Karr said, “A pawn of the Emperor. He turned on his own kind.” He paused. In the back of his head, an idea gelled. He spoke slowly, putting the words in order as they occurred to him. “The dark side won. The bad guys won so completely that when they were finished…there was nobody left to remember the good guys. No one to tell their side of the story. No one to collect their history and write it down—not once the Temple was gone. They say history is written by the winners, but it should be written by those who remember. Those who care about the facts.”
The old man settled in a loose cross-legged position, his arms at his sides, his hands lying limply in his lap. “It was all a lie. My whole life, everything I lost…”
Karr scrambled to his side and picked up the rolling cup. He dabbed at the spilled liquid with the cuff of his sleeve, then gave up in favor of supporting his miserable host. “Grandfather,” he said, taking one of Naq Med’s hands and holding it—trying to compel him to make eye contact, but failing. “You did what you had to do. You did everything as right as you could. Your family survived. I survived.”
His great-grandfather shook his head and closed his eyes. He was deflating, becoming smaller as he closed in on himself—as if he would sink through the floorboards if only he was able. “You did survive. J’Hara survived, and she lived…a long life. A happy life?” he asked.
Karr nodded, even though his great-grandfather couldn’t see it. He squeezed the man’s hand between his own. “She was very happy. She ran the family shop until a few years ago, and was known all across Merokia for her fine clothing. She took pride in it. And in her son, and…and me, I think. It was a good life,” he concluded.
“Then it wasn’t for nothing.” When he opened his eyes again, they overflowed. “But it’s a shame that it cost so much, and it took so long. So much was lost.”
Maize tried hard to pretend that she wasn’t getting sniffly, but her words were thick when she said, “So much was saved, too.”
“That’s true,” Karr said. “For a long time things were bad for the Jedi. But then a Jedi came along who brought balance to the Force. Palpatine eventually lost. And the days of hunting Jedi came to an end.”
Naq Med sighed so deeply, so heavily that Karr thought it was the very last of his soul leaving his body. He sank even deeper into his oversized, scavenged clothes. “That’s good, yes. Very good. Then my job is finally done. I kept my family safe. And now I can rest.”
“Yes,” Karr confirmed. “You’ve done all that you needed to do.”
Naq Med smiled. “Tell me something. Have the Jedi been redeemed? Do people know the truth?”
Karr lowered his gaze. “Not exactly.”
The old man’s smile began to fade. He slumped forward, his head hanging so low that his chin tapped against his chest. “A pity. Soon there will be no one left to remember.”
Karr was quick to respond. “I’ll always remember!”
Naq Med lifted his head, but this time it was only his eyes that smiled. He reached out his other hand and grabbed Karr’s in his own. Then with one more breath, let out slow, he sank down farther—folding in on himself until he appeared to have no bones at all. He was still and quiet, his scraggly head resting on his knees and his back bowed, elbows jutting left and right. “If only people knew…the truth.”
Karr touched his shoulder. It collapsed, as light as matchsticks. “Great-grandfather?”
Maize left the cushion and crawled a meter across the floor, where she pulled Karr back, first by his arm—and then she pulled him into a hug. “He’s gone. He’s already gone.”
Karr could hardly breathe and barely speak. “He can’t be gone. I just got here….”
“I know.” She rocked him back and forth, pulling him away from the corpse of the old man who looked so very small. He could’ve been a child or a small mannequin. A ghost made of kindling and cotton. “But he left because you allowed him to. You gave him what he needed. You helped him. You saved him.”
They wrapped Naq Med’s body in the curtain-turned-rug that took up most of the floor in the shack he’d called home for decades. He hardly weighed anything at all, and when he was wrapped in the makeshift shroud, the kids placed him at rest on the pillows he’d made out of bags he’d found at the mining camp. They were stuffed with sawdust and straw, so Karr knew they would burn.
“When the rain stops…” he started to say, but ran out of words.
RZ-7 picked up the thread. “When the rain stops, we can honor your grandmother’s wishes—as she spelled them out in her message.”
Maize nodded. “Leave them nothing to find. Not even ashes. We should burn the whole thing. He might have things inside that could point back to your family.”
The boy stood baffled and restless, looking for something to do with his hands. “It’ll be like he never existed.”
“No,” she argued. “You’re living proof that he existed. When the rain stops,” she started again, “we can dump a little fuel on the house as we leave and hit it with a plasma beam. It’ll be a great send-off. Your grandmother would be satisfied, and he would be proud.”
The droid was ambling around the little cabin, poking his hands into baskets and bins, drawers and shelves. “But while the rain holds, sir…perhaps we should look for items to add to your collection. It’s grown quite extensive, but you should save something of your great-grandfather’s—for yourself, if no one else. Your father might want something to remember him by, too.”
“He’s got a point, Karr. You’ve collected Jedi artifacts from every corner of the galaxy. It’d be a shame to leave your great-grandfather’s place empty-handed. He’d want you to take something.”
He tried to keep from staring at the body, laid out on the cushions. “You don’t know that,” he said, but he couldn’t really argue. The small house was flooded with the Force, accumulated over a long lifetime—whether or not the old man had renounced his vows. The Force didn’t go away just because you were no longer pledged to it. And it didn’t only touch those who’d made pledges in the first place.
It stayed.
And it touched many people who weren’t committed to the light or the dark. Sometimes, it touched people like Karr.
“Look around,” she pressed. “Hold out your hands, feel the Force, or whatever it is you do. There must be something in here that calls to you. Try it and see.”
He held out his hands and scanned the room thoughtfully, trying to ignore the black hole around his great-grandfather. He felt the Force in all four corners, and in the rafters, and under the floor.
Under the floor.
In the back corner, behind some shelves that held folded rags and a tin of tea that the man had either found or collected and dried himself. Karr pushed aside a canister that looked like it might have held trash or compost and found a hatch cut into the grain of the floor. There wasn’t any lever or handle to open it with, but he pried it loose with a rusted knife blade he’d found in the sink.
Maize joined him. “What have you got there?”
They both stared into the hole while RZ-7 craned his metal neck to get a look for himself. Down under the floorboards, hanging in a net above the water—tucked tight beneath the house so no one would be likely to see it, or find it, or open it—was a box about the size of a suitcase.
Karr hauled it up into the house. It wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky and hard to maneuver; he pushed it into the middle of the floor so he’d have more room to work and tweaked the latch until it popped.
“It’s not locked?” asked Maize.
He lifted the lid. “Nope. Oh…oh, wow.”
“Is that…?”
RZ-7 let out a soft digital whistle.
He reached inside and pulled out a neatly folded bundle, tied with twine. With the same rusty blade he’d used to pop the latch, he sliced the twine and unleashed a pale, wax-colored robe. He held it up by the shoulders and rose to his feet—measuring it against himself and his own shoulders.
The robe
was made for a bigger man, but not that much bigger. It was made for a man with wider shoulders, but not that much wider. In another few years, Karr would be big enough. His shoulders would be wide enough. But this robe was not for him to wear, and he felt it in his bones—every bit as much as he felt that it now belonged to him.
The Jedi might be dishonored rogues, if any of them remained alive to care, but he knew the facts and he could remember them. He could collect the robe, and archive it, and save it for future generations.
If the Force was as eternal as Karr believed and history did, in fact, repeat itself, then more Jedi would come, and they would need to know the truth. They deserved to know the truth.
He held the robe up to his face and sniffed it deeply. It mostly smelled like mildew, and he loved it. For a split second, he wondered if they ought to dress his great-grandfather in it before they set fire to every shred of evidence that he’d ever lived there—but no. He understood his role now. He was a collector, and he would collect.
“Can I see it?” Maize asked.
“Sir? Don’t forget about this….”
Karr passed the clothes to Maize and turned his attention to the droid. “What is it, Arzee?” But he saw it before the droid could answer—Naq Med’s lightsaber. It remained on the table where he’d left it, looking as unobtrusive as a teacup without the Force of the Jedi behind it.
He ran his thumb up and down the metal cylinder until he found the switch that turned it on. A bright green column shot out, startling them all. It buzzed and hummed, glowing with power.
Karr held it with terror and awe, aiming carefully at the middle of the room where no one stood and no one could be hit or hurt. “A lightsaber,” he gasped. “I’m holding a real lightsaber. Not a broken one, not a piece of one. A real one.”
“And your head didn’t explode or anything!” Maize said, clapping her hands and laughing. “Does it hurt?”
“It feels…” How did it feel? He didn’t have the words. It felt like electricity and pressure between his ears, but it didn’t feel like a hot spike. It felt like hyperspace. It felt like the Force. “It feels…good.”
“Good? That’s all you’ve got?” she asked, but she was grinning from ear to ear.
“It feels light, not dark. It feels like I’ve finally found the balance.”
RZ-7 asked, “In the Force?”
He nodded. “And in life. I don’t fear the future anymore. It’ll be whatever I make of it. Good? Bad? Jedi? Tailor? Collector?” A light went off in his head, and almost to himself he said, “Maybe I’ll even be a…” But his voice trailed off, and he replaced the last word with a smile. He took another admiring look, then turned off the lightsaber.
“What are you doing?” she wanted to know. “Swing that thing around! Get some practice!”
“No, it isn’t for me to use—it’s for me to hold. That’s where the balance is, see?” He put it back down on the long strip of cloth and rolled it up. “I spent so long trying to figure out how to be a Jedi, and how to master the Force…but I’ve been looking at it all wrong. Maz Kanata knew. That’s what she was trying to tell me with the milk. I’m not the milk.”
“You’re losing me, Karr. I don’t get it.”
“That’s okay,” he told her. “Because I get it, finally. I’m not the milk. I’m the glass. I’m the one who sees the past, and the truth about what happened there. I’m the one who holds the memory.”
“Why you, sir? Why now?” asked the droid.
“Because there’s no one else to do it. This is where I fit,” he said with real confidence. Real certainty. “This is what I’m meant for. I get it now. I’m ready now.”
When he stopped talking, he realized that the sky was quiet. The rain had stopped. The storm was over, and they had everything of value there was left to take. His great-grandfather was dead, and he was going to leave for a trade school in a month—but that was all right. He understood that part now.
“Let’s go,” he told them, tucking the case with the robe and the lightsaber under his arm. “We still have some tracks to cover when we get home, right, Maize? You have to switch the transponders, and all that stuff?”
“It won’t take me twenty minutes, but sure.”
“Arzee, do you see anything else we should take with us?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Then let’s head home.”
Down under the house, they found a shallow dinghy tied to a post. It wasn’t much, but it made the trip back to the Avadora that much less miserable. When they got stuck, bogged down in the thick grass, they took turns getting out to tow the other two passengers—and the hike back to the ship took half the time.
Maize made them all clean up, or make a token effort to do so. “It’s my dad’s ship. If we get mud all over the interior, I’ll never hear the end of it. He’s already going to wonder about the fuel we’re leaving behind. Let’s give him one less thing to gripe about, huh?”
So they swabbed themselves off, removed their boots, wrung out their jackets, and hung it all up in the bunks to dry. They buckled themselves into their seats wearing little more than their undergarments. It was awkward at first, but mostly because of habit. Everyone was covered up enough to be decent, and their wet clothes were gross and uncomfortable.
RZ-7 found a hand towel and used it to wipe himself down, afraid of rust.
When the engines were ready, Maize took the ship up and out, flying low above the marshlands, the dark grass, the swirling water, and the remains of the mining community that had no one else left to scavenge them. “If we had enough fuel, I’d burn it all down for fun,” she declared. Karr gave her an unhappy look. “But we don’t. So I won’t.”
She saved it for the shack on the platform. She calculated how much they could spare, dumped it right on the roof, and pulled the ship back.
“Any final words you’d like to say?” she asked Karr, who stared at the little building with a mix of emotions that he couldn’t have untangled to save his life.
“I can’t think of anything except…thank you. Thank you to the Force, for keeping Naq Med safe—and thank you to my great-grandfather, for doing everything he could to keep me and my family safe. He wasn’t all wrong, he just didn’t know the whole story. He has inspired me to fix that for other people, in the future.”
“By collecting the Force?”
“One piece at a time. Go ahead, Maize. Do…whatever it is you have to do, but burn it all down and let the ashes wash away. It’s the last thing I can do for him.”
“Very well, Mr. Copilot.” She aimed the small forward cannons and pulled the trigger. An instant later, the house was reduced to flaming rubble that sizzled and sank and disappeared into the marsh.
They waited, hovering over the water, until it was completely gone except for a couple of straggling, scorched piers.
“Sir, if you’ll excuse me for asking, what do we do now? Should we head home, or have you decided to dodge your tailoring fate once more?”
“Home,” he said decisively to the droid. “I’m not dodging anything anymore. No path is set in stone, but the fun of it will always be that next step. Because they’ll be my steps. My story. All right, Captain. Bring us back to Merokia.”
“You’ve got it.”
Hyperspace engulfed the Avadora, and with one more jump, they were back in their home orbit. Then back on the ground, where Maize was as good as her word—and she swapped out all the fiddly technical things that would hide their trail, even though there was no one left to protect on a big abandoned planet called Pam’ba.
It was the principle of the thing. Like J’Hara had said in her message: leave them nothing—not even ashes.
“We’ll tell them we didn’t find anything,” she told him. “We’ll say it was a bust, and we lost some fuel so we gave up and came back. My dad might not believe it, but he probably won’t ask too many questions. I don’t think he’ll care that much, as long as I make it back safely. So what about you?”
“What about me?” Karr asked, unsure of what she meant. He sat on the ramp, eating a piece of fruit and waiting for her to finish tidying up the ship to her personal satisfaction.
“What are you going to do now?”
RZ-7 clarified with his own version of the question. “I think she means about the trade school, sir. Do you intend to keep your word?”
He nodded. “Sure. Why not? Being a Force collector won’t pay the bills. I’ll need something to fall back on. Something to pay for new collectibles, at any rate.”
“Well, thanks a lot,” she told him. “You’re leaving me to finish out school on my own?”
Karr took another bite, crunched up the fruit, and swallowed it. “That place isn’t so bad. Besides, I’ve still got your holocomm. You can call me and yell at me whenever you want.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. Arzee, you’re coming with me, right?”
The droid said, “But of course, sir. I doubt your parents want me lurking around listening in on their conversations anymore.”
Maize laughed. “I’ll keep you right here always, Arzee.” She placed her hand to her chest.
“Hey, what about me?” Karr asked.
“You’re out of luck, I guess,” she said. “Oh, hey. I know I told my mom she could help me pick out a tattoo, but you want to see the one I’ve got my eye on?”
“Sure.”
She took out her holocomm and projected an image.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s beautiful. Does it translate to anything specific?”
She looked at him sideways. “You mean like Karr? Fat chance.” She laughed.
Karr turned red. “No, I didn’t mean that. I meant—”
“I know what you meant. And yes, it does translate to something. It means…‘friendship.’”
Karr smiled, and Maize smiled back. Then the two teens hugged, eventually making room for a protocol droid disguised as a medical droid—and went their separate ways for the time being. Maize went home to talk to her folks about family, and Karr went home to share his findings quietly with his own.
Even his brother was impressed—a little bit, anyway—when Karr produced the lightsaber and turned it on. The little house lit up green, and it hummed with electricity. It sizzled with the Force.
Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Page 22