Chapter 03

Chapter 03

KAEDEN SHOWED UP on Ahsoka’s doorstep bright and early the following morning with two ration packs and a—

“What is that?” Ahsoka asked, staring at the mangled bits of scrap Kaeden held under her arm.

“Your first patient, if you’re interested,” Kaeden replied cheerfully.

“I can’t fix it if I don’t know what it was supposed to do in the first place,” Ahsoka protested, but held out her hands anyway.

Kaeden took this as an invitation to enter. She deposited the broken pieces into Ahsoka’s hands and then sat on the bed, putting the rations down beside her.

“It’s the thresher I lost a fight with,” Kaeden said. If she felt strange about sitting on the place where Ahsoka slept, she gave no sign. Then again, the bed was Ahsoka’s only furniture, besides the low table.

Ahsoka spread the pieces on the table and sat down on the floor to look at them more closely. She supposed that the contraption might have been a thresher. But it could have also been a protocol droid, for all the mess it was in.

“I’d hate to see what happens when you win fights,” Ahsoka said.

“It was not my fault.” Kaeden said it with the air of a person who has made the argument, unsuccessfully, several times before. “One moment we were cruising along, set to make quota and everything, and the next thing I knew, disaster.”

“How’s the leg?” Ahsoka asked. Her fingers moved across the table, rearranging parts and trying to figure out if anything was salvageable.

“It’ll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow,” Kaeden said. “I’ll keep my harvest bonus, particularly if I don’t have to pay to replace the thresher.”

Ahsoka gave her a long look.

“I’ll pay you instead, I mean,” Kaeden said quickly. “Starting with breakfast. Dig in.”

She tossed Ahsoka a ration pack. Ahsoka didn’t recognize the label, except that it wasn’t Imperial or Republic.

“No place like home,” Kaeden said, ripping her own pack open. “There’s not much point in living on a farm planet if you have to import food. These just make it easier to keep track of who gets what.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Ahsoka said. She tore the packaging open and took a sniff. She had definitely eaten worse.

“Anyway, can you fix my thresher?” Kaeden asked.

“Why don’t you tell me what went wrong with it, and I’ll see what I can do,” Ahsoka said.

She turned back to the table and continued to move the parts around while Kaeden told her about the mishap. Ahsoka was used to the way clones told war stories, but Kaeden could have given them a run for their credits. To hear her tell it, the thresher had suddenly developed sentience and objected to its lot as a farming implement, and only Kaeden’s quick thinking—and heavy boots—had prevented it from taking over the galaxy.

“And when it finally stopped moving,” Kaeden said, winding up, “my sister pointed out that I was bleeding. I said it was only fair, since the thresher was bleeding oil, but then I passed out a little bit, so I guess it was worse than I thought. I woke up in medical with this fancy bandage and the stupid machine in a tray beside my cot.”

Ahsoka laughed, surprising herself, and held up a bent piece of what had once been the thresher’s coolant system.

“Here’s the problem,” she said. “Well, I mean, part of your problem. If you can replace this, I can rebuild the thresher.”

“Replace it?” Kaeden’s smile died. “Do you think you can just, I don’t know, unbend it somehow?”

Ahsoka looked down. This wasn’t like the Temple, or even her field experience commanding troops. There were no supply lines and no backup, not without cost. Replacement was a last resort.

“I can give it a shot,” she said. “Now tell me more about how things work around here.”

The previous night, Kaeden had not been overly curious about Ahsoka’s reasons for coming to Raada. As the girl chattered on about work rotations and crop cycles, it occurred to Ahsoka that having reasons might not be important. As Kaeden described it, Raada was a good place to lead an unmomentous life: hard work, ample food, and just enough official enforcement that local freelancing was discouraged. No one asked too many questions, and as long as you met your work quotas, your presence was unremarkable. Ahsoka Tano wouldn’t do very well here, but Ashla would do just fine.

Ahsoka looked for something heavy she could use to hit the metal. If she was going to fix things professionally, she was going to have to invest in some tools. She mentally counted her credits and tried to figure out how many of them she could spare against an unknown future. She would have to make an investment at some point, and tools would help sell her cover story.

She ended up using the heel of her boot and hitting the piece against the floor to avoid breaking the table. It wasn’t top quality when she was finished, but the part would no longer let coolant leak out. She set to reassembling the thresher around it.

“I’ve left my ship at the spaceport,” Ahsoka said. “Do I have to register it with anyone?”

“No,” Kaeden said. “Just make sure you lock it up tight. There are more than a few opportunists around here.”

She meant thieves, Ahsoka understood. Nowhere was perfect. “That’s why I left most of my gear on board,” she lied. “It’s more secure than this house is.”

“We can help you with that,” Kaeden said. “My sister and I, I mean. She’s good at making locks, and I’m good at convincing people to leave you alone.”

“When you’re not losing fights with machinery, I assume?” Ahsoka said.

“Most people lose arms and legs when things go badly,” Kaeden said in her own defense. “I’m too good for that.”

Kaeden rolled off the bed and walked over to take a look at what Ahsoka was doing. She hummed approvingly and then pointed to the random pieces still on the table.

“What are those for?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Ahsoka replied. “But they didn’t seem to have a place in the machine, so I left them aside. I think it should work, once you refill the coolant and refuel the lines.”

“I can do that when I reattach the blade,” Kaeden said.

She flipped a switch and the repulsors fired up, lifting the thresher off the table about a meter. She turned it off just as quickly.

“Excellent,” she said. “I’ll test the steering and the other parts when I’m outside, but the repulsors were the part I was worried about. It’s not much good if it can’t fly.”

Ahsoka wasn’t sure how much good it would be if it wouldn’t steer, but she was also not the expert, so she let it pass.

“You’re welcome,” she said. She pulled the rest of the food out of the ration pack and ate it quickly. Kaeden watched her eat.

“I’ll pay you in food, then?” the girl asked. “I mean, it’s a good way to start, and later we can work out other arrangements.”

“Can I trade rations for tools?” Ahsoka asked.

“No,” Kaeden said. “I mean, food rations aren’t worth much to those of us who have been here a while.”

Ahsoka considered her options. She hadn’t had time to take a full inventory of the ship, and it was possible that the tools she needed were there. And she did need to eat.

“Just this once,” she said, hoping she sounded like someone who was experienced at driving a hard bargain. “Next time we’re going to negotiate before I do any repairs.”

Kaeden picked up the thresher and smiled. She still seemed a little guarded, which suited Ahsoka just fine. She was, she reminded herself, not trying to make friends, particularly not friends who were at perfect ease sitting on her bed. That sort of thing bespoke a level of intimacy in most cultures. The Jedi Temple was not a place where such things were encouraged, and Ahsoka never felt motivated strongly enough to go around the rules the way that certain others had.

“I left the crate outside,” Kaeden said. “You can come and get it.”

Ahsoka followed her out the door and saw the promised payment—food enough for a month, probably, and maybe longer if she was careful with it. Kaeden was right: food was only worthwhile to trade if you were new. Clearly, shortage was not an issue. She dragged the crate inside as Kaeden made her way down the street, her limp much less noticeable than it had been the day before. Alone again, Ahsoka lifted the crate onto the table, and fought off the childish impulse to do the work with her mind instead of her arms. The Force wasn’t meant to be used so lightly, and it wasn’t as though throwing boxes around was real training. Her focus needed to be elsewhere.

Using the Force was a natural extension of herself. Not using it all the time was strange. She would have to practice, really practice with proper meditation, or someday she would need her abilities and be unable to respond in time. She’d been lucky to escape Order 66, and her escape had not been without terrible cost. The other Jedi, the ones who had died, hadn’t been able to save themselves, powerful or otherwise.

She felt the familiar tightness in her throat, the same strangling grief that came every time she imagined what had happened when the clone troopers turned. How many of her friends had been shot down by men they’d served with for years? How many of the younglings had been murdered by a man wearing a face they implicitly trusted? And how did the clones feel after it was done? She knew the Temple had burned; she had received the warning not to return. But she didn’t know where any of her friends had been during the disaster. She knew only that she couldn’t find them afterward, that her sense of them was gone, as if they had ceased to exist.

Ahsoka felt herself spiraling down through her grief and reached out to grasp something, anything, to remind her of the light. She found the green fields of Raada, fields she hadn’t even seen with her own eyes yet. For a few moments, she let herself get lost in the rhythm of growing things that needed only the sun and some water to live. That simplicity was heartening, even if at that particular moment she couldn’t remember exactly what Master Yoda had said about plants and the Force.

The extra pieces of Kaeden’s thresher were still on the table. Ahsoka leaned down and picked them up, absently weighing them in her hands before she put them in her pocket. There, they jingled against the rings she’d taken off the ship console the day before. If she kept accumulating tech at this rate, she was going to need bigger pockets.

Thinking about what she needed reminded Ahsoka that she really ought to check her ship for tools and other useful items. She looked around the house quickly: the crate was on the table, but it was nondescript, and the panel over her credits in the shower was secure. It didn’t look like anything that would appeal to a thief, but Ahsoka was uneasy as she shut the door behind her.

“I hope Kaeden needs something else fixed soon,” she said under her breath to a nonexistent R2-D2. “I’d feel better if I had a lock.”

One of the problems with spending a lot of time with an astromech droid was that one tended to continue talking to it even when it was no longer there to talk to.

Ahsoka walked up the street, toward the center of town and the spaceport. She paid more attention to her surroundings this time, noticing the little shops perched on corners, waiting for customers. Most of them sold the same goods and sundries, and Ahsoka needed none of them. The larger houses in the center of town no longer looked intimidating now that Ahsoka had a place of her own to retreat to. Two places if she counted the ship, which was still parked in the spaceport, exactly as Ahsoka had left it. She opened the hatch and went inside.

It would draw too much attention if she did a flyover of the hills near her house. If she wanted to scout out the caves, she was going to have to do it with her feet. The house and the ship were a good start, but it would be nice to have a place she could go in an emergency.

“Food, tools, safe place in case I need to run,” she said out loud. She really should stop that. She missed R2-D2.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing.

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