From what she could learn in her lucid moments, Kath kept three troopers at the transport while the rest were sent out to hunt for the Resistance base, monitor and recruit in the outpost, or scan the wilderness for resources. The First Order tended to favor planets that already had factories and industries in place so they could merely take over the mines or refineries rather than go to the trouble of building mines and refineries of their own. That’s how smaller planets like Batuu flew under their scanners: They were simply more work than they were worth.
But at the same time, even a primitive planet might offer easy pickings that the First Order could exploit. They were always on the lookout for certain ores and fuel sources, and Vi learned that Kylo Ren would look favorably on any scouting party that returned with Jedi or Sith artifacts when she heard Kath use his comlink to order his men to visit Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities and demand access to Dok’s special collection—at blasterpoint, if necessary.
She made a mental note to talk to Ylena about warning Savi to hide his own Force-related artifacts for the day Kath or his troopers stopped by the scavenger’s workshop.
Well, she would talk to Ylena about that if she ever saw Ylena again.
Which she would. She would get out of this situation.
Because even if Leia had sent her here to build a refuge for the Resistance, she was also carving out a haven for the people on Batuu who needed it, people like Kriki and Dolin. As much as she needed them, they needed her, too. She had to protect women like Jenda and Oh-li, keep the market safe for people just living their lives. That frail old woman had taken a blaster to the face for her, and Vi was determined to live long enough to repay that kindness. She’d made this mess, and she would fix it.
“Enough of waiting,” Kath said. “She’s never going to wake up, at this rate.”
When Vi opened her eyes and squinted through her bangs, she saw the polished tips of his boots, mere centimeters away from her face. She tensed, waiting for a kick.
“Get this box off her and put her back in the chair.”
Vi couldn’t stop her sigh of relief as the weight of the cargo crate finally left her back. Gloved hands roughly grabbed under her arms and jerked her upright. She went instantly dizzy as the blood drained from her head. Her vision went red, and when she exhaled, she could feel every bruise down her front, the pain concentrating on the bones that had pressed against the metal floor, her ribs and hips and knees.
“Ah, good. You’re awake,” Kath said.
The trooper slammed her back in the seat, and her muscles and bones screamed at the sudden change of position. She pinned her lips and breathed through her nose, unwilling to show them how much it hurt her. The harness was pulled down tightly and clicked into place, cutting into her chest where it was puffed out from the hands clasped behind her back. She’d been tortured before, but never in so simplistic a manner. An interrogation chair was about mind games and riding out the shocks, but this was about an animal’s contorted body screaming for relief as the human being’s mind struggled to function.
“This is the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed at,” she said, and she hated that it came out in gasps.
“Yes, well, you’re not my favorite guest. Tell me what I want to know, and your life will become infinitely more comfortable. I’ll unbind your wrists and legs, give you water.”
Oh, by the stars. Water.
Vi would’ve wrestled a rathtar for some water.
At least when Cardinal had interrogated her, he’d kept her fed and hydrated. She’d recognized early on that whatever the First Order had hoped he would become, he still had empathy and nobility.
Not so Kath. With Kath, they had succeeded in expunging any heart he’d ever had.
Now she couldn’t stop thinking about water, feeling the dry burn in her throat and the thick weight of her tongue. A human being, she knew, would die in a couple of days without water. She’d gone three days before, and it had hurt more at the beginning than at the end. Kath most likely knew this, too—and would soon use it as a more active part of the torture.
“Have anything to tell me?” he prompted.
Vi snorted. “What, do you think I suddenly got answers while I was unconscious? I still don’t know where anything or anybody is. But I did have a dream that Daddy Hux was disappointed in you. Not gonna get the award for Best Toady this year, huh?”
Crack.
His slap was a harsh reminder that he was in charge—and that his relationship with Hux was as sore as a bad tooth. It did help wake her up, though. She felt groggy and stiff. Perhaps she had slept—there was no way to know. Time ran strangely when you were being tortured, but it couldn’t have been a long time. Kath looked just as fastidious and exacting as ever.
He leaned in so close that she could see the pores on his nose and smell the cinnamon on his breath. “Perhaps three questions is a bit too much for you. You don’t look very smart. If you were, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t even be with the Resistance. So let’s start small: Where is your base on Batuu?”
Vi tossed her bangs out of her eyes and licked her desiccated lips, for all the good it did. “We don’t have one. This planet is strategically useless. You know that.”
He pulled out his leather roll of instruments again and selected a scalpel, gently placing the blade on her eyelid in that tender place where the eyeball rested in its orbit inside the skull. She’d been tortured several times, but it was generally rough and loud, with big movements and broken bones and her body going rigid with electricity. This strange, soft torture wasn’t something she’d ever fought before. She struggled not to move, knowing that the tiniest twitch could puncture her eyeball or leave a gaping hole in her eyelid.
“Where. Is. The. Base.”
It wasn’t a question this time—it was a command.
The blade pressed in, and a drop of blood rolled down her eyelid and caught in her lashes.
Vi’s lips pressed together.
She could feel the line of the blade against her eyeball through the lid, and she realized that in all the pain she’d been through, this one felt the most intimate, the most invasive, the most personal, the most utterly inescapable.
“I—”
The blade hovered there, waiting, the tiniest push from slicing directly into her eyeball.
“Sir!”
Vi shuddered as the blade left her flesh. Kath growled and straightened his posture before addressing the stormtrooper who had just appeared, her blaster at the ready.
“What?” he barked.
“There’s a local here. Says he wants to help us.”
Kath threw the scalpel against the wall, and it plinked off the metal floor. “You interrupted me to tell me some local cretin wants to chat?” After moment of internal struggle for control, his voice went slow and deadly. “You think that’s important enough to halt an interrogation? Are you a soldier of the First Order or a complete idiot?”
The stormtrooper didn’t move, didn’t reveal any reaction to this outburst. “He says he knows who shot CF-3363 and 3871 in the market, sir. He has one of their helmets.”
With a heavy sigh, Kath turned his back on Vi. “Fine. Watch her. Don’t take your eyes off her for a single second. I’ll be back shortly. And don’t speak to her.”
The trooper took up position, standing as still as a statue.
“So your boss is a real piece of work, huh?” Vi said.
The trooper said nothing, didn’t move.
“Just between us girls, how’s the First Order treating you? Are they all like him?”
Not even a twitch.
“So it looks like the new programming protocols are working out well. You’re practically a droid.”
Nothing.
In fact, the stormtrooper was so dedicated to staring at Vi and not moving that she didn’t turn around wh
en a new figure appeared in the transport’s open hatch, and Vi was well schooled enough not to give the trooper any reason to turn around, even though she immediately knew who had just joined them despite the goggles, hat, and orange Batuuan wrap.
She could tell by the limp.
It was Archex.
To think that he had actually stepped onto a First Order ship—
To save her. Of course.
The fool.
Not that she was about to complain.
DOLIN SHIFTED FROM FOOT TO FOOT as he stood by the jagged stump of a spire deep in a part of the forest he’d never seen before. Waba strained against his harness, anxious to smell the small box Dolin had placed on the ground a dozen meters away, per Archex’s orders.
“No, Waba,” he said, pulling the truffleboar back. “It’s not safe.”
Archex had ordered him to wait for a signal before carrying out his part of the plan, and the farm boy had never been more nervous about anything in his life. Sure, he believed in the Resistance and was excited to join up if it would help preserve his planet, family, farm, and way of life. But working at Savi’s and helping build a settlement was one thing, and what he was doing now—Sabotage? An act of war?—was another. If the First Order caught him, they would take him prisoner. Or kill him. What would they do to Waba, to Grana, to his community?
There was nothing he hated more than seeing the flora and fauna of Batuu suffering, so he’d chosen this spot carefully. No living trees would be harmed, no nests would suffer, no tall, ancient spires would topple. Just this old stump and some logs, maybe, things that were already dead.
Nighttime birdsong filled his ears, and as much as he wanted to push the button and be done with it, he couldn’t help wincing at the knowledge of what he was about to do and how it would upset this little corner of his planet. The ancients had left their mark here, but the forest would be fine. Surely the ancients, or their gods, or their echoes, would understand that everything he did, he did for Batuu. Nature knew well enough how to heal, even after a heavy blow. Everything grew back richer after a fire, after all. But there was no way Batuu and its smaller communities would recover if the First Order razed the planet, so he would accept this small sacrifice to preserve the greater whole. Maybe one day, if they all lived, he’d come back and plant seedlings, do his part to help the land heal.
Far off, he heard a raised voice—Zade.
“Look, I’m just trying to do a public service!” he wailed melodramatically.
“Now,” Archex whispered through the commlink on Dolin’s wrist.
That was the signal.
“Come on, Waba. Hurry.”
Tugging the hog’s leash, he jogged back the way he’d come. When he could no longer see the box on the ground or the rocky stump, he pulled Waba behind a jagged rock formation, picked up the struggling creature, and tucked Waba’s wide face into his shoulder.
“It’s okay, pal,” he assured him. “It’ll be over soon.”
Taking a deep breath and scrunching his eyes shut, Dolin pressed the button, and the world exploded.
ZADE SHOOK THE WHITE STORMTROOPER HELMET at the tightly wound and all-too-familiar officer raising a manicured eyebrow at him—it was a heavy bastard of a helmet, too.
“That’s right, a public service!” he wailed, letting his voice carry, per Archex’s instructions, and hoping his racing emotions came across as the usual bellowing rage. “Just being a good citizen! And what do I get? Doubt and a definite lack of credits crossing my palm. What’s the point of supporting the First Order if you don’t respect or remunerate a man, eh?”
The two stormtroopers on either side of their officer shifted uncomfortably. Zade wondered whether it was because their armor was uncomfortable, because their leader was a rancid, puffed-up frog-dog, or because they didn’t like thinking about their own mortality as they beheld the blood splattered up the back of the helmet’s otherwise pure-white betaplast.
“Look here, you histrionic piece of space effluvium—” the officer began, and then it happened.
Boom!
The farm boy had actually gathered up his guts and detonated the ordnance. Of course he got the fun job. No one ever let Zade blow things up.
On purpose.
His job was to be loud in a different way.
“What the skrit—” he began, but the officer cut him off.
“You two go find out what that was,” he barked.
The stormtroopers said, “Yes, sir,” and jogged off in lockstep, holding their identical rifles in identical positions that made Zade’s stomach turn with their precision.
“You.” Kath pointed at Zade. “You look familiar.”
Zade’s heart cranked up. Perhaps dressing so well had its drawbacks. If this monster realized who he was, the situation would take a dark turn—and it was already pretty dark.
“I have a brother,” he lied. “Famous musician. Always on the holos.”
He’d never been so grateful that he’d re-dyed his hair before he’d come to Batuu, because that was possibly the only reason this officer didn’t realize they’d met before.
“I don’t care about your brother. Stand right here. And no more of that high-pitched caterwauling. No reward was offered for this information, and you’ve already given us said information, so we’re not required to pay you. It’s a simple concept.”
“Me not getting paid is far from a simple concept,” he said, his mouth running full-speed as his brain and heart tried to catch up. “You see, people who don’t work for a tyrannical political movement require something called ‘money’ so that they can do something called ‘live,’ and I like to eat—and drink—rather a lot, so—”
The officer rubbed his eyes and held out his hand. “You will give me the helmet and leave, and in return, I won’t have you executed for being annoying and maligning the First Order.”
In the wake of the explosion, the forest had gone deathly still, and thus Zade, as someone who craved a crowd and recognized the moment when he no longer had one, realized that he and the black-clad officer were utterly alone.
“Yes, sir,” he said, saluting with the helmet in hand.
The moment the officer exhaled and let his guard down, Zade swung the heavy helmet backhand in a 180-degree arc with all his might, bashing the bearlike officer right in his big, dumb skull.
“At least the ‘yes, sir’ counts toward the part where I promised to leave.” Zade looked down at the man’s hated face, relishing the odd numbness that zinged up and down his arm from the impact. “I can commit to that. The rest of that rot you can stuff into your hairy belly. I don’t work for you. I don’t take orders from you. And I sure as—”
The officer’s eyes blinked open, and Zade screeched in surprise and lunged, swinging the helmet again and bashing the man directly in the forehead with it.
This time, the officer blessedly returned to unconsciousness, a very wise move on his part, as Zade’s next plan involved kicks directly to the face with expensive pointy boots. There was very little in life he wanted as much as to cause this man grievous bodily harm. As far as he could tell, the officer wasn’t even breathing. Maybe—
Right on cue, ever the spoilsport, Archex limped into view from behind one of the far-too-large-to-make-sense trees and awkwardly loped toward the transport wearing Vi’s hideous orange wrap.
“Blaster ready?” Archex whispered.
“Always,” Zade stage-whispered, because he wasn’t particularly fond of real whispering. “But if I can just make sure he’s dead first?”
He pulled his blaster, which he’d lovingly nicknamed Nadia, and aimed it at the officer’s face.
Archex looked back at him, frustrated. “No. We need him. Interrogation, or at least as a hostage. Just watch the forest and make sure he doesn’t wake up. Protect me. Got it?”
Zade twir
led his finger in the air with a raised eyebrow and turned his back to the transport, spinning dramatically on one heel with his scarf swirling around with him. He hated doing what Archex told him to, especially when it was the opposite of what he longed to do. Archex was exactly the sort of person that made Zade’s skin crawl. Hurrah for rules and order and duty! What if we never smiled or laughed again? Tra la!
It was enough to make Zade sick—or perhaps that was last night’s alcohol intake, or the officer’s face. He still couldn’t see any breathing, so he would have to focus his thoughts on something else and hope the man was dead.
Zade couldn’t hear what was happening in the overly large transport, but he was glad to find that no one appeared to be barreling into the clearing to attack him. Most of the troopers would be back in town berating children or off doing whatever they did in the forest instead of hanging around home base. Hopefully the two that had run off toward the explosion hadn’t hurt Dolin or his hog, both of whom Zade quite liked.
These Resistance blokes were actually growing on him.
And as much as he hated it, he couldn’t forget the debt he owed Vi. Zade knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if she hadn’t interfered, he would’ve drunkenly shot his mouth off at those troopers and ended up dead in the alley that night. His wounds were just too fresh. When he was drunk, it was easy to imagine the relief that might come with not existing, without feeling the pain of loss, for all that he hadn’t yet shared his particular reason for hating the First Order with his new friends. But when he was sober, he wanted to live, and well. Death was terrifying, and if there was one thing Zade wanted, it was to keep being Zade.
And sometimes, deep in his cups, as he heard the cantina folk cheer as he preached against the First Order, he actually felt like one of them. Like he belonged. Like he had a family.
Galaxy's Edge Page 27
