For the seventh time in half an hour, Cordelia wondered if she was making a mistake. The worry had yet to set in when she was still back at the compound, when she had levitated two hundred-galleon canisters of water onto a flat-bed truck, when she had climbed in after them and pulled a torn sheet over to conceal herself. She had spent the time from midnight to before dawn, after the humiliation at the Skywalker residence the previous night, watching the changing of the guard and marking their paths, waiting until the trucks were set to leave for a supply run in the nearby town—she hadn't missed her chance.
The short ride across the golden dunes from the Atalian facility to Mos Espa gave her little time to dwell on her actions and the suspicion they would bring, but now, as she held both hands out in line with her shoulders, her elbows locked into her hips to stabilise the progression of the two canisters at her back, worry had made a home in her chest.
As she trudged along the still-vacant streets of the city in the moments before the first sun's rise, the princess began to wonder. What questions would they ask? How could she answer them? How could she explain how a child had moved two tanks of water that easily weighed half a ton? How could she explain how she'd even had access to such a wealth of water? She shook her head; if she moved quickly, they wouldn't be around to ask questions at all. Her only goal now was to help—it was the least she could do for them. Once that task was complete, it didn't matter what happened next.
Turning a corner, she huffed a shaky breath—born of both exertion and fear—as her eyes latched on to the sand-dome residence of the Skywalkers. The yellow glow of phosphorus lighting emitted softly through the open carved windows and Cordelia blinked in surprise as she realised that, in this ungodly hour before dawn, at least one of the pair was already awake.
Shame settled into the hollow beneath her ribs once more, shame at the depth of her ignorance. Not a single critical thought had entered her mind when she had offered him those credits, republic credits in the Outer Rim no less, and she would now be forced to bear the weight of that mistake each time she looked at him. The best she could do, both for him and her own fragile pride, was to leave her gift and then scamper back to the facility before her absence was noted.
She took the last steps to the edge of their door, her arms shaking as she set the crushing weight of the canisters down where they could be seen easily, in the shade of the building next to a stack of messily heaped rakes and shovels—to clear the entry in the event of a sandstorm, she supposed. She paused, her eyes trained on an uneven lining of limestone bricks, as the sound of laughter reached her ears.
