, the jobs he did, and he was going to make sure he kept doing well enough that the Empire would keep paying him to do it. He had no intention of ending up like the benighted souls who called Raada home: destitute and marooned on a lifeless rock.
They talked in the fields. The Imperials couldn’t hear what they plotted there, and neither could the girl who called herself Ashla.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Kaeden said. “Ashla wants us to wait.”
“Ashla isn’t from here,” Hoban said. “She got to Raada only just before the Imperials did, and she wouldn’t even tell you her name at first. We don’t know anything about her. For all we know, she’s with them.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kaeden said, but even Miara looked hesitant.
Kaeden bristled. She didn’t like it when other people speculated about her feelings, especially when they were right. Neera held up a hand.
“Look, Kaeden, I know you like her, but think about it,” Neera said. “Ashla said it herself. She doesn’t understand farming. She doesn’t really understand what we lose every day this blasted plant is in the ground. She has a ship. She can go whenever she wants.”
“But she hasn’t!” Kaeden said.
“Anyone with any sense has left,” Neera said. “Anyone who can. And yet she stays. Why do you think that is?”
“Maybe she likes us,” Kaeden said.
“Oh, Kaeden,” Neera said. It was almost kind but edged too far into pity to be pleasant to hear.
“Don’t treat me like a child, Neera,” Kaeden said, and hated how petulant she sounded. “And don’t you dare involve my sister in anything dangerous.”
“I’ll do what I want,” Miara said. Kaeden looked sharply at her. They were almost the same height now. When had that happened?
“All we’re saying is that when Miara builds things for Ashla’s stores, she also builds things for us,” Hoban said. “It makes sense to have our supplies split up. That way if something happens to Ashla, we’re not strung out on our own.”
Kaeden hesitated. She wanted to trust Ashla, but what Hoban was saying made sense. Ashla had said a lot of it herself, or at least implied it. She’d worked with Selda without telling any of them, and she’d stolen her own ship. It couldn’t do much harm for Kaeden to help her own crew make their own plans.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m in. Tomorrow Miara and I will go with Ashla and learn as much as we can. And we’ll share it with you.”
“Good,” Hoban said. He looked up and saw that Vartan was heading back toward them, so he turned away from the girls and focused on his job.
Hoban was watering today. The work didn’t take a lot of his concentration but required strong shoulder muscles, which he had in plenty. Miara was too little to be more than a runner, so she’d been carrying messages. Hoban’s shoulders ached under the weight. He didn’t mind hard work, but this was extreme, and it was only a matter of time before he got too weak to work on the rations he was given. And if he was feeling it, the others were, too.
The girls would crumple first, he knew. They were strong, but they weren’t indestructible. Miara was already attracting too much attention from the Imperials as they questioned her abilities in the field. If they sent her off, she’d lose what small rations she was still getting. Hoban was helping them, even if Ashla couldn’t see it. She just didn’t understand farming like he did, but she would, and then she’d realize that they were all in this together.