by Rae Carson
The street narrowed, and Han was forced to slow down. Decay surrounded them—boxy warehouses with broken windows, ramshackle huts made of scrap metal, and ragged beggars huddling beneath makeshift eaves. The air smelled of wet soot and burned meat.
Though it was nighttime, everyone was about their business. Music drifted toward them, coming from the glowing open windows of a cantina. They passed a line of beings waiting at a rickety food stand that advertised eel skewers. Han’s stomach growled. As soon as they were settled in Qi’ra’s safe house, he’d eat that dog biscuit he’d saved against her advice. Unless it was soaked in sewage from his swim. Well, actually, maybe even then.
Qi’ra leaned forward and said, “Turn left at the intersection.”
It was hardly an intersection, more like the confluence of a few crooked alleys, but he did as directed.
“We’ll have to hide the speeder,” she said. “Any working vehicle in this district gets stripped clean before you can blink.”
“Where should we hide it?” Han asked.
“Just go where I tell you.”
She sounded cold and brusque, even more than usual. Maybe she was sore about him taking over the pilot’s seat.
Qi’ra directed them through the warren of alleys and crooked side streets with confidence. The land sloped lower and lower. The cracked duracrete began to sheen with wetness. Here and there, stubborn weeds grew in clumps, clinging to any patch of soil they could find—in the cracked streets, along the walkways, even on rooftops.
The buildings parted, revealing utter darkness. Han adjusted the light setting so he could see his way forward.
A vast, swampy field stretched ahead, filled with long, stubborn grass and pollution-stunted trees. Giant, building-sized lumps dotted the field, like massive toads ready to spring. As they approached, the lumps manifested into something more recognizable, and Han gasped.
They were starships. Hundreds of them. All abandoned hulks, stripped of anything useful, rotting in the swamp.
“The freighter boneyard,” Tsuulo whispered reverently. “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been here before.”
“Circle around the western edge,” Qi’ra said, pointing.
They cruised by a looming shell of metal that in the distant past had housed a high cockpit centered above twin propulsion jets. A clothesline hung between the massive jets, and grimy fabric fluttered in the breeze.
“People live here,” Han breathed.
“People live everywhere,” Qi’ra said. “Always. No matter what. They find a way.”
“Is one of these ships your safe house?” he asked.
Qi’ra said nothing.
“We’ll have to be careful,” Tsuulo said. “This is Silo territory.”
Everyone had heard of the Silo, a work camp filled with orphans, run by the nastiest people Corellia had ever seen, where the life expectancy was less than eighteen cycles. Word on the street was the Silo made the White Worm den seem like a palace of luxury and decadence.
“There!” Qi’ra said. “See that big tree? Pull the speeder in behind it.”
Trees were uncommon in and around Coronet, so this one was easy to spot even in the dark—a stunted thing with a huge trunk that grew from the side of a hill, reaching desperately for sunshine it hardly ever found. Behind the tree was a depression of sorts, an indentation in the land that made for a perfect hidden parking spot.
Han turned off the speeder and jumped out. His boots made a squelching sound as he landed; they were smack-dab in the middle of a bog.
Qi’ra and Tsuulo landed beside him. Now that the speeder was turned off, they were in almost total darkness. A hint of moonlight diffused through thick clouds, giving both Tsuulo and Qi’ra a bluish cast to their skin.
“So…” Han said, looking around at a big black nothing. “This is it?”
Solemnly, with obvious reluctance, Qi’ra said, “Welcome to my…home, I guess.”
She turned, bent toward the steep hill, and yanked at something. An entire layer of sod lifted away, revealing a doorway.
Qi’ra’s hands shook as she pulled up the sod that camouflaged the entrance to her safe house. She had spent years fixing this place up. She’d poured sweat and tears and all the credits she could scavenge into it. And by showing it to Han and Tsuulo, she was giving it up.
Bringing them here was a necessity, she told herself. Now that the Kaldana, the White Worms, the Droid Gotra, and maybe even the Empire were all after them, the only safe place was the one no one knew about.
But now Han and Tsuulo knew, and after tonight, things would never be the same.
Qi’ra shoved aside the fuselage scrap that served as her doorway and beckoned them into the dark. She felt their presence at her back as she groped along a shelf for the lamp…there! She fumbled for the switch. Light flooded the room, searing her eyes.
Han and Tsuulo stood gaping.
“It’s a ship!” Han said.
“Well, we are in the freighter boneyard,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, but from outside, it looked like…”
Qi’ra shoved the fuselage scrap back into place, sealing them in against the night. “I found this place a while back,” she explained. “Half buried. There was hardly room to stand up, but the structure seemed sound.” She reached up and caressed an arched gray beam. Several of them all in a row gave the room shape, like the metal ribs of a giant beast. “I excavated it and took the dirt outside, covered over the rest. Now only the people who live here in the boneyard know that my hill is actually a ship.”
Tsuulo asked her something, and she looked to Han.
“He wants to know if you have power. If not, he says he can rig something for you.”
A funny feeling twinged in her chest. It was the feeling she always got when someone wanted to do something nice for her and she didn’t know if there were strings attached.
“Thanks, but no,” Qi’ra said. “I thought about setting up some solar panels, but they’d just get stolen. I have a few items here that run on fuel, but fuel is really expensive….” Suddenly, she saw the place through their eyes: cold, dark, with only a crooked shelf, a sagging cot, and a rusty table and chairs for furnishings. The ceiling was too low for them to stand up straight. Not to mention the constantly seeping floor. She never set her belongings on the ground. They’d be ruined in less than a day.
She sighed. The thing she took the most pride in in all the galaxy was a rotting garbage heap. “Sorry,” she said glumly. “I know it’s not much, but at least we’ll be safe—”
“It’s amazing,” Han said. “It’s perfect.”
Tsuulo nodded enthusiastically.
Qi’ra’s face warmed. She wasn’t sure why their opinion mattered, but somehow it did. “Well, make yourselves at home. Let’s get some sleep. Then we’ll make a plan. We should sleep in shifts. The table is durable enough for sleeping. And the cot. One person can keep watch out in the speeder.”
Han and Tsuulo exchanged glances, then they both plopped down into chairs. Tsuulo leaned his forearms on the table and slumped over, as if relieved to find something sturdy.
“So…no sleeping?” Qi’ra said.
“I feel like I’m going at hyperspeed,” Han said. “Might be a while before I can fall asleep.”
Qi’ra knew exactly what he was talking about. Though her body was exhausted, her mind was too busy for sleep.
Tsuulo said something about Reezo.
“He hopes his brother is suffering and scared right now,” Han said, pulling the dog biscuit out of his pocket. It crumbled to pieces in his hand, and he stared down in disgust.
“I wouldn’t eat that,” Qi’ra said, remembering their swim through sewage.
“Might not have a choice,” Han said, but he brushed all the pieces onto the table instead of putting them into his mouth.
“Tsuulo,” Qi’ra said. “Why do you hate your brother so much?”
The Rodian bleeped in protest.
“He does
n’t hate him exactly,” Han explained. “They just don’t get along.” After a pause, Han added, “So are you going to tell us or not?”
The line of tiny spines along Tsuulo’s scalp fluttered, and his mouth turned down. Then he started talking. With Han’s help, Qi’ra gathered the gist of it.
Tsuulo and his brother, Reezo, were born on Coruscant. They went to school there. Tsuulo loved school so much he took extra classes via the local holonet. He didn’t have a knack for languages or literature; like many Rodians, he struggled to speak Basic. But he was a natural in his engineering courses. He wanted to design hyperdrives someday.
Their mother was a sales rep for a small freighter company, and her work often took her offworld. One year, after winning a big sales bonus, she decided to take the whole family with her on one of her business trips. “It will be a great education for the boys,” she’d said to her husband. So off they went, all four of them, to Corellia for a sales conference at the famous Buckell Center.
On the second morning of the conference, while Tsuulo and his brother were sleeping in, their parents left for an early breakfast. They were strolling toward a nearby restaurant when a speeder cab swerved off the thoroughfare and missiled into them, killing them instantly before crashing into Diadem Square.
It turned out the speeder cab had been hijacked by an angry factory worker, a young Besalisk male who recently had lost his job. He’d been aiming the speeder for the employment office. Tsuulo’s parents had just been in the way.
Tsuulo paused at this point and blinked a few times.
“You don’t have to tell us any more if you don’t want to,” Qi’ra said. She knew what it was like to have secrets. Giving them to others felt like peeling parts of yourself away. Even the seemingly unimportant secrets.
Because when you had nothing, your secrets were everything.
But maybe a little sympathy was all Tsuulo needed, because he started talking again, even faster than before.
Later that day, when CorSec found the boys and told them what had happened to their parents, Reezo assured them he was old enough to take care of his little brother, that there was no need to send them to an orphanage or a work camp. A few days later, an insurance settlement came through from Coruscant. If Tsuulo and Reezo were very careful, the money their parents had left them would pay for their educations and get them on their feet.
But Reezo had a better idea. He’d heard about Corellian speeder racing and become obsessed with the idea. Without consulting Tsuulo, he used the insurance settlement to purchase a speeder and enter his first race. He was sure he could double their money with his winnings.
He crashed the speeder, leaving them broke.
When Tsuulo found out, he was furious. Reezo seemed to feel awful about it, but no matter how many credits came their way—through begging, through odd jobs, through selling all the clothing and items their parents had brought with them from Coruscant—Reezo couldn’t keep himself from spending it on his new hobby. Finally, six months before, Tsuulo had left his brother behind, certain he’d be better off on his own. He left with nothing but the clothes on his back and his datapad.
He’d been so relieved to get accepted into the White Worm gang. Then he ate at least once per day—a big improvement over being with Reezo.
So no, he didn’t hate his brother. His brother was trying, in his own way, to make things right. But Tsuulo still hoped he was suffering, alone and scared in the engine compartment of Han’s speeder. Reezo had it coming.
After Tsuulo finished telling them, they were silent a long moment. Finally, Qi’ra said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
But she didn’t feel all that sorry. At least he’d had parents. His datapad, brought all the way from Coruscant, was by far the most valuable possession of any of the White Worms. He’d been given an education. Enough to eat during his most formative years. Qi’ra would have cut off a finger for a past like that.
But Tsuulo took her words at face value. “Thanks,” he said. It was one of the few words he could pronounce in Basic.
He stood and stretched, bleeping out something.
Han said, “He says he’ll take the first watch shift. While he’s out there, he’ll make good on our word to Beejay and strip Reezo’s speeder.”
“Come wake one of us up in a few hours,” Qi’ra said as Tsuulo pushed aside the fuselage scrap and stepped into the night.
She and Han were alone now.
“I should have let you drive,” she said, all in a rush. “I was wrong to insist on doing it myself. I’d read about it and talked about it, and I thought that meant I could do it, but…I don’t have a feel for it the way you do.”
His eyes narrowed, and he studied her for a long moment. “You’re…different,” he said at last.
The power of anger swelled behind her eyes, and she glared blaster bolts right back at him. “Let me guess,” she began scathingly. “I’m not like other girls?” She knew a pickup line when she heard it. Somehow, she was disappointed to discover that Han was just like all the rest.
“No, I mean you’re not like other people. That’s the second time you’ve admitted you were wrong about something.”
She blinked, her anger fleeing as quickly as it came. “Oh.” Then: “Really? That’s…different?”
He shrugged. “Most people argue just to argue. But not you. When you’re wrong, you just come out and say it.”
Qi’ra considered this. “It would be deeply impractical to continue on the wrong path just for the sake of argument.”
His lips turned up into a half smile. “And you’re never impractical.”
“I try not to be.”
Han rubbed at his eyes. Maybe he was getting tired after all. His ruddy brown hair was curling slightly at the nape now that it was dry, and something mud-like was streaked across his right cheek. She considered whether to draw his attention to it but decided not to.
“Speaking of practical,” he said, and Qi’ra had a funny feeling he was going to ask a question she didn’t like. “Why here? All the way across town? This is the worst part of Coronet City, and it’s so far away from the White Worm den, I imagine you can’t make it out here very often.”
She said nothing. He wanted more of her secrets. More of her.
“What I mean is,” he continued, “it just doesn’t seem practical. How did you find this place anyway? What were you doing way out here in the freighter boneyard?”
Wind whistled through the tree outside. Bilgefrogs croaked out that dawn was not too far away. A clanking sound nearly sent Qi’ra out of her chair, but Han said, “That was Tsuulo. I bet he just removed the holo-flames attachment.”
She settled back, placed her hands on the table. Her short nails were grimed with dirt.
Finally, she said, “I grew up here. In the Silo.”
Han’s eyes flew wide.
“So I knew the territory, knew about the boneyard. Mostly, I think I keep a safe house here because I want to always remember where I came from. I want a reminder, every time I’m eating rat sludge for breakfast or pickpocketing an innocent person for Lady Proxima, that things used to be worse. If they can get better once, they can get better again, right?”
Han was studying her closely, almost like he was seeing her for the first time. And she didn’t hate it.
“That makes sense,” he said carefully. “Is it true what they say about the Silo? That it’s Corellian hell?”
“It’s worse,” she said, and her voice sounded empty and hollow even to her own ears.
“How so?”
“Actually…I’d rather not talk about that.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, but she could tell he was disappointed.
“Let’s talk about that speeder instead,” she said, if only to change the subject. “You were awfully familiar with that garage. And you knew just what to say to that droid to convince her to let us go.”
Han scratched at the smear on his face, then pulled his fingers away
in dismay. “Ugh,” he said. “I hope that’s mud.”
“The droid?” Qi’ra prompted.
“Beejay,” Han said. “She’s a mechanical repair droid. Someone repurposed her to help build custom speeders. She’s quite good, knows a lot. I’ve learned from her. You know she has her own speeder too? Bee is kind of obsessed with the idea of building the perfect custom speeder. She thinks she’s going to win a race herself someday.”
“And she hates Reezo’s speeder.”
“Hates. With the rage of an exploding sun. All those useless attachments. There’s nothing more offensive to Bee than a customization that does not specifically”—Han modulated his voice to sound mechanical and female—“optimize performance and increase efficiency.” He grinned. “The speeder she’s working on is the ugliest in the garage, but when she’s done, it’ll have it where it counts.”
Qi’ra’s brain was finally catching up to the fact that her body was exhausted. She yawned and stretched, saying, “So that’s where you’ve been going after shift every night. To work on your own speeder.”
His face was suddenly stricken; Han was terrible at keeping his feelings hidden. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Not anyone,” Qi’ra said. And she meant it. Unless he betrayed her in some way. Or if she really needed the leverage. But probably she wouldn’t tell anyone. “You pilot the way a fish swims in water,” she observed. “You’re a natural.”
“I’ve done a little driving for Proxima,” he said. “Some getaway stuff. But not much.”
“You should do more of it. Practice. On the other hand, maybe I should never drive a speeder again.”
“I’m glad you’re bad at driving,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m glad there’s something in the galaxy you aren’t instantly good at. You might be the smartest, most competent person I’ve ever met.”
Qi’ra narrowed her eyes at him. Was he flirting with her? Han could turn an insult into a compliment as smoothly as he took those hairpin turns. No wonder he was a finalist for the Head position. Lady Proxima could make use of a slick talker like him.
No, he wasn’t flirting, she decided. He was acknowledging her worth from a place of genuine respect. Not something she was used to.