by Revis, Beth
The port worker noted the names. “Confirmed: no one by those identifications has docked here yet.”
Jyn stepped past the droids clustered near the damaged hull. The metal embedded in the planet hopper was clearly a part of a ship, something ripped right off the side. The explosion…it must have hit another ship. But the metal wasn’t black like the TIE fighters that had been chasing them, nor silver and yellow like the Y-wings.
The swath of burnt, shredded metal was roughly twice as big as Jyn, the steel twisted like a claw, curled into the planet hopper. And there was writing there. Half a handpainted mandala and the letters O-N-E. All that remained of the Ponta One.
“You’ll need to register at the front desk,” the port worker called to Jyn. “I’ll put a flag on the names you said so you’ll be alerted to your family’s arrival. What was your name?”
Jyn looked up blankly.
“Your name?” the port worker pressed.
“Tanith,” Jyn said absently. Saw had trained her too well to register her real name with any authority.
“Tanith Ponta,” the port worker said, recording her name. “If you’ll come this way.”
The explosion that pushed her into hyperspace. Into safety. A ship exploding just behind her.
The Ponta One .
“Miss?” the port worker called. When Jyn didn’t move, he approached. “Are you okay, Miss Ponta?”
Jyn nodded mutely.
He moved down the row, heading toward the arrival station. Jyn followed, but she didn’t hear any of his prattling. The droids walking across the metal surface of the docking port, the chatter of workers, the hiss of tools, the glugging of fuel lines. None of it reached Jyn. For her, there was nothing but the empty, gaping maw where her heart had been.
The Five Points space station was designed like a fancy top, the kind Jyn had had when she lived on Coruscant. The wide center revolved around the axis like a gyroscope, and ships docked along the center pillar. After checking in with the droid at the entrance desk, Jyn was given a hundred credits—the worth of her broken ship in scrap metal, minus docking fees.
A giant banner emblazoned with the Imperial logo hung over the main entrance hall. Smaller posters called for volunteers to join the Imperial military, with information on how to reach the recruiter on the station. Jyn stared at the image of a proud stormtrooper bringing peace to the galaxy. She tried to feel…anything. But when she thought of the Empire—when she thought of the rebellion—she just felt numb. Their battle on Skuhl hadn’t involved Akshaya and Hadder…and yet it had killed them.
Jyn wanted to hate the Empire. She could say all the words Saw had taught her, emulate all the old hates, but it was fake. She didn’t hate the Empire. All she felt was nothing . The Empire hadn’t killed Akshaya and Hadder. The Empire plus the rebels had. The damn rebels. If Xosad and his group hadn’t shown up when they had, the Empire never would have knocked on Akshaya’s door. And did it even matter whether the Empire or the rebels had fired the shot that blew up the Ponta One ? In the end, Akshaya and Hadder were still dead.
And further back—Tamsye Prime. Would the Empire have destroyed the factories and towns had Saw not gone? Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Senjax had said that the Empire was done with production there, but it attacked because she and Saw had been there, because they were spying on the Empire. It was just as Akshaya had always said. The people of Tamsye Prime had been ants, ants the giants would have ignored. But Saw had made the giant stomp.
Jyn remembered one of the science experiments her mother had given her when she was teaching Jyn on Lah’mu. Lyra had held a bowl of acid and directed Jyn to pour in a chemical base; then they had watched as it fizzed and bubbled. The Empire was the acid; the rebels were the base. Separately, they were fine. When they met, they bubbled over into chaos and destruction and death.
Extremists were the problem. The rebels and the Empire, the people who couldn’t exist without drawing lines and daring others to cross them. Jyn very consciously turned her eyes away from the Imperial banner. She was done with giants. She could be an ant.
She ran over her options as she was carried closer and closer to the top of the space station by the lift just past the entrance desk. A hundred credits. The clothes on her back and a small pack of supplies. At least on the station, she wouldn’t need to worry about environmental hazards or dangerous animals…but beyond that, she couldn’t really consider anything or anyone safe.
She’d heard Saw talk about Five Points before. It was a last-resort sort of place, a den of infamy where the Empire didn’t rule; the gambling lords did. Bounty hunters often met there to pick up new jobs. The black market thrived.
Jyn tucked her hundred credits in a hidden pocket of her pants. They would not last long. She had to find food and a ship out of there. It didn’t matter where.
The lift doors opened, and Jyn stepped into the station’s main hub. Five Points was nothing compared with the city-planet of Coruscant, but it was a hundred times larger than the town on Skuhl had been. With a finite amount of space, the inhabitants of the station occupied every area. Living cubes were built all along the walls, so high that if she stood on top of them, Jyn’s fingers could have brushed the ceiling. Despite that, many of the solar lights embedded in the metal ceilings were burned out—or perhaps just broken—casting the entire city into a perpetual twilight.
Someone bumped Jyn’s shoulder, hard, and she scooted out of the main line of foot traffic. She leaned her back against the wall of a nearby shop, her eyes alert, watching the various types of people walking by.
“So I knew Crawfin was on my tail, yeah?” someone said in a deep voice. A large man with broad hands was talking animatedly to a Twi’lek. The Twi’lek kept her eyes on the ground, not on the man who was clearly trying to impress her. “So what did I do? What’d I do? I took my ship straight into Smuggler’s Run. Knew he couldn’t catch me there. Hid out, caught a hyperspace route, and here I am.” The young man puffed out his chest.
“Uh-huh,” the Twi’lek said, glancing at the comlink strapped to her wrist.
The couple continued down the street, but Jyn bit her lip, thinking. Smuggler’s Run…She could use some of her credits to comm Saw. He owed her.
She snorted at her own stupidity. She could no more contact Saw than she could her father. Both men had proven exactly where their loyalties lay. Her father cared more about his science and the Empire than about her. And Saw cared more about himself.
Jyn scanned the crowd again, though, half wondering if Berk, the man Saw had hired to spy on her, was out there. Her hand went to her hidden pocket, the hundred credits. If Saw knew…
He left me to die, she told herself.
She could still smell Tamsye Prime, burning.
No Saw. This was just Jyn being weak. Her home on Skuhl had been destroyed by the Empire much like her home on Lah’mu had; stormtroopers had invaded like parasitic space ants, eating away at another place she had felt safe. Saw had saved her once. But she would never ask for his salvation again.
She pushed off the wall, heading aimlessly down the street, absorbing Five Points. She chanted in her head with every step the things she needed: food, shelter, a ship off this place. Food. Shelter. Ship.
Saw may not have been the answer to her problems, but at least his training would come in handy. At the heart of every punch and each cold night, he had been teaching her how to survive in this galaxy. Food. Shelter. Ship. Survive.
She needed a job. Anything would do. Well—not anything. Not yet anyway. But definitely something. She could forge Imperial freight route passes—that could work. There had to be a demand for those, considering the new blockades and checkpoints.
She felt the brush of a touch on her hip, near her pocket, where her only credits were. Instinct took over; she snatched the slimy wrist of a Caldanian and twisted it away from her. The Caldanian cried out in pain, a gurgling, low sound, and Jyn tightened her grip.
“Let go of my man,” a Gigoran s
aid. His translator was old and broken, the words barely understandable through the crackle in the speakers, further drowned out by the respirator he wore over his mouth.
What an odd pair, Jyn thought, evaluating them. The Gigoran’s long, fine white fur was matted and dirty but still stuck to the Caldanian’s dark-brown, slimy skin. Tendrils of the Gigoran’s fur clumped around the Caldanian’s elbows and in the hollow spaces that encircled his long neck.
The crowd drifted apart, leaving Jyn, the Caldanian, and the Gigoran in a pocket of space between a wall and a dead-end alley. Jyn could potentially burst past the two and into the crowd, but she was fairly certain that would do her no good. Not there. She couldn’t see them, but there were surely others watching like carrion birds, waiting to see whom they could pick off next.
Jyn cracked her knuckles as the Gigoran and Caldanian grew closer. Fine. She was going to have to rely on Saw’s other lessons on survival.
The Caldanian struck first, which Jyn had been fearing. Caldanians didn’t have bones, just a flexible cartilage that they could change the rigidity of. The surface of their skin was also covered in a tacky mucus that could potentially slow her down. She needed to strike hard and fast, and she couldn’t waste time getting too close.
Jyn pressed her fingertips together against her thumb, forming a hard point with her fingers, reared back with all her strength, and jabbed her hand straight into the Caldanian’s wide left eye. He screamed in pain, dropping back. Jyn’s fingers were coated with sticky mucus, but the Caldanian was too distracted and in pain to fight. The Gigoran shouted as he raced toward her, but Jyn dropped to the ground, kicking out to trip the large furry creature while reaching for her knife in the other boot. When she jumped up, the Gigoran had already spun around to face her, and the Caldanian was standing again, his eye turning blue around the rim.
Jyn flashed her knife blade, shifting it from one hand to the other, hoping it would be enough to scare off her two attackers.
It wasn’t.
They rushed her simultaneously—clearly they’d fought together before—and Jyn slashed wide. She cut the Gigoran’s shirt and fur, but she didn’t see any dark blood splatter across his long white hairs. The Gigoran’s beady eyes narrowed, but Jyn didn’t have time to focus on him; the Caldanian had wrapped a slimy arm around her throat and started squeezing.
The Gigoran laughed at Jyn and pulled out a small blaster.
“We were just going to take your credits,” the Caldanian snarled in Jyn’s ear. “But you poked me in the eye. That was rude. Wasn’t it rude, Bunt?”
“Rude,” the Gigoran agreed.
Jyn didn’t bother replying. She shifted, and thinking that she was trying to escape, the Caldanian tightened his grip around her neck.
Jyn stabbed him in the arm.
The Caldanian let go, howling. The Gigoran, distracted by his friend’s injury, didn’t shift the blaster in time as Jyn lunged for him. Blaster fire scarred the resident cube behind Jyn as she slammed into the Gigoran. She wrapped her left hand in his long white fur, yanking hard enough to jerk his head around. She balled her other hand into a fist and slammed it into the Gigoran’s face, aiming for his beady eye. She felt her knuckles crunch against the Gigoran’s hard skull, but she punched him again, hoping to daze him. She grabbed his wrist, pressing hard and then slamming it against the pavement until the Gigoran’s fist opened and the blaster fell.
Jyn let go of the Gigoran and grabbed for the blaster. As soon as her hands were off him, the Gigoran kicked away, scooting down the alley. He made a run for the crowd, the Caldanian on his heels.
Jyn cursed under her breath. She had liked that knife, and it was still sticking out of the arm of that slimy Caldanian.
At least, she thought, I got a blaster out of the trade.
Jyn hid in a nearby bathroom stall and pulled out her credits, counting them one by one, just to be sure they weren’t gone. One hundred Imperial credits.
She noticed the Imperial cog on the front. She had thought Five Points station wasn’t under Imperial control—and she was mostly right, judging from the heavy presence of gambling halls. But she’d seen a flash of black-and-white armor on some street corners, especially in the center of the station, where the more elite lived. No one wanted to be near the walls.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. She couldn’t go to the Empire for help—that was obvious—but she doubted they cared about her, either. She was still an ant. At the attack on Skuhl, they had come for her, but they hadn’t known her last name. Just that she had ties to “terrorists.” Maybe Xosad had given them her name. Maybe Berk had, or someone else in town who just didn’t like her. It didn’t matter—what was important was that they had been after “Jyn, last name unknown.” Not Jyn Erso. And besides, now she was Tanith Ponta.
What would happen if she went back to her father? The Empire had killed her mother but just taken her father. He was their golden boy, and he seemed to relish that status. Could she be afforded the same luxuries he had been? Another apartment on Coruscant, another Mac-Vee, another chance?
Jyn shoved her hundred credits back in her pocket. Even without them, there was no way she was going back to him or that life. Not while she still wore her mother’s necklace.
One hundred credits. She had to make it last. But first: food. Jyn slipped out of the reeking public bathroom stall and headed deeper into the station. She clung to the outer perimeter of the main floor, where the shops were smaller but cheaper. A bodega built between two towers of residential cubes looked local enough not to extort her too badly. She bought a can of nutritive milk that was dusty on top and a tube of dehydrated vegetable protein straws. Not the tastiest but definitely the healthiest, most filling option; this would last her the whole day if she was careful. Food was important. Hunger would make her careless, an easy target. Food and sleep were vital to survival.
Ninety-four credits left. After jamming a bland protein straw in her mouth and choking it down with the slightly chunky nutritive milk, Jyn headed to the midrim of the station. The gambling halls went from flagrantly touristy to elite houses of decadence within just a few blocks. The games played were mostly the same on the ground floor of each hall. Sabacc, chance cubes, wheels of fate. Jyn ventured into a few of the halls, enticed by the promise of free liquor and meals, but it was quickly apparent that nothing in those places was free, and Jyn wasn’t willing to risk her credits on a chance. Especially since the gambling halls used their own specialized credit chips, and she was willing to bet the conversion rate wasn’t that great.
Still, she logged the gambling halls in the back of her mind. There was a way to make money there; she just had to figure it out.
But first, she needed better weapons. The blaster she’d taken from the Gigoran wasn’t in the best condition. Actually—she cursed—it wasn’t holding a charge. A short circuit somewhere. Dangerous. It could overheat or, worse, not fire when she needed it. Jyn headed to a shop with used weapons in the front.
“How much to fix this?” she asked, plunking it down on the counter.
The Kath picked it up with a look of disdain on his scaly face. “More than it’s worth,” he said, tossing it back on the counter.
Jyn had figured as much. She glanced through the shopkeeper’s cases. Any blaster was out of her price range. Instead, she pointed at a set of extendable truncheons. “Those?”
The Kath pulled out the batons for Jyn to examine. She flicked them open in her hands, extending the collapsible truncheons to their full length, the solid krallian core locking into place. She whacked one in her palm, testing the weight.
“Yes,” Jyn said. “How much?”
The shopkeeper stated his price in a bored but firm tone, indicating there was no chance to haggle for a better bargain.
Jyn hefted the pair of truncheons in her hands again. Quiet. Discreet. No one would ever think that a girl like her could do any damage at all with a set of weapons like this. Meanwhile, she knew the damage she coul
d do. The truncheons didn’t look like much. Neither do I, Jyn thought.
She paid the shopkeeper and strapped the truncheons to her back. She kept the blaster, despite its malfunction, strapped to her hip. It would be the weapon people went for, if they bothered her. It would be the thing they would watch. They wouldn’t think anything of the truncheons, and that would be her saving grace.
Eighty-six credits left, Jyn thought as she left. She had never worried about credits as a child. Her parents had always had enough for her. She didn’t worry about credits when she was with Saw, because they rarely had any to worry about. But now that a pocketful of credits was all that stood between Jyn and starvation, they felt hugely important.
Jyn kept walking. The problem was, she wasn’t very sure what to do . Without Hadder or Akshaya, she had no goal. Without a ship, she had no escape.
Near the center of the station was a small park. Fake greenery sprouted from fake rocks, and recorded nature sounds wafted from cleverly hidden speakers. A group of various species huddled near the larger rocks, their palms held outstretched over their knees, their heads tucked down. Jyn wondered how long her eighty-six credits would last. If she would ever have to supplicate by the fake rocks and hope for enough to survive another day.
As she watched, an Imperial officer strolled by. He looked down at the beggars, but then he paused, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a single credit that he dropped in the outstretched hands of a young woman with a child leaning against her. The child whispered her thanks.
After the officer had left the park, a different man cut across the path, kicking at the woman’s feet. She curled into herself like the petals of a daybloom when the sun sets, pulling her daughter under one arm. She didn’t lift her head.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the man spat at the woman. “Taking an Imperial’s money. Disgusting.”
He glared at the woman, but when she didn’t so much as look up, he growled and stormed off. Jyn watched him leave the park, agape. If, in the next week, she had to sit beside that woman and beg, she would not turn down Imperial credits. And she had absolutely no shame about that.
