She stopped and smiled at herself, looking away. Hopefully her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. “Sorry,” she said. “I get carried away.”
“I was settling in for a good story,” Jonathan said, receiving a self-conscious chuckle in response. “So you got your technician job through your mother?”
Kaiya shook her head. “It was after she left. I needed money, so I didn’t have much choice. There was plenty of work in Leth for tile technicians.”
“So you were working for the Tarkinians?”
She clenched her jaw and glared at Jonathan’s innocent face. “No,” she said. “Never. I was doing it for Leth. Protecting it from the Tarkinians. And I always did as much as I could to sabotage sections I knew the Tarkinians would be using.”
Jonathan remained silent.
“Anyway,” Kaiya said. She couldn’t hold hi
