They do not stop to camp that night. They hurry on.
On the morning of the seventh day, they hear the Kyaddak: the tak-tak-tak of their many limbs, the click-click-click of their chelicerae. By midday, they begin to see their sign: scratches in the crystalline trees, gleaming silicate scat smeared across bulging rock. By evening, they see them: just flashes and shadows at the margins, far away and down branching tunnels, but closer than anyone cares to discover.
His voice trembling and his breath weak as they hurry on, Addar says, “I hate those things. Why won’t they leave us alone? We should kill them.”
Jumon says, “They are creatures of the Force, too.”
“So?”
“So, we do not attack.”
“But we know they’ll attack us.”
“It is their way.”
“Maybe their way is the dark side.”
“Maybe Brin has it right,” Jumon says, “maybe there is no dark side.”
“It can’t be that simple. I believe in evil. So does Brin. Besides—” Addar lifts his shirt and shows what he brought—a small blaster pistol. “I have this. We can use it.”
“You shouldn’t have brought that. A lethal weapon? Here? On this sacred place? You know the—”
Uggorda shushes them both and they continue on.
On the eighth day, Uggorda is dead. Or so they believe. The Kyaddak come out of nowhere, three of them—their saw-blade limbs cutting her down as the massive bugs pounce upon her, pincers holding her fast. Jumon has his telescoping staff out quick as anything, and he bares his teeth as it spins in his hand like a whirring rotor—he and Mabo leap into the fray. The droid lifts one of the Kyaddak high, flinging it into the trees—branches snap and crystal rains to the ground like a hail of singing, tinkling glass. Jumon’s staff connects with one of the bug’s many-eyed heads, closing it permanently as it erupts in a gush of fluid. The thing shrieks and skitters away. The last one is Addar’s—he rushes up to it, fear governing his limbs. He closes his eyes and draws the blaster pistol, firing it wantonly in the air—not to kill, just to scare it off. He knows that when he opens his eyes, the monster will be upon him, cutting open his middle— But he hears its many limbs going tak-tak-tak in the other direction.
Addar opens his eyes and it’s gone.
Together they stare at Uggorda’s dead body—until she sits up suddenly, slick with her own blood. Addar wonders if she came back from the dead somehow or if she was just not injured as badly as he thought. Uggorda wheezes, “Let us keep moving. Those three will just be the first. They claim this forest as territory—when we are free of the trees, we are free of the Kyaddak.”
They do as Uggorda says, helping her along.
On the ninth day, they are out of the forest. Here the rocky ground gives way to crystal beneath: slippery and smooth, a thousand facets on which to lose one’s footing.
That night, they sit around the fire again. Mabo tends to Uggorda’s wounds with a surprising tenderness—delicate despite the droid’s massive box-lifting limbs.
Around the fire, Addar says to Jumon: “I want to ask you something.”
“Ask,” Jumon purrs.
“When did you become a believer?”
Jumon shrugs like it’s no big thing. “I had an experience. A vision called to me three years ago. It showed me a path through a wilderness not far from my home. I followed it and there I found Brin, injured after having fallen into a crevasse. I helped him, and he told me it was destiny that we met. That what guided me was the Force.”
“You’re lying. The Force is only for the Jedi.”
“No!” Jumon says, not angry so much as he is incredulous. “They wield it, but the Force is in all living things. It is what gives us our intuition, our drive, it’s what connects us to one another. We are all one with the Force.”
“The Force, the Force, the Force! Everything the Force.” Addar is frustrated and afraid. He has no faith in this, or in Izisca. Just because his mother helped found the church doesn’t mean he has to be a believer, too. Does it? This is a fool’s mission. A death parade. One of the so-called pilgrims is already dead, another has almost perished. He whispers: “How many more of us have to die to carry this burden? We didn’t steal these things. The Empire did. They should be the ones performing penance.”
“We all carry the burden. We all pay the penance. Because—”
“Yes, yes, I know, because we are all children of the Force.”
“You should watch more of Izisca’s holoform.”
“I don’t want to.”
But after the others are asleep, that’s exactly what Addar does. He watches a vid of Brin reading from the Journal of the Whills:
“The truth in our soul,
Is that nothing is true.
The question of life
Is what then do we do?
The burden is ours
To penance, we hew.
The Force binds us all
From a certain point of view.”