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I told them we could stop trouble like we had gone through today. I knew a way. I told them my plan, and my hope that the Empire would come to recognize what we had done, and what this would mean for their people and mine.

Wimateeka had trouble explaining the map, and I didn’t know if they could understand what a map was. Wimateeka and I smoothed out a flat space in the sand, and I set up the holo-display unit and displayed my map. Some of the Sand People rushed back, startled, but others soon crowded forward, and it began to make sense to them.

But I would not negotiate till they had freed Ariela.

“What we are about to do is better than more killing,” I said. “I want you to free your captive—release her to me. She is my friend. Accept this water and cloth as compensation for the trouble you’ve had in caring for her till now.”

They argued about that, but eventually they took the water and cloth and passed it back into the crowd somewhere, and they cut Ariela free and let her walk up to me.

She came slowly through the throng of Sand People. They would barely move aside for her. But she was taller than all of them, so she kept her eyes on me and Wimateeka and eventually got to us. I hugged her, and she hugged me and Wimateeka.

And we started to haggle and negotiate and draw the lines on my map.

It was working.

I thought of all the generations of anthropologists who would have wanted to be here with the Sand People. The day was bright with sunlight, and I could feel the tension ebb away from among us. My map had never looked so beautiful, I thought, as it did then shining out flat above the sand and divided by the black lines of boundaries.

We finished negotiating, six hours before my deadline.

Ariela and Wimateeka and I packed up.

The Sand People stood up and watched us, then started to move off into the dunes, heading northwest to their camp.

Ariela climbed into my landspeeder.

I handed Wimateeka to her and climbed in.

And the dune west of us exploded in flame. My vaporator blew apart, and steam rushed up from it like smoke. Explosions ripped the air—and the young Sand People were screaming and running.

Six hours before our deadline—after everything we had worked for had come to pass. I had to stop the shooting.

I flew straight to where the shots were coming from —a rocky rise south of us—and we were not hit. A path through the fire opened up for us.

Stormtroopers. There were Imperial stormtroopers in the rocks. The farmers who opposed me had called them in, that was all I could think. I slammed the landspeeder to a stop and rushed up into the rock. “Stop shooting!” I shouted. “Those aren’t even adults you’re killing!”

But no one listened or stopped firing. I pushed into the stormtroopers and shoved their guns up to make them stop—and I was grabbed from behind and slammed into the rock.

“Stop it!” someone shouted at me.

It was the other farmers who had me, eight or ten of them.

“The stormtroopers will kill you,” someone hissed in my ear. “Live through this day and we’ll talk later about what happened.”

I tried to break free, and they shoved me back.

“The Empire would never let your plan work,” someone else hissed in my ear, then Ariela was in front of me, her face white and tear-streaked.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “They want trouble on all the worlds so the majority will welcome their presence to keep the peace. If you make peace here, our real enemies would become clear—and what then?”

I should have seen this. I should have known this would happen from the day the Imperial Governors first refused to map this region.

The firing stopped. The other farmers thanked the stormtroopers for “rescuing” Ariela and Wimateeka and me.

“You’ll have to evacuate from your farm for a time,” a stormtrooper told me. “It won’t be safe to stay in your house, isolated as it is.”

I wouldn’t just have to evacuate for a time. This could be the end of my farm. The Sand People would want to kill me for sure—unless I could find a way to convince them I hadn’t betrayed them, unless I could