Aftermath: Star Wars (29 page)

The case is light. Though he’s moved it before, it surprises him again: the crate with the black carbon locks looks like it should weigh a ton. And one might expect a weapon like this (er, whatever “this” is) would be heavy. But it isn’t. It’s light as air. Hollow as a balloon.

As the others move into the passageway leading into the catacombs beneath the city, Temmin lifts his end and Bones lifts the other (the droid helps not because the crate is heavy, but rather because it’s cumbersome).

They get it inside the door.

Temmin looks at his shop, says a small and silent good-bye, then shuts it. Ahead, Sinjir snaps on the illumi-droids: little floating lanterns, each with a trio of tentacle arms dangling beneath. Arms that dead-end in pincer grips.

The light from the droids is mottled, greasy. (They’re dirty and dinged up.) But it’s enough.

Norra and Sinjir forge ahead. Temmin starts to follow, but Jas catches his arm first. “This crate,” she says.

“Surat’s weapon,” he says. He tries to say it with some authority, like,
Yeah, this is Surat’s, and I stole it. What of it?

“It’s not a weapon.”

“What? Yes it is.”

“Maybe it can be. But it isn’t literally a weapon.”

“I don’t understand, how did you—” He touches one of the carbon locks, and it springs open. His eyes widen. “What?
What.
I’ve been trying to open these for days. For days!”

“I picked them.”

“You…you just picked them. Do you have magic fingers? Are you some kind of wizard?”

“I have talents. And I used them while I was down here repairing my gun before I helped your mother claim one of those TIE fighters for herself.” She gestures toward it. “Go on. Pop it.”

He does. Like a kid on his naming day, he rips into this present with greedy gusto. Soon as the lid lifts, a blue glow emerges. He has to squint against it, it’s so bright. Then he sees. It’s a box of data cubes.

“Data cubes?” he asks. “That’s it? It’s not a weapon at all!”

“It’s not. It’s something far better:
information.
”

“Surat was protecting information?”

“I don’t know about what. But if we get through this, I’ll help you figure out what that information is. And then together we can sell it.”

Ah. There it is. There’s her angle. He knew there had to be one. He clucks his tongue. “And I assume you get a cut. For your benevolence and wisdom and your connections to whatever market would buy this—”

“Sixty–forty.”

“Oh, whoa, hey, that’s not fair—”

“I’ll give you the sixty.”

Oh.
He hesitates. Ahead, the light recedes as the others walk on, the illumi-droids bobbling after them. His mother calls: “Are you coming?”

“Deal,” he tells Jas, then shakes her hand.

“Deal.”

“We’re coming!” he yells. Under his breath, he adds: “So impatient.”

Sinjir is used to tight spaces. The Empire was not known for its
roomy
architecture. It was fond of austere pragmatism (that term,
austere pragmatism,
or sometimes
pragmatic austerity,
found its way atop many Imperial brochures and propaganda tracts), and so kept its hallways low and narrow. Stormtroopers were literally supposed to be within the same range of height and weight in part because of exactly that—he wasn’t joking when he said he was too tall to be a stormtrooper.

The catacombs, as such, do not give him claustrophobia. Not strictly speaking. No, the anxiety in his chest is from something else: the way they wind around. It’s not enough that the maze asks them to go right, left, or straight. Instead some passages go up, others down, and others yet wind around in a spiral. One pathway will be dry as dust, and the smell coming out of it will be of pulverized bone. Another pathway will be wet, heady, almost fungal. They walk through puddles and over crumbling stone and mortar. Sometimes the illumi-droids highlight a wall as they pass, and the wall shows off filthy handprints streaked across the rock, or instead shows something in a language far off from Basic. Some curse, perhaps, some profanity. Or perhaps some threat.

Occasionally, sounds wind their way through the labyrinth, too. Scraping. Scuffing. A hiss. Once: A pair of green eyes sat shining in the darkness like glowing crystals. When their light reached it, Sinjir saw it was just a fengla—a pale, hairless vermin. High haunches and crooked incisors. It spits and hisses before scurrying off, claws clicking.

They walk for a while. Stopping sometimes to check the map. Then they continue on. Walking underneath dripping water—lingering rainwater, Temmin assures them, not, like, the bodily excretions of some Ithorian doing his business up above. They cross a long, narrow bridge—only halfway across it does Sinjir realize that it matches the battle droid, because the thing is mostly bones. Larger bones. Not human. Bound up with rusted wire. It sways over a chasm, and Sinjir remembers the great rift below him as he dangled there in Surat Nuat’s dungeon. A dungeon that must connect up to the city’s underground space.

Soon, they start to see droid pieces. And blaster scoring on the walls. Sinjir even thinks he sees scarring from lightsaber blades: This was the site of an old battle during the Clone Wars. When the Jedi were populous and not on the edge of extinction.

Temmin says, “We’re coming up on the junk pits.”

The map says as much,
Sinjir thinks.

And then he watches Temmin. He hadn’t been, not really. The boy seemed fine, if a bit shook up from all of this. He can pretend he’s hard against it, but between almost getting killed by a Sullustan gangster and losing his mother, it’s to be expected that the boy is off his kilter.

Something else is going on, though.

It’s in the way the boy looks around. And fidgets. He’s nervous. Like he’s hiding something.
Temmin has a secret.

Sinjir hangs back, and urges Jas to hang back with him.

“What is it?” she asks in a low voice.

“We need to talk.”

“Mm,” she says, nodding like this was inevitable. “I knew this would come. And yes, I concede.”

“You concede what, exactly?”

“You are satisfying.”

“I…don’t follow. Satisfying? I don’t know what that means. I do know that it sounds awfully…milquetoast. Drinking a cup of protein slurry when you’re truly hungry is
satisfying.
And yet, disgusting.”

Jas gives him a frustrated look. “I mean that I find you capable. You interest me. And so,
yes,
when all this is over, we may couple.”

“Couple. Like—” His face goes suspiciously and surprisingly red. “Like you and me? Together?”

“That is indeed what I mean.”

He laughs. “Oh.”

“If you’re going to laugh about it,” she says, suddenly stung. “Then you can take my invitation and stick it in your exhaust port.”

“No, I just mean…I’m not into…this.”

“This?” Her scowl deepens and her teeth bare. “Aliens?”

“Women.”

“Oh.
Oh.
”

“Yes, oh.”

“Oh.”

Moments pass. The awkwardness between them is a living thing—like a cloud of flies you can’t ignore no matter how hard you try. Eventually she blurts out: “You wanted to speak to me about something else, apparently?”

“Ah. Yes. The boy. Temmin.”

“He’s clearly too young for you.”

“Would you stop? That’s not what I mean. Listen. He’s lying to us.”

“Everybody is lying all the time, Sinjir. I recognize that your former role in the Empire makes you
excessively
paranoid, but—”

“The map,” he says, finally. “It’s about the map.”

“What about it?”

“Temmin told us the map had changed. That it was wrong.”

He sees the realization hit her. It lands on her the way a fly lands on someone’s nose. “But it hasn’t been wrong,” she says. “It’s been right.”

“Exactly.”

“He’s hiding something.” Her brow darkens. “Something down here he doesn’t want us to see, perhaps.”

“A stash, maybe. A trove.”

“Could be. Keep your eyes peeled.”

“You too.”

The junk pits: massive craters dug out of the catacombs. The stone brick gives way to natural rock, opening into chambers wide and deep that house heaps and mounds of old scrap. Droid parts, mostly, and a great deal of it largely unrecognizable or unusable. The good stuff likely picked over and pulled out—
by my son,
Norra thinks.

She stands by it, looking around. She kicks a stone forward. It
pings
off what looks like a half-melted protocol droid arm. Other parts clang and clatter, sliding down—a momentary avalanche of scrap-scree. All of it echoes. Temmin sidles up next to her. “There goes us being quiet,” he says.

“We’re alone down here.”

“You hope.”

She rolls her eyes. “Where are the other two?” Mister Bones stands about three meters back still cradling the crate of thermal detonators while humming. But the other two aren’t here.

“They’re back a way. Talking. I saw the light from their droid.”

“Hm.” She wrinkles her brow. “Temmin, do you trust Sinjir?”

“I dunno. Why?”

“He’s an Imperial. He hurt people for a living.”

“You trust the bounty hunter but not the Imperial?”

She shrugs. “A bounty hunter lives by a certain code. They want to get paid and this mission gets her paid. I trust her as far as all that.”

“But Sinjir, not so much.”

“I…don’t know. I want to trust him.”

“He got us this far.”

“That’s true.”

“He hasn’t fragged us over yet.”

“Language,” she chides.

“Sorry.”

“And you’re right. But we could be walking into a trap.”

Temmin tenses up and looks away. She sees now she’s given him cause to worry. “They aren’t family,” he says. “We’re family.”

“We are. But I’m sure we’ll be fine. It’ll all be okay.”

“Yeah.” He thrusts his tongue in the pocket of his cheek and idly nudges a stone with his shoe. “Mom, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He dithers a bit. “For…being a real sleemo to you. It wasn’t right. I just…” His nostrils flare as he draws a deep breath. “I missed you. And I miss Dad. And I was mad that you left and then even madder that maybe you died and I…I don’t have what you have. I don’t have the…courage, I don’t have that fire in my heart for the New Republic like you. I just…”

She puts her arm around him. “It’s okay. You’re a kid, Tem. You got enough to worry about. Don’t worry about this. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

A flutter in her chest. She knows he loves her. But to hear it? It makes all the difference.

From behind them, Jas calls: “Are we stopping?”

Norra answers: “No. Just waiting for the pair of you to catch up.”

They keep on.

It’s time, Sinjir thinks, to pry.

They walk past the junk pits, toward the direction of what the map says is the old droid factory. Or its entrance, at least. Temmin says they’ll have to go right past the front of it—though thankfully not inside.

As they pass by a wall of glowing fungus—the stone beneath their feet loose and slippery, slick with spongy moss—Sinjir catches up with Temmin and his B1 battle droid, Bones.

“That droid of yours,” Sinjir says. “He’s something.”

Temmin looks up. A dubious brow raised. “Yeah. I know.”

“You find him down here?”

“Uh-huh. In one of the pits.”

The battle droid saunters alongside. Singing a quiet (well, not that quiet) little song: “DOO DEE DOO DOO BAH BAH BAH DOO DOO.”

“He’s obviously no longer standard-issue,” Sinjir says. “You’ve done some modifications.”

“Thanks, Darth Obvious. Or is it Emperor Palpable? Next you’ll tell me which end of a blaster is the shooty-shooty one, or why I wouldn’t do so hot in a Wookiee arm-wrestling league.”

“You can’t out-snark me, boy, so don’t even try. I’m just saying—how exactly did you program that droid to be so…
that.
” He gestures to the droid, who stops singing long enough to do a high kick.

Temmin sighs. As if this line of questioning bores him and yet he must persevere. “Bones is primed with a high-octane cocktail of programs. Some heuristic combat droid programs, some martial arts vids, the moves of some Clone Wars cyborg general, and also, the body-mapped maneuvers of a troupe of la-ley dancers from Ryloth.”