Chapter 10

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.”

“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.

AHSOKA GOT A terrible bargain for the ship, but she didn’t care. It was money she hadn’t had before she made the trade, and the ship was too noticeable, too easy to trace. She was better off without it, even though she was now much less mobile. She cleared every trace of herself from the cockpit and hold, and handed over the launch codes with only a moment’s hesitation.

The man who bought the ship had brown skin and black hair and said his name was Fardi, even though Ahsoka hadn’t asked. His daughters, or maybe nieces—Ahsoka wasn’t entirely clear on their relationship—had been the ones to meet her at the landing pad. They had the same coloring as Fardi, only their glossy black hair was long enough to sit on and completely straight. They’d chattered about the city, about where Ahsoka could find food and a place to stay, so Ahsoka had asked if they knew of anyone who might buy her ship for a decent price.

Or at least a nearly decent price. But the trade had made her a friend, and it wasn’t like she had bought the ship with her own credits in the first place.

The Fardi girls—it turned out Fardi was their family name—took Ahsoka under their wing, even though she was at least three years older than the eldest of them. It was they who showed her the vacant house she would buy and they who told her which shops had the best prices. Once they found out Ahsoka could fix droids, her place was secure in what she was coming to realize was a neat little smuggling operation. Sure, several of the Fardi businesses were legitimate, but they mostly served to cover for the less legitimate ones. Ashla didn’t ask questions, so they liked to have her around. In return, Ahsoka made a bit of money and didn’t have to answer any questions about where she’d come from, which she thought was a fair deal.

For several months, Ahsoka had slipped into a sort of functional comatose state. She refused to feel anything and didn’t talk to anyone much, but she was able to go about the business of daily life as though nothing was wrong. Someone who knew her wouldn’t have been fooled for an instant, but no one knew her anymore, so the deception held. She was even mostly able to deceive herself and believe that Ashla was a real person after all. She liked being useful and being a part of something, and the Fardis dealt in money, not blood, so she was able to sleep at night.

Two months before the first anniversary of Palpatine’s ascension to Emperor, Ahsoka saw something that nearly changed everything. She was at the shipyard, tinkering with one of the bigger droids that wasn’t easy to take off-site. Several of the youngest Fardi kids were playing in the yard, which they weren’t supposed to do, because it was dangerous. Ahsoka was about to shoo them out when a stack of crates that a couple of the kids were playing on wobbled and started to fall.

Afterward, when she was able to think about it, Ahsoka was glad to know that she’d responded instantly, reaching out with the Force. The numbness she had worked so hard to maintain since Order 66 remained intact, but she hadn’t watched mutely as the crates fell, the children screaming as they fell, too. She’d acted.

And then the screaming stopped. The crates settled gently on the ground, and the children settled just as gently on top of them. The other kids stared, unable to figure out what had happened, but Ahsoka knew. She got ready to run. She looked around and saw little Hedala Fardi, too small to be included in the game, standing just clear of the crates with a fascinated look on her face.

“You know you’re not supposed to play out here,” Ahsoka said, hoping to head off any awkward questions the kids might have had. “You were almost crushed by falling crates. That’s no way for a Fardi to go out!”

She was right to appeal to their pride and fear of the trouble they’d be in if they got caught. They made Ahsoka swear not to give them up—for her silence, she exacted from them a fair amount of sweets, the only currency they had—and then they all ran off. They never mentioned it again, and Ahsoka was fairly certain they hadn’t even noticed their brush with physical impossibility.

She watched Hedala closely after that. She was certain that the child was the only one who’d fully seen and understood what Ahsoka had done. Three days later, she watched with some horror as Hedala, left alone by the older kids, casually moved a small stone from one side of a doorway to the other without laying so much as a finger on it.

She should have done something. She should have told the girl’s family and helped get her off-world. But she had no idea how to hide a Force-sensitive child from the Empire. She could barely hide herself. So she did nothing instead. She told herself she would think of a plan, but she didn’t, or at least she didn’t try very hard.

And then it was Empire Day and the Imperials came in greater numbers. Ahsoka could have stood her ground, could have fought them, but she couldn’t take on the whole Empire herself. When the Fardi girls warned her and offered her a way out, she took it without a second thought. She didn’t remember Hedala Fardi until she was in orbit, and then it was too late.

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