And they’ve been here for months. Jakku is a decrepit wasteland, bleached to death by an unforgiving sun. And now, mysteriously, it hosts the largest remnant of the Empire—her remnant, as a matter of fact, a military faction she thought she controlled. But her control was an illusion. She was just another puppet dancing on the strings of Gallius Rax, a supposed war hero who came to serve the Empire at the urging of Palpatine himself.
None of it makes sense. Questions layer atop questions, and no answers are forthcoming. Why here? Why this place? It seems that Rax himself comes from this world, but why return? Jakku is no prize. It has few exports of note; kesium and bezorite have some value to the Empire, but only barely. Better resources exist, and they exist on worlds far livelier than this one. Why make an attack on Chandrila only to abandon the galaxy and come here? Why leave Sloane dangling on the hook? Why do any of it?
What is Rax’s game? He has one—that much is clear.
He will tell her. One day soon, she will make him tell her. At the end of a blaster, a blade, or her own choking hands.
But first, they must get to him.
Which is why they’re here, right now, on this rolling cart. A cart pulled by men unclothed except for the skirts of threaded leather hanging from their waists—their chests, backs, arms, and shorn scalps are naked, painted with streaks of greasy red dust. Their mouths are closed with metal hooks—a hook in the top lip, a hook in the bottom, the two tugged together with a cinching knot. They can only murmur and mumble. They are servants and slaves—ardent operators and faithful lunatics giving their lives over to their mad desert mistress.
Next to her, Brentin grunts and growls as he shifts.
“I told you,” she says to him. “Practice your breathing. Relax your limbs, a deep breath in, a deep breath out. Oxygenate your blood.” Since leaving Ganthel, Sloane has lived her life on starships. In her earliest days, she flew patrols in TIE fighters and shuttles, and her very first job was as a signal hawk on an asteroid monitoring station in the Anoat sector. Those roles did not allow her the luxury of getting up and moving around easily, and so she learned ways to remain comfortable even in contortion.
“That only helps so much,” he snaps, and she detects a surge of anger. He hates her, she believes, though he won’t say as much. It stands to reason: His own wife, a rebel pilot, is the one who gave her the grievous wound he helped her to heal in the first place. She represents something he despises: the autocratic rule of a mad galaxy. He prefers that madness—the madness of rebellion. So be it. This alliance is built on anger and hatred, and that hatred is the glue that fixes Brentin to Sloane.
The cart stops short. Hard enough that she almost loses her balance, which would mean pitching forward and smashing her face on the stone-fiber boards. Next to her, she hears Brentin do exactly that: He oofs as his head thuds against the floor of the cart.
Footsteps all around them. Hands grab at her face, tugging the blindfold off—hers is stubborn and fails to easily fall away, and she feels the cold metal of a crooked blade against her temple. Thankfully, the blade faces away, and with a quick pull the cloth is cut and falls.
It takes her vision a moment to adjust.
A massive impasse awaits: The cavern ends in a gargantuan, bulb-shaped chamber, its walls shot through with other smooth-walled tunnels—tunnels that are too high up for this cart to easily reach.
Next to her, she spies Brentin—his face and neck scrubby with beard, his forehead smudged with filth. He gasps as the slaves lift him up, rocking him back on his knees. They cut his blindfold free, too.
Red-streaked, dust-caked faces regard them with wide eyes. Hook-bound mouths murmur and hum. The servants perform one more action—cutting through the ropes that bind their wrists—before scampering off like animals. They clamber up the rocks, long fingernails mooring in the cracks. They pull themselves into the tunnels and scurry away.
Sloane and Brentin are alone.
He gives her a puzzled look. “Now what?”
Those two words echo, echo, echo in the bell-shaped cavern.
“I suppose we wait,” she says.
“They don’t want us to follow, do they?”
“I’m strong, but not strong enough to climb up into those tunnels.” Still, maybe that’s what these deviants expect. They seem hardly human. Sanity does not shine in their eyes—no, what lingers there in their stares is a special kind of derangement. The zeal of service, of having given your body and your mind over to someone else.
Sloane does not add that climbing into those tunnels would be difficult. Her side hurts today, a dread, deep ache from her injury—an injury that never really healed properly. Sometimes she lifts her shirt just to look at it—the skin there is puckered like the sealed, dry lips of a dead man. Were she still in civilization, it would have healed over well with bacta and mend-gel treatments. But Jakku is not civilization, and so her wound healed poorly. Every day it hurts, the pain lurking far deeper than the skin.