by Renee Ahdieh
And into the stars. Astromech droids’ memory cores were filled with the most spectacular logs of their owners’ flights. In those stories, Jot would push back the hood of his robe and lift his face into the hologram, surrounding himself with the illusion of passing stars. He would close his eyes as he approached the image, then open them, and for a moment his mind could trick itself into thinking this was his flight, his ship, his sky.
Those moments of delusion were the happiest of Jot’s planet-bound life.
—
It was Jot’s preference for astromech droid memories that led him to stake out a peculiar R2 unit acquired by Snatchers in the canyons outside of Mos Eisley.
It had caught nearly everyone’s eye on the prep team, mostly because of how little prep it actually needed. Most droids that came down the line needed exhaustive scouring to give their rusted chassis some semblance of presentability to the customer. This R2 unit looked like it hadn’t spent a minute in the dunes. Its components weren’t flooded with sand. Its treads looked like they had been replaced yesterday. Its blue-and-white chassis still had paint, which the desert winds wouldn’t have permitted for very long. A few burn marks tarnished its otherwise pristine exterior—not ion burns from a trigger-happy Snatcher, but actual blaster scoring.
This R2 unit was a mystery to everyone on board. Jot knew exactly how to solve it.
With even more reverence than he usually exerted, Jot removed the R2 unit’s memory core from its nearly flawless housing and stole away to the gap. He pressed its contacts to his tongue and reflexively yelped as it gave him a potent retaliatory shock. He clasped a hand over his mouth and hoped nobody had heard him, waiting silently to ensure he hadn’t betrayed the secrecy of his compartment. After several tense, quiet minutes, he proceeded.
He loaded the memory core into Storyteller, and for the first time Jot’s extraordinarily felonious droid had some difficulty decrypting its contents. Storyteller whirred worryingly, dedicating more power to the task than Jot thought its small frame was capable of producing.
But Storyteller completed its assault with a satisfied chime, laying the R2 unit’s story out to bear.
Jot’s chest sank inside his robe, his mind racing to memorize the odyssey he was witnessing.
He watched the R2 unit perform a daring repair on the wing of a sleek silver starship, flak bursting all around its station, missing by centimeters.
He watched the R2 unit race through an enormous droid factory, a cavernous building, all metal and molten lava, a monolith that put his sandcrawler to shame.
He watched the R2 unit bear witness to some sort of ceremony, a man in black, a woman in a lovely veil, a solemn kiss exchanged over a lake at sunset.
He saw armies of droids as far as the eye could see.
He saw swords made of fire.
He saw robed people who could actually use magic.
The magic people were fighting each other using the fire swords.
A pair of them laid low an entire platoon of droids, using their magic.
Jot was mystified. Enraptured. He leaned against the scalding hull one, two, three, four seconds before even realizing it.
The picture flickered, and Storyteller projected another memory.
Jot saw a woman wearing a long white robe. Her hair was swirled into tight wheels around her ears. She spoke to an unseen audience for less than a minute, then crouched, her calm demeanor shifting to worry for the first time, her arm extending, readying a blaster.
Jot could not understand her—he could not understand the languages spoken in any of his stories. But even without hearing her message, Jot could read the concern on her face as plain as day. This was a warning.
And the R2 unit’s final story showed Jot exactly what her warning was about. A starship the size of a planet. A round, beautiful, hateful vessel, with a scale beyond comprehension. Of all the impossible images Jot had seen in this R2’s memories, this was the most outlandish and, for reasons he didn’t understand, the most terrifying. A cold, bubbling fear climbed his throat as he studied the diagram.
The warm security of his secret compartment drained away, and for the first time since discovering the gap, he felt completely exposed. He felt watched.
Moments before the image blinked off, Jot noticed a string of numbers in the corner—a date and time. This story had been backed up off an external media source within the past two days.
This wasn’t like the other stories Jot had borrowed from the desert-weary droids he serviced. This wasn’t an ancient flight log of a long-crashed freighter, or the final moments in the life of a wandering, abandoned droid. This story, with the magic and the fire swords and the crouching woman and the planet-sized ship—it was happening right now.
The gravity of this realization descended on Jot suddenly. His face went numb.
His entire life, Jot had happily served as spectator to the stories that constantly unfolded around him. Even in the tale of his krayt dragon, he wasn’t the star. His brothers were the first to find the skeleton that morning. His father finished excavating it. His mother adorned the skull with a crown of desert sage and funnel flowers. Jot was just there.
But being there wasn’t good enough, now. The next part of this droid’s story—if not a chapter, just a line—was Jot’s responsibility to author.
Like the glistening bones of his dragon, like the stars in the sky, like every panel and fiber and joiner in the machines he had worked with every day of his life, Jot was now a part of something, too. For the first time, he felt like he wasn’t just a passive observer of the story of his life. He was a participant.
It was an enlightenment the likes of which few are lucky enough to experience during the span of their lives. Jot just happened to find it in a furnace-hot, coffin-sized design flaw in the side of a rolling junkyard.
Storyteller ejected the R2 droid’s memory core, its chronicles expended. Jot stowed it in the folds of his twice-hemmed robe, its data still intact. The thought of carrying out the data wipe didn’t even cross his mind. Jot didn’t believe himself worthy to participate in this droid’s story. He certainly did not deserve to bring it to an unceremonious end.
Jot wriggled his way out of the compartment, unconcerned about being spotted as he squeezed through its secret entrance and back into plain sight. He ran, stumbling, down the sandcrawler’s decks and gasped with relief upon seeing the still-deactivated R2 droid in the loading dock. He loaded its memory core back into its housing, hands trembling with excitement.
Jot knew his dereliction of duty would eventually be discovered by some hapless customer after the R2 unit was reactivated and brought out to market. He didn’t care. His departure from the sandcrawler was imminent, and long overdue.
Tomorrow he would leave the salvage team. He would find a ship in Mos Eisley or Anchorhead that would have him, no matter what.
He would see the stars, and write stories about each and every one of them.
He would become an irreplaceable part of more and more designs, until, at long last, he could see fully the shape of the machine that was made for him.
The boy talked too much. If Reirin ever yapped with such disrespect at her elders, she’d be nursing a bruised bottom and milking banthas until her fingers turned blue for good.
Though the old man wasn’t much better, hemming and hawing over the droids like a Neimoidian bargaining over a trade deal. Trrru’uunqa! Why were they so damn slow? Reirin needed in that sandcrawler, and she needed in there now.
Reirin shifted her gaderffii from her right hand to her left, and shook the sand from her robes. Just pick something, you old fool. The Jawas sold junked-up droids made shiny with dollops of oil in the right places. Reirin snorted. Only an idiot farmer would be stupid enough to buy them.
Moisture farmers, specifically. Reirin’s hands closed tight over the blaster at her waist. Stinking, sweating peasants who thought they had more right to the desert and its gifts than she did.
The farmer settled on a dull go
ld protocol unit, which jabbered at him in a tinny voice until the old man snapped at it to shut up. Typical. Farmers treated anything that didn’t look like them like bantha dung. Droids, Raiders, Jawas. All the same. Second-class. Lesser.
Reirin daydreamed about proving to them who, exactly, was lesser. She daydreamed about taking her father’s gaderffii and wreaking bloody havoc. And if not that, then simply proving herself. Proving that she was meant for more than hiding from krayt dragons in the wastes, caring for her bantha and her children and her mate.
But the Raider women in her clan did not join battle—never mind that she spun the gaderffii better than any of her useless male cousins. Raider women did not fight, and Raider women were not meant for more, and so Reirin’s daydreams would continue to be just that.
Unless…
She hunched down behind the condenser. She didn’t dare think on it, lest doing so drive the possibility from ever existing. There was no guarantee she’d even be able to steal the item the trader requested, let alone get it to him in one piece without the Jawas noticing.
The old man and the boy finally settled on their second unit, a white-and-red-striped astromech droid. The two new purchases tottered through the blistering sands toward the farmer’s homestead. Not much time left now.
Trrru’uunqa! She needed a distraction. Would that she had an ally! Someone to make a ruckus so she could dash into the sandcrawler, find the item, and disappear back into the wastes. Someone she could turn to. Someone who wanted off this hellish rock as badly as she did.
She thought, briefly, of Qeruru’rr. He wielded the gaderffii with natural grace, deadly as a starving krayt. He didn’t think women should remain home during the raids. And he made her laugh.
He was a good friend. Reirin would have liked him at her side. For she did not know what she would find in Mos Eisley when she took the item to the trader. He might cheat her—tell her that the price for a berth offplanet had gone up. He might be selling her into slavery, and she wouldn’t even know—not until she was dropped onto Kessel to be starved and beaten and worked to death.
Yes, it would be nice to have an ally. And Qeruru’rr would have been a fine one.
Too late, now. She’d been gone long enough that her return would result in questions that she couldn’t answer. Not without shaming her family. Not without earning weeks of icy silence from the rest of the clan. Even Qeruru’rr wouldn’t speak to her now. Not if he didn’t want to be shamed, as well.
As if wanting something more than banthas and heat and raids was shameful.
But as quick as Reirin’s anger rose, it faded. Her people’s ways allowed them to survive though they were surrounded on all sides by enemies. She’d been gone only for a day, and already she yearned for her mother’s black melon pudding, for the gravelly voice of her father as he told stories beside the fire.
She would miss them. She knew it. And she would not see them again, for if she did make it offplanet, she could never return to Tatooine.
No use dwelling. You’ve made your decision.
Harsh words echoed off the flats, and Reirin turned her attention back to the moisture farmers and the Jawas. The old farmer was having words with the lead Jawa, gesticulating like a madman at the astromech droid, which billowed a damning plume of black smoke. The boy, standing beside the golden droid, gestured at another unit, squat and blue.
Now, Reirin! While they’re not looking! She dropped low, thankful for the simple child’s mask she wore, made of leather and cloth. As the Jawas and the farmers argued over the droids, Reirin scuttled from behind the condenser into the shadow of the sandcrawler. She crept carefully into the hollow space between the two enormous tracks that carried the transport across Tatooine’s unforgiving terrain.
Then she turned her head up to the guts of the crawler, digging with gloved hands through wires and gears and tubes. There must be a handle around here. There must. There is.
But where?
The raised voices dropped—the mishap outside dealt with. Any moment, the sandcrawler would move and she’d be squashed between its tracks.
Come on, Reirin! Her hands grew more frantic until finally her fingers closed on a long metal bar. Yes! She grabbed it, turned, and moments later lifted herself into a dim cargo hold. A scant bit of light filtered in from a row of tiny portholes. Outside, the farmers escorted their new purchases into their homestead. The sandcrawler rumbled to life.
Now! Find it! But where to begin? The grumble of the Jawas as they entered the front of the hold stopped her in her tracks until she had the sense to dive behind a giant rusted freighter engine.
She couldn’t hear the Jawas’ steps—they walked lightly as cats—but she could smell the damn things. Reirin gagged beneath her mask. They were worse than the farmers, and with the hum of flies about them. The Jawas maneuvered the leftover merchandise back into the hold, and then their reek faded. The sandcrawler slowly rolled east, toward Tosche Station and Anchorhead.
Reirin would need to be long gone by then. With that, she turned her attention to her search, but hopelessness quickly engulfed her. The trader hadn’t given her much to go on.
He’d found her in Bestine three weeks ago, heavily hooded and trying to hawk stolen goods. He’d been lying low himself—despite meeting twice with him, she’d yet to see his face, and knew only that he was humanoid in form.
It will be small, he’d told her. Perhaps stored in a bag or a box. No larger than your hand. And it can be one of many colors. Blue. Green. Purple. The Jawas will know what it is, and may have it locked away.
Reirin rifled through the nearest pile of junk before quickly dismissing it. The Jawas were far more fastidious about their possessions than their hygiene. They wouldn’t leave something of value just lying around. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, but it was nearly impossible to tell which direction she should look in—all the piles of junk looked exactly the same. She cursed the Jawas. Stinking little hoarders.
Her neck prickled and she whirled, scanning the piles behind her. If there was a Jawa sneaking around back here, she’d know, right? She sniffed the air. Nothing but stale oil and rust.
There! In the back left-hand corner of the hold, so covered up she’d nearly missed it, sat a large metal box. She edged closer, trying not to upset any of the piles of junk, wincing when a tray of tiny gears clattered loudly as she passed. She heard rustling at the front of the hold and hunkered down, waiting. The raspy voice of a Jawa sounded and she didn’t dare to even breathe.
Leave—leave! But the Jawa didn’t leave. Instead it trotted closer, muttering to itself. She could smell it—hear the flies—it would turn at any moment and spot her hiding. Reirin tightened her hand on her blaster. She’d have to kill the damn creature—
But moments later, the Jawa disappeared back toward the main hold, still muttering. The sandcrawler trundled onward.
Reirin moved quickly for the box. It was nearly as tall as she was, and a lock hung from it, an ancient sort Reirin only ever heard of in the stories her father told.
Reirin pulled on it. It should have come right off.
Instead she got a lungful of rust and suppressed a cough. Trrru’uunqa! She cast about until she found a long, heavy bar with a notch at the end. She wedged it between the two prongs of the lock and jerked down with all her might, huffing through her mask. The lock held.
The sandcrawler began to slow—the next homestead wasn’t far, and the Jawas would be back in the hold, pulling out their merchandise. If Reirin was going to find the trader’s item, she needed to find it now.
It might not even be in here! You might be wasting your time for nothing!
But something, some strange feeling deep down in her gut, told Reirin that the item she needed was here. Just as she knew her mother’s touch, and the shuffle of her bantha, she knew that this lockbox held her salvation.
The cargo hold clattered as the sandcrawler went over a bump. Reirin considered, then grabbed her blaster. She took a wary step
back and, at the next bump, fired. The resulting blast incinerated the lock—and half the box, too. Reirin burned a hole through her glove yanking the smoking lid open.
Quickly! Quickly! She pawed through sacks of bolts, hair-thin gold wires, and what appeared to be the bones of some large animal.
And then she spotted a shimmer—deep green, like the light that dashed across Tatooine’s horizon at dusk.
The moment the rock was in her hand she felt…whole. As if she’d been missing a limb her entire life and never known it, and she finally had it back. She marveled at it: a tiny thing, no longer than her palm and jagged on one end—it was broken. Where was the other half?
Reirin searched through the safe for the rest of the rock, but she sensed it wasn’t there. At a sound on the other side of the cargo hold she froze, terror in her stomach, not for herself, but for the rock. They wouldn’t take it from her. It belonged to her. No one else.
But why this attachment? Why did she feel this way when she’d never even seen the thing before? She peered down at it, at the way it shimmered in the orange light of the hold. What power did it have over her?
Was this what her mother spoke of, when she spoke of the bond with her bantha? Reirin never felt it, though she’d raised the same mild-mannered beast since she was a child. To her, it was more a pet than a friend.
If the attachment she felt to this rock was anything like what Raiders were supposed to feel for their banthas, then Reirin understood the reason the beast was so revered among her people. She understood why Raider unions succeeded or failed based on the relationship between the two partners’ banthas. If this rock was ever taken from her, she’d wage war for it. And if she ever found the other piece of it, he who owned it would also own a piece of her—and she of him.
How then will I part with it? How, when giving it to the trader is the only way to escape this place?
She looked through one of the tiny windows. The moisture farmers’ homestead was long gone now, a bump in the distance. The boy would be bathing the droids, preparing them for work. In the meantime, the next farm was close enough that the outbuildings were in sight, their shadows long in the coming twilight. Night drew close, and Reirin knew she couldn’t travel the desert safely after sunset. She didn’t have time to think or ponder any longer. She had to go.