Sinjir growls at him: “Sit down! We’re about to leap.”
Furiously, Temmin reaches to the hyperspace navigation system, tries to turn it off—but it’s locked. Damnit, Mom. She did that on purpose, and he doesn’t know the passcode to get it to stop. Wait. A new idea hits him. There’s a second pod. If he could make it fast enough, if he could run through the ship and launch…
But Sinjir can’t fly this ship. Bones can’t, either.
Every cell inside his body wants to abandon this ship and go after his mother. But his mind is clear and he knows the score: Someone has to get back to Chandrila. Someone has to tell Leia: The Empire is here.
Temmin punches the back of the seat and slides back into it. He grabs the flight stick with one hand and brings his other to his mouth, yelling into his comlink: “Bones! Can you get to the second pod?”
The droid’s distorted voice crackles over the link.
“ROGER-ROGER, MASTER TEMMIN.”
“Go. Now. I’ll buy us a minute,” Temmin says. Sinjir gives him a look, but Temmin keeps talking to his droid over his wrist comm: “Launch and get to Jakku. Find Mom. Protect Mom. At any cost!”
“ROGER-ROGER. NONE SHALL HARM HER OR THEY WILL BE CONVERTED TO A PLEASING BLOOD MIST.”
“Go!”
Temmin grits his teeth so hard he’s pretty sure they start to crack. He whips the freighter back and forth even as his bewildered ex-Imperial gunner fires fruitlessly at the swooping TIEs. New alarms start kicking off, the sounds coming faster and faster, indicating that the torpedoes are closing in—sizzling blue arrows of vicious energy aiming to blow the Moth clean in half. And they might if I can’t manage some fancy flying.
He looks at the light above his head.
Still dark. Still dark…
One of the torpedoes is on them, roaring up from behind. Temmin yells, “Hold on!” and does a hard inverted roll, bringing the ship up and back in a gut-churning loop. The torpedo passes by, and scanners show it and one of the TIEs going dark. One torpedo down, but two more are coming in heavy, and he sees them screwing through space right toward the Moth.
Bright-blue lights perforating the dark. Like the eyes of a terrible, vengeful thing, hungry for death.
Above his head, the light goes yellow.
Then green. Go, Bones, go…
Sinjir fires the Moth’s cannons at the torpedoes—missing with every shot. The ex-Imperial winces and screams in ear-shattering frustration.
The light goes red.
Pod free.
Temmin launches to hyperspace, just as the torpedoes thread the spot where the Moth was half a second before.
A ringing sound in the back of the skull. A faint beep beep beep. Flashes in the black, memories like light pulsing in a dark room: a heel against a button; a shake and a bang as the pod unmoors from its socket in the freighter’s side; a feeling of weightlessness as the whole thing drifts…
Then, light. Atmosphere. Heat. The pod shakes like a toy in the hand of an angry child. Everything feels like it’s coming apart. Darkness goes to blue. Night to day. The weightlessness dissipates, stolen away by the feeling of falling—plummeting down, down, down. Someone screams. An elbow in a throat. A knee in an armpit.
A sudden lift from the repulsor-jets—a hard jarring motion.
The whumpf from a pair of parachutes.
Too late. Too fast.
Wham.
Darkness. Silence. The memory of it all threatens to crush her.
Norra gasps, fumbles for the door latch—she draws the lever down, a hard ratcheting mechanism. The door springs free and lands in sand: thump.
The light reflecting off the surface of Jakku blinds her. Everything is seared away in a burning wave of brightness. Her hands find hard rock and slippery sand. Her guts are suddenly weapons-free and next thing she knows, she’s puking up what little she had to eat today.
Behind her closed eyes, new memories flit past: the tangled pipes inside the resurrected Death Star, the battle above Akiva as she chases Sloane in a stolen TIE fighter, the shock as her husband lifts a blaster in the direction of Chancellor Mon Mothma…
Her eyes open again. Staring into her own ejecta.
This world before her is Akiva’s opposite: dead and dry instead of damp and teeming with life. The only comparison is the heat, but here the heat is like the inside of a clay oven. It’s drying her out. Baking her to a crispy blister. She coughs. She cries out. She thinks: I am alone.
Wait. No.
Not alone.
Jas!