by Rae Carson
“There’s one left,” she called back, searching the wide blue sky. Nothing in sight.
No help for it but to continue on. Together, the skimmers raced for the ship.
The closer they got to the freighter, the more its familiarity troubled Rey. Where had she seen it? Maybe one like it had stopped on Jakku. Small freighters landed at Niima Outpost all the time. It was the place to go to trade junk no one else in the galaxy wanted.
Rey steered toward the on-ramp. A ship like this would never survive long on Jakku. It would be stripped for parts within days. Maybe the Forbidden Valley really was forbidden, only used once every forty-two years during the Festival of Ancestors. There had to be an explanation for why this ship remained untouched.
As she and her friends were about to jump out of their skimmers, something roared overhead. Charges exploded all around them, throwing them to the sand and blowing their speeders to smithereens.
Everyone whipped up their weapons and fired; Rey wasn’t sure which of them hit, but the jet trooper spiraled out of the sky and slammed into a cliff. His jetpack detonated, shooting him into yet another bluff and out of sight.
Rey had just enough time to register that the sand around her was a different color—more black than ocher—and that she’d seen this kind of sand before…
She sank up to her hips.
Her friends were descending around her, especially Poe. “…the hell is this?” he said, trying to extricate himself, but his movement only made him sink farther and faster.
“Sinking fields!” Rey said. The Sinking Fields of Jakku had taken many an unwary soul. She should have recognized the sand right away. “Grab onto something!”
But there was nothing to grab onto. Chewie called out, panicked.
C-3PO dropped all the way to his recharge coupling. “Oh, what an ignoble end!” he exclaimed.
BB-8’s round body spun wildly in the mire, to no avail. Within the space of a breath, the little droid disappeared beneath the surface.
“Beebee-Ate!” Rey yelled.
Tears filled her eyes as she panic-thrashed against the sand. Rey was going to lose them all. Not to a dark and powerful enemy, but to a natural phenomenon she should have recognized. Jakku was going to have its last word after all.
She locked eyes with Finn. Her friend’s face was stricken. “Rey!” he said. “I never told you—” He dropped, the sand reaching his shoulders.
“What?” she cried.
Finn slid down to his chin. “Rey!”
No! “Finn!”
Finn disappeared beneath the surface. C-3PO and Poe followed. She reached for Chewie as if in apology, and he reached back. She held her breath as sand covered her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Grit filled her ears, scraped her skin. The world went dark.
* * *
—
General Leia was in the command center, getting briefed by Rose Tico on the status of their tiny-but-growing fleet. “Everyone who can hold a wrench or pilex driver is repairing and upgrading ships,” Rose said. “We’re working as fast as we can.”
Leia nodded. Just outside, sparks were flying everywhere, and she was about to ask for status updates on a few specific ships, but Snap Wexley hurried toward her, interrupting them.
“General, we’re getting reports of a raid at the Festival of Ancestors.”
Of course they were. Of course the First Order had found her people. “This mission is everything,” Leia said. “It cannot fail.” Then, her voice a little plaintive, she asked, “Any word from Rey?”
He shook his head. “The Falcon’s not responding.”
At the look on Leia’s face, Rose said to Snap, “Do you have to say it like that?”
“Like…what?” he said.
“Do me a personal favor,” Leia said to him. “Be optimistic.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Snap, forcing his features into bland pleasantness. “This is…this is terrific. You’re not gonna believe how well…This is gonna turn out great.”
Leia resisted rolling her eyes. But she said, “Major Wexley, requiring optimism doesn’t mean hiding the truth.”
“Yeah, what aren’t you telling us?” Rose demanded.
Snap shuffled his feet. “The raid at the Festival…General Leia…Our eyes on the ground say it’s the Knights of Ren.”
* * *
—
Sand was scraping Poe’s eyelids, shoving into his ears, up his nostrils. Any moment now, he’d lose control and inhale a mouthful of grit. The sand would scrape away at his lungs in the painful seconds it would take to choke to death.
Just when he thought he couldn’t hold his breath a moment more, his feet met air. His torso broke through a layer of packed sand, and he dropped, hitting the ground hard.
BB-8 dropped after him, plunking down just a few meters away. Poe gasped to replenish his lungs, shaking sand out of his hair, blinking rapidly to clear the grit from his eyes. He looked around; BB-8 was right beside him. It was too dark to see well, but they had fallen into some kind of tunnel made of hard-packed sand. A gaping dark maw marked what might be an adjoining tunnel. Hopefully, he’d find the rest of his friends there. He got to his feet, dusted himself off, and stepped toward the maw. “Rey? Finn?” he called out.
“You didn’t say my name, sir, but I’m all right,” C-3PO responded from a few meters away.
A squelching noise made Poe turn; it was Rey, her legs dangling from the ceiling. He hurried over to keep her from dropping as hard as he had. After he lowered her to the ground, she bent over, coughing.
“I should have used the Force,” she muttered between coughs. “I panicked…I didn’t even think to…”
“Rey? You all right?”
She nodded. Her face was covered in sand. “Where’s Finn?”
“And where’s Chewie?” Poe said.
Chewbacca dropped through the ceiling and thunked to the ground. Poe winced at the impact, but Chewie shook himself off, seemingly unscathed.
“Finn?” Rey repeated.
He appeared in the entrance to the adjoining tunnel. Sand peppered his black hair. “Yeah, I’m good,” he said. “What is this place?”
C-3PO doddered toward them. “This isn’t the afterlife, is it?” he asked. “Are droids allowed here?”
Poe felt like he could truly breathe again, now that everyone was accounted for. He’d had it with people dying on his watch. “Thought we were goners,” he said.
“We might still be, sir,” C-3PO reminded him helpfully.
“Which way out?” Finn asked, looking around.
Rey unhooked her lightsaber and turned it on. Its blade lit the walls around them in soft blue, and Poe could feel its hum in the back of his throat as she waved it around, studying the walls.
Poe reached for his glow rod and turned it on. Its glow compared with the lightsaber’s was like that of a moon to a sun. He shrugged and aimed it forward anyway, seeking an exit.
“This way,” Rey said, and headed off.
He thought of protesting, of asking how Rey could possibly know which equally unremarkable direction was the right one. But Poe had learned that when Rey said things that way, her face determined, her voice unwavering, a fellow ought to just follow.
* * *
—
Lando Calrissian crouched on a rock outcropping, making himself as small as possible. Directly below and within spitting distance was the Millennium Falcon, surrounded by stormtroopers. Behind them was a high rock cliff, and Lando could make out several dark figures. His helmet zoomed in on the image until he could identify them: the Knights of Ren. They eyed his ship like vultures.
His ship. He hadn’t been prepared for the sting of nostalgia that overcame him when he laid eyes on the Falcon again.
Lando had re-donned his mask and crept to this viewing perch, hoping he
could grab the Falcon and return it to Chewie before the First Order found it. But he hadn’t been fast enough.
A desert trooper wearing a colored pauldron strode forward. “Confiscate, scan, and destroy that ship,” the stormtrooper commander ordered. “By order of the Supreme Leader.”
Lando’s breath grew tight with rage, and his helmet hummed to keep up with the task of filtration. The First Order always destroyed what you loved.
He’d been spending a lot of time on Pasaana to get away from all that. The Aki-Aki were joyful and nonviolent, and they’d welcomed him without question or reservation. He’d had to don the helmet, sure, because an old Rebellion general was nothing if not recognizable. A small price to pay for a little peace and quiet.
But maybe scoundrels like him didn’t get to have peace. Maybe trouble always came looking, no matter what.
He watched, his determination growing, as the desert troopers broke the locks and forced the Falcon open. Then the best ship in the whole galaxy lifted off and screamed out of the atmosphere, its fusion engines glowing blue, no doubt heading for an incineration hangar.
Lando knew what he had to do.
CHAPTER 7
The sand burrow made for easy traveling with its flat, hard-packed ground and cooler air—which was good because Rey had no idea how long it would take to find an exit. She only knew that a strange instinct drew her forward. Let it guide you, she imagined Leia saying. She’d been doing that a lot lately, imagining what Leia would counsel her to do.
She should have let the Force guide her when she and her friends were sinking into the sand. Rey wasn’t sure what she would have done, but…something. Calling on the Force was easy. But she needed to make it her first instinct. Leia had observed that her formative years on Jakku had taught her to look for tactile solutions to impossible problems. Leia thought that could be why it took so long for the Force to awaken inside her, and why it might take even longer to shake that kind of conditioning.
But Rey didn’t have that kind of time, and she wouldn’t let herself make that mistake again.
BB-8 beeped a question.
“I don’t want to know what made these tunnels,” Poe answered.
“Judging by the bore circumference,” C-3PO said, “any number of deadly species could—”
“Do not want to know,” Poe repeated. “Not.”
The tunnel curved around, and Rey followed. “So what was it?” she asked Finn, mostly to keep her mind off C-3PO’s words.
“What?” Finn said.
“What were you going to tell me?”
“When?”
“When you were sinking in the sand, you said, ‘I never told you…’ ”
Finn avoided her gaze. “I’ll tell you later,” he mumbled.
“When you’re not ‘with Poe’?” Poe said.
“Yeah!” said Finn, with a mock glare.
“Great,” said Poe. “We’re gonna die in a sand burrow, and we’re all keeping secrets…”
“I’ll tell you,” Finn said, “when you tell us how you know how to do all that shifty stuff!”
BB-8 warbled at something ahead, which brought them up short. Something metallic flashed in the glow of Rey’s lightsaber as they peered closer.
“What’s that?” Poe said, aiming his glow rod.
“A speeder?” Finn asked.
“An old one,” Rey said. Its steering vane was bent at an impossible angle, and it was outdated by at least a decade, but the dry, windless tunnel had largely preserved the acceleration module and repulsorlift. If she stripped this thing for parts, she could get at least three portions for her trouble.
“Perhaps we’ll find the driver,” C-3PO said.
BB-8 told C-3PO what he thought of that.
“Yeah, I think dead, too,” Poe said.
Chewie complained that he was getting thirsty.
C-3PO waddled over to the speeder’s hood ornament and bent over, peering close. “It’s a hex charm,” he said.
“A what?” Poe said.
“A common emblem of Sith loyalists!” C-3PO said, delighted.
“The Sith…” Rey murmured. This was the place her instincts had been leading her to, no doubt about it. But it was not the hex charm that had drawn her. Something else…
“Luke sensed it,” Rey said. “Ochi never left this place.” Disappeared into the desert, Lando had told them.
“He was headed away from his ship,” Poe said. “Same thing happened to us happened to him.”
That explained why the freighter had remained untouched for all these years. Anyone familiar with Pasaana knew better than to go near this place, the same way the residents of Jakku knew to stay clear of the Sinking Fields.
“So how did Ochi get out?” Finn asked, looking around for an exit.
Rey stepped toward the speeder, her limbs tingling. “He didn’t,” she said.
At her feet was a pile of old bones.
“No, he didn’t,” Finn agreed.
“Bones,” said Poe, looking away in disgust. “I don’t like bones.”
Ochi’s speeder had fallen into the tunnel, and either he’d died on impact, or he’d injured himself so badly that he’d died slowly, trapped and alone.
BB-8 warbled that he’d found something.
Rey moved next to him and peered closer at the pile of bones. Tattered clothes clung to the remains. A leather belt with a knife sheath circled his pelvis. The sheath was empty.
BB-8 extended a tube from his tool compartment and began blowing away some nearby sand. Gradually, an object appeared—long and metallic, with a still-sharp blade.
Rey’s heart began to race as she picked it up, gripped its cold handle. This dagger. Those runes…
Screams rending the air, the metallic scent of blood, the feel of blade against bone and sinew…
Rey blinked the vision away, feeling sick. “Horrible things have happened with this,” she murmured.
Poe took it from her, and a weight lifted from her shoulders when the dagger left her hand.
“It has writing on it,” Poe said, studying the blade’s etchings.
“Of course it does, sir!” C-3PO said cheerfully. “Perhaps I can translate.”
It was an archaic text Rey had never encountered in all her years at Niima Outpost. The blade itself was silvery but untarnished, with a scalloped edge designed to do as much damage coming out of a body as sliding into it. A hefty, curved crossguard protected a leather-wrapped handle. She’d never seen anything like it.
C-3PO took it from Poe, and a weight was lifted from her shoulders when the dagger left her hand.
“What does it say?” Poe asked.
“Sith assassins often inscribed their secrets on…” the droid observed. “Oh! Look! The location of the wayfinder!”
They all practically knocked heads trying to get a closer look.
“What’s it say?” Poe demanded again.
“Where’s the wayfinder?” Finn said.
“I’m afraid I cannot tell you,” C-3PO said.
Poe gaped at him. “Twenty-point-three-fazillion languages, and you can’t read that?”
“Oh, I have read it, sir!” C-3PO enthused. “I know exactly where the wayfinder is. Unfortunately, it’s written in the runic language of the Sith.”
“So what?” Rey said.
“My programming forbids me from translating it. I am physically incapable!”
“Wait,” said Poe. “Wait. The one time we want you to talk you can’t?”
“Irony, sir.”
Rey was surprised to learn that C-3PO knew what irony was.
“My vocal processors cannot phonate words translated from Sith,” the droid said. A hulking shadow moved behind him. Something huge, and—Rey sensed—in great pain. Rey lifted her lightsaber in readin
ess. Oblivious, C-3PO added, “I believe the rule was passed by the Senate of the Old Repub—”
The thing in the shadows hissed, manifested into a serpent more massive than a happabore with a segmented body and wicked red eyes. C-3PO turned. The droid dropped the dagger into the dirt and screamed, “Serpent!” as the snake opened its massive jaw to reveal sharp fangs dripping venom. It drew back into a striking position.
“Rey,” Finn whispered.
BB-8 rolled behind Rey as Chewie whipped up his bowcaster, preparing to fire.
The Force should always be her first instinct. So Rey reached out to the bowcaster to lower it, her eyes glued to the snake’s huge fangs. She’d once heard about this creature—a vexis—from a trader. He’d been complaining about Jakku, and how it was hard to get a decent drink anywhere on the planet, but at least Jakku had never been home to a vexis, like some of the other desert planets.
Poe said, “I’m gonna blast it.”
“Don’t blast it,” Finn said, his gaze fixed on the snake.
The vexis rose even higher. It hiss-roared, blowing Chewie’s fur back.
It was terrifying. Rey could sense its rage, its hunger. But she also sensed great pain. Unsure exactly what she was doing, she handed her lightsaber to Finn and stepped forward.
“Rey—” Finn protested.
“It might be injured,” she said.
“Might just be a giant killer sand snake,” Poe said.
Rey narrowed her eyes as she approached the serpent’s body. “More light,” she ordered.
Poe aimed his glow rod where she pointed, illuminating the creature.
Yes, the serpent was definitely wounded. A giant gash ran across several segments. She just had to reach it. Carefully, slowly, she climbed over the vexis’s curved body until she stood within its coils. If it decided to kill her, all it had to do was squeeze…
She spoke gently, to comfort herself as much as the snake. “Leia says when something’s trying to hurt you, it was usually hurt by something bigger.” Like farm equipment. A grain farmer had probably rolled a tilling blade right across this creature’s lair, flaying it open.