The Farming Saint in the Starry Wasteland (Elizabeth Schofield) novel Chapter 360

Chapter 360 Raise Your Hand

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Elizabeth moved slowly and looked carefully. She didn’t speak. She met the eyes of each person who was conscious, nodded to each family member who noticed her passing.

By the time she made her way back to the entrance, nearly everyone in the hold had registered her presence, this composed young woman moving through their space with Elmer at her side.

Eyes followed her. Puzzled. Curious. And underneath both, a numbness that came from having stopped expecting anything a long time ago.

She turned to face the room.

She looked across the faces, some twisted with pain, some gone flat, some still holding onto something by sheer stubbornness, She looked at the families, exhausted and unrelenting. She looked at the children, still clear–eyed in the middle of all of it.

Then she spoke. Her voice was quiet, but it carried in the silence.

“My name is Elizabeth Schofield. I run a farm on Planet A001. I’m looking for workers.”

She let that sit for a moment, standing in the full weight of every stunned and uncomprehending stare in the room.

“I’d like to know if anyone here would be interested in coming to work for me.”

Silence. Complete silence. The steady rhythm of the monitoring equipment suddenly felt very loud.

Elmer was certain he’d misheard. He stepped forward and dropped his voice.

“Ms. Schofield, I think there may be a misunderstanding. These men’s injuries go far beyond what’s visible. Lost limbs can be partially compensated with advanced prosthetics, but much of what they’re dealing with is neurological, some of it psychological, some of it irreversible damage at the level of their life force itself. They genuinely cannot work. Commander Hewitt’s arrangement to send them to a care planet is the right call for them.”

He thought she’d been moved by what she saw and hadn’t quite understood what she was looking at.

Elizabeth heard him out. Her expression said: and?

She didn’t argue with him. Instead, she raised her voice slightly and looked past him, at the family members whose eyes had briefly lit up at her words and gone dark again at his.

“Lieutenant, I think you’ve misread what I’m asking. My farm does need workers. Badly.”

She pointed to the men lying in the recovery pods and berths, still and connected to their machines. “They may not be able to work the way they once did. Some of them may never be able to. But…”

Her gaze moved to the people standing beside those beds. Parents bent with years of caregiving, still upright. Spouses worn thin. Children who had grown up faster than they should have.

“What about their families? Their parents, their husbands and wives, their children. Is there any reason they can’t come to work at my farm?

building

“Because one person in a family gets hurt and loses the ability to work, does that mean the whole family gets written off as a burden? That they can only sit and wait for support and stipends, instead of using their own hands, earning their own way,

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10:50 am pppp

Charter 9 Raise Your Hand

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#isatyam arief for the person they love?”

She didn’t rame he voice the

Then to Each word landed with a weight that had nothing to do with volume.

The room absorbed it

And then, all at once, it hit.

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They could still work. Their hands were fine. Their legs still carried them. Their minds were intact. One person in the family had tallen Not all of them. Not even close to all of them.

They weren’t liabilities waiting to be managed. They were people who could still build something. Who wanted to.

The silence that followed was different from the one before. Deeper, but not empty. Something was gathering in it.

The little girl’s mother moved first. The one who’d seemed soft, slight, easy to overlook. Her eyes went red in an instant, not from grief but from something she hadn’t let herself feel in a long time, a hope so sudden and large it broke straight through whatever she’d been using to keep herself steady.

She loosened her hold on her daughter, stumbled forward half a step, and thrust her right hand into the air. Her voice shook, but it was loud. “Me. Ms. Schofield. I want to stay. I’ve never worked on a farm before, but I can learn anything. I can support my daughter. I can take care of her father.”

Her voice cracked the silence open.

A young mother with an infant looked up from across the room, something igniting behind her eyes. “Me too. I’m a hard worker. I’m stronger than I look.”

“I’m older, but I’m still capable.” A white–haired woman raised a trembling hand. “I was a mech engineer. My hands still work.”

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