Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(39)

I’ll work, she told him.

So they brought her here. Where here is, though, she barely knows. Kilometers from someplace called Cratertown, apparently.

And so she works. Every day she works this same black valve, the metal on the wheel so hot it first blistered her fingers—by now, though, those blisters have turned to calluses, and the skin around them is dry and splitting. It doesn’t even bleed. I don’t think I have blood anymore. Just dry Jakku dust whispering through her veins.

To her right, a hollow-eyed alien hunches over a set of levers. The bone-white creature doesn’t talk much. Occasionally it moans into the backs of its hands. It weeps tears that glitter like silica.

To Norra’s left is a dirt-cheeked man, his face round and thick even though the rest of his body looks like a skeleton draped in the rags of his own skin. He sometimes grins over at her—the broken-toothed smile of a bona fide madman—and he sings little songs.

Gomm is his name. Gomm, Gomm, the biddle-bomb, the womble-balm, speaking on the intercom, doozy woozy holocron…His words, not hers. One of his bizarre songs. He reminds her in a way of Mister Bones, if Mister Bones were a lunatic prisoner stuck on a dead dirtworld.

“Fancy a mancy,” he says to her.

“Fancy a mancy,” she answers back, not having any idea what it means. It matters little.

Norra needs to get out of here.

An obvious sentiment, but true just the same. She’s been thinking on escape plans, and none of them are sensible.

The chains that bind them are literally just that: chains threaded through metal manacles. Breaking them doesn’t seem to be an option. Not by herself, at least.

She thought about sabotaging the rig and letting it explode. But what good would that do her? It’s a fantasy to think that somehow it would bulge and detonate in just the right way, shearing her chain and letting her free. Far likelier to turn her into a scattering of charred bone across the sand. Plus, this kesium rig is not the only one. Front to back, another dozen rigs topping another dozen wells sit all around. If this one goes, they all might.

Which means she might not kill just herself.

So that’s not an option. What, then?

She has no answer. She keeps working. She tries to cry but no tears come. Norra has no more tears just as she has no more blood. It seems that on this planet she’ll just dry up and flake away when the night winds come.

—

At the end of the day, they throw her back in the cage. A portion of food lands in with her: a rubbery plastic packet of protein mush. Sometimes it’s a powder, and they give her a little water with it, and the powder sizzles and turns into something: a ballooning piece of bread, a cup of gruel, a biscuit so hard it’s like biting into a fresh-baked brick. Today, though, it’s just this packet of goop. She tears the top off with her teeth and greedily slurps it down. It tastes like the happabore spit smells.

But it will sustain her.

“Ah, nothing better than eating one’s own sick.”

That voice. She knows it.

She wheels around on the one who spoke.

And there stands Sinjir outside her cage. A cocky tilt to his hips and a smug, self-satisfied sneer on his face. He nips from a flask. “Norra, dear.”

“How…?” she asks.

“Who can say? I am called and conjured. I’m here to rescue you. My, my, we do find ourselves in cages, don’t we? And I don’t mean that as a thematic conceit, either, I mean—well. Look around you. Metal cage. Imprisoned once again. Naughty business, this Empire.”

“Well, get me out of here!” she says.

A hand falls on her shoulder. She startles, crying out, raising a fist to whoever would grab her—

“Whoa,” Temmin says, holding up both hands. “Hey, relax. It’s okay. It’s me. It’s your son. We’re getting you out of here. Me and Wedge. Just sit tight.”

Her son. He’s here. He came back for her. And there behind him is Wedge Antilles, and he’s got that boyish smile and those dark, warm eyes, for a moment the pulse in her neck quickens…

And yet how are they here in the cage with her? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Suddenly she’s doubling over, her middle clenching up as waves of heat and cold take turns crashing into her. Sweat slicks her brow even as her lips go dry. She tries to say her son’s name, but all she can manage is a sad mewling, like a rodent caught in the teeth of a trap.

She looks up to him, but he’s gone.

So, too, is Sinjir.

They were never here at all, were they?

No. Just illusions pressed upon her by the heat. Suddenly she understands Gomm—the sun and dust have blasted his sanity away, like a coat of paint scoured free. And she wonders if sanity is really just that—something to be worn off, a veneer that with enough pressure and effort can be stripped away. Civilization, too, can fail the same way, can’t it? Scraped down to nothing, leaving only the raw metal of anarchy and oppression behind. And madness. That is the Empire. That is what it has done to her and to the galaxy. A corrosive force, eating away at everyone and everything.

A new illusion seizes her. This hallucination reaches her ears before her eyes, and she hears the mechanized voice of her son’s droid, Mister Bones. Trails of sand slither along on a sudden wind like snakes, and they carry those familiar words of his, “ROGER-ROGER,” distorted and broken by static. And sure enough, the hallucination completes itself as it reaches her eyes, too. Norra lifts her head (no small effort) and glances over her shoulder to see Bones trotting along through the camp, pushed along by a stormtrooper whose mask shows the carvings of endless jagged spirals.