‘What do you usually do with the bodies?’ Laila 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.’

  Laila nodded.

  ‘Is that right?’ Jecca asked.

  Laila 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?’

  Laila 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.’

  Laila 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,’ Laila 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 plants inside?’

  Laila 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, Laila explained about growing plants 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, Laila light be able to repurpose them to some better grow lights.

  She offered to help, but Jecca only had the one shovel and Laila was glad 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 Laila was sure she hadn’t needed to do that.

  Jecca seemed unconcerned about it, which Laila 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 Laila 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 Laila 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.

  Laila 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.

  Laila 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.

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  ‘That would be where the pirates are?’ Laila 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 last time I was there.’

  Laila 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 Laila by counting on her fingers. For someone who remembered days so exactly, Laila 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.’

  Laila 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.’

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

  ‘You want to go there?’

  Laila only now realised that she hadn’t explained 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?’

  Laila 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 particular 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.

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

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

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

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

  Laila 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?’

  Laila 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?’

  Laila’s eyebrows met in the middle. How to explain 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.’

  Laila 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?’

  Laila hadn’t been prepared for that question. ‘In… a lot of place, you need money to buy food and medicine and a place 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?’

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

  Jecca nodded some more. ‘Most places?’

  ‘Well, my parents’ farm was a bit more like what you’ve got going on,’ Laila 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?’

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

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

  Laila 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?’

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

  Jecca nodded once more. ‘Thank you for explaining 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,’ Laila 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?’

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

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