The thought of the dying Jedi Knights always stopped him. The thought that their deaths were his fault—or would be his fault—kept him from trying again. It was too hard to think about. It’d been hard enough to watch once. No, if he stayed home and went to school and took up tailoring like a nice dull citizen, surely there would never be any Jedi blood on his hands.
The thought of a trade school didn’t horrify him quite as much as it had a week or two before. Now he could see the upside.
The trade school was a long way away from his parents, who barely knew how to speak to him anymore. It was a long way away from Maize, too, and he never wanted to see her again after what she’d told the First Order.
Karr sat on his bed and tinkered with the still lifeless body of RZ-7. The droid was almost back to his old self, courtesy of a new set of circuitry and a plate that didn’t match the rest of his finish but held all his electronic guts securely where they belonged.
He was just about to switch the droid on when he heard a scratching sound at the window. He didn’t look to see what was making it, although he had his suspicions.
The noise continued until he heard a faint crack that suggested something small had broken. It was the latch on the window. Then a small click. His window opened with a sticky sliding sound.
Karr turned to face the window. A pair of hands was pushing it up. It squeaked in the frame. It slid far enough to allow a person to come inside. A small person.
A teenage girl, perhaps. Like Maize.
She heaved herself up onto the sill and squeezed inside hands and head first, then collapsed onto his floor. She stayed there, huffing and puffing like she’d climbed up a tower—and hadn’t just toppled over a windowsill on a house’s first floor. “For crying out loud!” she declared. “What’s your problem, Karr?”
His problem? He had told himself that when this inevitable confrontation took place, he would remain calm and collected, but now that it had arrived, he decided it was just easier to yell. “My problem? What are you even doing here? You are my problem.”
“Um, how do you figure that?”
He flung his feet over the side of his bed so he could sit there and glare at her while he fumed. “You set me up!”
“Excuse me? If by ‘set up’ you mean, got you off this planet and helped you go on a quest to find stuff to touch, then, yeah, I guess I did set you up! And very well, I might add. Think of all the galactic sword swingers you would’ve missed learning about if I hadn’t.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” he argued. “You knew I was desperate to find the Jedi, so you used me. Used my abilities to try and sniff them out so that the First Order could find Luke Skywalker.”
“What?”
“Thank the Force I didn’t find him. I would have led them right to him, and if he isn’t already dead, he most certainly would be thanks to me.” Karr paused, the image of him slaying a Jedi still fresh in his mind.
She stood up and faced him, hands on her hips and feet planted far apart. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything like that.”
“I saw it, Maize. I saw your holomessage to the First Order relaying all the information I had told you. About my whereabouts, about finding a clue regarding a missing Jedi Master. They even knew Arzee wasn’t really a medical droid.”
She glanced over at the refurbished robot and looked as if she was about to ask what happened to him, but stayed focused. “Karr, I never sent any messages to the First Order. The only messages I ever sent were to my…” She stopped as her mind caught up with her mouth. “Dad.”
“Who works for the First Order,” Karr said.
Maize stared at Karr, but really was staring through him. “They must have intercepted the message,” she said. “Or hijacked it or something. I swear, I never would have told them about you.”
“But why even tell your dad?”
She suddenly erupted. “Because you’re my friend, Karr! I wasn’t trying to tell on you, you big jerk. I was trying to tell my dad about you.”
He paused. “You told your dad about me?”
“Eventually he wondered what happened to the ship, so yes—I told him about you. About the boy I met on this new planet who made me feel less alone. And who I didn’t hate hanging out with. I was trying to tell him that you’d done a great job, and you weren’t all bad, and that you wouldn’t destroy the Avadora or anything like that. I told him that you were cool, and you knew what you were doing, and you’d come home on your own before long. I was trying to convince him that there was no good reason to send the stormtroopers after you.”
He narrowed his eyes. “But he did.”
She threw her hands up in exasperation. “That wasn’t my fault! I don’t even know if it was his fault. He might not even know they came after you.”
“Don’t stick up for him.”
“Karr, did the First Order drag you home? I’m thinking not, because someone did a horrible parking job putting the Avadora back.”
“Horrible? That was an awesome parking job!”
“You were so far out of the lines I assumed someone finally bought you a drink at one of those cantinas.”
Karr started to crack a smile but wasn’t ready to forgive her yet. There was too much he needed to digest first.
“Look on the bright side,” she said. “You’re home safe, you’re not in any real trouble—and you don’t even have to finish out the school term!”
“How did you know that?” he asked.
She sighed heavily and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Moffat told me, when she brought my homework over to the house. I can’t go back to school until I’m ungrounded and unsuspended, but they’re letting me keep up on my work so I don’t have to catch up all at once. I asked how you were doing, and she said she didn’t know—but that your parents had pulled you out of school. And then you wouldn’t answer the holocomm, and I got worried. Do you hear that? I was worried about you, even though you’re being completely awful.”
Karr was somewhat deflated. His anger still simmered, but mostly he was just unhappy. “Give me a break! You broke into my bedroom and caught me off guard. I’ve had a hard couple of days, you know.”
“If you’d answered the holocomm, I wouldn’t have had to surprise you. Why are you blaming me for everything that happened? You ought to be thanking me. I got you out of the house and into space.”
Maybe that was the problem, he thought. Maybe he was better off not knowing anything. To quote his dad, maybe what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
Carefully, sweetly, she patted him on the back of his shoulder. “I only promised you an adventure. I didn’t promise you it’d all shake out just the way you wanted. I’m sorry you didn’t find any intergalactic crime-fighting sorcerers to teach you, but you found evidence of them. You proved me wrong. That’s got to be worth something, right?”
“Maybe,” he admitted, with the barest hint of a smile. “But it’s not enough. Can you just leave me alone, please? My parents have been lying to me for years about something, and I’m about to find out what.”
She waited another minute or two to see if he’d change his mind. When he didn’t, she gave him one last pat—a little harder than necessary, in Karr’s opinion—and left the way she’d come in.
He went back to working on RZ-7. Despite the complicated mechanics required to bring droids to life, he found their relationships the most simple. He meant it when he told RZ-7 that he was his best friend, and he smiled at the thought as he switched the droid’s power back on.
“And you are mine, sir,” the droid said, responding to the last thing he’d heard before losing power days earlier.
Karr laughed for the first time in a while. “Good to have you back, pal.”
“Did I miss anything important?”
Suddenly, the door to his bedroom creaked open and his mother’s perennially worried face peeked in. “Karr? Darling, your father is home. He and I would like to have that talk wit
h you now.”
Karr looked back to Arzee. “We’re about to find out.”
Karr joined them in the living area, where his mother had prepared a small spread of milk and cheese and crackers, as if she planned to host company. “What’s all this?” he asked, gesturing around at the table, the food, the chilled beverages. “Is someone coming over?”
Tomar said, “No, it’s all for you.”
Looway added, “You’ve hardly eaten since you got back. You need to eat. You can’t stay locked up in your room forever, and…” Whatever else she’d meant to say, she didn’t get it out. Her voice faded away.
“Does this mean you’re finally going to tell me the truth?”
His parents looked at each other, as if they didn’t know how to respond.
Karr tried again, pushing a little further. “The truth you’ve been keeping from me?”
His father took a deep breath. “Let’s all sit down, eh? Yes, there are some things we haven’t told you. Things we probably should’ve told you a long time ago, but we’ve had our reasons. When you hear them—when you hear all of it—I hope you’ll understand.”
“What if I don’t?” he asked, dropping onto the couch, daring them to impress him with their transparency.
“Then you can die mad about everything, I suppose. I’ll lay it all out for you, and how you respond…that’s up to you.” His dad took the seat across from him while his mother hovered nearby, chewing on some reddish cheese that stained her teeth.
Not knowing what else to do, Karr took a couple of crackers and nibbled their corners. He swallowed the first bite dryly, and asked, “Am I really dying after all? Is that the big secret?”
“No, nothing like that, thank goodness,” his father said. His parents shared another nervous look, as if deciding who would be the one to spill the beans. His mother bowed out by disappearing into the kitchen. While she opened cupboards and made other useful-sounding noises, his father cleared his throat and began to speak.
“We haven’t been entirely honest with you,” he began, fidgeting with his own piece of cheese until his fingertips turned pink. “We had this talk with your grandmother, a number of years ago. We had different opinions on the matter, but since you’re my son she obeyed my wishes.”
His mother returned from the kitchen, an extra glass of milk in her hand. Mostly, she was looking for something to do with herself—or that was the impression he got.
His father continued. “I don’t expect you to understand, but your mother and I had your best interests at heart.” Karr braced his hands against the seat cushions.
His parents shared another look. Karr couldn’t keep track of all these looks, or what they might be in reference to. But he didn’t like them. He was about to scream in frustration when his father said, “There’s a Jedi in your family history.”
Karr was stunned. It was fortunate he was sitting down, because otherwise he would have surely fallen down. “What? Who?”
“My grandfather. Your great-grandfather.”
“Grandma’s dad?” he asked, feeling a bit betrayed.
“Yes.”
“I thought Jedi couldn’t have families.”
“Well, apparently this one did,” his father said. “I’m not sure of the situation exactly. I think something happened and he left the Jedi, back before the Clone Wars. After all the Jedi were killed he went into hiding.”
“Why didn’t Grandma tell me? Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been struggling for so long.”
“We didn’t think it was relevant.”
“Not relevant?” Karr said incredulously. “What are you talking about?”
Karr’s mother finally found the courage to chime in. “Your headaches were getting so severe, Karr. We needed you to take them seriously. And we felt that if you knew there was a Jedi in the family you might dismiss them, or claim they were signs of the Force instead of getting the proper care.”
“But they are signs of the Force. I know it now. Grandma knew it then! Why didn’t she tell me her father was a Jedi?”
“The answer is we asked her not to, for the very reasons we already stated. She wasn’t happy about it, but she respected our wishes.”
“Mostly,” his mother added with the raise of an eyebrow.
“She agreed not to tell you about him, but she said she couldn’t stand idly by and do nothing, either. So we made the agreement that we would each address this in our own way. Your mother and I would continue to have you tested by legitimate medical professionals, and your grandmother would do what she saw fit to nurture what she believed was the Force.”
“Don’t misunderstand, Karr,” his mother said pleadingly. “We would’ve loved nothing more than to believe you had some mystical power instead of a terminal brain tumor, but we needed to be sure. We needed to exhaust every possible option. You’re our son. And we need to protect you. Sometimes your blackouts were so bad, we honestly wondered if you were ever going to wake up. We needed to face facts, and telling you about some family member that may or may not have had something similar was only going to confuse things. We needed to know for sure.”
“Grandma knew for sure.”
His father leaned wearily back in the chair as if he very much wanted a drink of something much, much stronger than milk. “Well, maybe grandparents have that luxury.”
Before Karr could question what his father meant by that, his mother stood up. “The point is we believe you now.”
This hit Karr almost as forcibly as one of his visions. “You do?”
“Yes,” she continued. “But that does not excuse your running off without telling us. You had us worried sick, Karr. You could’ve been dead for all we knew. Your headaches were getting worse and you just disappear? Did you ever once think of us?”
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, knowing full well that he hadn’t thought about them, and feeling guilty about it. “But what changed? Why do you believe me now when even Grandma couldn’t convince you?”
Maize announced herself with a polite cough and poked her head around the living room entrance. She greeted him with a small wave and a shuffling of her feet.
“Maize?”
Karr’s father crossed to Maize and put his hands on her shoulders. “This young lady filled us in on where you were and what you’ve been doing. I have to say, I didn’t like it. It sounded reckless and rebellious. But when she explained to us how you were going about it and the results you were having, well, I guess I began to see things differently.”
“We both did,” Looway said. “Keep in mind, from where we stood those visions could’ve been hallucinations brought on by the pain. There was no proof of anything. But then Maize told us about how you used those visions to follow clues and found people to verify your findings. And that’s not recklessness, that’s determination. That’s bravery. That’s…” She struggled to find another word, but Tomar stepped in.
“Let’s just say it’s anything but weak.”
Karr smiled, knowing his father could never allude to anything without using a heavy hand.
“Now, granted we weren’t there to see all this,” he continued. “But I’d have to say the thing that won us over the most was how convinced Maize has become. You’ve certainly made a believer out of her.”
“Oh, really,” Karr said with a slow turn of his head.
“Don’t look so pleased. It took me a while,” she said with a laugh. “If I’d known you had an actual family connection to all that mystical stuff, I might not have given you such a hard time. Are you mad? Please don’t be mad at me anymore. I was only trying to help. I know you didn’t want them to know where you were, but when I found out just how upset my dad was when I went missing, I realized it probably wasn’t fair to torture your parents, either.” She stepped farther into the room, looking nervous. “Then once I started talking about our trip, I guess I couldn’t stop. I thought we had fun, up until the soldiers caught me. And I’m sorry you didn’t find exactly what you were lookin
g for but I was trying to tell them…”
Karr’s mother nodded and gestured for her to join them. “She told us how important it was to you, and how determined you were, and…well. In some ways it seems you might have uncovered the news about your great-grandfather on your own. But I’m sorry we didn’t offer it up outright.”
Maize leaned into his line of sight. “So…are you still mad at me? I’m not leaving until you tell me you’re not mad.”
He thought about saying something clever, like telling her to pull up a chair and get comfortable, because she wasn’t going anywhere for a while. But he couldn’t do it. He’d never really been angry with her in the first place; he’d been angry with himself. And his parents, too. He was still annoyed by their betrayal, but they had finally told him the truth. Even if it came at his urging.
Karr finally had a real lead on a real Jedi. Maybe a dead Jedi, but a dead Jedi in his direct line of ancestry! He was the great-grandson of a Jedi!
Thinking back, he realized Maz Kanata had never said he wouldn’t be a Jedi, just that those particular visions were not his story.
“What was his name?” he asked everyone and no one in particular.
His father said, “Naq Med. That was his name.”
“Did you know him at all?”
He shrugged awkwardly, the forgotten piece of cheese still dangling from his fingers. “Not really. He was gone before I was old enough to care. In retrospect, I wish your grandmother had been willing to tell you about him. She knew him better than I ever did, of course.” He sighed and looked sad enough to take away the last of Karr’s lingering angry feelings. “She did want to tell you. I know she did. It’s our fault, not hers.”
His mother wiped away a single tear and blew her nose on a napkin. “It was never our intention to hurt you, Karr,” she said, pointing at him with the damp scrap of soft paper. “We only wanted to protect you.”
Journey to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Page 17
