—
Hours later, she’s up and working a kesium gas rig—it’s a big cylinder-bore screwed into the sand, and it needs people all around it to turn valves and tug levers to balance the rush of gas coming up from beneath the mantle. Let too much up at one time and the whole thing pops its top, maybe blowing them all to vapor. Let too little up, and the shaft-line seals shut as the sand collapses back into the channel. She’s here, chained along the edge with half a dozen other prisoners, all shackled around the circumference of the well. If any one of them fails, they either get punished or get dead.
Worse, she still smells like bile and spit. That, courtesy of the bucket dumped over her. It wasn’t water. Oh, no. Nobody would waste water on this planet just to wake up a prisoner. It was backwash from a happabore trough: rancid water sloshed in and out of their leathery maws.
Norra, at this moment, has never felt so alone.
When the troopers brought them here, they scanned and ran their faces, said that there was a bounty out for Jas. Before Norra knew what was happening, they were throwing her friend aboard a sand-scoured shuttle—and just like that Jas was gone.
That was a week ago. Or longer. Norra can’t even tell anymore.
After they took Jas, some pock-cheeked officer asked Norra point-blank if she wanted to die, or if she wanted to work. The answer was easy. If Norra gets dead, then that means Sloane escapes. Death was not an option. Not until revenge had its day.
I’ll work, she told him.
So they brought her here. Where here is, though, she barely knows. Kilometers from someplace called Cratertown, apparently.
And so she works. Every day she works this same black valve, the metal on the wheel so hot it first blistered her fingers—by now, though, those blisters have turned to calluses, and the skin around them is dry and splitting. It doesn’t even bleed. I don’t think I have blood anymore. Just dry Jakku dust whispering through her veins.
To her right, a hollow-eyed alien hunches over a set of levers. The bone-white creature doesn’t talk much. Occasionally it moans into the backs of its hands. It weeps tears that glitter like silica.
To Norra’s left is a dirt-cheeked man, his face round and thick even though the rest of his body looks like a skeleton draped in the rags of his own skin. He sometimes grins over at her—the broken-toothed smile of a bona fide madman—and he sings little songs.
Gomm is his name. Gomm, Gomm, the biddle-bomb, the womble-balm, speaking on the intercom, doozy woozy holocron…His words, not hers. One of his bizarre songs. He reminds her in a way of Mister Bones, if Mister Bones were a lunatic prisoner stuck on a dead dirtworld.
“Fancy a mancy,” he says to her.
“Fancy a mancy,” she answers back, not having any idea what it means. It matters little.
Norra needs to get out of here.
An obvious sentiment, but true just the same. She’s been thinking on escape plans, and none of them are sensible.
The chains that bind them are literally just that: chains threaded through metal manacles. Breaking them doesn’t seem to be an option. Not by herself, at least.
She thought about sabotaging the rig and letting it explode. But what good would that do her? It’s a fantasy to think that somehow it would bulge and detonate in just the right way, shearing her chain and letting her free. Far likelier to turn her into a scattering of charred bone across the sand. Plus, this kesium rig is not the only one. Front to back, another dozen rigs topping another dozen wells sit all around. If this one goes, they all might.
Which means she might not kill just herself.
So that’s not an option. What, then?
She has no answer. She keeps working. She tries to cry but no tears come. Norra has no more tears just as she has no more blood. It seems that on this planet she’ll just dry up and flake away when the night winds come.
—
At the end of the day, they throw her back in the cage. A portion of food lands in with her: a rubbery plastic packet of protein mush. Sometimes it’s a powder, and they give her a little water with it, and the powder sizzles and turns into something: a ballooning piece of bread, a cup of gruel, a biscuit so hard it’s like biting into a fresh-baked brick. Today, though, it’s just this packet of goop. She tears the top off with her teeth and greedily slurps it down. It tastes like the happabore spit smells.
But it will sustain her.
“Ah, nothing better than eating one’s own sick.”
That voice. She knows it.
She wheels around on the one who spoke.
And there stands Sinjir outside her cage. A cocky tilt to his hips and a smug, self-satisfied sneer on his face. He nips from a flask. “Norra, dear.”