Phasma was pacing around Siv’s vehicle, and finally she took off her helmet and set it down with a heavy sigh. Siv watched through her lowered lashes as Phasma put her hands on the GAV’s hood, her shoulders shaking. With rage or sadness? It was impossible to tell. Knowing Phasma as she did, probably a combination of the two. For all that Parnassos had become a daily hell in which their people could barely scrape by and often went to bed freshly grieving and panting for water, it was still home. And leaving home for the stars that had always seemed so impossibly far away was an enormously daunting possibility. Phasma had not spoken of defying and abandoning Keldo, but her warriors had known they could never go back. Even if Brendol’s ship had been reduced to ash, the Scyre was no longer a possibility. Phasma, Torben, Gosta—they had become Siv’s only family.
Not that it stopped Siv from missing Keldo.
She wasn’t sure if it was suicide or not, but Siv slipped out of the vehicle and walked around silently to where Phasma stood. The warrior had straightened and was looking through the quadnocs, back at the dunes they’d left behind.
“Are you okay?” Siv asked softly.
Phasma did not put down the quadnocs, which meant Siv couldn’t see her eyes, or even much of her face. But she could see the tear tracks glimmering in the moonlight.
“I’m fine.”
Phasma’s tone was clipped, a perfect mimic of Brendol’s.
“What are you looking for?”
Phasma didn’t answer.
“I’m surprised you’re looking behind us instead of forward,” Siv ventured.
Phasma snorted and put the quadnocs back on the hood, careful to keep her back to Siv as she leaned against the vehicle and crossed one boot over the other. It occurred to Siv that she hadn’t seen Phasma’s face since she’d slept off her beating. Perhaps the proud warrior didn’t want the others to see and pity her pain. Or perhaps, thanks to Brendol’s medicine, she was perfectly healed and trying to hide it.
“In my experience,” Phasma said, “it’s the thing that sneaks up behind you that’s the real threat, not the one that faces you.”
Siv leaned against the opposite side of the hood, her back to Phasma’s. “So you trust the strangers?”
“Of course not. But you know as well as I do that the Scyre is dying.” Phasma chuckled sadly. “Only one child. Frey will be the only one of her generation. And she’ll die alone.”
“There might be more children,” Siv ventured.
“Not if their mothers can’t bring them forth. Perhaps it’s the air here. Perhaps there’s some vital ingredient that the planet no longer provides. Perhaps almost starving is not the ideal way to conceive new life. But you’ve lost too many children already. You may yet lose the one you carry.”
That answered one question Siv had wondered about. Phasma had always been sharp. But did she know it might be Keldo’s?
“The medicine on their ship will fix it,” Siv said.
“That is the hope.”
“Do you think—” Siv started. But she stopped herself, worried that she was probing too deeply.
“Do I think?” Phasma’s rare gentle tone suggested, for once, that Siv might continue.
“Do you think the First Order will come back and help all our people? Bring them to the stars, too, or take them to richer lands, or at least drop some supplies? So rich a people should have more than enough to share. I hate to think of Keldo—”
“Do not speak his name again to me.”
The night went especially still and quiet after Phasma’s harsh bark, which seemed to tear unwillingly from her throat.
“They could help him, too,” Siv finished in a far meeker voice. “His leg is only a problem because Parnassos is so cruel. Perhaps there are other functions he could perform, with their help. He is an intelligent man, resilient. He could be useful—”
Phasma’s fist hit the hood of the vehicle with a clank. “That’s not my problem anymore. He made his choice. And he made the wrong one. Let him suffer for it.”
Pushing away from the GAV’s hood, Phasma snatched up the quadnocs and a few of the remaining fruits, which released a sweet, syrupy fragrance into the night, as if they might begin rotting at any moment. She walked to the top of the nearest dune, retracing the swiftly disappearing tracks of their vehicle and leaving her own shifting boot prints like a small river in the vast gray. Sitting on the top of the dune, she put the quadnocs to her eyes and stared back in the direction they’d come from, back toward the Scyre. Siv didn’t think of Phasma as someone who valued nostalgia or regret. Which meant, as Phasma had just told Brendol, that she suspected they were being followed.
Their conversation over, Siv ate most of the remaining fruits. They were the sweetest things she’d ever tasted, her entire mouth flooded with juice. Is this what the world was like when there was enough water? Is this what Brendol’s people ate on their ships in the sky? Perhaps she should’ve left more for someone else, but her stomach cried out with hunger. Thinking of her child, she sucked down all but the last fruit and wiped the evidence from her chin. She was instantly overcome with regret. In the Scyre, she would’ve divided the fruit into portions for herself, Torben, and Gosta, carefully ensuring that each person received a share that matched their needs. But here she was, alone and hoarding food. She told herself it was the baby, but she knew she was partially lying. The farther she got from the Scyre, and the more she followed Phasma’s orders, the less sure she felt about who she truly was.
That night was a longer one than most. The adrenaline from the arena fight still sang in her blood, and thanks to her earlier nap, she barely slept. She used the time to pull out her leather bag of herbs and craft a new pot of oracle salve, as the old tin was running low. The sun here was more punishing than it had been back home, and they were using three times as much of the balm, yet their skin continued to redden, even under their masks. The complicated process was challenging, especially in the low light of a lantern they’d brought from Arratu, and by the time she was done, she was exhausted.
The argument she’d overheard between Brendol and Phasma replayed in her head as she snuggled up with Gosta, reminding her that the world was, in many ways, turned upside down. There was hope now, but there was also a new sense of dread. Every time she looked up from Gosta’s shoulder, she saw Phasma’s silhouette, a lonely figure keeping watch on the sand. Whatever Phasma was waiting for didn’t happen that night, and the next morning they divided up the remaining Arratu food and began the next leg of their journey.
Siv couldn’t find a way to prevent the group from splitting up as Brendol and Phasma had arranged. The way Brendol suggested that Gosta ride alone sounded downright gallant, and the girl was pleased and relieved to have the space to herself.
“Wouldn’t you like to stay with me, though?” Siv asked.
“I mean, it would be nice to have some room.” Gosta looked down, blushing, unaccustomed to arguing with her elders. “My ankle is feeling better, but it can get cramped.”
So the girl stretched out in the back of her own GAV, driven by a trooper, while Siv found herself pressed up against Torben. Part of her was grateful for his reassuring bulk and easy company, but she just couldn’t relax as she watched Gosta’s hair bounce in the front vehicle, knowing that any traps or attacks from the front would claim the girl first, as the hidden pit before Arratu had. But then she realized that she and Torben were in back, the very direction from which Phasma was expecting trouble. Phasma and Brendol’s GAV was neatly placed in the center, and while this fact would’ve escaped Siv just a few days earlier, now she had seen a brief slice of the machinations that happened in secret between Phasma and Brendol. And she didn’t like them.
Life in the Scyre had prepared Siv well for this sort of journey. Very little occurred, but she was always wary, waiting for an attack or natural disaster. The motion of the vehicle had once exacerbated her nausea, but now it lulled her into a strange, light sleep, and she could feel the sun pressing a
gainst her eyelids as her body jigged with every slip of sand. Torben was a pleasant companion, happy enough to be quiet or chat, his arm keeping Siv upright and feeling safe. The trooper in front, Huff, was a study in silence. Siv often forgot he was there, much less that somewhere under that helmet and armor was a human being with a history, thoughts, and dreams. When they stopped for a brief lunch and to relieve themselves, she found herself curious about the man.
“Where are you from, Huff?” she asked.
He had his helmet off and was picking at some dried meat taken from the lizard attack while sipping his water. He had pale skin that seemed as if it had never seen the sun before, and the longer he stood out under the burning rays, the pinker and sweatier he looked. Siv had offered him some oracle salve, but he made a disgusted face and waved it away. Although he appeared to be in his early twenties, judging by how folk aged in the Scyre, his buff hair was already going thin. His eyes were a light gray that verged on white, and he frowned as soon as she spoke to him.
“Where am I from? The First Order,” he said, as if she were a fool.
Siv noticed that his accent was different from Brendol’s, something closer to her own, maybe.
“Is it a planet?”
He shook his head. “Hard to say what it is. The government that should be. It’s the right side to be on, I’ll tell you that.”
“But were you not born on a planet?”
Huff shrugged. “I was in an orphanage somewhere when I was little, don’t even remember where. Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t good. The First Order is my real home now. A ship called the Finalizer. When I came on as a kid, I’d never seen a place so big. You could walk all day long and never see everything. There’re thousands of people on there I’ve never even met.” He looked around the empty desert. “Opposite of this, really. The food isn’t much, but I miss it. This meat tastes rotten.”
He threw a strip of jerky down on the ground, and without thinking about it, Siv knelt to snatch it up and dust off the sand. She gave him a reproachful look.
“Food is not to be wasted here. Can you not see how very rare it is?”
“The First Order will pick us up, and then it won’t matter. Until General Hux orders me to be thrifty, I’ll go on as I always have.”
As she cleaned the jerky off with her fingers and stuffed it in her mouth, she tasted it: the rot. Nothing lasted long enough in the Scyre to begin to turn, but she instinctively wanted to spit it out. Still, food was food, and her teaching ran deeper than her distaste. She swallowed it down quickly and followed it with a tiny sip of water from one of the Arratu skins. When she stood to ask Huff if he liked the First Order, he was already walking away. Not that it mattered. They were closer to their destination than to their old home, and there was no going back.
They were soon loaded into their vehicles and plowing toward where Phasma swore Brendol’s ship would be. For hours and hours, there was nothing. No lumps, no animals, no walls. Nothing but rippled gray dunes of sparkling sand and the sun beating down, making Siv sleepy and woozy and wishing she hadn’t eaten that strip of rotten jerky. The taste plagued her, and no matter how much she swallowed water or nibbled on salty sea veg, it wouldn’t go away. Torben dozed beside her, one huge paw always on his club. His long, wavy hair billowed prettily in the breeze in a way that he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate if she’d taken the trouble to explain it. He was a practical man, and beauty didn’t last on Parnassos.
Siv grew bored and restless, her glance lazily switching from the lead vehicle, in which Gosta slumbered, to the middle one that Brendol drove, hunched over the steering wheel, while Phasma sat up in the turret, her hand on the gun and her helmet constantly turned to watch the sand behind them.
Siv told me that she felt something strange in the air then. As if the desert were holding its breath, waiting. Everything wavered in the haze with the sun at its highest, white and punishing. Her eyes hurt from staring at the sparkling gray, and each time the sun caught on a bit of metal, it flashed hot enough to leave red spots dancing in her field of vision. The drive became endless, and for the first time Siv worried that they might not make it to Brendol’s ship. How could these vehicles keep going? What fuel powered them? How long would their water, salve, and food last until they started eyeing the weakest of their companions?
Or, to be more honest, how long until Gosta suffered an unfortunate and unavoidable accident and Brendol Hux merely shrugged as he urged Siv to use her detraxors?
“There’s something ahead!”
The shout woke Siv from her uncomfortable, half-asleep musing, and she went on alert, one hand on her blade. Even though she’d been carrying the blaster, it was the scythes she’d inherited from her mother that fit her hands best and sang of home.
Torben likewise tightened to alertness beside her, shaking his head and muttering, “Yes, but what kind of something? That’s the bit that matters.”
Scanning the sands before them, Siv saw two things. The first was a strange fence made of metal wire stretching forever in either direction. The second was a figure glittering so bright that it burned her eyes to look at it.
Without a word, the lead GAV changed its direction, aiming for the figure. Siv couldn’t tell from so far back whether it was a structure, a droid, a machine, or something different. Another mystery seen only from far off involved white placards placed at equal distances along the fence, flapping against the metal and making an eerie, toneless song as they were buffeted by the wind. Any writing that had been there had long ago been scoured away. The fence went on and on, rising stark against the bright-blue sky, and they didn’t slow as they approached.
When they were almost within blaster-rifle range of the bright thing, the first GAV skidded to a halt. Brendol and Phasma’s vehicle drew even with it and stopped, as did Siv’s. All in a row, engines growling, they stared at the puzzling figure. Phasma pulled out her quadnocs, considered the scene, and handed them down to Brendol. He, too, looked a long time, and when the ’nocs dropped, he was frowning, his whole face bright red and dripping with sweat.
“What is it?” he asked Phasma.
She shook her head. “Nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“The way the sun reflects off it,” Torben said. “It burns my eyes.”
The two leaders hopped down from their vehicle, and Phasma gestured to her warriors to join her while Brendol consulted with his troopers. Even with the quadnocs, Siv couldn’t tell what the bright thing might be, and she had the sharpest sight among the Scyre folk.
Gosta sidled up to Siv and tried the quadnocs herself.
“Strange,” she muttered. “It’s too lumpy for a machine, but too shiny for a living thing.”
Brendol put a hand on Gosta’s shoulder. “You’re still injured. You stay here and guard the GAVs. Everyone else, have your weapons ready.” He pulled his own blaster and fiddled with the switches on the side. “This is not normal.”
“Well, what is, these days?” Torben said, hefting his club and ax.
The troopers went first, blaster rifles up and ready, their boots slipping through the sand. Phasma came next, Siv and Torben flanking her. Brendol came last, his blaster shaking in his hand as sweat dripped down his forehead in a way that Siv found nearly blasphemous when she glanced back. Gosta clearly hated staying behind, but she held her blaster and took her place in the back of her vehicle as the others crept up the hill. Defying Brendol had somehow become as ridiculous a thought as defying Phasma.
The whole thing seemed silly to Siv. If the mysterious object was a machine, it either was deactivated or had been tracking them all along. If it was an animal, it was stupid or slow, as it hadn’t budged. She couldn’t think of anything else that could pose a real threat, and yet Brendol commanded them to sneak up on it? Still, her leader was following his orders, and so she would follow Phasma.
Closer and closer they crept in plain sight, every blaster aimed, every bit of metal reflecting in the sun, and still the glitt
ering thing didn’t make any move whatsoever. Soon Siv could make out the true shape of it, and it reminded her of a statue she’d seen in Arratu, a piece of claywork vaguely in human form, apparently representing some much-loved Arratu of time past. This shape was lumpy like that, and yet the material wasn’t anything she’d seen before.
“It’s not your ship?” Phasma whispered to Brendol. “You said it would shine.”
“Not like this.”
They were close enough to poke it with a spear when two silver eyes blinked open amid the mirrorlike gold, each one the size of Siv’s fist and segmented like an insect’s.
“Ah. Greetings, travelers. Churkk has been waiting for you.”
“Let’s kill it,” Torben whispered. “I don’t like it.”
Brendol holstered his blaster, held up his hands in a calming sort of way, and stepped forward.
“You are a Gand, are you not?”
“Churkk is a Gand you speak with, yes. Churkk is the last guardian of the dead lands.”
Torben gestured to the infinite sea of gray sand behind them. “You mean there are lands deader than that?”
Churkk buzzed a laugh, and as its head shifted, Siv finally understood the glittering metal appearance. The Gand, if that’s what a Gand was, was completely covered with the same kind of golden beetle that had been responsible for killing Carr. As it laughed, beetles darted from around its eyes and down to where its chin would be, if a giant insect had a chin. The beard of beetles shifted and clicked, making Siv shudder in horror. The Gand’s face revealed was no less horrifying, a chitinous bag with alien eyes and an apparatus that looked nothing like a mouth, even if that’s where the buzzing, clacking voice was coming from.
“Those beetles,” Siv said, pointing. “Why do they not kill you?”
“The beetles are the closest thing Churkk has to family. It is lonely in the wastelands, is it not? Pleasant to have beings with which to converse.”
Phasma (Star Wars) Page 23