Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(23)

Sloane and Brentin are alone.

He gives her a puzzled look. “Now what?”

Those two words echo, echo, echo in the bell-shaped cavern.

“I suppose we wait,” she says.

“They don’t want us to follow, do they?”

“I’m strong, but not strong enough to climb up into those tunnels.” Still, maybe that’s what these deviants expect. They seem hardly human. Sanity does not shine in their eyes—no, what lingers there in their stares is a special kind of derangement. The zeal of service, of having given your body and your mind over to someone else.

Sloane does not add that climbing into those tunnels would be difficult. Her side hurts today, a dread, deep ache from her injury—an injury that never really healed properly. Sometimes she lifts her shirt just to look at it—the skin there is puckered like the sealed, dry lips of a dead man. Were she still in civilization, it would have healed over well with bacta and mend-gel treatments. But Jakku is not civilization, and so her wound healed poorly. Every day it hurts, the pain lurking far deeper than the skin.

Brentin stands and stretches. He gingerly steps down off the cart, almost losing his footing. Sometimes Sloane looks at him and sees how much he’s been stripped down. Again, the planet as an abrasive: He’s gone from being a gangly, unruly branch to something leaner. A spear. A splinter.

Though she hasn’t seen a mirror in months, Sloane assumes it’s happened to her, too. Times like this she realizes nothing will ever be the same. She’ll never have her Empire back. She’ll never have her own starship. I’m going to die on this planet. That truth has settled into the well of her gut. That truth is a part of her now.

“I don’t think—” Brentin starts to say.

But the sound of something coming through those tunnels cuts him off. It’s a rasping sound. Something sliding along sandswept stone.

It’s her. Their mistress.

The Hutt’s face appears at the topmost chamber. Bruise-dark with red striations, the slug’s face is not fat and thick as those of many Hutts, but narrower, like a slimy arrowhead. The mouth is wide, practically bisecting its whole head—the maw opens and a long, lashlike tongue licks the air, tasting it. The Hutt hisses. She blinks her one eye—the other is rheumy, the skin around it pocked and pitted with flecks of embedded metal, like a moon with glittering debris caught in its orbit.

The slug begins to slither. Up out of the chamber she comes, long arms pulling herself down from tunnel to tunnel. Sloane has met other Hutts: Jabba, for instance, was a fat, blubbery stump whose short tail was the most dexterous part of his corpulent body. A worm, a slug, a grub. This Hutt is longer, leaner, not like a slug at all, but like a serpent.

The Hutt slithers and wriggles down toward the ground, Sloane sees that behind the thing’s head are a series of bulbous nodules and tumorlike protuberances. They hang bound together with filthy red ribbon—a strange accessory serving as an emblem of the creature’s curious vanity.

As the Hutt nears the bottom of the hollow cavity, once more her servants emerge from the various tunnels and chambers—they meet the beast at the bottom, thrusting the palms of their hands upward, catching her as she eases forward. Their hands form her stage. Their feet, her vehicle.

Dozens of her slaves now make up a roving dais.

They hum and sing gibberish as they draw her forward.

Their gibberish dissolves into a single word:

“Niima. Niiiiiiimaaaaa.”

They haul her forward, this long-tailed worm. It is Niima who will help them. It is Niima who will open the way to find Rax.

—

On this world, Rax is a ghost.

Nobody knows him. Nobody’s heard of him. Sloane and Brentin went to every ramshackle shantytown they could find, from Cratertown to Blowback to hovels in the desert. They visited with Teedos hiding in their trapdoor tunnel systems. They asked questions of Blarina traders, of kesium gas-miners, of black-market merchants. Rax was a non-entity.

Then someone said something—a bartender back in Cratertown, one of the first people they’d met on this world. He said for them to be careful, that someone had been stealing children.

The Empire needs children. Wasn’t that what Rax told her?

She asked the bartender: “Where? Why?”

He said he didn’t know, but they’d been taken by thugs belonging to Niima the Hutt. Most taken from small villages and from the makeshift orphanages run by the anchorites. “That’s where most of the kids are kept. Nobody wants children running underfoot when you have a heavy-gauge blast-drill blowing chunks of canyon wall apart. So they dump them there, with the anchorites and their nurse-women.” The bartender added: “I would’ve never let my kids go there.”

The thought hit her: If Rax had been a child here, what if he was there? An orphan left behind for the anchorites?

That’s when she found the trail. And it began with a man named Anchorite Kolob. He was a wretched old monk, carved by wind and sand and worst of all by time. She found him kneeling in a mud-daub hut with a bent metal roof. He was praying. When she demanded he help them, he did so willingly. But he also said the man she seeks is not a man named Gallius Rax. Rax is a lie, a false identity, he explained.

“Galli was the boy,” Kolob said, his voice shaking.

He said to her that Galli was always a rebellious one, always running off and chasing stories. Then one day something truly changed in him. He became defiant. He led the other children astray. They began disappearing. And one day, Galli disappeared, too.