Aftermath: Star Wars (13 page)

A strange thing, being a parent. A parent raises a child with the expectation that it’s her job to teach the child how to…well, how to do everything. How to eat, live, breathe, work, play,
exist.
A mother advises her child on how to deal with bullies at the academy, or what streets are safe and what ones aren’t, or how to drive a bala-bala cart without crashing it into a wall. The parent teaches these things because the child needs to know. Because the child isn’t capable. Not the child’s fault, of course. They’re born a clean slate. It’s the parent’s job to put the first writing on the wall, to make sure that writing serves as an instruction manual. To ensure, well, the kid doesn’t
die
trying to figure out how to
live.

It’s hard to get out of that mode. Hard to see when one’s child has cast off the mantle of ignorance and figured out how to do things.

Or just how to
be.

And right now, Norra isn’t seeing it.

Because her son is about to kill them both.

She leaps on the speeder bike and Temmin launches back out of the
Moth
’s bay doors like a jogan-bat with its wings on fire. She tugs on his arm, points toward the jungle—the rain forest is thick, and it’s easy to get lost out there. These stormtroopers aren’t wilderness-ready. They’re not proper speeder pilots. Out among the trees and vines, Temmin and Norra will be able to disappear. Maybe even down into the canyon.

But Temmin doesn’t listen.

Listening, it seems, is no longer his strong suit. He used to be a good listener. A good
kid.
Always headstrong, sure, but he listened to his mother. Took her advice, did what she told him to do.

That has changed. Plainly. She tells him to go toward the jungle, and he goes the other way. Temmin points the speeder back toward the
city.

The streets are too narrow! They can take some of the main thoroughfares, yes—whip the speeder down the CBD or across Main 66—but the former will be choked with people, and the latter choked with vehicles and herd animals. She tries to yell at him again, trying to get him to turn back around and head toward the rain forest, but he brushes her off—

Just as laserfire kicks up mud and stone around them.

A glance over her shoulder reveals: two speeder bikes, coming up fast.

The stormtroopers are hunched forward, throttling the speeders to their maximum. Red blaster fire sears the air from underneath the bladed steering vanes at the fore of each vehicle. She yells in Temmin’s ear: “Incoming!” And he gives her a quick nod and then cuts the speeder sharply to the right. He takes it over a small berm, and then beneath them is the shattered plastocrete that takes them right down a winding alley.

Walls whip past on each side. Norra finds her breath trapped in her lungs. Just a few centimeters one way or another, and they’re toast. If she moves
even a little bit,
the wall will wear down her kneecap or elbow like a macrosander, and that’ll be the end of them. Suddenly the speeder jerks up and over a bundle of wire fencing crossing the alley.

Behind them, both the pursuing speeders manage the same jump. One after the other—now in a line, not next to each other. Which means that only one can fire its cannon. A shrewd move by her son.
Maybe.

As long as they don’t die from taking a too-sharp turn.

Temmin does indeed take a sharp turn—around the bend of an octagonal building. An old bank, she thinks, which means they’re headed toward the markets, toward the CBD avenue. There, a wider place to drive, but more dangerous, too. All those people will complicate the equation. Like asteroids floating in wide-open space—and the last thing she wants to see is what happens when they clip some poor ship merchant or quilka-leaf vendor and turn him into a red spray.

Ahead, between a stack of boxes, the way toward the CBD.

Blaster fire pocks the boxes. They jump and judder.

The turn comes—

And Temmin doesn’t take it.

He keeps going straight.

Ahead, a low wall. A
dead end.
Just a pile of junk: more bundles of wire, more crates, a piece of corrugated aluminum.

She begins yelling Temmin’s name—“Temmin!
Temmin!
”—but he just gives her a thumbs-up. He yells back:

“Trust me!”

Trust in her son.

Trust him to make the right decisions.

Trust him not to kill him, her, and those two stormtroopers hot on their tail.

The wall approaches fast—boxes, wire, sheet metal.

It’s then she realizes:

He’s not going to go straight forward.

He’s going to take them straight
up.

One quick shot from the blaster at the fore of his speeder and the aluminum does a quick hop—it slides a bit to the left, creating a shallow ramp. He turns the speeder
just so,
and next thing Norra knows, her stomach is left somewhere about three meters behind them, down on the ground.

Norra feels her son tense up. And then turbothrusters push them forward, fast and hard.

The speeder zips up the ramp, over the boxes, and along the top of the short wall. A wall that’s scalloped, the concrete shaped with wavy contours—and the speeder follows them like a boat skipping across rollicking tides. They zip fast with sickening dips and Norra holds on for dear life.

Behind them, one of the stormtroopers tries the same move.

The front foil catches at the lip of the wall, and the back end of the vehicle flips up and over. The stormtrooper shrieks as he pitches forward, the whole speeder crashing down on him. It bursts into a plume of flame.

The other speeder makes the jump. Through the belching fire of the first speeder it roars, cannon on full-auto. Peppering the air around them with screaming laser blasts.

Temmin cuts to the right. He takes the speeder over a plank sitting catty-corner from the short wall to a taller one: a house with a decrepit rooftop garden long gone unused. They whip past a saggy-bellied, shaggy-chinned Lutrillian sitting in a half-collapsed lawn chair, a half-eaten amphibian in his grip. He barely startles as they zoom past.

Temmin, she realizes, isn’t planning on dropping them down to the street level
at all.
The rooftops—of course. You want to travel Myrra, most people stick to the streets. But Temmin and his friends always used the rooftops. Making jumps from building to building that would cause Norra to snap her ankle like a piece of brittle driftwood. Temmin and the others set up planks and sheets of tin. Ropes and balance poles, too.

He knows the rooftops of this city well.

And it occurs to her: This probably isn’t the first time he’s taken a speeder bike up here, either.

Her son, she realizes, is a damn good pilot.

And a smaller voice chides her:
Just as reckless as you, too.

Suddenly—a shower of sparks behind them. Her tailbone vibrates as a blaster hit clips the back end of their own speeder. The vehicle starts to wobble and drift just as they cross over another set of planks to an even higher rooftop. But Temmin manages to keep it steady.

He reaches back, grabs his mother’s hands, and pulls her forward, placing both her hands on the handlebar controls.

“Your turn!” he yells. Then starts to squirm under her arm.

“What?” she yells back, in panic.

Ahead, a metal pole thrust up out of a greenhouse at a forty-five-degree angle. As Temmin snakes his way to the back of the speeder—leaving her in control of it—he yells: “Meet me at Aunt Esmelle’s!”

Temmin, no!

He jumps off the speeder.

She continues to rocket forward—ahead, a cobbled-together crossing of hull metal between one roof and another. Norra thinks to jam on the brakes, but doing that now? She’d lose too much momentum. Probably drop the front end of the speeder over the edge of the wall and go over with it.

And so she does what she can. She accelerates.

Behind her, she sees her son spin around the metal bar like a circus performer—
when did he learn to do that?
she wonders—and then he swings back down, landing right behind the stormtrooper on the Imperial’s speeder.

Norra takes her own jump, crests another roof, and then:
brakes.

The speeder protests the fast deceleration. She cocks the maneuvering controls so that she skids to a halt, parallel to the roof’s edge—

Her heart sinks when she sees:

There, on the roof, a stormtrooper. Supine and still.

And going the other direction:

Temmin’s new ride, disappearing back down the way they came.

Norra grits her teeth, pivots the vehicle back around—but she hasn’t ridden a speeder in years. Everything feels clumsy, and even as she throttles it forward again, the realization hits her like a fist to the chin:

I’ve lost him.

Thunder throttles the skies over Myrra, lightning flicking between bands of dark clouds like a dewback’s tongue. Darkness has settled in, and with it the rains have come. Norra stares out the window. Rain streaks the circular glass. Every boom and flash makes Norra flinch.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” says her sister, Esmelle. Esmelle is older than she is by a good number of years—when Norra was born, Esmelle was already running around the city with a gang of hooligans all her own. She’s lost a lot of that rebellious edge since then—now a woman content to sit in her home on Orchard Hill, as if waiting to die and join the rest of the graves that wait just up the road. Graves underneath fruiting trees.
SO THAT WE MAY EAT OF THOSE WE LOST AND REMEMBER THEM,
a plaque says on the gate into the orchard. That idea always turned Norra’s stomach.

Norra turns to meet Esmelle. She’s been trying to keep the anger inside the bottle, all stoppered up. But she’s nervous, on edge, and she feels the bottle shaking, the glass cracking. “Really? Why would you say that?”

Esmelle, a wispy thing, just smiles. “He’s always been fine.”

“Yes. Fine. Perfectly, utterly
fine.
Like how he doesn’t live here with you, but how you let him live in our old house. And how you let him turn it into his own personal little black market, where he gets threatened by…by
criminals,
where he steals and sells
the-stars-know-what,
where—”

Esmelle, always the smiler, pats Norra on the shoulder. “Norra, honey, you should be proud of him. You raised him to be smart.
Independent.
You can’t be mad at him for being what you taught him to be.”

Norra laughs—a hollow, bitter sound. “I’m not mad at him, Esme. I’m ticked at
you.
I left him in your care. You were supposed to be a parent to my son. And now I find you’ve given that up. Did you ever even try?”

“Did I?” The smile falls away from Esmelle’s face like the last leaf on a storm-shook tree. Her eyes narrow.
Good,
Norra thinks.
Let’s do this. Let’s scrap this out.
“Might I remind you that you, dear Norra, took off. I thought better than to chase some fool’s crusade halfway across the galaxy like you, choosing to make other people your responsibility and not your own blood-born son. And—” Here Esmelle makes an exasperated sound,
pfah!
“—and if you wonder why the boy enjoys hanging around criminals, might I remind you that your own husband was—”

Norra raises the back of her hand. “Don’t.”

Esmelle blinks. Swallows. As if she realizes she danced right up to the edge of the cliff and now it’s breaking apart underneath her feet. “I’m simply saying: The boy’s last memory of his father is of them coming and dragging him out into the streets like a common thief-runner.”

“Brentin was a
good man.
He carried messages for the Rebellion even before there
was
a Rebellion. And now there’s more than that. There’s a new dawn, a new day, a New Republic. In part because of people like
him.
”

Esmelle sniffs. “Yes. And I suppose you think you’re just such a hero, as well. You saved the galaxy, but lost your son. Worth it, dear sister?”

Why…you venomous canyon adder…

Esmelle’s wife, Shirene, steps in. She secures Esmelle’s elbow with her own, giving the woman a kiss on the cheek. “Esme, how about a hot tea? I’ve left the thermajug on the stovetop in the kitchen.”

“Yes. Yes, that sounds good. I’ll…I’ll get tea.” Esmelle offers a stiff smile, then fritters off as she is wont to do.

Shirene sighs. Shirene is the opposite of Esmelle in many ways—Esmelle is thin, reedy, pale as a ghost. Shirene is rounded, pillowy, skin as dark as a handful of overturned soil. Her hair is short and curly and close to the scalp; Esmelle’s is long, a silver cascade down her back.

“Shirene, you don’t need to step into the middle of this—”

Shirene clucks her tongue. “Please, Norra. I’m in this. I have skin in this game. I love Temmin like my own son. But what I need you to realize is that he
isn’t
our son.” Norra starts to protest, but Shirene shushes her—and somehow, Shirene has the magical ability to make that shushing feel gentle and welcome, soft and necessary. “Don’t misunderstand me. I just mean that we were never ready for this. For
him.
He’s got your spark in him. Yours and Brentin’s. He’s challenging
because
he’s smart as a whip-snake, savvy as a sail-bird. Forgive Esmelle. Forgive me. We just weren’t ready. And you were gone, so what choice did we have?”

“I had to go. I had to fight.”

“I know. And I’m sorry you never found Brentin.”

Norra winces at that. It’s like being slapped. Shirene doesn’t mean it that way—the look on her face tells Norra that the thought is a sincere one, and not a barbed lash. But it stings just the same. “He wasn’t a criminal.”

“I know. And Esmelle knows it, too.”

Outside, the sky splits with a close clap of thunder. Rain batters the side of the house. Normal for this time of year—the mausim-storms have already come and gone and ushered in the wet season.

“Here’s the stars’ own truth,” Shirene says. “Temmin takes care of us more than we take care of him. He helps pay for things. Shows up at the start of the week with a basket of fruits and bread, sometimes some wyrg-jerky or some of that spicy arguez sausage. If our evaporator or our flood-pump breaks, he shows up with the parts and the tools and he fixes it. We’re a couple of old cluckers, and he takes care of us good. We’ll miss him.”

“You can come with us. That offer is still on the table—”

“Pssh. Norra, better or worse, we put down roots. We’re as grown into this hill as the orchard up the road, as settled as the bones in the dirt. You take your boy, though, and get him somewhere better.”

Norra sighs. “It’s not like he wants to go.”

“Well, he’s built up a life here. That shop of his—”

That shop of his.

It hits Norra like a beam of light.

“That’s where he went,” she says, scowling. “Temmin was never planning to come here. He went back to his shop.”
I never should’ve taken him away from there in the first place.

“Well, that’s probably all right—”

“It’s not all right. Those criminals I mentioned? They’ll be looking for him. Damnit! I’m too caught up in everything—I didn’t even see it. The stormtroopers didn’t get him. He just bailed.” She sighs, presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. Hard enough that she sees stars streaking and melting across the black behind her lids. “I need to borrow your bala-bala.”

Shirene offers a sad smile. “Of course, Norra. Anything you need.”

Damn this rain!
Temmin thinks. He lies on his belly on the rooftop of Master Hyor-ka’s dao-ben steamed bun shop that sits across the alley from his own—and though he sits under a tarp, he’s still soaked through like a red-eyed silt-rat that drowned in a cistern. The rain pins him there like a divine hand.

He again lifts the macrobinoculars to his eyes. Flicks them over to night vision.

Two of Surat Nuat’s lackeys—a potbellied Rodian and that oil-skinned Herglic—continue to do what they’ve been doing for the last hour. They pitch junk from Temmin’s shop into the street with a clang, clatter, and splash. And then the same pair of Kowakian monkey-lizards descend from the nearby rooftop and canopy to pick through the shiniest bits before fleeing once more, cackling like tiny wizened lunatics.

Inside, he hears more banging. Drilling. Yelling.

They’re trying to find out how to get into the sub-layer. They want what he stole from Surat.

Not that he knows what exactly it
is
that he stole from Surat.

A weapon, he figures. Has to be.

And whatever it is, it’s
his
now. Not that Sullustan frag-head’s.

When they have the door open, he can see just inside—and there, he sees the familiar pointed feet of his own personal B1 battle droid bodyguard: Mister Bones. The feet are still. They look collapsed against the legs, which means the rickety droid is collapsed and in storage mode. Worse, Temmin can see a slight blue glow around the metal.

That, he suspects, is the glow from an ion lock. It explains why Mister Bones hasn’t been responding to his comlink. They’ve got the droid locked up and shut down in an ion field.

Smart move.

And it leaves Temmin with one less option than before. In fact, Bones was his best chance to reclaim the shop quickly (if temporarily): Send the refurbed, modded B1 droid in to whip everybody’s tail so that Temmin could sneak in and get back into the sub-layer to secure his stuff.

With that option off the table, it means the longer, more arduous path awaits: He has to go find one of the bolt-holes into the old catacombs beneath the city, then wend his way back to his own shop. He knows the way, but it won’t be fast. Better to get to it, then. And hope he gets there before Surat’s entourage of space-brains figure out how to gain entry.

Temmin starts to put his binocs away—

But then, off to his right? A shrill cackle.

He knows that sound.

Suddenly a flash of movement—a darting shape moves toward him, and one of the monkey-lizards has seized his binocs. The little demon hisses and spits at him, then pecks at his hands when he starts playing tug-of-war with it.

“Get! Off!” he growls.

But then something cannonballs into the small of his back.

The second monkey-lizard.

That
one begins clawing at his ears and biting tufts of hair off his scalp. Laughing all the while. It’s enough of a distraction. The binocs slip from his grip and the monkey-lizard gambols about, delighting in its prize.

Temmin lurches to his feet, lunging for it—

And the second one drops to the ground and darts in front of him.

His ankle catches on the creature’s body—its tail around his thigh, giving a hard tug. Next thing he knows, Temmin is going tail-over-teakettle as he tumbles over the edge of the roof. He hits the awning over the dao-ben shop and rolls off it, landing in a deep puddle.
Splash.

He splutters and spits, lifting himself up. Water streaming down in a small dirty waterfall, his hair now in his eyes. Temmin wipes locks away—

And the curled tip of a giant ax blade hooks just inside his nostril and tugs his head up.
Ow, ow, ow!
The Herglic stands there, its mouth twisted into a sinister grin—rows and rows of serrated teeth sliding together with the sound of a rasp running across wood.

The Herglic cries: “It’s the kid! We got the kid!”

Above, the monkey-lizards chant and cackle.

He staggers through the forest. The burning forest. Bits of brush smoldering. A stormtrooper helmet nearby, charred and half melted. A small fire burns nearby. In the distance, the skeleton of an AT-AT walker. Its top blown open in the blast, peeled open like a metal flower. That burns, too.

Bodies all around.

Some of them are faceless, nameless. To him, at least. But others, he knows. Or knew. There—the fresh-faced officer, Cerk Lormin. Good kid. Eager to please. Joined the Empire because it’s what you did. Not a true believer, not by a long stretch. Not far from him: Captain Blevins. Definitely a true believer. A froth-mouthed braggart and bully, too. His face is a mask of blood. Sinjir is glad that one is dead. Nearby, a young woman: He knows her face from the mess, but not her name, and the insignia rank on her chest has been covered in blood. Whoever she was, she’s nobody now. Mulch for the forest. Food for the native Ewoks. Just stardust and nothing.

We’re all stardust and nothing,
he thinks.

An absurd thought. But no less absurd than the one that follows:

We did this to ourselves.

He should blame them. The rebels. Even now he can hear them applauding. Firing blasters into the air. Hicks and yokels. Farm boy warriors and pipe-fitter pilots.

Good for them.

They deserve their celebration.

Just as we deserve our graves.