Chapter Text
Numa knew that what she was doing might be a massive mistake. If she got caught, she would be in so much trouble. She was an unaccompanied kid, which had gotten her in trouble many times before, she had hoarded food, and she was trying to stow away on a ship to get herself to her brothers.
The supply ship was being unloaded by a crew of various beings and droids. There were always more supplies arriving than ever made it into the hands of the refugees, as Numa had discovered when she had first started plotting her escape. And sometimes, some crates went back on to the ships.
It was the time between when the final crate was unloaded and the new crates started to go on that Numa was relying on. That and her memory of the ship’s schematics she had downloaded from the holonet.
The day started to swelter above them, and Numa was glad she had found a hiding spot with a little bit of shade cover, tucked between a large boulder and some overhanging rubble at the edge of the field that had become a temporary landing pad. No one would miss her for a good while yet, and it was almost time for the unpacking to be done, if the workers followed their regular schedule.
Finally, the last of the crates was put on to a cart, and the crew followed after it into the depths of the camp.
“Where’re you going?” A tiny voice came from beside Numa as she shifted her weight to stand and dart out onto the ship. She jumped and looked down.
It was the baby. Numa didn’t know how old she was, four maybe, and she was small. She tended to stick to Numa like a burr but Numa had thought she’d been asleep when Numa had left the orphanage tent.
She’d never heard her speak before. No one had. No one even knew her name. The kids called her Nawara, because ‘speaker’ was a funny name for someone who didn’t talk. The ladies who ran the orphanage called her Sama. They could have meant ‘daughter’ but the way they said it made Numa think they meant ‘girl’.
Numa looked at her for a long moment. She thought about Nawara. And she thought about the plan. She thought about the orphanage, and she thought about Waxer and Boil.
And she made a decision.
“We’re getting out of here on that ship.” She hissed. “C’mon.”
Nawara’s tiny hand slipped into hers and they darted out, across the field and up the ramp.
Racing through the ship, Numa found what she was looking for and pulled the hatch open. The crawl space was dusty when they climbed in, but Numa figured that was a good thing. The more dust there was, the less likely it was that someone would look into the space for some reason and find them.
Nawara curled up against Numa’s side, Numa’s bag between them and the hatch as an extra shield, and they settled in for the wait.
Once they were in space and the ship was making enough noise that Numa felt like she could safely move, she carefully began to pull tools out of her belt.
She may have only been seven, but she had learnt a lot from her uncle and his friends in the years of galactic war and civil war. One of those things was a tiny amount of slicing.
Numa pried the wall panel open, and using the schematics, figured out which of the wires would lead to the ship’s computer.
She had no real way of knowing how they would get to where they were going until they got to a spaceport, but Numa wanted to know when that would be.
So, very carefully, Nawara looking on with sharp eyes, Numa began to peel back the casing on the wire. She did it slowly, in the dim light of a glow rod she had managed to get ahold of, held in Nawara’s tiny hands. Once she got the wires free, she spliced them with a wire to connect to her tiny comm, and began to look.
When she finally got into the ship’s manifest, she couldn’t read most of it, but it did tell her how much longer they would have to wait before getting off.
“It’ll be a few more hours.” Numa said, removing her hardware hack from the wires, and shutting off the glow rod and the comm to conserve energy. “I’ll keep watch, you get some sleep.”