Her Celestial Farm on the Scrapyard Planet (by Kay Lucas) novel Chapter 344

Chapter 344 Collateral Damage

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Stand with the farm, respect its people and its rules, and you’d be rewarded in ways you wouldn’t expect. Come in swinging against it, bully its staff, and it didn’t matter if you ran half the shipping lanes in the kingdom. You’d be gone.

The visitors who’d watched the whole thing unfold were still processing it. They’d all seen managers and owners bend over backwards to smooth things over with difficult customers, pressuring their own employees to apologize, to absorb it, to keep the peace. Not one of them had ever seen an owner blacklist a client on the spot to protect a kid on her payroll.

Abigail had steadied herself enough to move. She guided Paul forward by the shoulders and stepped up to Elizabeth, her voice cracking before she’d gotten a single word out.

“Ms. Schofield, thank you. Thank you so much, I don’t even know how to…”

She was already reaching for Elizabeth’s hands when Elizabeth caught her by the arms and held her upright, firm but not unkind.

“Do good work. Take care of Paul. Follow the rules, and you’re part of this farm. And nobody messes with the people in this farm.” She left no room for argument in it, then turned and looked down at Paul, her voice shifting into something slightly less formal. “Still hurt?”

Paul shook his head so hard it looked like it might come off. His eyes were filling up again, but it was a different kind of tears this time. “It doesn’t hurt anymore, Ms. Elizabeth. Thank you. Thank you!”

He understood what she’d done. She’d protected him and his mom, held the bad guy accountable, and recognized the people who’d helped.

He felt something settle in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Pride. Safety. The particular kind that comes from knowing someone’s got your back.

“Good.” Elizabeth glanced at the recruitment flyers still scattered across the ground, then looked at him. “Next time something like this happens, you find one of the adults on staff first. Don’t try to handle it alone.” She turned to Fiona. “Take them to get some rest. And get someone to clean this up.”

Then she swung onto her little hover bike and puttered off toward the fields, not looking back, not waiting for a response. Just gone, the way people are when they’ve already moved on to the next thing.

The crowd stood there for a moment longer, watching the space where she’d been.

Claire’s ship left Planet A001 in what could generously be called a hurry, engines burning hot with wounded pride.

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11:08 Sat, Jun 6

Chapter 344 Collateral Damage

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She was gone, but she’d left a mess behind, and the people stuck standing in it were the NovaSea Transport research team she had never even bothered to acknowledge.

They’d arrived mixed in with the general visitors, quiet and careful, running assessments on the farm and its output, noting everything with the methodical attention of people who got paid to evaluate threats and opportunities.

They had a report to write, a recommendation to make, and, if they were being honest with themselves, a personal reason or two for wanting a closer look at produce that supposedly did things to mental power damage that no licensed treatment center had managed to replicate.

That last part wasn’t in any official brief. It was just the reality of life in the interstellar era. High–pressure work, constant transit, radiation exposure, the low–grade grinding stress that came with the territory. Nobody who operated at their level came through it completely clean.

The damage was just a question of degree, of whether it had started affecting your daily functioning yet.

For people who spent their careers calculating angles on shipping routes and corporate positioning, mental fatigue wasn’t a complaint. It was background noise. They’d been prepared to see whether the farm’s reputation held up in person.

They hadn’t gotten that far.

One heiress’s tantrum had been enough to land the entire NovaSea Transport network, every affiliated company, every major shareholder, every executive and their families, on a permanent blacklist.

Which naturally included the handful of internal staff currently standing at the gate with company IDs and company business cards and absolutely nowhere to go.

Desmond confirmed it on the screen without any particular expression. They were on the list. The mood among them was difficult to describe. Frustrated, yes. Humiliated, certainly. And somewhere underneath it, a quiet, simmering resentment aimed squarely at Claire, who had caused all of this and was now presumably back on her ship and no longer anyone’s problem but her own.

The man with glasses tried first. “Sir, we’re just regular employees. We came here on our own time, we’re genuinely fans of the farm. What happened with Ms. Rhodes has nothing to do with our personal views. Is there any way we could at least speak with Ms. Schofield directly? We’d just like a chance to explain…”

Desmond didn’t look up. “The blacklist applies equally to everyone. No exceptions.”

The older man, the one who seemed to be the team lead, stepped forward and tried a different angle, more measured, more formal. “We understand the situation, and we regret it deeply.

2/3

11:08 Sat, Jun 6

Chapter 344 Collateral Damage

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