"What about?"

"Whether going haywire was a real phenomenon.  He said I was trying to get Lylat to reassure me that going haywire was real and that we weren't bad people, and since going haywire isn't real and we are bad people it was kind of awful and grotesque to have a conversation like that in front of a droid.  He doubted his ability to deliver the apology in person without breaking down into tears."

"I think Enseven would appreciate hearing that he apologized but I don't think anything good would come from asking him to deal with Thell being emotional about it. I'll tell him."

He nods. "Good. He also called Lep kind of a bully and a creep."

She nods. "Yeah, that kinda tracks," she says. "I get the sense he defected mostly because all the other Jawas hate him."

"Can you elaborate?"

"So this touches on organic issues that I only have a secondhand understanding of, but reading between the lines, I think - he enjoys occupying a position of social power among Jawas - younger, or somehow more vulnerable, than him - and indulges this enjoyment by saying things that are plausibly deniably compliments or jokes but make them uncomfortable."

" - ah." So a less sophisticated and more impulsive version of him. "Yes, that's a recognizable... mm, type, or pattern. He never did anything worth exile but was consistently unmoved by lesser censures...?"

"Yeah."

"Yes," he murmurs, more to himself than to her. "All right. If for the time being we are exercising close control over all the Jawas regardless, we can probably keep him isolated from the subset that he harasses, but it's a complication to a long-term problem that we already don't have a good solution for."

"And the sort of complication there's probably gonna be more of."

"Yes." If he were still a pirate baron he could just set Lep up with a small squad of subordinates and victims that would keep him occupied, or kill him if he was too much trouble. Damnable. "Even if they won't prosecute the enslavement of droids, are there in fact prisons on Tatooine...?"

"Some of the big cities might have them. I think moisture farming communities usually handle really heinous crimes with exile. And, uh," dark amusement: "your geas might kick if you hear about the conditions in a Mos Eisley prison."

"Wretched planet," he mutters.

..."Uh," says Moke, "how long has Thell been gone?"

Athal blinks. "I'm not sure... a while, I suppose."

"Do we think, uh..."

Zubec, steadily: "It wouldn't square very well with how they've treated us so far, I think."

"But, I mean, haywire droids..."

"Someone should ask. Even if we don't trust them, their reaction will still tell us something." He looks at Moke. "I can go."

Moke takes a deep breath, deliberately, and shivers. "No, let me."

He pokes his head out of their communal room.

There's a Treadwell and a red 3PO-looking unit walking the beat.

"Hey, uh. Thell hasn't been back yet. Are we allowed to know if something happened?"

The Treadwell bloorps something in old-fashioned Binary - the glorpier, lower-pitched way it sounded before the rebranded dialect that came out with the R2 unit, that everybody eventually standardized on. The other droid holds up a handheld communicator to the Treadwell's vocabulator, silently, and Treadwell bloops at greater length into it.