“Thanks, Sinjir.”
“Don’t thank me. I want them back as bad as you do. Now we just have to find a way to make it happen without, well, dying in the process.”
Night falls on Jakku. With the darkness comes the cold. It leaches the heat out of the air, the sand, the stone.
In the distance, black shapes rise—shadows deeper than the dark of the sky. Plateaus and buttes like carbon anvils. It was Jas’s idea to head that direction. Not only would that get them out of the hellish heat of day, but she saw a flock of ax-beaked birds flying that way. “They’re headed toward something,” Jas said, then. “Don’t know what. Food, hopefully. A settlement, maybe. Anywhere is better than nowhere.”
And so, once they pilfered the pod of all its limited goods—medkit, blaster, a handful of rations—they started walking.
And walking. And walking some more. The sand is slippery beneath their feet. It’s hard to find purchase, which works extra muscle groups—every time the sand shifts or she steps on a stone slippery with scree, Norra’s muscles tighten further, and by now her legs feel as stretched out as the control belt on an old speeder.
Worse, Norra feels sick. The sun sucked everything out of her, siphoning her lifeforce away drop by bloody drop. Now, with night, the chill has crept under her skin and settled in those empty spaces like an infection.
But still, they trudge along.
To where, she doesn’t know.
To what end, she cannot say.
This was a mistake.
Sloane is here. She knows that. She can feel that—not like she has the Force, but like it’s something in the air, in the dust. Maybe she’s just trying to convince herself that this is it, this is where it all ends. But even if Sloane is here, then what? Norra is on a dead-end, bone-dust world. The erstwhile grand admiral could be anywhere, in any direction, and Norra could spend the rest of her days wandering the burning dunes managing to find nothing or no one but her own foolhardy demise.
Perhaps the one advantage is that this is such a dead place. Someone like Sloane would stand out. Now if only they could find someone to whom that matters—someone with eyes to have seen Sloane in the first place.
She’s about to say something to Jas—
But the bounty hunter now faces her with wide eyes. A hard finger mashes against Norra’s lips. The Zabrak warns: “Shh.”
Norra watches as the shape of Jas—her shadow, her silhouette—gestures toward her ear. A sign to listen, so Norra listens.
The few sounds of the planet crawl into her ear: the whisper of wind across the dunes, the distant ululation of some animal, the drum-pulsing of her own heartbeat behind it all. But then their ears pick up something else—a faint shudder and hiss. Like the sand moving. It’s off to Norra’s right. And then, again, to her left. The sounds come simultaneously.
And they’re getting closer.
The noises stop as fast as they start. Once again Norra and Jas are left with the wind, the faraway beasts, the pounding of blood in their own ears.
Norra thinks and is about to say: We need to keep moving.
She doesn’t get that chance.
It happens quickly—from both sides, the sand erupts around them. The spray stings against Norra’s cheek and she staggers back, her eyes burning. She swipes at her face, blinking back tears, and something crashes into her, roaring. Her shoulders hit the ground half a second before her tailbone. The wind is knocked out of her, leaving Norra gasping. Her attacker is on top of her, and as her vision clears she wishes it hadn’t: The face leering down at her is far from human. Big black eyes, an insectile mandibular mouth, leathery flesh—
No. Not a face. A helmet. A mask.
“Sah-shee tah!” her foe barks at her, words gurgled around a hissing ventilator. A fist slams into her middle. Anger blooms in its wake.
Her adversary has his legs straddling her hips—but the ground beneath her shifts easily with the sand, and it takes little effort to wriggle free. She kicks out hard, pivoting her lower body as she does, and it gives her the opening she needs, crab-walking backward as her foe paws for something in the sand—a weapon. A blade.
Square at the top, bent in the middle. Like a machete. The metal is dark, maybe rusted, though it’s hard to tell. He roars again and brings the blade down against her legs—but she scissors them apart, and the blade is buried in the sand with a coughing cuff sound.
Norra stabs out with her foot.
Her heel connects with his ventilator, and it starts squealing. Plumes of steam, white as a ghost, come free of his mask as he claws at his face.