‘What do you usually do with the bodies?’ Lai asked, eventually.

  ‘The tablet said that the normal thing to do with dead people is to bury them,’ Jecca said. ‘So I usually just dig a hole and do exactly that.’

  Lai nodded.

  ‘Is that right?’ Jecca asked.

  Lai frowned at her for a moment. ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ she said. She tried to smile and didn’t do a very good job of it. ‘I’m just remembering my parents used to tell me stories about admin officers coming to the farm and how they’d chop them up and put them in the fields for fertilizer. They were probably bullshitting me.’

  ‘Bullshitting?’

  Lai took a deep breath and gave the smile another go, she thought she did a better job of it this time. ‘Joking,’ she said.

  Jecca nodded. ‘Nothing grows up here anyway,’ she said. ‘Even when it gets above freezing for a while.’

  Lai nodded back. ‘Might want to go and collect dirt from that forest down there, then.’

  ‘I can’t grow anything out here,’ Jecca said. ‘It’s too cold.’

  ‘You can grow things inside,’ Lai said. ‘I’ve been saving the roots of those onions and cabbages. They’d both grow alright, if you have pots or something for them.’

  Jecca nodded a few times. ‘You said you grew up on a farm, didn’t you? You know how to grow pnts inside?’

  Lai nodded a few times.

  Jecca frowned at the rolling cover the pirates had brought. ‘We could use that cart they had. After we… after I bury them, maybe.’

  As Jecca stripped and buried the pirates, Lai expined about growing pnts inside. Sure it would better with more sunlight, but even the lights Jecca had in her main room would basically work. And if any of the lights from the ship had survived, Lai light be able to repurpose them to some better grow lights.

  She offered to help, but Jecca only had the one shovel and Lai was gd she didn’t actually have to do anything. She didn’t even like looking at the bodies, especially not the man she’d shot through the eye. Sure it had probably been self-defence, but the more time passed, the more Lai was sure she hadn’t needed to do that.

  Jecca seemed unconcerned about it, which Lai supposed made sense. From what she’d said, this was far from the first time Jecca had had to fight people off in the time she’d been here.

  Only as Jecca was starting to fill in the graves did Lai think of something she could do.

  The inside of the metal walls the pirates had brought was spattered with blood. There was far less than Lai had expected from media, but there was enough that she felt unsettled about it.

  But it would be much more sensible to just take the wheels off, rather than drag the cover back down the slope to wherever the pirates had left those carts.

  Lai and Jecca finished up at around the same time, just as the sun was starting to rise.

  The bridge was distinctly less intact than it had been yesterday. Most of the consoles had been stripped into the train of carts sitting nearby, and then dumped out on the ground so that the front two carts could be tipped over to get to the wheels.

  Despite the dusting of snow, the blood was still obvious.

  That was distracting.

  Lai was hardly a detective, but she had been a mechanic long enough to spot an obvious clue. What it actually meant was less clear. Some blood had pooled near the centre consoles, where Woll would have been when the Friendship went down, and from there it was smeared across the floor. The smear pointed deeper into the woods.

  ‘That would be where the pirates are?’ Lai suggested, pointing where the blood smear indicated.

  Jecca nodded. ‘They have a base about six hours walk that way,’ she said. ‘Not very big, maybe seventy of them st time I was there.’

  Lai frowned to herself. ‘Why were you there? And how long ago?’

  ‘I was investigating my surrounds,’ Jecca said. ‘Would have been 1531 days ago now.’

  ‘And how many of them have you killed since then?’

  Jecca surprised Lai by counting on her fingers. For someone who remembered days so exactly, Lai had expected her to have the number ready.

  ‘I’ve killed eighteen,’ Jecca said. ‘Three more wounded badly enough that they died before they made it back. Twenty-three wounded but probably made it back to the base. I’m not sure if some of those wounded came back multiple times. I didn’t always get a good look at them.’

  Lai nodded. ‘But at least twenty-one killed?’

  Jecca nodded. ‘Twenty-one dead, yes.’

  ‘Are you not counting the ones who died from their wounds?’

  ‘You asked how many I’d killed,’ Jecca said. ‘I’m not wounds.’

  Lai decided to leave that alone. ‘So there’s probably something like fifty of them still at the base? Unfortunate.’

  ‘You want to go there?’

  Lai only now realised that she hadn’t expined herself at all. ‘This blood is most likely from one of the other crew, Woll,’ she said. ‘From the look of it, someone started dragging him in that general direction.’ She pointed again. ‘I liked Woll well enough, at least well enough that I don’t want the pirates to have him, if he survived.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘I don’t recall you mentioning more people on the ship than you and Rukan,’ she said. ‘Did I miss that?’

  Lai briefly tried to wrack her memory, then decided against it. ‘I might not have mentioned them,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t going into that much detail about this particur run. But yes, two other people, Woll and Shae. I haven’t seen any signs of Shae, so I have no idea where she ended up. But Woll was in here when we crashed,’

  ‘And you liked Shae well enough to not want the pirates to have her either?’ Jecca asked.

  Lai nodded. ‘Yeah. Shae’s good. Young and energetic, but good.’

  Jecca nodded a few times. ‘How young is she?’

  Lai hadn’t expected that question. ‘Twenty-four.’

  Jecca nodded a few more times. ‘How young are you?’

  Lai frowned a little ‘Thirty-five,’ she lied instinctively. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Jecca shrugged. ‘I’m curious, I suppose. And just so I’m clear, you’re talking about years, right? That’s twelve-thousand seven hundred and seventy five days, right?’

  Lai nodded. ‘Not exactly, but yes, years.’ She tried to do the math in her head and realised that she’d lied about her age.

  ‘Oh, I’m thirty-three,’ she said, for some reason. ‘Don’t tell anyone that, though.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows met in the middle. ‘Why not?’

  Lai’s eyebrows met in the middle. How to expin it? ‘When I first left home, my parents’ farm, I couldn’t find work because I wasn’t registered,’ she said. ‘And, for some reason I still don’t understand, the only people in town who would still give me a job wouldn’t give me a job if I was under eighteen. I was seventeen, and I picked nineteen for some reason.’

  ‘Why eighteen? Oh, you already said you don’t know.’

  Lai shrugged. ‘According to the admin, eighteen is when someone becomes an adult,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why people doing crimes cared about that, but they did.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘Why did you need work?’

  Lai hadn’t been prepared for that question. ‘In… a lot of pce, you need money to buy food and medicine and a pce to live,’ she said. ‘Most people need to work, in some capacity, to earn money.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘You can’t just trade things for the things you need?’

  Lai shrugged. ‘I guess there’s an extra step, but you basically trade work for the things you need.’

  Jecca nodded some more. ‘Most pces?’

  ‘Well, my parents’ farm was a bit more like what you’ve got going on,’ Lai said, she’d been prepared for this question. ‘We worked to make the things we needed. Occasionally traded with other people for some things.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  Lai shrugged a couple more times. ‘I already said, right? I didn’t like my parents very much.’

  Jecca kept on nodding, eyebrows rexed. ‘It sounds like you wouldn’t have wanted to, but could you have left and set up your own farm?’

  Lai shrugged again for good measure. ‘It would have been difficult,’ she said. ‘The towns around were getting bigger, the admin had already shut down one of our neighbours. I would have had to go pretty far to find a spot I could set up.’

  ‘Like out here?’

  Lai smiled. ‘I probably wouldn’t have come out here, but I suppose I could have.’

  Jecca nodded once more. ‘Thank you for expining all of this to me. I… it’s odd to realise that there’s so much I didn’t know, or… or so much that would never have occurred to me to know.’

  ‘No problem,’ Lai said. ‘I remember that feeling, even if my parents had told me some about the outside world before I left.’

  And that was that, apparently.

  ‘So, do you want to go to the pirate base?’ Jecca asked. ‘Try to get your crewmates back?’

  Lai frowned. ‘Fifty people is a lot,’ she said.

  ‘We have more than fifty bullets,’ Jecca said.