“You … you’re a Jedi!” Orrin exclaimed.
Ben said nothing. His arms hung at his sides, the lightsaber limply pointing toward the ground.
Orrin’s mind raced. He thought back to the holonews he’d seen in Anchorhead a while back. There’d been some kind of coup, waged against the Republic by the Jedi, he thought. Orrin didn’t know much about Jedi. It had never made sense to him why the Republic would put its faith in a group it neither controlled nor understood. It wasn’t smart business. Something must have gone wrong, because the Jedi had been purged, giving rise to the Empire.
“That’s why you’re here,” Orrin said, clawing at one of the rocky walls in an attempt to stand. “That’s why you’re hiding. They’re looking for you. Everyone!”
Ben just looked at the krayt corpse. But he had not deactivated his weapon, and at once, Orrin realized the danger he was in. Ben had just killed a krayt dragon—and now his secret was out.
Orrin winced as he tried to move, supporting himself against the stone towers. “You’re going to kill me!”
Ben looked back at him. “I haven’t decided about that.”
“You haven’t decided?”
A weak smile came over Ben’s face. “I’m not inclined to kill to silence people. That’s something you’d do.”
Orrin staggered from one stone surface to another, trying to make his way to the clearing. Behind, Ben sighed and turned to follow. But he walked slowly—and as he did, he switched off his lightsaber and returned it to its hiding place beneath his robe.
He’s not going to kill me, Orrin thought, forging ahead against the pain. That led to his next thought. I’ve got a card to play.
Orrin would go offworld and visit this Empire, and become something again. He had something to sell again: Ben Kenobi’s hide. To blazes with Tatooine, with all of it! Struggling, he stepped out into the light of the suns.
Annileen was nowhere to be seen, nor Veeka. But Mullen was there, on the ground near the JG-8. A lone massiff stood over his body, feasting.
Heart in his throat, Orrin dragged his broken leg across the clearing. The massiff, done gorging, wandered away. Orrin reached his son’s side and collapsed onto the ground beside him, wailing. Mullen was dead at the hands of a Tusken, just like his beloved younger son, Veeka’s twin.
Where was Veeka? Squinting, he saw footprints and a light trail of blood heading off to the northern exit. Was it Veeka’s blood, or Annileen’s? Would Veeka really have fled back to the posse? If so, there was no helping her now, any more than if the Tuskens had gotten her.
Ben approached, staying a respectful distance away. Orrin looked up from the mess that had been Mullen. Did Ben expect him to repent now? After all this?
He snarled hatefully. “I’m going to tell them. The Empire! And they’ll destroy you!”
Ben folded his hands together and looked at the ground.
Orrin struggled to stand again. “Did you hear me, Jedi? The Empire will destroy you—and everything you love.”
Ben shook his head. “They’ve already done that.”
The farmer ignored him. He staggered toward the damaged landspeeder. “You’d better kill me now, because I mean it!” He heaved himself into the vehicle. “I’ll do it, Kenobi!”
“No, you won’t,” Ben said. “I’ve seen your future. I don’t think you’re going to live much longer.”
“Because of you!”
“Because of you. Because you didn’t turn back.” With that, Ben pivoted and started walking away.
Orrin gawked at the man, but only for a moment. He activated the JG-8, which groaned in protest. There was no going back, not with the posse and the crooks down there. No, there was only forward, through the opening to the south, and whatever lay that way. If Veeka lived, he’d find her again—somehow.
Ben simply stood and watched as the vehicle lurched forward a few meters at a time, starting and stopping fitfully. Orrin fought with the controls, pounding at the dashboard with his fist. “Blast you, move!”
* * *
The younglings hidden, Annileen reentered the clearing from a narrow opening to the east. Visiting Tuskens in their place of last resort was unnerving on its own, but she nearly turned right back around when she saw Orrin hovering toward her in the battered JG-8.
Then she realized he wasn’t heading for her at all, but rather making for the exit to the south. Orrin looked even more beat up than the vehicle, his hair covered with dust and his mouth bloodied. He seemed to be paying her no mind. Looking back, she saw Ben standing, fifty meters away, making no effort to pursue.
Orrin seemed to notice her at last when the reluctant landspeeder came to another sudden stop. Annileen could barely recognize the man she knew—but for the wicked smile that came over his face when he saw her. His words dripped with delightful venom. “Ben’s been lying to you,” he said.
Annileen shrugged. “You did it all the time.”
Orrin sneered. But before he could say anything else, the Tusken he knew as Plug-eye emerged, gaderffii in hand, from the western labyrinth near the southern opening. The adversaries saw each other. Orrin took aim and crushed the accelerator.
The JG-8 seemed to forget its reservations, gunning forward. A’Yark stood stoically as Orrin raced to ram her—until the moment she hurled her gaderffii. The heavy implement spun through the air, striking the windshield with terrible force.
A spray of glass showered Orrin, his windshield smashed for the second time by someone he’d angered. But the landspeeder surged forward anyway, striking the Tusken warrior with full force and carrying her with it toward the southern exit.
Annileen pursued the landspeeder. Orrin couldn’t see anything through the fractured windshield, she realized—but he was accelerating nonetheless. She skidded to a stop in time to watch the hovercraft miss the narrow bantha path that led down the side of the cliff. The vehicle sailed freely for seconds until, lacking anything for the antigrav units to repel against, it tumbled downward, end over end. It vanished in the bad country.
Meters behind Annileen, Ben ran up. “A’Yark!” he yelled.
Annileen looked down. Off the edge of the sheer drop from the bantha trail, A’Yark clung to a jutting rock. Annileen scrambled to the side and reached down for the raider’s hand. Dazed, the Tusken stared up at her, jeweled eye gleaming in the suns. Then the Tusken murmured something, and Annileen felt A’Yark’s grip loosening.
Reaching Annileen’s side, Ben leaned over her shoulder and looked down at A’Yark. “You want to live,” he said. “Remember?”
For a moment, A’Yark didn’t move, but then her hand tightened around Annileen’s. The settler and the stranger hauled the warlord up.
Bowed but unbroken, A’Yark knelt and gazed at the smoke rising from the canyon hills below. The Jundland was unforgiving.
“You have what you wanted,” Ben said.
“Not all.” A’Yark turned back. Straightening, she pushed past Ben and Annileen and climbed back onto the plateau. “But deal is done. You go.”
Annileen nodded. She could hear the sounds of pounding boots; the Tuskens would be returning at any minute. But with Ben there, she felt no fear at all.
“I thank you,” he said to A’Yark, bowing.
Standing before a passageway into the labyrinth, A’Yark looked back coolly. “You remembers, Ben,” she said. “You knows what you can be.” With that, she slipped back into the shadows.
Annileen and Ben walked swiftly across the clearing, stopping only at Mullen’s corpse. Annileen blanched then—and turned to gaze back in the direction of Orrin’s departure.
Ben looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m not,” Annileen replied. Turning, she embraced him.
It was not a passionate hug, but the exhausted collapse of someone who had had a very long day—and night, and day. This embrace, Ben did not refuse. She looked up at him and started to speak.
He spoke first. “Not here,” he said. He smiled. �
�My place. Tonight.”
Then he nudged her in the direction of the trail leading down.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
BEN HAD FOUND HIS OWN WAY HOME. So had Annileen, and it began the hardest afternoon of her life.
She’d emerged from the hills to find a muted victory celebration. The farmers who’d come to the Jundland after a would-be traitor had found instead a battle with a perennial enemy, the gangsters of Mos Eisley. And the country folk had absolutely routed the city folk. Mosep Binneed, mathematician enough to calculate odds on the fly, had decided to cut his losses in the Gault affair and withdraw with only the tail of his skiff on fire.
Ulbreck and the others were relieved to see Annileen, but unhappy to hear that they’d been robbed of their chance to settle with Orrin. Nearby, Annileen found Veeka, under treatment from Doc Mell. In shock, the injured woman didn’t respond at all when Annileen told her of her father’s demise.
Questions came at Annileen from all directions. Thankfully, Leelee’s husband saw her situation and offered to drive her back to the Claim alone. He dropped her off and departed without a word. Home, the famished Annileen ate as she packed, explaining to her puzzled children between bites what had happened. What she understood of it, anyway.
In late afternoon, Leelee arrived at the back door of the residence, her face an ashen pink. She stayed outside as she recounted to Annileen what was being said at her home—and at others across the oasis.
In a moment in which every hidden resentment against the Gaults suddenly found voice, most had been quick to find Ben faultless. It was so like Orrin, they said, to deflect blame to a hapless newcomer—and someone would have had to be terrified to seek shelter in a known Tusken nest. Or crazy. But while all appreciated Ben’s revelation, it rankled many that he’d evidently learned truths in days that had evaded people who worked around Orrin for years. Blameless or not, Ben was a strange character, and few were in any hurry to see him again.
Under the settlers’ questioning, once-tough Veeka had melted into a pathetic, simpering thing, describing in detail Orrin’s embezzlement from the Fund and his attacks against those who wouldn’t subscribe to it. Then, fearing for her life, she’d lashed out at the Calwells, claiming Jabe had been along not just on the staged Ulbreck raid, but all the ones before. And in Veeka’s story, Annileen had known all about it, had profited from the sales of guns and ale.
No one was overly inclined to believe Veeka—nor the oafish Zedd, who echoed her story when confronted for his role. But the financial records found in Orrin’s home—which he had failed to erase, through lack of time or overconfidence—held damaging facts. They detailed tens of thousands of credits paid from the Fund to the Claim over the years for ale, weapons, and garaging, all the way back to Dannar Calwell’s time.
All quite legitimate, from Annileen’s point of view; but the sums boggled the minds of many poor prospectors, who saw conspiracy. Several old-timers recalled Jabba trumping up a Tusken war, years earlier, to sell shoddy weapons. Was this like that? Annileen had seemed beyond corruption, sure—but hadn’t they seen Orrin walking behind the counter many times, plucking money from the cashbox with Annileen’s indulgence? And what about all her private financial records, sitting in the datapad right on his desk? How separate were the families, really?
Annileen already knew: not very separate at all. There were just too many ties to disentangle, ties that Annileen had let grow over the years because it was easier not to argue with Orrin. But where the links between the two families had brought them to a position of respect and relative wealth, it now made them the focus of envy and suspicion.
It had all transpired just as Ben had said it would; Annileen now counted fortune telling among his other talents. She had already noted that no one had arrived at the Claim for dinner. Her position was untenable. Given time, she might sort it out—if she were on Coruscant, with a lawyer. But this was Tatooine, where rumor and bad feeling spread like sand on the wind, and where minds, once made up, never changed.
She and Leelee hugged tearfully, Annileen unable to begin to explain to her friend what had transpired, or what her plans were. She simply promised to contact her again.
And then she shut the door, ready to walk the Claim one last time.
Light returned to Orrin slowly. When it arrived, it was piercing—and so was the pain.
The sky shimmered for some reason, a brilliant whorl at the end of a tunnel. He could not feel his legs. They were there, he could tell; his hands were resting against them. But there was no feeling in his feet or toes at all.
It’s the crash, he thought. I’ve been burned. He’d been through this before. As a child, he’d stayed out on a midsummer day with no hat or skin protection—and had come back with a face so raw and parched that even smiling hurt. His parents had kept him inside for a day, his face bandaged to keep him from picking at it. The fabric on his face now felt like that, only rougher.
Yes, that was it. He’d been bandaged and taken to Bestine. Doc Mell was probably there, conferring with the local doctors about his case. Orrin breathed in relief.
And then he heard his breath.
Something was over his mouth, something metallic, clacking against his broken teeth when he opened wide.
Another sense memory flooded back, from his one offworld trip. He’d picked up a bacterial infection that had left his limbs raw and scabbing; it had earned him an hour in a bacta tank, something uncommon on Tatooine. He’d worn a breather mask then. He wore something like that now—only tinny, and cold to his lips.
The light above disappeared. Slowly, the face of a Tusken came into view and vanished.
No.
He pushed down with his hands, lifting his torso. He saw his legs, now, bandaged. He felt the gloves on his fingertips. He felt the shroud on his face, and the metallic eyepieces against his eyelids.
Merciful universe, no.
Another Tusken stepped into view. “Orringault.”
Orrin heard it as an animal grunt. But it was his name, and it was definitely the one-eyed Tusken he’d tried to ram. Plug-eye.
“I am A’Yark,” the Tusken warlord said. “You lives, Orringault.”
He clutched at the bumpy surface beneath his body. He realized he was lying some distance off the ground, atop a rectangular pile of stones.
“This is my son’s burial platform,” A’Yark said.
Orrin simply shook his head, his eyes too dry for tears. He had seen the things before.
A’Yark grabbed at his shoulders. “You have work.” She turned him. Orrin saw the familiar stone pillars go past—until, finally, he faced a shorter, metallic cylinder.
It was a vaporator.
He knew the model by sight. It was the vaporator the Tuskens had stolen from Wyle Ulbreck. But instead of gutting it for metals, the warrior and her companions had placed it upright. Now, heaving, they brought it closer. As it approached, he realized the funereal bier had been expanded to become something else.
It wasn’t to be Orrin’s grave. It was his work platform.
“You gives us water,” A’Yark said. “And you will be fed.”
Orrin struggled. The parts of his body that could still move were suffocating, they were so tightly wound beneath the wrappings.
“You will be fed. And we moves you when we move. And you will live—while we have water.”
Orrin heard his breath rasping louder and louder.
No. No. No.
Orrin thought it, but didn’t say it. For no was a word, and hearing his voice through the mouthpiece would confirm what he knew: that he was now one of them.
A Sand Person.
He resolved never to speak again.
The first sun was slipping behind the cliffs to the west when two hovercraft arrived at the foot of Ben’s hill. Gloamer had kept Annileen’s battered old landspeeder and the LiteVan, which Tar would need to run the store. In exchange, he’d provided her with two of his souped-up sports speeders, which she figured wou
ld come in handy in the desert—or wherever they and Ben ended up.
She chuckled to herself as she parked. She’d seen Ben on a hoverbike, but had no idea if he drove a landspeeder. Well, she’d have time to find out—and teach him, if he didn’t. She stepped out of the vehicle, its backseat packed to overflowing with hastily packed luggage and goods. Across from her, Jabe and Kallie emerged from their similarly loaded repulsorcraft.
So much stuff—but so little, too, worth taking away from a lifetime. It was sad, Annileen thought. But also refreshing.
Jabe’s face fell as he looked up at the hut. “This is it?”
“He still doesn’t have a door,” Kallie noted. Annileen’s daughter had been quiet since closing the livery. But seeing Ben emerge from the home cheered her up. As it did Annileen.
“Welcome,” Ben said, walking down the slope. Instead of his cloak, he wore a white shirt with long cuffs and light gray trousers, an ensemble she hadn’t seen him in before. He looked refreshed, as if he’d somehow gotten some sleep in the few hours since she’d seen him. He carried a small beige backpack over his shoulder.
Annileen stepped toward him, glowing. But before she could reach him, Ben’s eopies trotted from inside the house, bleating to him. “Ah,” he said, setting down the backpack. “I found them on the way home.”
“The gang’s all here,” Annileen said affectionately.
Ben looked up. “Are your affairs settled?”
“As much as they’ll ever be,” she said.
In the vehicle, she had hard currency from her stash. And Gloamer’s payment to her electronic account could be accessed in Bestine or Mos Eisley. It was enough to live on for a long time, especially out here. She didn’t know if that was Ben’s plan: he had only told her to pack for time away. Wherever it was, though, she felt safe in assuming they’d be together.
As Kallie knelt to nuzzle Rooh and the baby, Ben studied Jabe. “Are you all right, son?” he asked.
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