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It takes Hera two months to put him back together, scrambling in and out of the ditch with pilfered tools. Even then, she has to leave out a couple of essential pieces and just solder together new connections. If he were a person the poor droid would be missing some ligaments. She is shocked—shocked—when she flips the power switch for the twenty-fifth time and gets not only whirrs and beeps, but strings of words that almost look like sentences on her wrist translator. Of course, the thoughts don’t make a lot of sense…she hopes… but he moves around and extends those arms towards things (oh, she needs to find some more grease for his arms), and it’s almost like owning a real droid.
“Hey.” She tries to corral him as he careens from one wall to the other in the little rock gulley, but he won’t hold still and pay attention. “Hey! What’s your name?”
He’s banging repeatedly against the spot with the least rubble, trying to break the rocks apart, when the answer appears on the translator. C1-10P. After that, the nickname takes all of about five seconds. “Okay. Chopper. Got it.”
She hasn’t fueled him up much, but he manages to get the blowtorch working all the same. He smashes through the entrance she’s been climbing over without melting off too much of his own paint. Ouch. She needs to oil the blowtorch arm, too.
“Hey, wait a minute, where are you going?” Hera has to trot to keep up. “You belong to me now. I put you back together, and whoever left you here is long gone.” A string of indignant beeping has her throwing up her hands and apologizing. “Okay! Sorry. Sorry. But look—you’re my droid now.”
Chopper twitters something about no time and nonsense, then speeds off like a demented mazer, as if he can’t even hear her calling him. It’s pure coincidence (and the little path she’s beaten over weeks of working in secret) that leads him back to the encampment, Hera trailing behind him. Once there, he heads straight for the mechanic’s shed. “No! You can’t go in there!” she tells him.
He ignores her, of course. And that’s when things get more complicated.
“Her’asyndulla WHERE have you been?!” It’s Papa. He’s angry. Really angry.
“I was just working on a project. Look!” She manages to jog out in front of Chopper and block his path for a second, at least. “I found this droid in about seventeen pieces and I got him working!” Chopper bumps against her legs, not violent, but not particularly caring if she gets knocked down in the process.
Her father doesn’t even acknowledge the droid. “You sneaked away again without telling anyone where you were, in other words. We’ve been searching for you for an hour. I thought you were dead!” Cham’s voice is full of such violence and so much fear that Hera winces without meaning to. Chopper ceases his frontal assault. Cham can catch anyone’s attention.
“I was fine.” Hera keeps her voice even. “Why would you think I was dead?”
But now Gobi and Treya and the others are trotting up, Treya calling back, “We found her! It’s okay. We found her.”
“Papa.” They’re too anxious. Something’s wrong. “Where’s Maman?” She should be back by now.
Smoke on the horizon. Cham eyes it, not worried, but…something. Something bad.
Eventually, Hera feigns sleep to get away from her family’s aggressive comfort. When she pulls her head out of the blanket to see what’s bumping her leg, face disfigured with crying, she finds that the droid has come to her. His head is smooth on top where a spot of paint has worn away. Like a worry stone. Touch for good luck. Ryl animals are mostly venomous and make rotten pets, but the thrumming of Chopper’s motor feels almost like a purr. Except for that hiccup. She’ll have to fix that tomorrow.
Acting as Chopper’s master becomes her favorite kind of play, an escape from a world she increasingly fails to control and a father she increasingly fails to please. Chopper complains all the time, so none of his criticism bothers her much. She bosses him as horribly as she bosses all of the boys her age, and he listens even less. And if she doesn’t have a real restraining bolt, well, it hardly matters. She can just pretend that he’s obeying her the same way she pretends to be in charge of everything else in this scenario.
So Chopper is a bad droid who doesn’t do what she says. On the other hand, the Cazne plains aren’t a terribly safe place for a kid who likes to wander off, and he’s always there when she needs him.
That’s why she would do anything—anything—to protect him. Even from her own father. And that’s how she finds herself screaming at Cham until her air runs out.
“NO! No no no no NO NO you are NOT going to take him! You can’t take him, he’s MY droid, I put him back together myself and I didn’t take ANYTHING from you to do it! You can’t have him, that would be STEALING!”
“Hera.” Cham stays surprisingly calm under her onslaught. “Somebody has to go in with the explosives, or we will never be able to get aboard the transport.”
“You’re going to blow him up!”
“Better a droid than a person. Be reasonable.”
“YOU don’t be HORRIBLE. You’re going to murder him, and he doesn’t even get a say in it.”
“Hera. Syndulla.” There’s the sharp tone she knows so well. Now she’s done it. “There are twenty-three people on that ship—twenty-three of OUR people who have lived in slavery and will be sold into far worse slavery if we don’t stop it before it leaves the planet. Do you know what that means? Do you know what slavery is?”
Of course she knows what slavery is, how much her people suffer from this injustice. She has always known what “slavery” means, remembered from those earliest fairy stories where young girls work their fingers to the bone for wicked witches who might eat them at any time. She doesn’t want the people on that ship to be slaves, their every move dictated forever and ever, almost as if they don’t matter, almost as if they aren’t people.
But Chopper is her most loyal friend and she’ll be damned if Cham gets to take another one of her friends. “I don’t care. What you’re doing is wrong, and you can’t have him. He’s mine.”
In the end, she kicks up such a fuss that Cham changes the plan—no suicide bombers. Not even droids.
But he takes Chopper along on the mission, anyway.
Hera waits on the flat plain in front of the caverns—their landing area—for the party to return. They set down smoothly, no sign of trouble, and then Chopper bustles around Cham for a while—as if he is taking orders, she notes indignantly—before returning to her. For the first time in a long while, she doesn’t understand everything he says.
“Hera—stth.” Treya’s displeased. “You shouldn’t be up here without permission.”
“I’m old enough.”
Her aunt gives her a hard look, and Hera doesn’t know if she meets approval or not. “Fine,” Treya says shortly. “Then you’re old enough to work. Come and help us get them to the medical center.”
They’ve done it; they’ve freed the slaves. Hera helps escort them one by one to the cavern they use as a medical facility, and although she’s more or less immune to concussion blasts and blaster fire and dismembered droid parts by this point, just walking these people a few hundred meters is…scary.
For one thing, they’re not wearing any clothes. Well, strips of cloth that might serve as clothes in those holomags the teenagers all pass around secretly. But these aren’t perfectly placed, obscuring, tantalizing. These keep slipping to the side and revealing adult bodies in ways she finds obscene and confusing.
For another, they’re not… right. Sane. One man keeps reciting “The Lylek and the Prince” at breakneck speed and then pausing to laugh a screaming kind of laugh and beg for something. Hera ends up half-dragging a grown up woman who’s in no hurry to get to the med center. Lips parted, eyes dilated to blackness, she keeps laughing as if everything Hera does is funny.
“Spice,” Hera accuses Cham when he walks out of the med center. “They’re all high on spice. Or coming off of it, maybe.”
He nods in assent, mouth a grim line.
“You always told me the spiceheads were wasting their lives.”
“Child, you do not know what you’re talking about.”
“And you want to go blow up my droid to save a bunch of them.”
“Hera, that is ENOUGH.”
“Cham.” Treya shakes her head, a tiny motion in a thunderous face. “Hera, come with me. You’re old enough. We need to talk about these prisoners.”
“Hold STILL so I can get it off!” Cham has fixed a real restraining bolt to Chopper, and Hera pries at it desperately, scratching the poor droid’s paint. “CHOP! Hold still!”
The bolt detaches with a pop and flies into some dim corner. Hera doesn’t care. “Okay, that’s it. You’re free. Now you’ve got to get out of here. Find somewhere they’re not going to treat you like this and make you do these awf— these awful things to yourself.”
Chopper tweets gently, sardonically—where is this utopia she suggests?—but Hera rubs at her face with both hands and twelve-year-old fury. “Did you hear me? GO! You’re free. I don’t want to be your master, anymore.”
Chopper locks his feet and sits. Hera thunks down next to him. She’s tired, so tired, the guilty feeling in her stomach and the exhaustion at the back of her head sapping whatever anger she has left. She’s growing so fast these days, they all say. Chopper beeps a question.
“Yeah. I want to come, too.”
A familiar blat, and she smiles without opening her eyes. “Okay. Partners.”
She’ll just adjust her dreams, then. There’s more than one way to escape.