Instead he slumps back against the wall and draws the crate toward him. He pops a series of latches; the lid opens. Inside waits a series of crystals like the ones in the walls and ceiling above. Hundreds of them.
Addar stifles a cry, then withdraws another of the projector disks. He places it in his lap and ignites it—again, the holoform of Brin Izisca appears. The vid of Brin says: “Just as the Jedi are a lens that focuses the Force, so is the kyber crystal a lens that focuses the light inside the Jedi—and the light inside the Jedi’s weapon, the lightsaber. But those crystals can be used for greater, more evil powers—the Sith focus the Force, too, but they use it not for light, but only for destruction. These crystals were taken from Christophsis to power two of the most insidious weapons built, the legacy of Galen Erso, the legacy of Orson Krennic, of Tarkin and the Sith, of Palpatine and Vader. The Death Stars are gone. Light has persevered through the necessity of dark. These crystals must go home. That is your task.”
With that, Addar begins taking the crystals out one by one, setting them down into the cave from which they had been taken years before. He sets the disk to project the holoform once again. He tries not to think about how this is the place where he is going to die—or, in Brin’s words, where he will join soon with the living Force, all hail the light, the dark, and the gray.
At the camp, the troopers are dead.
Effney has been reduced to spare parts.
Bones frees the prisoners. Gomm gabbles as he’s let loose, scrambling on all fours around the sand. The skull-eyed thing warbles with laughter, kneeling and raising its arms to the sky to take in its freedom. The others filter out to gather around the Imperial water supply and drink till their bellies must hurt.
Norra tells them they’d do best to hightail it out of there, because the Empire will soon come. And next time they might put them in graves, not cages.
She finds a speeder bike. She and Bones steal it and go.
Together they travel for hours. Endless sand streaks past in mounding dunes that grow higher and higher, and soon the bike is cresting each hill and leaving her stomach behind with the drop back down on the far side. Bounce and dip, rise and fall. Worse, she has to close her eyes most of the time—she has no goggles, and the streaming sand burns her eyes. And it’s not like she even knows where she’s going. Right now, the priority is get away in any direction. The direction she picks is the one they chose at the outset: In the distance she sees canyons and plateaus. The same ones, she believes, that they saw when they crash-landed here.
So that’s where she points the front prongs of the speeder.
The blue sky begins to dim, bleeding at the horizon line. In the distance she sees a pair of goggle-eyed humanoids half her size digging in the sand. They don’t even look up as the bike zips past.
She hears something. An engine. A ship. That can’t be good. The Empire controls the airspace here. Ahead, a small shape in the air grows larger and larger until she can see that it’s a shuttle. Imperial, probably.
Norra turns the speeder next to a heaping dune and lurks in its shadow as the ship passes overhead.
It’s not Imperial. It’s some other make. Corellian, she thinks.
It burns sky and keeps going until it’s gone.
Norra tells Bones to hold on again, then she throttles the speeder. It leaps forward like a haunch-whipped varactyl—and again they’re up and racing across the sands, fat plumes of dust filling the air behind them.
Soon, though, she hears that ship once more, and she hears it too late to hide. The shuttle blasts past. It’s not the Empire, so they should be safe, right? Except now the vessel is slowing down. It eases to a stop, hovering above the next dune—slowly its blunt front end starts to rotate back toward her direction. Oh, no. Whoever it is, this can’t be good. They have to keep on moving.
Go around, she thinks. She turns the speeder so it’ll take a far path around the shuttle. Just in case.
But as she whips past, someone is yelling.
At her? To her?
Wait. They’re yelling her name.
“Norra!”
She tilts her heels back and pops the brakes. The bike skids to a halt in a spray of sand. She was right—the pilot of that ship is a bounty hunter.
There, on the far dune next to the shuttle, stands Jas Emari.
—
Jas takes the shuttle up toward the red-rock canyons, and there, as night falls, they park the ship in the shadows of a rocky overhang.
Without even caring whose ship this is or where Jas got it, Norra greedily feasts on food from a locker. It’s not good food—it’s a survivalist ration of kukula nuts, dried galcot, and kalpa sea-threads. But just the same, it may be the best thing she’s ever eaten. And they have a water recycler, too. That she gulps down. It’s cold and hurts her throat and it’s amazing. Everything is amazing. She wants to sleep. She wants to dance the way Bones is dancing right now. Dance, then sleep. Sleep, then dance.