Though Luna kept looking for an opportunity to escape, they were watched near-constantly from morning til night, when they were locked in the barn. Sometimes they were locked in with the animals Luna came to think of as the cows, black hulking mammals that Long Hair taught them to harvest a kind of puffball fungus from. Sliced and roasted, that same fungus made up their dinners most nights. It tasted bland, but not unpleasant – or at least, not excessively so. Still, Luna grumbled regularly about the lack of spices. “Spice,” she would say, “not variety, is the spice of life.”
Asta, for her part, had adapted to her new way of life with something approaching enthusiasm. Not that she enjoyed herself particularly, but since there seemed no point in sulking while they waited for their chance, she occupied herself with each task almost cheerfully.
One night, after at least a dozen nights had passed, Asta proudly said to Luna:
“I’m starting to pick up the language.” She pointed at one of the cows, that was standing peacefully a few metres away from their beds (now pushed together). “Grychi,” she said, and then beamed like a child.
A few mornings after, when Mouth Scar and Long Hair came to take them to their tasks, Asta said something in their language, though Luna couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Hair and Scar alike looked at each other, open-mouthed. Both went to leave in opposite directions at the same time.
When they had picked themselves up off the floor, a brief hurried discussion ensued and then Long Hair departed. Putting her eye to one of the knotholes in the wall, Luna watched as he broke into a run towards the house.
A hand on her shoulder pulled her away, and Scar spat a few words. Somehow, Luna knew that he was trying to see if she spoke any of the language. She scowled and said nothing. She would be damned if she was going to let him break her. A ringing slap from the back of his hand made her cheek burn, but still she said nothing. He threw her aside with what must have been an exclamation of disgust and she hit the dusty floor of the barn hard.
In her own way, Luna began to learn the language herself then. What else could he have been shouting at her but “get up”?

Asta didn’t return to the barn that night. Nor was she there the following morning. When Scar came to take her to her work – cleaning out the stables of a stubby beast of burden that she had taken to thinking of as the oxen of this little world – she grabbed him by the naturally-black rough leather that he wore and yelled, not caring if he understood:
“Where is she, you blue-skinned ape?” Scar struggled, but lacking her steel sinews or the backing of Long Hair, she quickly overpowered him and pushed her way out of the door to freedom.

The wooden door to the farmhouse shattered around the lock beneath her mighty boot, and she burst into the front room ready for a fight. She didn’t have long to wait, as the farmer came running at the noise, brandishing a short kitchen knife. Luna hopped out of the arc of his swing as he lunged and pinned his wrist to the doorframe with a swift movement. The knife clattered to the floor as his hand opened from the shock and Luna’s other fist struck, snakelike, to his shoulder. As he staggered, she released his wrist and pressed the advantage, pushing him back into the house with fast and furious blows.
Still she couldn’t find any sign of Asta. Pinning the farmer to the wall again, she snarled: “What have you done with her?”
Just then, a figure appeared at the top of the stairs. It was the woman who had been with them when Luna and Asta had been captured, who they hadn’t seen since she had entered the house that day except in the distance, leaving for market with a cart laden with goods. She had a forceful expression and a formidable chin that gave Luna shivers at the thought of contending with her. She shouted something in the harsh language of the planet, and Luna found herself releasing her pressure on the man’s chest.
All of a sudden, then, another figure was beside her.
“Asta?” Luna said.
“Lu? You’ve got to stop fighting! It’s not what you think!” said her partner urgently.

As Asta told it, the farmers had taken them for savages (Luna laughed at that), a people who roamed the savannas and forests in raiding parties and nomadic tribes. The tribal nomads and the farmers hated one another, killed one another, took one another as slaves. That was the way of things. But no nomad had ever learned a word of the farmer’s tongue – be it out of defiance or some psychological incompatibility none could say – so when Asta had tried, haltingly, to communicate with their captors, they knew at once that something was amiss.
The farmer’s woman – Ren – had kept Asta at the house, probing her understanding and making the first shaky contact between them. Asta spoke slowly, and the others often laughed explosively and then offered corrections of pronunciation or grammar. That night, Asta had eaten with the natives, a stew seasoned with the juice of one of the bright red vegetables that they had been made to pluck just a few days prior.
All of a sudden, their relationship to their captors was completely changed. Though Luna still refused to speak in the language, she grudgingly began to gain an understanding of it, tutored by Asta. For her part, she was a quick pupil, grasping the often complex phonetics as if she had known them all her life. Their work in the field was now shouldered in part by Mouth Scar and Long Hair – whose names were, it turned out, Vich-Clac and Shten Braghent respectively, twin brothers who had braved a long journey across oceans and perilous mountains to live here in the shadow of the city. She came to understand a little of the political situation between the city and the farmers and ranchers that lived beneath it too. The city dwellers provided protection to the farmers in the form of squadrons of armoured Magistrates, as well as the only legally-sanctioned gunsmiths. In return, the producers outside the city walls kept the city fed, watered and supplied with a steady diet of menial labour from the fortune-seekers who entered the city from the Low Gate. It was a perfect arrangement, apart from the fact that each side resented the other without exception or reservation. The ‘protection’ of the magistrates was grossly overstated, and the people outside the city walls were often dismissed as ‘hangers-on’ by the cognoscenti within.
While Vich-Clac elaborated this over a bottle of reeking root moonshine that the brothers often shared, kept squirrelled away inside the wall behind a board, Luna found herself thinking back to that first glimpse of the city they had gained. It had seemed so full of promise, towering over the plains. Now it looked hollow in the distance, a looming hulk that drained the potential out of the landscape.

Luna was woken by Shten shaking her shoulders. She looked around, confused, and saw Vich-Clac across the room doing the same to Asta.
“You have to wake up,” Shten was saying. “They’re here. They’ll search the house!”
“Who?” said Asta, barely awake herself and already being pulled to her feet by the scarred, rangy man. They were in a guest room on the second floor of the building which had the two beds attached to opposite walls, with a small dining table in between.
Shten turned to face Asta, pulling on Luna’s arm to lift her up out of the bedclothes. “Magistrates,” he said. At that moment a pounding on the front door downstairs startled him, and a muffled voice called out: “open this door!”
Vich cursed. “Come on, we’ve gotta hide the ’shine!” he said, grabbing Shten’s arm. His brother shook him off and whipped around, pushing him back.
“And leave them?” he said. “You heard what happened to the Olans when they got found with strangers in the house!” He turned back to Luna and grabbed her hand. “Can you understand me?” he said. Luna nodded, open-mouthed, still processing what was happening in front of her. “Good. I need you to go downstairs and hide in the wall, remember where we got the ’shine?” Luna nodded.
“What the hell are you saying? We get taken in for their sake?” Vich said.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Shten, his face a picture of grim resignation. “We don’t know what they’ll do to them if they catch them.” Pressed in tight to the wall cavity Luna and Asta heard it all: the door opened, the heavy boots of the magistrates as they came tramping through the house. Above them, through the floor, they heard the questions: “Have these beds been slept in?” “Visitors? From where?” “Where did you get these jars?” They heard Ren’s cry of “Leave them alone!”, the slap, and the thud as she fell to the floor.
“What are you doing?” said Asta as Luna began to push on the wall. It didn’t budge at first.
“Helping them. Asta, we can’t let them take the fall for us!” Luna said.
“Why not? They decided it, not us,” said Asta, pulling the wall shut. Luna rolled her eyes in the darkness. Asta’s self-preservation instincts were usually admirable.
“Because they decided it.” she said, not really knowing what she meant. Then she gave a last shove and the wall fell open. She heard the argument upstairs stop dead.
“Hey, pigs!” she yelled, using the word for the kind of boar that they had encountered by the watering hole what was now months ago and hoping it translated. “Come get us!”