Mayv—stealing and sneaking around the warehouse levels of Coruscant—had been driven not by hope but by a grim determination. Her energy had come from anger at the wrongs done to her planet, not from any real hope of setting them right.
But now there it was. She had felt hope when she touched the tree. It had felt good. Not like a trick but like a new kind of energy. It had shocked her at first, but already she longed to feel it again.
“ROWRIGGHH HRMKUHHRNNN,” Chewie repeated.
Cautiously, she touched the tree trunk again with a finger. The energy flowed into her again: hope, courage, and…something else she had never really known…peace.
“Are all the trees like this?” she murmured. “I guess they must be. Yes…they are, I can feel it.”
The tooka, meanwhile, was rubbing her ear-type things against the tree in complete bliss. This was clearly millions of times better than the trash-ridden lower levels of Coruscant where she had grown up.
“I read something once,” said Mayv, “about the Force. Have you heard of it?”
“MYYURH MYYYURHH MYYYYURH,” Chewie said, chuckling. Had he heard of the Force? He’d been hearing about it his whole life—for over two hundred years—and had known several Jedi—Ahsoka Tano, Luminara Unduli, and even Yoda.
“Do you think that could be what we’re feeling when we touch the trees? The Force?”
Chewie just said “Trees are life” again. To him it wasn’t that surprising at all. Not every Wookiee was Force-sensitive, but every Wookiee knew that being among trees connected them to the Force and the Force to them. Baby Wookiees learned that before their first shedding.
But Chewie had spent so long in ships and space stations, loading bays and detention cells, bars and cantinas that he had almost forgotten what the saying meant.
He rested his whole body against the tree and purred as happily as the tooka.
It was almost as good as being home.
For Mayv it was even better than being home. Her home had been a war zone. This was the opposite.
She leaned her head against the trunk and soaked in the peace and gladly let go of the anger and fear. It was the most beautiful moment of her life.
“I’ll just stay here with the insane killer monsters then, shall I?” called K-2 below, his voice still calm but his volume raised. “All eight of them?”
Mayv looked down and saw that there were, in fact, eight snarlers.
However, they were already losing interest in K-2 and, sniffing the air, trotting off toward the ship.
As both Chewie and Mayv knew, the ship’s cargo hold smelled strongly of tooka cat even though the cats had fled into the forest.
The snarlers followed the smell right up the boarding ramp and through the hatchway, tongues dripping the whole way. Smashing and crashing began as the snarlers tore the place apart looking for the cats.
“NYAARRR!” yelled Chewie from the tree, protective of his ship even if it was cruddy.
Suddenly, the ship’s cargo door slammed shut, trapping the creatures inside.
“I have achieved victory over all eight of the insane killer monsters,” announced K-2. There was an awkward pause. “You’re welcome.”
“Uh…great, but what are we supposed to do when we need to use the ship again?” asked Mayv.
“You’ll probably be dead before then.”
“Excuse me?”
“The chances of your returning to the ship alive are very small,” said K-2, “however, they are better now that I have single-handedly achieved victory over all eight of the killer snarlers.” Awkward pause. “You’re welcome.”
“Chewie,” said Mayv quietly, “is it just me, or do you think that droid is really weird?”
“MRRRRRULLL,” said Chewie, shrugging. In his experience most droids were really weird.
“Well, should we head back down? Try to get through the forest before any more snarlers show up?”
“HHHUMMGHHRA NWURRR ROWRIGGHH!” said Chewie, pointing up. As you’ve probably guessed, this is another Wookiee saying related to trees and paths and destiny.
It’s very poetic but in this case also quite practical. Over their heads, the forking trunks of the trees reached out far enough to touch and actually join with other trees.
Goldie was already scampering across one of these connections in pursuit of a large bug of some sort.
“RHHOWROO. RHHOWROO. RHHOWROO HOWG,” Chewie explained, pointing to one tree after another.
“You mean you want us to go from tree to tree? All the way to that chasm?”
“MHHHHRGGROT!” said Chewie with a satisfied nod.
Mayv groaned.
“Oktar Crumbuth! You do know that Oktarians are afraid of heights, right? We only have one hill on the whole planet, and no one ever climbs it! We even sing hymns about it! I may be higher up right now than anyone in the history of Oktaro! I’d be freaking out if it wasn’t for the trees keeping me calm.”
Chewie waved his hands to try to show her how climbing higher would actually make it safer to cross from tree to tree.
“Well…” she said at last, “I might be able to do it, but what about the cargo droid?”
“The cargo droid will not be doing that,” came K-2’s amplified voice from below. Mayv hadn’t realized he was listening or could even hear them at that distance.
“RHHOWROO HOWG!” insisted Chewie.
“I have compiled a list of thirty-seven reasons why I should stay on the ground. One: the K-X series operates at optimal efficiency on flat surfaces. Two: being odor-free, I appear to be in no danger from the ground-based predators. Three: I—”
“RHHAA GHUNRUT!” That was Chewie’s way of saying he did not wish to hear all thirty-seven reasons. I fear it wasn’t very polite.
K-2SO was about to say something in return that was even less polite when he remembered that he was supposed to be K-2SB, simple cargo droid. So he picked up his crate.
“Throw down one end of the cable and attach the other end securely,” said K-2.
Chewie wrapped the cable around a branch, then let the coil drop.
K-2 took the loose end and inserted it in an opening between his shoulders.
Three small wheels clamped down on the cable and, with the help of some whining servomotors, began to spin. K-2 was propelled up the side of the tree with surprising speed.
He hooked an arm around a branch, then reversed the servomotors. The cable was pulled up behind him as fast as Chewie could coil it.
“I brought your crate,” K-2 told Mayv, as if it was perfectly normal for him to be hanging by one arm from a blue tree while cable whirred out of a hole in his back.
“Uh, thanks,” said Mayv, checking to make sure the medkit was still in there. She was starting to think they were definitely going to need it. (And she was right.)
Chewie slung the roll of cable over his shoulder and grunted a “HRUNG?” that clearly meant, “Ready?”
“Just a second,” said Mayv, wiping the triangles from her forehead. “I’m not taking another step until I repaint.”
“GRNH?” Chewie grunted curiously.
“I guess Wookiees don’t paint treblixes, do they?” Mayv laughed. “Too much hair!”
“YRUNK,” agreed Chewie.
“I’m making the pattern for gracefulness,” continued Mayv, clustering four triangles over each eye. “Not a symbol I use much, but I figured it couldn’t hurt when I’m this far off the ground!”
Whether this symbol—or any of them—worked, I can’t say. But Mayv believed, and maybe that was all that mattered.
“All right,” she said, “ready when you are.”
Chewie looked up and then, without hesitating, jumped. He caught the next branch and swung himself up onto it. It had been a while since he had climbed a tree, but every motion was as natural and easy to him as swimming is to a Gungan or flying is to a Geonosian.
He was about to reach back down to lift up Mayv, but he was too late.
Feeling gra
ceful, hopeful, and possibly overconfident, Mayv was already trying to follow him Wookiee-style.
She jumped as high as she could, then activated the exo-glove. The fingers extended almost a meter and grabbed on to the branch right next to Chewie. With a click of the controls, Mayv was pulled up after it. She swung a leg over the branch and hauled herself up to sit next to the Wookiee.
“MLURRRPH!” he grunted approvingly.
“All right…I think I can do this,” she told him, “and it’s definitely better than being a chew toy for whatever we might run into down there.”
Then she jumped up to grab a higher branch with the exo-glove, and it pulled her to where Goldie was impatiently waiting.
Chewie cocked his head and tried to figure out the girl.
She was starting to remind him of Han—one minute grumbling about something being impossible, the next minute ready to charge in at full speed.
It was a dangerous way of doing things. Crazy, in fact.
And it suited Chewie just fine.
After a few more branches, Mayv went on ahead while Chewie stopped and used the cable to boost up K-2.
“Uh, Chewie!” Mayv called down. “There’s something up here! A lot of somethings!”
Chewie raced to catch up with her and came face to face with a chubby eight-legged bug-type thing that was walking down the tree trunk. It was almost the same size as a tooka cat and almost as ugly as a tooka is cute. Its body was a pasty pale blob with smaller pasty pale blobs sticking out in places.
It stopped and stared at Chewie with two of its four big lidless eyes.
“Glorbbbbb?” it bleated, flapping its wide lips at him as it burbled out the “bbbbb” part.
“GROURRB!” growled Chewie.
“Uh, maybe don’t growl at them,” said Mayv. “There are a lot of them. They don’t seem dangerous, but let me check and see what the mining scouts found.”
While she flipped open her vidscroll, Chewie peered past the bug and saw a long line of identical bugs all marching behind the first one. They seemed pretty grumpy at being halted. “Glorb?” each one asked the one in front of it. “Glorbbb?”
The problem was solved when the leader turned, walked partway around the tree, then turned back toward the ground and continued plodding along.
“Glorb,” it called to its comrades, and they followed along exactly in their leader’s path.
“The scouts called them glorbs. Looks like they’re harmless,” said Mayv, “unless they build a nest in your equipment. Hopefully we won’t be here long enough for that. They’re kind of cute in a way. You have anything like this on your planet?”
“RWWW,” answered Chewie, and Mayv had no idea if that was a yes or a no. (It was a no.)
“Hey, Kay-Tu,” she called down. “Look for some big bugs coming your way!”
“What should I do with the big bugs?”
“I don’t know. Just look at them I guess.”
“Exciting,” said K-2 in his deadpan tone.
“I really don’t know about that droid,” Mayv muttered to Chewbacca.
Chewie leaned back and looked as far up as he could, following the line of glorbs. There seemed to be hundreds of the creatures crossing some sort of bridge to get to that trunk from a different trunk.
He climbed up to take a look. It was a bridge. Or at least it served the same purpose as one.
The branch seamlessly grew into (or out of) their tree and into the next. And that tree had one growing out of (or into) it and connecting to another trunk and so on, all at exactly the same height. The branches seemed to have grown for the sole purpose of giving the bugs an easy way to move from tree to tree.
There’s a fascinating reason for that, but right then Chewie was not particularly interested in why it was there, just that it was there.
He trilled merrily.
He had found the path in the trees, just as he said he would.
“But do they go in the right direction?” asked Mayv when she reached the bridge branch. Or maybe I should call it a branch bridge. Anyway…the thing that went from one tree to the next tree.
“MRUMPH,” assured Chewie, pointing.
“Are you sure? I’m having a little trouble figuring out this holomap….”
“MRUMPH!”
“Okay, okay,” she said, returning the vidscroll to her belt. “You’re the Wookiee, so I’ll let you handle forest navigation.”
“MRUMPH!” chortled Chewie cheerfully. It really was great to be back in a forest, he thought. Even a weird semifungal one.
“Kay-Tu!” yelled Mayv. “We found a path! We’re heading for the rift now.”
“Should I come on up or continue looking at these bugs?”
“Up, please,” said Mayv, rolling her eyes. “You see what I mean?” she whispered to Chewie. “I think his processors may be damaged.”
Chewie gave yet another shrug and rolled out the cable for K-2 to climb.
He would have done a lot more than shrug if he had only known that K-2 hadn’t used his time to watch the bugs. Instead he had silently transmitted a holomessage to Cassian with every detail of the mission so far.
“Stick with the girl and help her get the book,” ordered Cassian, “but we can’t afford to let the Emperor get his hands on it. So just make sure you’re the one who actually gets it, not the girl and definitely not the Wookiee.”
Crossing the bridges between trees was as simple for K-2 as walking on the ground. He had no fear of falling, no vertigo, no nerves, and perfect balance.
Chewbacca was the same, although he came by these abilities naturally, whereas K-2’s skills were artificial.
Mayv, however, had none of those abilities, artificial or otherwise, and each bridge crossing for her was a feat of courage—stepping away from the tree trunk, out onto a narrow branch with nothing on either side except a fatal fall.
At first, she’d edge out onto the bridge as far as she could while holding on to K-2 for balance, then take four or five nervous steps across to where Chewbacca was waiting with an outstretched hand. Soon the nervous steps became confident ones and she could follow Chewie across without breaking her stride.
K-2 would then stomp fearlessly after her and they’d do it again for the next tree.
“This is taking a while,” said Mayv, “but so far nothing is trying to eat us, so that’s good.”
“GRURRRUGH!” agreed Chewie.
As they went, they saw many different kinds of glorbs. Some walked on the tops of branches. Some walked on the undersides. Some flew. Some rode around on larger glorbs.
Despite all the variations of bugs—tiny, small, big, monstrous, furry, beaked, long-legged, short-legged, no-legged, winged, greebled, and so on—there was an essential glorb-ness to all of them. The other thing they all had in common was a fear of the ground. Even on the most crowded trees, there was never a glorb within fifty meters of the dirt below. The bugs avoided it as if it were Mustafar lava.
Unfortunately for the glorbs, they were unprepared to avoid Goldie. She had already sampled several of the smaller varieties of glorb and was feeling very pleasantly stuffed and just wishing everyone would stop for a few minutes so she could have a nap.
She got her wish.
SNAP!
“I’m falling,” said K-2 as he plummeted to the ground. The bridge he had been walking across was not strong enough to hold a cargo droid.
There was nothing Mayv or Chewie could do but watch him disappear into the murky green mist that hid the forest floor. At last they heard him hit the ground with a THWONK.
“Are you okay?” Mayv yelled after the impact.
“I see a worm with hook hands,” K-2 said calmly but at maximum volume.
“I’m not sure if that means he’s malfunctioning or if he’s found some kind of horrible new monster,” Mayv said to Chewie.
“The second one,” boomed K-2. “Cable. Now.”
“MRRRUNG!” answered Chewie, unslinging the cable, securing one end, and
letting the coil drop down into the mist.
A minute later, K-2 was back…with a dent in one shoulder, a lot of new scratches, and some disturbing news.
“We should go,” he said.
“Aren’t you worried about the bridges? What if we find another one that isn’t strong enough to—”
“We should go,” repeated K-2.
“What did you see down there?”
“As a cargo droid, I have a limited knowledge of galactic wildlife. I saw a worm with hook hands. And it is no longer down there. It is halfway up here. We should go.”
Mayv flipped open her vidscroll. “Hmmm, I don’t see anything about any worms with hands. The miners did find some kind of snake monster they called a sniffer, but that was a lot bigger than a worm. Anyway, a worm shouldn’t be a problem as long as we watch our step, right?”
“Incorrect,” said K-2. “We should go. It is here.”
Mayv looked down and saw a huge snakelike shape rising out of the gloom. “It’s huge! I thought you said it was a worm!”
“Yes. With hook hands. We should go.”
“HYRUUUK!” agreed Chewie, and he turned to sprint across the next bridge.
Then he froze in his tracks with a yell: “GGRRRRWWUGH!”
Just across the bridge was a massive fleshy shape…another worm! It was at least as tall as Chewie, but there was no way of telling how tall it actually was, because they couldn’t see the end of it.
Now Mayv knew what K-2 had meant by “hook hands,” and she wished she didn’t.
The hook hands—exactly ten of them—were clustered around a large, oozing four-holed snout on the end of the worm.
The sniffer turned from side to side as the four nostrils investigated the air. Then it turned toward the Wookiee.
It moved without seeming to move. There was no sign of any muscles contracting or any slithering. The long wormlike body just seemed to extend…stretching toward our heroes, the bony, long, many-jointed hook hands grasping and flapping.
Three of the hands already held glorbs, their tiny legs waving frantically and helplessly.
“Glorbbb…glorbbbb…glorbbb…”
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