Escape from Vodran

by Disney Book Group

  “Are you suggesting I leave my prisoners unregulated?”

  “No, sir. Just…have your guards maintain some distance. Allow Mattis and Lorica and Aygee to feel comfortable enough to talk. Maybe…How big are your cells? I mean, how many can they hold?”

  “Some hold four prisoners.”

  “You could place a fourth in with them. Someone they’ll feel relaxed enough to be candid in front of but who will, out of self-preservation, report back to you.”

  Wanten nodded. It was a good plan. But Wanten wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t completely trust this boy.

  “I will place them in a cell together,” Wanten told Jo. The boy seemed pleased. That wouldn’t last another moment, if Wanten had his way. These people had to be reminded who their commander was. “Just the two,” Wanten added. “Eliminate the droid.”

  “Eliminate?” The boy sounded shocked.

  “Like the rest of the service droids and dregs that Harra the Hutt left behind, this machine, which was for some reason allowed into the Resistance, will be jettisoned from this mud planet,” Wanten said in a voice that dared Jo to question him.

  Jo did. “With all due respect, sir,” he said, “Aygee-Ninety was allowed in the Resistance as a recruit, not just a service droid. It’s possible there was a reason for that.”

  Wanten rolled his eyes. “It’s possible,” he said. “But I don’t care. I don’t care for droids, especially droids who act above their station. Your droid seems that type.”

  “He isn’t my droid, sir,” Jo sniffed. “In fact, his owner is far from here, having fled the planet without a look back. His owner was a quality mechanic.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Jerjerrod?” Wanten was impatient with the boy.

  “There might be value in the droid, sir. I don’t mean to be impertinent or question your decision.”

  “And yet, you’ve done both.”

  Jo tried again. “Let it be my pet project,” he said. “Allow me to reprogram Aygee-Ninety. Perhaps I can make a First Order soldier of him. If I can devise a quick and efficient way to do that, wouldn’t the First Order want to reward my commander for allowing me the opportunity?”

  Wanten laughed without smiling. “You’re not as cunning as you think you are, young man. You’ve spent some time with this droid and wish to continue to do so. But, yes, your notion intrigues me. Reprogram the droid. Make him one of ours. Maybe he’ll be the spy in that cell!”

  “Programming the levels required for deception is beyond me, I’m afraid. Mattis and Lorica would know right away.”

  Wanten deflated. “I suppose if I can’t be tricky, I can at least be cruel. It would be funny to make the reprogrammed droid their guard, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. It would.”

  “Good, then! I’ve made a wonderful plan.” Wanten clapped his hands together. The smacking sound was loud in the echoing throne room, empty but for the few stormtroopers, Jo, and Wanten. “You there.” Wanten motioned to one of the stormtroopers. “Take Mr. Jerjerrod and collect that droid, then take them both to the Garage.”

  “Yes, sir,” the stormtrooper agreed, and started out.

  Before Jo could exit the room, however, Wanten stopped him. “Mr. Jerjerrod,” he said. Jo turned back. “You’ll have supper with me tonight, I hope? It’d be a treat to hear some of those insignificant details about the Resistance with which you are acquainted.”

  Jo nodded dutifully. “Yes, sir. It’d be my pleasure.”

  “Very good,” Wanten said. “Your hard work spying for the First Order will finally come to fruition, boy. And we’ll both be thanked for it.”

  Jo turned on his heel and left. Wanten looked around the throne room. Unable to find anything else with which to occupy his time, the detention center commander clasped his fleshy hands together and stared into the middle distance.

  THE STORMTROOPERS deposited Lorica in a double-wide chamber, dank and slick with a dirty film. There were two bunk beds along either wall and on each bunk a thin, filthy mattress. Lorica dropped onto one of the bottom bunks. She was exhausted. She was angry. She didn’t know whom to blame for this embarrassing capture by the First Order, but it wasn’t her fault.

  She’d been a good soldier for the Resistance. She felt joining the Resistance was her duty, especially after all the rumors about her heroism on her home planet. They were rumors that weren’t true, but that Lorica hadn’t corrected. She wasn’t a hero before, but she would work hard to become one in the Resistance. She followed the rules. She made herself indispensible to Jo, her squad leader. Yet she’d still wound up on Vodran, sent there by Admiral Ackbar as punishment for a fiasco in which she’d really played no role. Then that, too, had gone awry, and here she was in a First Order detention center that was as busted and scruffy as the squadron of which she’d been part.

  Yes, Lorica was angry. She wished there was something to kick in this grimy cell. She was afraid that if she kicked the bed, the whole thing would collapse, and she didn’t see a kindhearted stormtrooper coming in to repair it for her. She had to do violence to something, though, so she leaped from the bed and took the mattress with her. She hurled it against the cell’s back wall. It wasn’t satisfying, soft as the mattress was, and following it with a hurricane of rough blankets didn’t cause the destruction she was after. She decided to kick the bunk bed after all. She kicked it a bunch of times, then she kicked it a bunch more. It hurt her feet, but the hurt felt good, felt like action, and she kept kicking and kicking and kicking until kicking wasn’t enough. She grabbed the frame and yanked it down to the floor. The metal screeched and wrenched and, as she’d predicted, fell apart.

  Not through yet, Lorica grasped the bunk bed opposite her and gave that a yank. It was heavier than the first one, but not by much, and she sent that one crashing to the floor, too.

  “Aaaaaaaaar!”

  Lorica thought she’d gone so far into her rageful haze that the scream had come from her own mouth. It took her a moment to realize that the screaming—as well as some thrashing—came from the mess of blankets that had tumbled onto the floor. Lorica stumbled back a few steps and watched as the thrashing subsided. A stick-thin woman who might have been ten or a hundred years older than Lorica yanked the coverings from over her head. She continued to sit in the nest of blankets, her enormous eyes never resting on one object, her large head framed by an avalanche of frizzled dark hair.

  “What are you?” the woman spat.

  “You mean, who am I?” Lorica countered. After her initial surprise, Lorica had quickly switched to a defensive position. Her body was braced for a fight; her hands were balled into fists.

  “You’re pink!” the woman on the floor squealed, then chittered out what must have been laughter.

  “I’m not pink.” Lorica bristled.

  The woman sprang from her squatting position and placed herself centimeters from Lorica’s face. Lorica flinched, but the woman matched her movement swiftly, like a synchronized dance.

  “You’re pinker than me, and me is the only one I know!” The woman snapped a couple of times in Lorica’s face, and Lorica swatted her hand away. The woman chirped out another laugh and fell back onto the pile of blankets.

  “Are you insane?” Lorica asked. It was the kind of flippant question she often threw at her friends (and enemies). Asking this woman, she was genuinely curious. The woman looked up at Lorica, then away, at Lorica, then away again.

  Lorica decided to try a gentler tactic. She forced her fists to unclench and her teeth to ungrit. She relaxed the muscles in her face. “What’s your name?” she asked in a slightly less mean voice. Sounding slightly less mean was as nice as Lorica tended to be.

  The woman studied the ceiling, as if she’d once written her name there in case someone asked. She studied for a while, as if the name she’d written up there was very long and complicated. When she looked again to Lorica, it was with an expression of deep consideration.

  Something easier, then, Lorica told hers
elf. “My name is Lorica Demaris. My friends and I were brought here by stormtroopers.”

  The woman pulled back her lips in a scowl. She had rows and rows of tiny sharp teeth. “Those shuck-jackets. They’re mean ones, yeh?”

  Lorica nodded. So the woman didn’t like the stormtroopers. They had that in common, at least. “They’re bad,” Lorica agreed. She righted the unbroken bunk she’d pushed over and pulled the mattress back onto it, then sat on it cross-legged.

  “So bad. When I tell them about the scootling in the walls, they bang on the bars there and they count me out.”

  It wasn’t surprising that the stormtroopers were foul to the woman. She was annoying and panicky and hard to understand. “Scootling in the walls?” What could that mean? It was too difficult a question, Lorica thought, if the woman couldn’t even come up with her own name.

  The woman popped up, wrapped the blankets around her, and bounded onto the bunk beside Lorica. She was appreciably calmer. “Cost Niktur,” she said.

  “Are you putting a curse on me?” Lorica asked. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that the woman was some sort of scary witch. Though she was less scary with every moment.

  “Cost Niktur!” the woman said again, gleefully.

  “Ahh, that’s your name,” Lorica replied. “Right? Cost?”

  “Cost, yes, me and I. We’re Cost.” The woman, Cost Niktur, smiled with all of her jagged teeth and nodded a few times. Abruptly, though, she stopped and jerked her head in the direction of the cell’s back wall. “You hear?” she demanded. “You hear? The scootling! They won’t come—they’ll bang the bars and tell me the scootling is inside. But it isn’t inside. It’s inside out!” She leaped from the bed and ran around the cell, throwing blankets around in a frenzy, as Lorica had done in anger.

  “Hey, hey…” Lorica stood and made what she hoped were calming motions. They caught Cost’s attention but only for a few seconds. Between breaths, Cost flapped around the cell, pounding on the back wall and hissing. “You have to calm down,” Lorica began again. She didn’t think it would do much good to reason with Cost, and she didn’t get a chance anyway because just then the stormtroopers arrived.

  “You there. Shut up,” the stormtrooper in front commanded. He banged a couple of times on the bars of their cell. “Get her to shut up,” he snapped at Lorica.

  “I’m trying!” she snapped right back. The stormtrooper smacked his club against the cell door. Lorica shook her head. It wouldn’t pay to make enemies of her guards, but neither was she one to back down.

  The stormtrooper stalked up to the bars and laid his fists against them. “You, Resistance blossom, don’t you test me. Tell your friend to shut up and you shut up, too!”

  Lorica couldn’t take it. All the anger and frustration of the past few days—the past few months—frothed up in her chest until she couldn’t contain it. She stormed the few steps to the bars where the stormtrooper sneered at her. He wore a helmet, but Lorica could tell he was sneering. She grabbed the bars closest to the stormtrooper’s black lenses and shook as hard as she could. The cage rattled, the stormtrooper jumped back, and Cost stopped yelling just as Lorica, having nothing left to say, roared a throaty howl at her captor. She let go of the bars, but they continued to shake—ping-ping-ping—against the concrete until they were silent, too.

  “Open the cell door,” the stormtrooper said coldly, batting his blunt weapon in his open palm.

  “Don’t open that door!” The voice came from somewhere out of Lorica’s line of vision.

  The stormtrooper hesitated a moment, then stood down. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  The person who’d spoken strode into view. He was younger than Lorica had expected for someone with such a commanding voice. He couldn’t have been much older than Lorica herself. He had jet-black hair that was too fine to be cut in the short military style favored by the First Order, so it swept across his forehead and fell into his dark eyes. He wore a stiff, stern look that softened when he met Lorica’s gaze through the bars.

  In the back of the cell, Cost paced, muttering to herself. Lorica picked out words like noise and scootling.

  “Aren’t you worried your cape will get muddy out here?” Lorica asked the new arrival. She tried to sound as defiant as possible.

  “I have several,” answered the guard, if that’s what he was. “And you’d be surprised what good housekeepers these stormtroopers are. Right, Ceezee-Ten-Seven-Six?”

  “Sir, I feel as if you’re telling me that I’ll be on housekeeping duty,” the angry stormtrooper replied. Lorica stifled a laugh. She didn’t like this new arrival—he was the enemy after all—but she did like his sense of humor.

  “That’s precisely what you’ll be doing, Ceezee-Ten-Seven-Six. You’re dismissed.”

  “This little blossom—”

  “That will be all.”

  The stormtrooper huffed inside his helmet, then lied, “Static, sir. Sorry.” He marched away down the corridor.

  Before his footfalls had even disappeared, his commander turned with purpose to Lorica. “Don’t taunt your guards,” he said. Any good humor he’d had was gone now. “Or I’ll be forced to keep a closer eye on your cell myself.”

  “You seem more reasonable than these nerf wranglers,” Lorica said.

  “I’m not. I promise.”

  “What’s your name, boss?” Lorica tried to keep her voice casual and fearless, but she couldn’t deny the discomfort rising inside her. It wasn’t anger, as before. It was something else. Something unfamiliar. Something almost like fear.

  “Ingo Salik. And please don’t forget that I am the boss. These stormtroopers work for me. I report directly to Commander Wanten.”

  “Sounds important.”

  “You’re trying to be diminishing, but it won’t work. My role here is important. Things don’t have to be adversarial—”

  “I’m in a cage,” Lorica pointed out.

  “Things needn’t be difficult, then. We can get along, if we each know our respective places. You, me, her.” He pointed to Cost. “Them.” He jerked his thumb at the stormtroopers. “We all behave, and things are easy.”

  “Then behave,” Lorica said, swallowing the catalogue of insults she wanted to shout at Ingo.

  He broke into that soft smile again. “I know I will. As a show of goodwill, how about I give you a friend?”

  “Besides her, you mean?” Lorica tipped her head back toward Cost.

  Ingo turned to the stormtroopers and said, “Fetch the other one. Wanten is done with him. Put him in here, so they can plan their escape together.”

  As the stormtroopers marched away, Lorica screwed up her face at Ingo.

  “What?” he asked innocently. “You’d be stupid not to talk about it, at least! I know you’re too smart to just sit here and accept your fate.”

  “I guess I’ll see you on the other side of these bars then,” Lorica agreed.

  “Oh, you won’t succeed,” Ingo assured her. “I’m good at this. We may be a new facility, but we haven’t had any escapees. A few eaten by a rancor out in the Fold, but we’ve maintained the perimeter fence better since then.”

  “Too bad. Inside of a rancor would’ve been a great way out of here.”

  Ingo laughed quietly. He possessed a calmness that Lorica was sure kept his prisoners tranquil as well. Before he could offer another agreeable parry, the stormtroopers returned, escorting Mattis. They stopped when they got to Lorica’s cell.

  “I’m going to have them open the cell door to let your friend in,” Ingo told her. “You won’t run, will you?”

  Lorica smiled. “Of course not. Like you said: I’m too smart.”

  Ingo motioned to a control box on the wall by the cell, and a stormtrooper stepped to it and punched in some numbers. The bars slid open, and as soon as the opening was wide enough, Lorica burst out. She knocked over the trooper who’d opened the cell and was halfway down the hall when she heard Ingo sigh, “Stop her, please.”

&nbs
p; She heard the pop of the blaster before she crackled with a sharp blue energy that she could feel in her teeth, then in her bones, all in a matter of seconds. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.

  Lorica awoke back in her cell. The mattresses had been replaced and the blankets reset. Cost was back in her bunk, rocking and watching the rear wall anxiously. Lorica was in the bunk opposite her. A pair of feet dangled in her face.

  “Good morning,” Mattis said, hopping off the bunk above her.

  Lorica looked to the windowless back wall, where Cost paced back and forth, inspecting its corners. “How do you know?” she asked.

  “That it’s morning? Well, I went to sleep, then I woke up,” Mattis replied.

  “That tracks. Kind of…” Lorica tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t support her. Mattis caught her by the arm and lowered her back onto the bunk. She didn’t lie down. She needed to remain alert. She glared at Mattis. “You know your sleep schedule doesn’t dictate actual day and night,” she said.

  Mattis shot her a goofy grin, the only kind he had. “Aw, you’re just mad because you got stun-blasted.”

  Lorica went to retort, but all that came out of her mouth was sour vomit. It poured out thin and watery, thanks to the little food she’d eaten in the past two days, collecting in a puddle at her feet.

  Mattis laughed. “Is that all you have to say for yourself?” he said.

  “What are you so chipper about?” Lorica asked, wiping her mouth.

  “Oh, I’ve accepted our doom,” Mattis said. He backed onto Cost’s bunk and sat down on it. “We’re prisoners of the First Order, Jo was a traitor all along, this crazy person is talking to the walls….”

  Cost paused and cocked her head, birdlike, at Mattis and said, “I’m hollering at the scooter in the walls, ya shrubb!” She knelt down where the wall met the floor and muttered something. Then, as an afterthought to Mattis, she added, “Walls don’t talk anyways.”

  “What do you mean Jo was a traitor all along?” Lorica demanded. Fueled by this revelation, she got to her feet, where she stayed only briefly. She wobbled and Mattis helped her sit down, which she liked less than being dizzy in the first place.