Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(14)

“They’ll notice now.” If Temmin made it away, that is…

“What’s the plan, Commander?” Jas throws her hands up. “I ask again, where do we start?”

“What?”

“You came down intending to be all by your lonesome, but now you have me. You’re in charge of this little expedition. Do you have a plan?”

Norra sighs. All the anger she felt, all the panic—the noise has dulled now to a dim susurrus, and mostly she just wants to crawl back inside the pod and go to sleep. For days. For weeks. For all of forever.

“I don’t have a plan,” she confesses.

“Let me guess: no time to make one up?”

Norra barks a grim laugh. “Yeah. Well. I reckon the Empire will be looking for us before too long. TIE patrols, probably.” Norra rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “We collect our gear. Then we walk.”

“Any particular direction?”

“Just spin around, point your finger, and away we go.”

“You got it, boss.”





Here on the slopes of Mount Arayakyak, the Cultivating Talon, the jungles once served as a rain-forest orchard, providing the Wookiees with an array of fruits, the shi-shok being most prized because its utility was wide—the pulpy fruit was delicious and vital, the hull was hard enough to withstand nearly any impact, and the vines of the tree made for the strongest binding and climbing ropes known.

But the child that lopes through the jungle now does not know these things. He does not know the world’s history, for he barely even knows his own. He does not know that this rain forest was once lush and once gave his people life. All he knows now is that it is a scarred, carved-up place. Many trees are broken and collapsed against one another like campfire kindling. Others are sickened from the roots up—a poisonous black mold has taken them, rotting them, turning their fruits into hard, shriveled pods.

Lumpawaroo knows very few things. He knows his name. He knows that his mother was taken from him. He knows that his father has long been gone. He knows that he has been a slave for the rrraugrah—the hairless Imperial intruders—most of his life. But he also knows that recently, something has changed.

The bad song has ended. Each of the Wookiees had a song in their head, a song of fire and terror, a song like the sound of the thrumming wings from a swarm of drriw-tcha blood-worm flies. The song made them do things. The song screamed louder whenever they defied the milk-skins. At its loudest, the song could kill them—Waroo remembers when one of his slave-mates tried to scale the walls of the daubcrete bunker, and the song in her head caused her such misery that her neck craned back far enough to snap.

But now the song is gone.

The rrraugrah locked them away. They brought out the old chains and collars. They now force the Wookiees to work again with shock-lance and blaster, with screams of rage and baleful threat. Things have gotten worse since the song died. But in that, they have also gotten better.

Many of the intruders at this settlement have fled. Others have doubled down, gone mad, locked themselves away. Sometimes the milk-skins are there behind their doors, yelling, smashing things, weeping. They’ve ceased cleaning themselves. They hide. They even attack one another, at times. All while claiming to wait for something, someone, anyone to come. They think they will be saved. That someone will come to bolster their forces, to bring them new food, to help return the song to the Wookiees’ heads to control them once more.

Waroo feared that might be true, that someone might come, that the song might again be sung. So Waroo watched. And waited.

And soon the opportunity came.

One of the rrraugrah in a filthy gray officer’s uniform began closing the pylon-gate. This was Commandant Dessard, a vicious little man with a greasy peak of dark hair. Waroo waited until Dessard had almost closed the gate…

Then he leapt for the opening. Though Waroo was weak and starving, he summoned everything he could to make it through that gap.

And make it, he did. Once out, he kicked backward with both legs, knocking Dessard through the gap. Waroo shouldered the gate closed, then howled to the other young slaves—for this is a child camp, where the young Wookiees are prized for their small hands and their ability to climb oh so high—that he would come back to free them all.

Then Waroo fled into the jungle, down the slopes of Arayakyak, the Cultivating Talon, through the broken trees, up into their diseased boughs, across old rotten bridges, and through shattered homes hanging from cratered bark. For a time, he was alone. Now, though, that too has changed.

Waroo is being hunted.

The stink of Dessard is carried on the wind: sweat and waste and his own hatred. Waroo knows now why the man comes for him: The loss of one Wookiee is of no consequence except to the man’s own ego. He is angry to have lost one, to have been tricked and injured. That anger is a foul odor all its own, and Waroo can smell it. Worse, Dessard is not alone.

But Waroo is Wookiee. He is smart even though he is weak. He knows they cannot come for him up high, so he finds one of the diseased shi-shok trees, and Waroo ascends. He clambers from branch to branch, up a blackened vine that twists in on itself, through the sickened pleach. But his hand falls on something—a bulging fungal sac, one of the spore-pods that have helped to sicken the rain forest here. It erupts. From it comes a cloud of black spore, and Waroo inadvertently takes a deep sniff of it—