by Ken Liu
Imagining the refreshing rain that would soon come, I smiled.
The space inside the nozzle darkened. My heart leapt into my throat. The man’s figure blocked all light.
“You’ll be dead in another ten minutes if you stay here,” he said. “Come on. Enough fooling around.”
Throwing me over his shoulder, he dropped down from the nozzle. Then he secured me to his back with a sling and climbed slowly up the hull until he found a jagged opening. Struggling with my weight, he stumbled into the ship. We were inside a utility cabin intended for miscellaneous supplies. Unceremoniously, he dumped me onto a storage ledge.
“Are you going to behave or do I have to tie you down again?” he asked, breathing heavily.
I shook my head; I was done running.
He left and returned sometime later with the litter. As I lay recovering on the ledge, he maneuvered the litter to block the hole we had climbed through. He lashed the makeshift door to the frame of the cruiser with the hauling cables. Aided by the light of a salvaged emergency lamp, he piled pieces of debris on the litter to weigh it down, sealing the seams between it and the hull with pieces of melted plastoid and bundles of cloth.
It was almost completely dark inside the cabin. Only a few thin rays of light fell through some holes made by the steelpeckers high above us. They penetrated the murk feebly, like forlorn hope scattered by a dark sea of despair.
Outside, an otherworldly moan grew steadily until it turned into a screeching howl, followed by the staccato pit-pat-pat of rain lashing against the steel hull. The tiny explosions blended into a constant, resonant clang in our dark sanctuary.
It no longer sounded like rain. It sounded like a regiment of stormtroopers firing their blasters against the wrecked ship.
“A sandstorm,” the man said.
I imagined myself in the nozzle outside, pounded by the suffocating sand. I imagined my skin being scoured away by a thousand wind-whipped grains. I imagined myself as a skeleton reclining in the nozzle, my bones picked clean by animals and bleached by the sun.
“How did you find me?” I croaked.
“You’ve been in those clothes for more than a week now,” he said. “I could smell you from half a kilometer away. At least I managed to recover the water you stole.”
Not magic then. Maybe this planet robbed him of magic just as it drained the life out of the starships that crashed into it.
“Did you grow up around here?” I asked. “Was that how you knew about sandstorms?”
“I grew up in a desert,” he said. “One very much like this one. You need to eat. And drink.”
I guzzled greedily from the canteen he held to my mouth. He pulled the last ration bar out of his sack, handed it to me, and dropped the empty sack on the floor. Lying down on the other ledge in the storage cabin, he turned his back to me and went to sleep.
In the dark tales told by my mother, the heroes needed to understand the villains to defeat them. Knowledge was the first step to control, to power, to order.
I needed to know this man who had taken me prisoner, and who had also rescued me from a sandstorm and handed me the last of his food. I needed to know this man who terrified me, but who also intrigued me.
I had seen the wanted posters, the shaky holo footage. I recalled the shiny figure on the deck of the rebel cruiser, pulling Imperial starships out of the sky with his bare hands. I remembered the way he had struggled up the wreckage with me tied to his back, refusing to abandon me to certain death. Maybe he just wanted to save me for some dark purpose later—or maybe not. I thought I knew all there was to know about this man, but in fact, I knew nothing.
After the sandstorm, we resumed our journey.
I lost count of how many starships we passed, their funeral pyres still burning. Since we had no more rations, we ate bitter roots he dug from the dunes and tiny voles he trapped with a net woven from delicate Imperial ion-conducting wires. Sometimes he cooked the meat; other times, we tore the flesh from the bones with our bare teeth. My stomach cramped from this barbaric diet.
We began to climb a hill, and the man had to stop every few steps to catch his breath.
It was hard to reconcile the figure of this man—mortal, weak, ordinary—with the glimpse of the powerful Jedi I had caught on the bridge of my ship. Had I imagined it all? Before the endless, unyielding sand dunes, everyone was equal, whether you were a magician or just a common soldier.
He stopped again, but this time, instead of resting, he turned to me, uncapped a canteen, and pushed the spigot against my lips.
I shook my head and moved my face away. The water, after baking in the heat of the sun for so many days, tasted bitter and metallic. Drinking it made me want to throw up.
“You haven’t drunk for more than an hour now,” he said. “I know you feel terrible, but dehydration is going to make it worse.”
In truth, I was feeling close to death. My vision blurred and swam. The fever was so intense that I imagined myself not too different from the burning wrecks we passed. I closed my eyes so the world would stay still.
I couldn’t breathe.
My eyes snapped open. He had pinched my nostrils shut. What manner of torture was this?
Panicking, I opened my mouth to gulp some air. He waited until I had taken a breath before forcing the spigot of the canteen between my teeth. I bit down but it was impossible to keep it out. He had pushed it in too far.
“Drink,” he growled. “Or I’ll start pouring and you can drown for all I care.”
I nodded. He let go. I swallowed the bitter, foul liquid. I had no doubt that he was willing to carry out his threat. A rebel, especially a Jedi, was capable of any act of cruelty.
After I drank, he resumed pulling me up the steep side of the dune again.
“I need a doctor,” I gasped. It was shameful for an Imperial soldier to beg, but I was beyond shame now.
“I know.”
I swayed back and forth as he dragged me toward the bright sky. I looked back at the graveyard of starships. They shimmered in the heat. Maybe soon I was going to join them, and all my dead comrades.
“There is a place surrounded by walls beyond the dune,” he said. In my semicomatose state, his voice sounded far away, unreal. “It’s guarded by stormtroopers, and I’ve heard rumors that masked soldiers in crimson robes patrol there from time to time. I’m taking you there.”
I couldn’t speak. So he was planning an assault on an Imperial stronghold. Was he hoping to use me as a hostage? Surely he knew that would be useless. In the Imperial Navy, we were trained to treat hostages exactly the same as hostage takers because they were weak and allowed themselves to be used as shields. I wanted to tell him that he would gain no advantage by dragging me along.
But my slow mind finally caught the import of his words. If the compound he spoke of was guarded by stormtroopers and the Emperor’s Royal Guard, then it was likely an important fortress—the fact that I hadn’t heard of it probably meant it was secret. Even a Jedi would not have an easy time breaching the defenses of such a place.
I could still redeem myself by sabotaging his attack. And if I should somehow survive, there would be doctors, medical droids, fresh water, safety.
Hope, which I thought was already dead, flickered to life deep in my mind.
With a final lurch, we crested the dune and gazed down the other side.
He had not lied. The walled compound sat in the desert like a black crown. The walls were interrupted at regular intervals by watchtowers. I strained to catch a glimpse of the imposing stormtroopers, but we were too far away.
The man sat down on the litter next to my feet. He untied a pair of long poles that ended in flat paddles. I knew what they were: blades from an air-circulating pump installed on starships. He placed the poles over his knees like the oars of a rowboat and stuck the flat paddles into the sand.
“Let’s go,” he said, and shoved hard.
We slid down the great sand wave on the litter raft, and h
e wielded the oars nimbly, giving us more speed when he thought we needed it, and steering us out of the way of protruding animal skeletons and clumps of vegetation when they got close.
Faster and faster we sailed. It was the most exhilarating and strange ride of my life.
I readied myself for a desperate burst of exertion as soon as Imperial guards came into view. I would push him off the litter and scream for help, to let the stormtroopers know that I was loyal, that I had not been rendered helpless by this dangerous war criminal, that they could still rescue me.
But no hopeful white armor showed on the walls as we approached. The doors to the compound were wide open, and a few men and women, pulling litters much like the one I was on, emerged with heaps of stolen goods.
The last of my pride and resistance left me; I wept helplessly.
Another burnt-out room. Smashed electronics, fragments of memory cores, the smoking wreckage left behind by explosive charges designed to erase all traces of the work that had been done in the laboratory.
From time to time, I heard the voices of men and women raised in anger somewhere in the compound. Scavengers fighting over scraps.
The man returned. One look at his face told me all I needed to know.
Then he picked up the hauling cables and dragged me through the maze of tiled corridors and empty laboratories again.
There were no stormtroopers, no Imperial Royal Guards, no doctors or functioning medical droids. Whatever this facility had been, the occupants had abandoned it earlier in the battle and destroyed everything that couldn’t be taken with them.
From time to time, we passed other scavengers hoping to find objects of value in this ghost compound. They looked at us warily, and some bared their teeth or flared their neck flaps or raised their horns intimidatingly. They belonged to a hodgepodge of species, some humanoid, some avian, a few aquatic or amphibian, most unknown to me. All dressed in rags. Jakku was not a rich planet, and these were people who had never scraped together enough to leave.
The man managed to negotiate with them and exchange some of his salvage for rations. He devoured a few portions and handed the rest to me.
I shook my head. The pain was so intense that staying conscious was torture. I wanted something, anything, to put me out of my misery.
“Leave me,” I muttered. “Let me die.”
The man said nothing. He simply went on, pulling the litter. He stopped to look in every ruined room, searching for what I knew wouldn’t be there.
We were passing one of the rooms with a narrow slit-like window when it happened. First, a bright flash that made both of us turn away. Then a deep rumbling that we felt through our bones, as well as heard. The ground heaved as though we were at sea or on the deck of a struck starship. The man fell, and anything still sitting on benches or hanging on walls crashed to the ground.
A groundquake? A volcanic eruption?
The man crawled over and dragged me into the doorway, where the frame offered some shelter. We huddled tightly, hoping that the building would not collapse on top of us.
Later, after things had calmed down, we made our way outside. The other scavengers, a few dozen in all, had gathered silently on the elevated balcony overlooking the entrance to the compound. The sight that greeted us took all words away.
The wreckage of the massive Star Destroyer that had stood a few kilometers away was gone, and in its place was a bubbling, bright-orange lake of fire. The red-hot liquid, lava-like, had spread to fill the depression among the dunes in which the compound stood. The low walls of the compound held the turbulent waves of the lake of fire back. But the sandblasted walls would not last much longer.
We were stranded in the middle of a burning lake, and the dikes were failing.
Half-asleep, I listened to the voices of the scavengers.
“The reactor cores in the ship must have suffered a meltdown….”
“Lucky that no one was anywhere near it…”
“…not lava. That’s melted sand….”
“…a sea of liquid glass…”
“There are cracks in the walls already….”
It was night, and the cold desert air was made more tolerable by the heat emanating from the glass lake. The fiery liquid cast a dim red glow against the faces of all the scavengers. The strong wind, the result of the drastic change in temperature between the desert day and night, drove powerful ripples and waves across the surface. Surrounded by a lake of tempestuous glass and dozens of misfit creatures from all over the galaxy, I again had the sensation that I was living in a dark fairy tale spun by my mother.
“We can’t stay here,” said the man who had taken me there. “When the walls collapse, we’ll drown in fire.”
“What do you suggest we do, then?” asked one of the other scavengers. He wore a simple vest made of woven wires over his furry body, and all his prized salvage—small electronics, tools, power supplies, gleaming crystal fragments—was attached to the net vest like the haul from a strange sea.
The man had no answer. There were no functioning vehicles left in the compound, and even if there were, how could mere wheels or treads be useful in a lake of scorching liquid glass? Only an AT-AT might have a chance, but there was none to be found.
I fell asleep. I was going to die, but the great villain of the Rebellion, trapped with me, would not escape, either. That was some comfort.
When I woke up, the man was gone.
I struggled to sit up and frantically looked around.
The dejected scavengers, seeing no way to escape their fate, huddled in small groups around the balcony. They played games of chance, shared stories, or simply stared into nothing at all.
A small figure down below, on top of the walls, caught my attention.
He was strapping something flat and large to his feet. I squinted against the hot breeze coming off the surface of the lake.
They were the paddles from the air-circulating pumps.
With no warning, the figure jumped into the lake. I was too shocked to cry out.
But instead of sinking into the deadly waves, he stayed afloat. Just like the wide boots issued to Imperial soldiers in snowy terrain, the paddles acted like miniature boats that distributed his weight across a wide area. Tentatively, he took a step forward, like a long-limbed water strider floating on a puddle.
Step by step, he gained confidence. As I watched his billowing robe float over the fiery lake like a blooming lotus, I imagined the hot liquid cooling into pure, crystalline glass. I imagined him stepping across the surface as easily as a boy loping across a sheet of ice. I imagined the stars reflected in the glass, an upside-down sky over which he strode.
He was the sky walker. I almost laughed aloud at the thought. Of course he was.
“That’s a ridiculous suggestion!”
“Absolutely not!”
“One slip and we’ll be dead.”
“You must be trying to kill us so you can steal our possessions.”
“The walls are holding, I think—”
“Maybe we should try to pile up the rubble here and build a tower. Even if the walls fall—”
“Stop it!” the man shouted. The cacophony of voices died. “I know you’re terrified. I am, too. But there is no other solution. You’ve seen the walls. They won’t last much longer. Even if you try to pile up all the rubble here and build a tower high enough to survive the flood, will your rations last until the glass cools? We have to walk out of here.”
The other scavengers looked skeptically at the paddles strapped to his feet. The very idea of trusting their lives to such flimsy contraptions on a burning lake was absurd.
They drifted away from the man, alone or in twos and threes to continue their hopeless games and useless fantasies. They refused to acknowledge the reality of our shared fate.
I beckoned to the man. Surprised, he leaned down to hear what I had to say.
“Tell them who you are,” I whispered.
He pulled back and looked
at me warily. I beckoned to him again.
“I know the truth,” I said. “I saw you up there”—I pointed to the stars—“and also down here. I thought you’d lost your powers. But then I saw you stride across the lake, so I know you’ve gotten your powers back. You’re still Luke Skywalker, the Jedi. They will follow you, but you have to tell them the truth.”
He sat up and looked at me with an expression I could not name. A few seconds later, the corners of his mouth curled up in a smile.
I was drifting under the stars again. Just like how I had arrived on that planet.
“Stay close to me,” called Luke Skywalker. Dozens of voices acknowledged him from behind.
I strained to look back. Over the molten lake of glass, a long, serpentine caravan wound its way. In the lead was Luke Skywalker, magnificent in his glowing Jedi robes and hauling me on a litter. The paddles strapped to his feet allowed him to step high and pull me with confidence, and the shiny metallic foil—scavenged from the Imperial compound—he wore instead of the thick shawl kept him cool by reflecting the heat of the molten sand away from his body.
Behind us, the bravest souls wore paddles fashioned after those on Luke’s feet. Molten glass was so dense that it was possible to float without making the paddles too bulky. They pulled small boats and rafts made from other insulating material, and those who were too fearful to walk on their own huddled inside the temporary vessels, covering themselves with more reflective foil to stay cool.
“I’m using the Force to guide you,” Luke said into the darkness. “As long as you stay close to me, no harm will come to you. The Force is with us. We’re one with the Force.”
The others behind me repeated the mantra. They didn’t trust the contraptions that kept them afloat so much as they believed in the mystical power of the man leading them.
They had a point. After all, the same faith had allowed a group of ragtag rebels to defeat a galaxy-spanning empire.
The blazing waves from the molten glass lake lapped the shore behind us. The makeshift boats, rafts, and paddle shoes lay scattered on the sandy beach. We were safe.