by Jason Fry
“This is a big mistake!” she insisted, as the guard strolled past, aiming his glow rod at the sprawled prisoners trying to sleep in neighboring cells. “We didn’t do anything!”
“You crashed your shuttle on a public beach,” the guard said, not even looking at her.
“Oh, I’m sorry—what, did we break the sand? You can’t break sand!”
The guard, unimpressed, continued his rounds.
“Hey, don’t—augggh,” Rose muttered as the guard turned the corner and disappeared.
She sagged against the bars. With the guard gone, Finn wedged himself in the corner of the cell and began pushing and pulling at the lock mechanism, trying to remember long-ago infiltration techniques from his First Order training.
Rose paced in tight circles, sizing up their surroundings yet again. As far as she could tell, the prisoners with whom they shared their cell were asleep, incapacitated, or possibly dead. There was no help there—and from what she could see, Finn’s lock picking was an exercise in stubbornness, not expertise.
“So after that totally works, what’s our plan?” she asked.
Finn strained at the lock. Something beeped. Rose looked over in surprise and wild hope, only to see an additional panel slide into place, covering the lock mechanism.
Finn leaned against the wall and blew his breath out in frustration.
“This thing that failed was our plan,” he said. “Without a thief to break us into that Destroyer, it’s shot. Our fleet’s out of time. We’re done. Which means Rey’s done.”
Rey Rey Rey, as always. Rose took a step toward Finn, determined to actually throttle him this time. What would they do if she did? Send her to jail?
“Why did I trust you?” she demanded.
“Baby face,” Finn reminded her.
“You’re a selfish traitor.”
Finn looked up. “ ’Cause I want to save my friend? Yeah, you’d do the same.”
“I would not,” Rose insisted.
“No? If you’d had the chance, you wouldn’t have saved your sister?”
That was too much. Rose turned, took two steps, and shoved him.
Her fury shocked him into silence. He looked so startled—and hurt—that Rose found her anger ebbing, replaced by a sick sense of weariness. It was over. They were going to sit in this cell while the Resistance died, and whatever happened to them after that wouldn’t particularly matter.
“Um, I can do it,” someone said.
“What?” asked Rose, more annoyed than curious.
One of their fellow prisoners had sat up on the bench and was peering blearily at them. He was scruffy and tattered, from his rumpled stack of hair and unshaven face to his battered jacket and dirty black pants.
The man conducted a lazy inventory of his possessions—a pair of worn boots with the laces tied together and a scrofulous-looking cap—and began scratching himself, his fingers digging into places better attended to in private.
“Sorry,” the man drawled. “Couldn’t help but overhear all the boring stuff you were saying really loudly while I was trying to sleep. Codebreaker? Thief? I can do it.”
He gave them a lazy double thumbs-up. “Yo.”
“Yeah, we’re not talking about picking pockets,” Finn said.
A feral grin split the man’s face. “Awww, yeah. Don’t let the wrapper fool you, friend. Me and the First Order codeage go way back. If the price is right, I can break you into Old Man Snoke’s boudoir.”
“Yeah, no thanks,” Finn said, at the same time that Rose assured the pile of vaguely animate rags that they were good.
The thief—if that was indeed what he was—just shrugged.
“Besides, if you’re such a good thief, what are you doing in here?” Finn asked.
The thief reached down and retrieved his hat, pawing it onto his head and making a vague attempt at straightening it. A cheap metal plate on the front was emblazoned with letters that spelled out DON’T JOIN.
“Brother, this is the one place in town I can get some sleep without worrying about the cops,” he said, working his feet into his boots.
Finished, DJ—that’s how Rose had decided to think of him—waddled over to the cell door with the stiff gait of someone hungover or still actively addled. He looked blearily at the lock while Finn watched, amused and curious.
“Hatukga,” DJ cursed. He reached over, adjusted something, adjusted something else, and slapped the lock. The door slid open noiselessly and he strolled out into the cell block, leaving Rose and Finn staring gape-mouthed at the open bars.
An alarm began to blare. Rose and Finn exchanged a stunned look, squeezed through the door, and began to run.
* * *
—
Sometimes the worst thing about being a droid was also the best thing: Nobody noticed you.
After being unceremoniously heaved out of the casino, BB-8 had watched, unmolested but powerless to intercede, as a police speeder carted off Rose and Finn. A map of Canto Bight suggested a logical destination: the local jail. So BB-8 headed that way, dodging groundcoaches and customized speeders, troubled only mildly by the coins rattling around in his innards.
By the time the droid arrived in the vicinity of the jail, Rose and Finn had been processed and an authorization issued to hold them pending identification and sentencing. Activating a slicing subroutine that had proven useful getting Poe out of more than a few scrapes, BB-8 delved into Canto Bight court records. After a moment’s search, he whistled mournfully: By the time Rose and Finn were eligible for bail under normal procedures, the chances of saving the Resistance fleet would have dropped from scant to nonexistent.
Well, so much for doing things by the manual.
While rolling across the speeder lot in front of the jail, BB-8 accessed his primary photoreceptor’s image memory, reviewing the denomination of the Cantocoins he had accumulated while masquerading as a slot machine. Disappointingly, the amount—while able to buy several months’ worth of high-quality oil baths—was likely insufficient to persuade a legal official to make the charges disappear from the docket.
That was disappointing, but not unexpected. Apparently a more direct approach would be needed—one that BB-8 concluded merited a pause for electronic consideration.
BB-8’s computational suite contained tens of thousands of subroutines, from ones accessed nearly every day (facial recognition and threat assessment of organics) to others that had never been initiated (it wasn’t impossible that mimicking the mating calls of Zohakka XVII’s sea life might prove useful at some point).
None of BB-8’s subroutines was an optimal match for the most likely scenarios that would unfold once he entered the jail—an antipersonnel tactical suite with accompanying weapons attachments would have been ideal, but the astromech didn’t have one of those.
Still, BB-8 had learned a few things from Poe over the years.
Humans and other organics were dangerously error-prone in so many ways: They somehow failed to see or hear important stimuli, insisted on ignoring data they didn’t like, and forgot things they desperately needed to remember. Any self-respecting droid would have addressed such failings with a quick diagnostics session and memory defragmentation.
Yet organics made up for this—at least a little bit—with a talent for tackling a problem with simultaneous bits and pieces of multiple subroutines at once, what they called improvisation.
BB-8 liked to think he had developed a knack for that.
At least entering the jail proved trivial—BB-8 consulted a map, headed for the employee entrance, and simply rolled past several officers sharing questionable strategies for betting on fathier races while exchanging rumors about the Nojonz Gang.
As always, nobody noticed a droid.
The time for improvisation came once inside the cell block—which did require BB-8 to wa
it for a guard beginning his shift to badge in and enter, completely ignoring the astromech rolling inside beside him. Once the new arrival finished chatting and joined a sabacc game with the other two guards on duty, BB-8 swung into action. His decontamination/foreign-body-purge subroutine allowed him to fire coins like slugthrower shells, forcing humans into a defensive crouch; his electroprod could be dialed up to an intensity level that would incapacitate them; and his liquid-cable launchers were adequate for binding them so they were incapable of pursuit.
BB-8 had just finished this work and was feeling a bit pleased with himself when the jail’s alarms began to blare. A moment later an ill-dressed human who needed a bath rounded the corner and almost tripped over the astromech.
BB-8’s threat-assessment matrix proved unable to categorize the new arrival—insufficient data. But judging from his appearance, he wasn’t a guard.
“You do that?” the human asked, taking in the unconscious guards with what BB-8’s auditory sensors identified as a mix of admiration and amusement.
Before the droid could answer, another guard rushed into the cell block, blaster drawn. BB-8 fired a fusillade of coins at the man, forcing him to raise one arm to shield his face. While he was distracted, the human brought his fists down on the guard’s head, leaving him motionless on the floor.
As the grungy man began scooping up coins, he looked over at BB-8 and grinned. “So what’s your story, roundy?”
Rose ran through the cell block after Finn, grateful that at least the wailing alarms were covering the sound of their footsteps. On either side of them, grimy humans and aliens pressed up against the bars of their cells, hollering to be let out, shouting encouragement, or simply reveling in a break in the monotony of captivity.
Over the din, Rose heard shouts behind her. Finn skidded to a stop and she almost plowed into his broad back. Before she could protest, she spotted glow rods bobbing in the gloom ahead of them.
They were trapped.
Rose looked around frantically—and spotted a grating in the floor. A foul smell wafted up from it.
“Finn! Help me!”
Finn heaved, teeth gritted. The metal groaned and the grate came free. Rose scrambled down a rickety-looking ladder into the darkness, Finn squeezing himself into the shaft above her.
“Put the grate back!” she called up to him.
“I can’t—not all the way,” Finn said, his voice strained by the effort. “It’s too heavy.”
“Then forget it,” Rose said, and the ladder shook as he hurried down after her.
They found themselves in a stone sewer, too low for Finn to stand without stooping slightly. Fortunately, there was only a trickle of fetid water flowing through the middle of the space.
“Which way?” Rose asked, looking left and right and trying not to gag. “Ugh, it smells even worse this way. Let’s go that way.”
Before she got more than a step, Finn grabbed her arm.
“It slopes down that way,” he pointed out.
“So?”
“So what if it comes out in the sea?”
“Then it comes out in the sea.”
“What if it comes out in the middle of the sea? How long can you hold your breath?”
“We’ll need to hold our breath going that way, too,” Rose objected. “Or we’ll suffocate.”
“That way at least there’s air.”
“Bad air.”
They glared at each other. Then a boot heel hit the grate above them.
“We go this way,” Finn said, pointing to the right.
“We go this way,” Rose said at the same time, pointing to the left.
“What do you want to do, a round of wonga winga?” Finn asked.
It was the stupidest idea Rose had ever heard. And she couldn’t think of anything better. She threw up her hands, scowling, as Finn held up a finger, pointing left.
“Wonga winga cingee wooze, which of these do I choose?” they recited together, Finn’s finger oscillating back and forth, like a pendulum. “Stars above and stars below, show me now which way to go.”
It pointed right, toward the bad air. Finn grinned. Rose scowled and hurried after him, into the foul air.
“Who knew they taught wonga winga in the Stormtrooper Corps?” Rose muttered.
Finn looked back over his shoulder, an annoyingly smug smile on his face. “Me. They also taught us you always win if you start with the choice you don’t want.”
“Cheater,” Rose grumbled. But she couldn’t help smiling back, just a little.
The tunnel ran on for about a kilometer, dimly lit by a strip of maintenance lighting. The smell grew steadily worse, until Rose’s eyes stung and she thought she would gag. Just as Rose was beginning to worry that the tunnel would never end, they encountered another ladder—one that emerged from a dark mound whose origins Rose could figure out all too readily.
“After you,” she said, turning away in disgust. It occurred to her that even Paige—who’d loved all animals from tookas to slime molds—would have opted to skip this particular experience.
Finn shrugged and scrambled up the ladder, paying considerably less attention to where he put his feet than Rose would have. She followed him up the ladder more carefully, grimacing, and emerged next to him in a dark, dimly lit space.
“That smelled great,” Finn said, scraping his boot against the top rung of the ladder. He looked around, puzzled. “What is this?”
They were in a long, pillared hall of brick and stone, with wooden gates on either side of them and a floor littered with straw. Rose wrinkled her nose—there was a strong smell up here, too.
A massive, milky-white head appeared over the wooden gate next to them, regarding them curiously. It had wide, winglike ears, deep, worried-looking eyes, and a short snout.
Startled, Finn slipped and fell, winding up on the stable floor. He moaned, but Rose ignored him. The animal was a fathier.
More heads appeared above the gates. Some of the fathiers’ hides were crisscrossed with pale scars.
Moving slowly so as not to startle it, she peeked over the first fathier’s gate, the animal snuffling at her and murmuring something. The beast itself didn’t smell bad—its odor reminded Rose of grass and sweat, but faintly spicy somehow. Its stall was barely larger than it was—it didn’t have enough room to lie down or turn around.
In the middle of all this wealth, too.
Startled, a small boy sat up behind the fathier, scooting back to where his rough cot met the wall. He stared at her, frightened, and fumbled for a red button on the wall.
“No no no!” Finn yelped.
“We’re with the Resistance!” Rose said at the same time.
The stableboy looked at her doubtfully from beneath a frayed cap. Rose fumbled with her ring—the one Fossil had given her in memory of her sister. She activated the hidden catch on its side, revealing the insignia of the old Rebel Alliance.
The fathier nickered plaintively. Rose held her breath as the boy studied the ring. Then a smile crept across his face.
* * *
—
When the police burst into the stable, blasters drawn, two things happened almost at once. First a massive door slid aside, opposite the row of fathier stalls. Then every gate on the stalls snapped open and the hapless officers were left spinning in the dust and straw as twenty fathiers leapt free of the confines of their pens, jostling to be first through the door leading to the empty racetrack beyond.
As the officers picked themselves up and stared after the departing fathiers, the stableboy grinned and crept away from the control panel he’d activated, looking down happily at the ring with the Alliance crest where it bobbled on his finger.
Rose clung to the lead fathier—the herd’s matriarch, the boy had explained in halting Basic—as her first steps exploded into a full gal
lop. In her ear, Finn let out an astonished yelp as the world began pitching violently up and down around them.
Rose knew a grin was plastered across her face. She’d been nervous when the stableboy had hastily buckled a saddle onto the matriarch’s back and indicated—with a wide grin—that they should climb aboard. But Finn had been little short of terrified.
Despite their nerves, the matriarch had accepted both Rose’s presence and the unaccustomed additional weight of Finn. Her sides quivered between Rose’s knees and her ears twitched, and somehow Rose knew: She wanted to run.
Around them, the racetrack was empty but lit up as if it were broad daylight instead of the middle of the night. Rose wanted to rear up in the saddle so her legs could better keep her in place atop the hurtling fathier, but she couldn’t with Finn plastered to her back, hands locked around her waist. There was nothing to do except hold on to the animal’s neck as best she could.
Rose could feel the matriarch’s enormous lungs working beneath her hide, and the muscles of her neck and legs working in synchronization. It was like being atop a living machine—one built with exquisite precision to maximize speed.
She was terrified and exhilarated—and aching for Paige to have been able to see this.
This isn’t a daydream or a story we’re making up in the ball turret so we can forget about the war for a moment. Pae-Pae, this is real—I’m riding a fathier!
The fathier’s head slammed up and down as she ran, her ears pushed back behind her by the wind. Rose could feel the blood pumping beneath her arms where they were pressed against the beast’s graceful neck.
“Stop enjoying this!” Finn yelled in her ear.
Police speeders rose into view above the track and Rose could see their weapons rotate, trying to get a fix on the matriarch and the herd sprinting behind her. But then the fathier matriarch snorted and lowered her head, as if she had a plan.
“Ohhh—hang on!” Rose yelled as she realized what that plan was.