by Revis, Beth
But there had still been that undercurrent of fear. It spiked occasionally, when the comm tower picked up static, or when Mama and Papa insisted they have a safety drill. They invented scenarios of bad things that could happen and told Jyn what to do. Papa liked to pretend it was a game, but Jyn knew better.
There wasn’t a scenario for if Mama died, Jyn thought. They had a lot of plans, but none of them ended with Jyn alone. They would hide, run, survive. Together. Mama had never thought about what would happen if she died and Jyn hurtled away from home through hyperspace.
But when she looked at Saw, she knew that wasn’t true. He was her parents’ plan if the worst happened. They hadn’t wanted to tell her that; they hadn’t wanted her to think about just how bad things could get, but Jyn knew it to be true.
Saw was her last hope.
His eyes were red-lined, and he sighed heavily as he ran a hand over his smooth head. As if he could feel her eyes on him, he glanced down at Jyn, and he tried to shoot her a reassuring smile. But then he said, “I don’t know what to do with you, kid,” and any comfort she’d felt disappeared.
The farther they went from Lah’mu, the more surreal the journey felt to Jyn. She half expected this all to be some sort of mistake, and when they finally stopped flying, they’d be back home, everything normal again.
But when they dropped out of hyperspace a few days later, it wasn’t beautiful green-and-blue Lah’mu that was waiting for her. It was an asteroid belt.
Saw sat up straighter, and Jyn watched as his attention zeroed in on the viewport. “We’re coming up on Smuggler’s Run,” he said. “Strap in.”
At first, it was just a few stray asteroids, but soon they were in the thick of it, the shuttle lurching up and down, left and right as Saw expertly navigated the ship through the onslaught.
“I like Wrea,” Saw said. “The belt keeps people away. It’s quiet.”
Wrea . The planet they were going to. Jyn’s body slammed against the safety harness as Saw swerved around another asteroid. It suited him, to live on a planet so difficult to reach.
When they cleared the asteroids, Jyn saw Wrea. It was smaller than Lah’mu, and bluer. Water, she thought. With little land masses of green and white and brown scattered over the surface, the islands big and long like fingers clawing their way through the ocean.
Saw flew the shuttle straight down, landing in a small clearing surrounded by craggy rocks. Wrea was cold, and the air smelled like salt, but she couldn’t see the ocean. She could only see rocks and tangled scrub brush. As they approached a broken comm tower, Jyn realized there was more to it than just the base. A door was carved into the rock, a heavy blaster-proof door that Saw accessed with a biometric lock. The metal squeaked when it slid open. Lights cascaded down a long hallway bored directly into the stone.
Jyn lingered in the doorway, looking around at the small rocky island. At the top of a hill that seemed as if it were made of one giant boulder was a comm tower. Or at least part of one. The other half lay broken and rusted at the base.
“Not used since the Clone Wars,” Saw said, walking past Jyn and into the outpost. “The natives aren’t exactly friendly, but they stay off this island.”
“What are the natives?” Jyn asked, jogging to keep up. The door whisked shut behind her, closing her in the dank stone hallway.
“Wreans,” Saw said, winking. When Jyn didn’t respond, he peered at her, noting her nervousness. “They’re water creatures, and they stick to the deep. You’re safe.”
Jyn nodded, swallowing. She didn’t believe him, though. She didn’t believe in “safe” at all.
The outpost was bigger than it appeared from the outside. Built directly into the rock, it had three doors on either side of the main hallway, which ended in a common room larger than Saw’s shuttle. He stood in the hallway a moment, as if considering his options, then he opened the door immediately to his right. It was an old office and had obviously been used for storage. “This do?” he asked. Jyn wasn’t sure what he meant, so she just nodded.
He led her down the hallway. Jyn looked at the other closed doors curiously, but he didn’t pause. The large common room seemed to be half cave, with a stone ceiling curving up. Jyn didn’t like it at all. It was too much like the cave she’d hidden in.
A long table stood in the center, and cabinets had been built into the wall. Saw set Jyn down at the table and opened a can of nutritive milk for her. From her seat, she watched as he went back to the hall, to the first room, and started clearing stuff away. He worked quickly, his beefy arms straining as he lugged a desk into the hallway, then several crates.
“You should get a droid,” Jyn called down the hallway when Saw stopped to swipe at his sweating brow. Back on Coruscant, Jyn had had a Mac-Vee droid who took care of her sometimes and kept the apartment clean. Papa liked to complain that he wasn’t nearly as efficient as Mac-Vee had been, so Mama had to help him with the dishes.
“I dislike droids,” Saw said in a low voice before turning and stomping down the hallway.
Jyn scurried after Saw, following him into the first room on the right. Inside were a half-dozen beds, each with a thin mattress and a blue blanket. Saw handed her a blanket and pillow from one of the beds, and Jyn thought that meant she would be sleeping there, but instead Saw picked up the mattress from the frame and carried it down the hall to the little office by the front door. He plopped the mattress on the floor, and when Jyn just stood there, he took the blanket and pillow from her arms and put them on top of the mattress.
Saw had cleared out most of the other furniture and the crates that had cluttered the little room, but he’d left a small table and an old datapad. As he straightened the mattress on the floor and draped the blanket over the end, it finally dawned on Jyn that this was her room. A dusty, tiny room with a mattress on the floor. She wasn’t even worthy of the larger room down the hall that was already set up with beds. No. This was her room.
It was so pitiful that Jyn wanted to cry. This was nothing like her room in Coruscant, sleek and filled with the highest-tech toys available. It wasn’t even like her bedroom on Lah’mu, cramped but homey and filled with the little dolls Mama had made for her. But when Jyn turned to see Saw’s face, she swallowed her dismay. He looked so…so anxious for her approval that all she could do was whisper her thanks.
When Jyn awoke the next morning, everything seemed too dark. There were no windows. The air smelled funny—musty, not crisp. Her heart thudded as she tried to wrap her mind around the disorientation of waking up in a place that wasn’t home.
Jyn rubbed her eyes. They were dry and scratchy, and then she remembered that she’d been crying. And then she remembered why. Her stomach churned, acid rising in her throat. She couldn’t push back the memories of the previous day. The sound of Mama’s body falling, lifeless, to the ground. The waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to save her while she hid in the cave.
But that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been waiting for someone . She’d been waiting for Papa. He was the one who was supposed to have saved her. Not Saw. A flare of rage washed over her, surprising in its intensity. She had never felt anger like this before. And even though she knew in her heart that it wasn’t fair to blame Papa for not being able to save her, she held on to the emotion. It was better than the sorrow that threatened to drown her.
There was no sign of Saw when she opened the door to her room and peeked into the hallway. Her stomach ached with hunger. She wondered if she should knock on the closed doors and find Saw, but instead she made her way to the common room and found another can of nutritive milk from the same cabinet Saw had opened earlier. She sipped it alone at the table.
Idly, she looked over the different things Saw had left there. He was a little messy; the empty can of nutritive milk she’d drunk the night before was still on the table, as well as other trash. But one side of the long table was used for Saw’s work. It reminded Jyn of the way her father worked—organized chaos, he called it. There were tr
ansparent sheets of star charts and schematics of Imperial ships jumbled together. But it seemed as if Saw had swept most of that aside. There was a datapad in a mostly cleared area, and Jyn saw notes Saw had been making about crystals. He’d marked down certain planets, some of which Jyn knew her father had researched as well. Jyn touched a holocube on the table, and her father’s face lit up, floating in front of her.
Jyn looked around guiltily; she didn’t want Saw to think she was a snoop.
But Saw was nowhere to be seen.
He’s in one of those rooms, she thought, looking at the half-dozen closed doors.
Or maybe outside.
She slurped the milk from the bottom of the can.
He didn’t leave me.
She set the can on the table.
I’m not alone. I’m not.
It was very, very quiet.
“Saw?” Jyn said in a small voice. She didn’t want to wake him if he was sleeping. “Saw?” she said again, louder.
No doors opened.
She pushed her chair back from the table, metal grating on stone. Could he have taken his shuttle and flown away, leaving her there with nothing but ration cubes and whatever Wreans were?
Jyn’s heart raced, and she went from door to door down the hallway, no longer caring if she disturbed Saw. An angry Saw was better than no Saw. Most of the doors were locked, and the few that weren’t contained nothing but cobwebs and broken furniture, obviously piled up when Saw was clearing the outpost for his own purposes. Jyn was starting to get more panicked, and she was actually trembling by the time she reached the door that led outside. It zipped open, and although she didn’t see Saw, she heard him.
Jyn crept around the boulder to where the comm tower was laying on its side. Saw had hung up various droids—a mishmash of tall, skinny metallic bodies—by their necks all along the rusty struts, and he alternated between using his blaster and attacking the dead droids in hand-to-hand combat. Saw was big and old and scarred, but when he fought, he came alive in a way Jyn hadn’t thought possible.
He lunged at one droid, slamming into it so hard its body shuddered on the metal scaffolding. He spun out quickly, leveling his aim at a droid hanging farther down and firing his blaster. Without waiting to see if his shot hit—it did—he ducked down and rolled away, ending near some rocks that he used for coverage as he fired three more shots into three more droids. Their bodies clanked on the metal tower, their empty shells dancing with the force of the shots.
“Saw?” Jyn asked.
Saw stood up, sweat streaking his bald head, rolling along the ridge of the scar on his face. He stood there, waiting for her to speak.
It wasn’t until that very moment that Jyn realized why, when the Empire was coming and the troopers were closing in, her mother had commed Saw. It wasn’t because he was their friend, although that had been part of her reasoning. It was because of this.
“Can you teach me how to fight like that?” Jyn asked.
“Darling,” he said, grinning, “that’s the plan.”
There were, apparently, a lot of droid bodies on Wrea.
“Clone Wars,” Saw said by way of explanation, but Jyn knew it was more than that. The battle droids and BX-series commandos were from the old war, but there were some new models as well—a prototype enforcer droid all in black, a shiny C-B3 that’d been modified hastily, and even an IG-RM war droid that looked fairly new. All of them were broken, their cybernetics cracked or removed entirely. The droids were nothing but shells, but Saw had notes scratched into each metallic body, quick little comments about weaknesses or uses of the droids, environments where they thrived or failed. And targets—Saw had taken bright orange paint and slopped it on each droid’s body to mark where best to strike or shoot.
At first, Saw just tied the droids up along the inside of the fallen comm tower. He had Jyn run the gauntlet, striking as many droids as possible. Soon after, he started to make it more complicated, using ropes to swing the droids around, throwing rocks and sticks at her to simulate battle strikes. Sometimes he would don a hollow droid head like a helmet and attack her himself.
“I thought you said the Empire doesn’t use droids as much anymore,” Jyn said one night as they chugged nutritives. She pulled the can away from her lips and glared at it. She could have made something tastier, but Saw didn’t like the hassle of food.
Saw grunted. “The Empire learned how to fight in a war against droids,” he said. “Droids and clones. It helped them to forget that war is about people.”
Jyn set her can down on the table. She was still hungry; she had been hungry ever since the day her mother died, and nutritive milk never filled her the way real food did. Nothing but grassroot stew and roasted skycorn and warm crusty bread and nerf-milk cheese would help the emptiness in her belly, and she wasn’t going to get any of that anytime soon. If ever again.
“Droids are sometimes harder to fight than people,” Saw continued, his voice contemplative. “They can be like hive insects, sharing the same mind, the same commands, able to work both individually and as a unit. You can’t think about taking out just one at a time; you have to think about how to wipe out the masses as well.” He leaned toward Jyn, jabbing one stubby finger at her, his chair squeaking in protest. “Or you have to take out the one giving the commands. Kill them all, or kill the head.” He shrugged. “Same difference.”
Jyn fiddled with her empty milk can. She liked spending her days learning to fight. When she was sparring, she didn’t have time to think about how much she missed her life from before. But she was also worried. She knew she wouldn’t be with Saw for the rest of her life.
“I should be learning,” she said softly.
Saw looked confused. “Learning? Am I not teaching you?”
“Not math and history and science,” Jyn said. “I should…” Her voice trailed off. “Mama used to teach me.” She thought about the lessons they had shared, the way Lyra had turned baking into chemistry class, or the way Galen had taught her about crystalline spectrometers.
An emotion Jyn didn’t recognize flashed over Saw’s face. Before she could ask him about it, he pushed away from the table and went down the hall toward her room. He came out a moment later with the old datapad.
Jyn had never even bothered to turn it on in all the days she’d been with Saw. But he touched the side now, and it lit up as he passed it to her. She turned it over in her hands, looking at the features. A low-light holoprojector and a networking card that would connect her to the HoloNet.
“I’m teaching you everything I can,” Saw said. “Anything else you want to know, you have to teach yourself.”
Her gaze drifted from the datapad in her hands to the scarred, rough knuckles of his.
“Okay,” she said. “Can I go to my room now?”
Saw blinked in surprise. “Of course. You can go anywhere you want. This is your home.”
Jyn made sure her bedroom door was closed before curling up on the mattress on the floor. It was so quiet and dark. Before her mother had sent Jyn to the cave to wait for Saw, Lyra had given Jyn the kyber crystal necklace and told her, “Trust the Force.” Then she’d said, “I’ll be there.” Jyn had taken that to be her mother’s promise that she would find her in the cave, but for a moment, Jyn wondered if it meant something different, if she had been saying she’d be in the Force.
Jyn sat in the center of her bed, her legs crossed, and closed her eyes. She focused on the silence and stillness of her little room. She willed herself to feel the Force. If there was anyone who could help her now, could help her reach her father, it was Mama.
She waited for the Force to prove that it was real.
It did not.
Jyn pulled the blanket over her head, then reached for the datapad. She booted up the Imperial HoloNet broadcast. The dim blue light filled her room, and she turned the sound on low, certain Saw wouldn’t want her to be listening to the enemy. With every new story, Jyn wondered if she’d hear something about her f
ather. Surely Galen Erso’s capture would be newsworthy? She just wanted to see him again.
But there was nothing.
The next day, there were no droids hanging from the fallen comm tower. Instead, about a dozen stormtroopers hung by their necks.
Jyn’s stomach lurched as she approached. The stormtroopers’ armor was still gleaming white and black, but it was scuffed and there were reddish-brown stains on some of it. The wind blew, and the bodies shifted on their makeshift gallows, clanging against the metal tower. The sound was hollow and reverberated and was somehow…somehow wrong?
Saw moved behind her. Jyn turned, and he offered her a blaster.
Jyn looked from the blaster to the stormtroopers and back again. She moved to flick the setting from kill to stun, as her mother had taught her. Saw wrapped his hand around hers, forcing her finger to keep it set to kill. “Never do that,” he said in a gentle voice. “If you’re going to shoot a blaster, you always shoot to kill. Always.”
Jyn swallowed. The stormtroopers hanging on the comm tower weren’t moving; they must have already been dead.
This is a training exercise, she thought. Nothing else.
“Take aim,” Saw said.
Jyn held the blaster in front of her with her right hand. It shook, so she raised her left hand, gripping her right wrist to steady the blaster. Breathe in. Aim. Breathe out.
Shoot.
The stormtrooper’s body danced against the metal comm tower, swinging out like a puppet whose strings had twitched.
“Good girl,” Saw said. He took the blaster from Jyn and handed her a pair of crudely carved clubs about the length of her forearm. Hand-to-hand combat.
