Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(22)
Sloane kneels, blind and bound.
The ratty ribbon across her eyes is filthy and rough; it feels like it’s abrading the skin off her face. This whole planet is like that, though: Everything is coarse-grained sandpaper wearing her down first to muscle, then to bone, then to the marrow beneath, and soon only to whatever passes for a soul or a spirit. A ghost left to wander these dust-choked deadlands.
Her wrists chafe, too: The rope binding them is raw and fibrous.
At least they haven’t sealed her mouth or her ears.
What she hears: the pad-pad-pad of feet on stone. Not hers, but those who pull the cart in which she waits, drawing it deeper and deeper through the winding red cavern. The cart itself is old—stone-fiber boards lashed together with braids of tendon and not buoyed by hoverplanks or grav-plates but rather kept rolling by a pair of proper wheels. Wheels that clank and rattle as the cart is drawn over the hard rust-stone.
What she says: “We’re almost there. The air is colder down here.”
What he says: “I hope so. Everything of mine is…cramping up.”
Those are the words of her traveling companion—a man named Brentin Wexley. She found him stowing away in her ship when she barely managed to escape Chandrila. Sloane was injured and drifting toward death, but he saved her life. Sometimes she’s surprised he’s still with her. But his purpose is her purpose, too: find Gallius Rax and end him.
Rax, who stole her Empire from her. Rax, who stuck a chip in this man’s head and turned him into a killer. Vengeance drives the pair of them. It marries them, too, in a way. The oddest of couples, aren’t they? She, the onetime grand admiral of the Empire (a title she cannot imagine matters anymore), and he, a former rebel spy turned programmed Imperial assassin. Neither of them wants to be here. But this is where they are.
And they’ve been here for months. Jakku is a decrepit wasteland, bleached to death by an unforgiving sun. And now, mysteriously, it hosts the largest remnant of the Empire—her remnant, as a matter of fact, a military faction she thought she controlled. But her control was an illusion. She was just another puppet dancing on the strings of Gallius Rax, a supposed war hero who came to serve the Empire at the urging of Palpatine himself.
None of it makes sense. Questions layer atop questions, and no answers are forthcoming. Why here? Why this place? It seems that Rax himself comes from this world, but why return? Jakku is no prize. It has few exports of note; kesium and bezorite have some value to the Empire, but only barely. Better resources exist, and they exist on worlds far livelier than this one. Why make an attack on Chandrila only to abandon the galaxy and come here? Why leave Sloane dangling on the hook? Why do any of it?
What is Rax’s game? He has one—that much is clear.
He will tell her. One day soon, she will make him tell her. At the end of a blaster, a blade, or her own choking hands.
But first, they must get to him.
Which is why they’re here, right now, on this rolling cart. A cart pulled by men unclothed except for the skirts of threaded leather hanging from their waists—their chests, backs, arms, and shorn scalps are naked, painted with streaks of greasy red dust. Their mouths are closed with metal hooks—a hook in the top lip, a hook in the bottom, the two tugged together with a cinching knot. They can only murmur and mumble. They are servants and slaves—ardent operators and faithful lunatics giving their lives over to their mad desert mistress.
Next to her, Brentin grunts and growls as he shifts.
“I told you,” she says to him. “Practice your breathing. Relax your limbs, a deep breath in, a deep breath out. Oxygenate your blood.” Since leaving Ganthel, Sloane has lived her life on starships. In her earliest days, she flew patrols in TIE fighters and shuttles, and her very first job was as a signal hawk on an asteroid monitoring station in the Anoat sector. Those roles did not allow her the luxury of getting up and moving around easily, and so she learned ways to remain comfortable even in contortion.
“That only helps so much,” he snaps, and she detects a surge of anger. He hates her, she believes, though he won’t say as much. It stands to reason: His own wife, a rebel pilot, is the one who gave her the grievous wound he helped her to heal in the first place. She represents something he despises: the autocratic rule of a mad galaxy. He prefers that madness—the madness of rebellion. So be it. This alliance is built on anger and hatred, and that hatred is the glue that fixes Brentin to Sloane.
The cart stops short. Hard enough that she almost loses her balance, which would mean pitching forward and smashing her face on the stone-fiber boards. Next to her, she hears Brentin do exactly that: He oofs as his head thuds against the floor of the cart.
Footsteps all around them. Hands grab at her face, tugging the blindfold off—hers is stubborn and fails to easily fall away, and she feels the cold metal of a crooked blade against her temple. Thankfully, the blade faces away, and with a quick pull the cloth is cut and falls.
It takes her vision a moment to adjust.
A massive impasse awaits: The cavern ends in a gargantuan, bulb-shaped chamber, its walls shot through with other smooth-walled tunnels—tunnels that are too high up for this cart to easily reach.
Next to her, she spies Brentin—his face and neck scrubby with beard, his forehead smudged with filth. He gasps as the slaves lift him up, rocking him back on his knees. They cut his blindfold free, too.
Red-streaked, dust-caked faces regard them with wide eyes. Hook-bound mouths murmur and hum. The servants perform one more action—cutting through the ropes that bind their wrists—before scampering off like animals. They clamber up the rocks, long fingernails mooring in the cracks. They pull themselves into the tunnels and scurry away.