Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

by Kevin Shinick

  Karr shivered and said, “It’s freezing in here.”

  “It’s freezing out there, too, sir, if you remember. But we won’t be here long, and no one else seems to mind it much.”

  “Everyone else is dressed for it,” Karr said, enviously remembering the Kijimi residents in their thick furs and animal hides. He dropped the mostly eaten bag of chips into a trash bin.

  He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall behind him. “I hope Tatooine has answers, Arzee.”

  “I’m sure it will, sir. But if not, were there any other planets that you saw in your vision that might help?”

  “Plenty, actually, but if we’re gonna keep planet hopping, we should really save up for our own ship. Despite what Maize says, sooner or later the First Order will come looking for the Avadora.”

  The droid said, “Sooner, rather than later. Or so I fear. Sir?”

  “Don’t nitpick, Arzee. It’s just an expression.”

  “Not nitpicking, sir. Trying to warn you.”

  But Karr was still leaning back with his eyes closed. “Warn me about what?”

  “The ship, sir.”

  “What about it?”

  “Sir, the ship is…not unattended.”

  Karr opened his eyes. There it was, the Avadora, right where he’d left it. But it was surrounded by about a dozen First Order stormtroopers.

  He watched through the glass as the refueling attendant listened to the stormtroopers, looked up, spotted Karr and RZ-7 through the glass…and pointed them out.

  Even though they were probably a hundred meters away, Karr held up his hands, and RZ-7 did likewise. This was way more troopers than the two who had picked up Maize. Minutes later, half a dozen soldiers joined them in the lobby area. Most of the stormtroopers stopped and stood at attention. A man in a black uniform seemed to be in charge. He stood in front of the boy and the droid with his arms crossed. He didn’t say anything.

  So Karr got the conversation rolling. “You caught us,” he told them. “Here’s your ship. We didn’t steal it, we just borrowed it from Maize. I’m sorry, but I’m done with it now, anyway. Just take us home already.”

  The officer in charge shook his head. “Home? You’re not going anywhere. First, you’re going to answer some questions.”

  “I am? I mean, I’ll try.”

  “Good. Let’s climb on board for a little bit of privacy, and have a chat.”

  Karr put his hands down, since no one was actually aiming any weapons at him, and besides, no one had told him he needed to do that in the first place. Furthermore, his armpits were starting to hurt.

  As the troopers marched him through the spaceport and up the ramp (with RZ-7 bringing up the rear)…Karr again began to question the severity of his crime. What could these guys possibly want?

  They had their ship back, for crying out loud. What else were they on this frigid planet for?

  He and the grim-faced officer sat down facing each other in the tiny sitting area that was hardly big enough for the pair of them—much less the droid, who hovered at the entry until he was told, in no uncertain terms, “Beat it, before I turn you into a can opener and leave you here to open freeze-dried snacks for the rest of eternity.”

  Then it was just Karr and the officer. His face may not have given anything away, but his posture said plenty. He didn’t want to be there, he didn’t like Karr, he didn’t like droids, and absolutely nothing had ever made him happy.

  Which became clearer as he leaned in and said with a menacing tone, “Tell me what you know about the Jedi.”

  It took Karr almost an hour to relay everything he had learned about the Jedi that day. The golden droid’s arm had conveyed so much, and it was all still fresh in his mind. But when he glanced up, the officer’s expression was one of confusion, emphasized by his gaping mouth.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “I ask about a Jedi, I get a history lesson?”

  “You asked me about the Jedi,” Karr argued.

  “I was talking about Skywalker!”

  “So was I!”

  “That’s ancient history!” the man yelled. “I’m talking about now!”

  It was Karr’s turn to be confused. “I have no idea where he is. Do you?”

  The officer rested his face in his hands and took a deep breath. “Were you not on a mission to find Skywalker?”

  Karr shifted in his seat. “I…guess so. Yeah. In a way.”

  “And did you not find a clue as to his whereabouts?”

  “No,” replied Karr.

  The officer leaned in closer, if that was even possible, his exasperation giving way to anger again. “And that’s the part I don’t believe.”

  Karr protested. “Do you think if I had found Luke Skywalker I’d be sitting here with you? I’d be kneeling at his feet, begging him to train me!”

  The officer tapped his fingers on a datapad that was sitting on the table in front of him, its screen glowing but obscured so Karr couldn’t tell what was on it. “Let’s talk about this message you sent from the Oba Diah moon orbit.”

  “What message?”

  The soldier checked some notes on the datapad. “The one where you say, and I quote, ‘I found a piece of a puzzle. Regarding a missing Jedi Master.’ Do you remember this conversation?”

  Karr thought for a moment and nodded. “Yeah, I was talking to my friend Maize that night, after we found the wreckage and the holoprojector.”

  “The holoprojector? Is that where the map was?”

  “Map?”

  “You didn’t find part of a map? Or anything else that could point to Skywalker?”

  “Skywalker? No. I told you, I found some pieces of a wrecked shuttle that belonged to Sifo-Dyas, a Jedi Master from long ago. There was an old, mostly dead holoprojector. I got it to play its last message, but there was nothing in it about Skywalker.”

  Skepticism permeated the officer’s being as if he had just bathed in it. He told Karr to stand up and instructed a stormtrooper to search him. After a very rude and invasive pat down, the trooper reported, “Nothing, sir.”

  But the officer wasn’t satisfied. He knew holoprojectors were small and that they could be hidden almost anywhere. “Take your gloves off.”

  Karr did and tossed them on the nearby table. The man looked them over, but the only thing they revealed was that J’Hara had been a skilled tailor.

  “What next?” Karr asked. “You want me to stick my tongue out?”

  The officer sat back and licked his lower lip. “Bring the droid back in!” he shouted to no one in particular. But whoever’s job it was knew enough to respond, because Arzee was escorted back up the ramp.

  “Sir, may I be of assistance?”

  “I’m not sure,” Karr admitted. “I don’t think so.”

  But the officer took command of the conversation again. “You two are pretty close, I hear.”

  “Of course.”

  “It would be a shame if you had to go home without him.”

  “Without him,” RZ-7 said curiously. “That would never happen. I am devoted to my master and would never leave him or—”

  But before he could finish, the officer unholstered his blaster, clarifying what he meant.

  “Oh,” the droid emitted. “Now I understand.”

  Karr tried to explain that there was a misunderstanding. “I’m telling you, I don’t know anything about Skywalker’s whereabouts. Or about any map. I only recently even heard of him!”

  The officer slowly raised his arm and pointed the blaster at Arzee. Karr’s words quickened. “I’m telling you the truth! I’ve told you everything I know. There’s no reason to shoot Arzee.”

  RZ-7 interjected on his own behalf: “If I may, I can vouch for Master Karr. He is an honorable—”

  But when the officer didn’t lower his arm, Karr resorted to an old tactic. “Wait!” he yelled. “Don’t do it! I have a condition. I get these headaches, and Arzee is the only medical droid who has the k
nowledge and the expertise to help me. Please! I need him.”

  The officer paused, finally lowering his arm. “I’m sorry to hear that, son. Because we both know he isn’t really a medical droid. And that means you’re a liar.”

  The blast that hit RZ-7 sent him across the room, separating his arm from his body. “Arzee!” Karr shrieked. Without a second thought for himself, he leapt out of his chair and dropped to his knees at RZ-7’s side. “Why did you—How did you…know?”

  The officer stood up from his chair. “We know a lot of things, kid.”

  He turned his datapad around and pushed it across the table. With a couple of taps on the screen, the officer brought up a holo—and it began to play.

  Maize appeared. She was smiling and talking with her hands.

  Karr seemed confused. “That’s my friend Maize.”

  The officer smirked in a wicked way. “You sure about that?”

  Karr kept watching, and the faint smile he’d mustered began to fade. Maize was in her house—he recognized the furnishings of the main living area. She was sitting on her couch, talking in an animated fashion about…him.

  “He found something,” she said. “Something about a missing Jedi Master. And I know he’s orbiting Oba Diah.”

  The holo ended there. The officer pulled the datapad back across the table and turned it off. “Still want to stick with your answer?”

  Karr could barely look at the man. Instead he spoke to the ground as his shoulders sagged with grief. “I told you already. The missing Jedi was Sifo-Dyas. I don’t know where Skywalker is.”

  The officer exhaled heavily through his nose. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to the stormtrooper.

  The trooper used his blaster to gesture over to Karr. “What about him?”

  “Leave him. He’s not worth anything.”

  As the intimidating men left the ship, Karr slumped the rest of the way to the floor. All this commotion and still nobody cared about the Avadora. He might as well take it for good, fly to the other end of the galaxy and keep going. After all, what was left for him at home?

  Karr tried to swallow, but his mouth was very dry. Maize had ratted him out to the First Order!

  His stomach felt hot and his eyes felt hot and his face felt hot. He was embarrassed and angry. It’d been stupid, hadn’t it? Stupid to think that the cool new girl at school was really his friend, and that she really believed in him and his mission.

  He wanted to curl up into a ball and die, but he didn’t have the luxury of that option. He had to attend to his droid.

  “Arzee, you’re still in there?”

  “Nowhere else to be, sir,” he replied, a whisper of static breaking up the words.

  “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay,” Karr insisted to himself as much as to the droid. “I can fix this.”

  “Not to doubt you, sir, but the odds of fixing me with what you find on this ship are approximately two thousand eight hundred twenty to one. In fact, it’s the first time I can say with complete conviction that I’d stake my medical reputation on it.”

  Karr gave a weak laugh, more for the droid’s benefit than his own. “Arzee, I promise you’re going to be okay, but I want you to know something.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  If droids could smile RZ-7 would have, but instead his eyes just flickered on and off as if he was pleasantly taken aback by the announcement. At least, that was what Karr chose to believe. But he would not get the chance to confirm it.

  The floor was covered with parts of his friend, and he knew that his only hope of rebuilding him was to collect them all. He was so overcome with emotion, however, that when he reached out to grab part of the droid’s casings, he forgot he wasn’t wearing his gloves.

  A vision, sharp and loud, went pealing around in the space between his ears. He heard nothing else. He saw nothing else. Not RZ-7 or the interior of the Avadora, clean and bright and sterile.

  He saw his parents. At home. RZ-7 was powered down and sitting in a corner like a discarded toy, and his parents were talking with the casually anxious ease of people who are worried about many things—but not being overheard.

  His mother was at her sewing machine, which had been hauled out to the kitchen table for a large piece of work. She shook her head. “One day, he’s bound to find out. If not from us, from someone else. Maybe we should just tell him.”

  “No,” his father replied. “It’ll only fuel his obsession.”

  His mother didn’t quite sound cold, but she sounded tired when she said, “It’s still our job to protect him.”

  “And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  The vision swam, and Karr missed a few words, but he caught the last bit. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  “True,” his mother responded. “But it might just drive him mad.”

  The edges of the vision fluttered and melted, and Karr felt many things all at once. First he felt stupid. It had never dawned on him to touch RZ-7, because they were practically inseparable. What the droid saw, Karr saw, and what they didn’t observe together they shared with each other. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that RZ-7 could witness something without noticing it. Second he felt confused. What were his parents talking about exactly? What would drive him mad? Did he have a tumor? But most important, he felt angry—angry that he was being lied to about…something. Something big. And he intended to find out what.

  Karr’s stomach was in knots, but his eyes became steely as he stared at the empty pilot seat. He had learned a lot in the past few days, but had he learned enough to pilot the ship home by himself? He sat in the chair and buckled himself in.

  Hell, yeah, he thought. In fact, there were a number of things he was about to do that he had never done before.

  The trip back home felt infinitely shorter than the trip that had taken Karr so far away from it, just a few short days before. There was no more hopping, skipping, or jumping from moon to moon, star to star—it was just a straight shot back to the little planet of his birth, his entire life so far…and possibly his future, too. He paced in the ship on the final ride, wondering if he was making the right decision, fearing that he wasn’t, but knowing full well that his anger and adrenaline made it his only option.

  As he maneuvered the Avadora back through Merokia’s atmosphere, he thought about all the things that had changed since he left. About the boy who had set out with friends to follow a tale and the young man who was returning home alone to finish the story.

  No one was around when Karr landed the ship on Maize’s family’s landing pad, just as no one was there when they had taken off. He wished RZ-7 could see the great job he was doing bringing the Avadora in, and decided to include him anyway. “Look at this, Arzee! We’ve come a long way from just being able to walk away from a landing. Owned it like a pro!”

  Once the ship’s landing gear was fixed firmly and he had powered everything down, Karr grabbed what he could of RZ-7’s remaining parts and threw them into a bag. He grabbed the bulk of the droid’s body around the waist, and the two of them exited the ship like old friends coming home from a party. Only Karr wasn’t ready to celebrate. He was ready for answers.

  When he finally got home, he slammed the door behind him and stormed past his brother, shouting “Where are mom and dad?” Not waiting for an answer, he made a beeline for the living room, where he found his mother measuring the waist of a clothing mannequin.

  “What are you keeping from me?” he demanded.

  Looway Nuq Sin nearly jumped out of her skin. “Karr! Where have you been? I have been worried sick about you.”

  Karr ignored her and repeated his question. “What are you keeping from me?”

  “What? Nothing. I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” he shouted. “Not anymore!”

  Looway tried to calm him down the way people do when they’re stalling for time.
“Honey, you’re upset, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the secret you and Dad are keeping from me. The one that’s for my own good. The one that might drive me mad,” he said, quoting his vision.

  That stopped her in her tracks, and Karr knew he didn’t have to say any more. Feeling both vindicated and slightly apologetic for frightening her, he gently took her hands in his own.

  “Mom, I have an ability. I didn’t ask for it, and I’m not always certain I want it,” he admitted. “But it’s mine and it’s real and I’m learning what to do with it. It hasn’t been easy, and to be honest I’m still scared. But now that Grandma is gone, I could use your help. I have flown across the galaxy looking for answers, and I am tired. But I came home because I’m starting to realize that the answers I’m looking for might actually be in the same place I’m running from. Now what is it you haven’t been telling me?”

  Looway fought hard not to cry, but eventually gave in to it. “You’ve grown so much so quickly,” she said. “But I need you to wait just a little bit longer. I promise you we will tell you everything, but your father had to leave for a few days to purchase some fabric and I want him here for this. You should hear it from both of us.”

  That seemed acceptable to Karr. After all, he half expected his parents to continue lying to him, so waiting was no big deal.

  Maize called him on the holocomm, but he didn’t answer. Not even when she tried again. The third time she called, he tossed the device out the nearest window. She was the last person on the planet he wanted to talk to. Whatever she had to say, he didn’t want to hear it.

  Days passed. He made sure to wear the gloves all the time, because he was too afraid of possibly experiencing any more visions. They were too strong, and he was afraid of what he might see.

  What if he saw the future again? What if he killed more Jedi?

  Was the future fixed? Could fate be distracted and avoided?

  If so, Merokia was probably the place to do it. Much as he complained about it, the truth was his home planet was safe. Sometimes he pulled the Inquisitor’s broken lightsaber out from under his bed and thought about, just one more time, touching it with his bare hands.