Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(55)

And I’ve lost Jumon, too.

Soon the cave begins to glow.

In the dark crystal walls are other, smaller gems—each glowing bright. Different colors. Like eyes watching. Red, green, blue. A feeling overtakes him. A strange, giddy madness. It rises within him, effervescent like bubbles, and he wonders, Is this what being drunk feels like?

Then the tak-tak-tak of Kyaddak limbs.

They’re coming.

Panic rushes through him. He turns and sees that the way he came in is the only way—there are no other points of entry. Out there, the shadows move and shift, sweeping in with alarming swiftness, and he pulls his blaster and grits his teeth and begins firing wildly into the space.

Plasma bolts cook the darkness. Kyaddak scream.

And crystals shatter. The walls and ceiling begin to fracture. The air is filled suddenly with the roar of the crumbling roof, and Addar falls, crab-walking backward as the cave passageway is swiftly closed off by a wall of ruined, broken crystal.

He can barely catch his breath.

The Kyaddak are gone. The wall is impenetrable. Many of the creatures may be buried beneath it, Addar doesn’t know.

When he has his bearings, he sees now that there is nowhere deeper to go. This is the end of this cave. He tries fruitlessly to dig himself out, but it is no use. The crystals cut his hands. The wall will not be moved.

Instead he slumps back against the wall and draws the crate toward him. He pops a series of latches; the lid opens. Inside waits a series of crystals like the ones in the walls and ceiling above. Hundreds of them.

Addar stifles a cry, then withdraws another of the projector disks. He places it in his lap and ignites it—again, the holoform of Brin Izisca appears. The vid of Brin says: “Just as the Jedi are a lens that focuses the Force, so is the kyber crystal a lens that focuses the light inside the Jedi—and the light inside the Jedi’s weapon, the lightsaber. But those crystals can be used for greater, more evil powers—the Sith focus the Force, too, but they use it not for light, but only for destruction. These crystals were taken from Christophsis to power two of the most insidious weapons built, the legacy of Galen Erso, the legacy of Orson Krennic, of Tarkin and the Sith, of Palpatine and Vader. The Death Stars are gone. Light has persevered through the necessity of dark. These crystals must go home. That is your task.”

With that, Addar begins taking the crystals out one by one, setting them down into the cave from which they had been taken years before. He sets the disk to project the holoform once again. He tries not to think about how this is the place where he is going to die—or, in Brin’s words, where he will join soon with the living Force, all hail the light, the dark, and the gray.





At the camp, the troopers are dead.

Effney has been reduced to spare parts.

Bones frees the prisoners. Gomm gabbles as he’s let loose, scrambling on all fours around the sand. The skull-eyed thing warbles with laughter, kneeling and raising its arms to the sky to take in its freedom. The others filter out to gather around the Imperial water supply and drink till their bellies must hurt.

Norra tells them they’d do best to hightail it out of there, because the Empire will soon come. And next time they might put them in graves, not cages.

She finds a speeder bike. She and Bones steal it and go.

Together they travel for hours. Endless sand streaks past in mounding dunes that grow higher and higher, and soon the bike is cresting each hill and leaving her stomach behind with the drop back down on the far side. Bounce and dip, rise and fall. Worse, she has to close her eyes most of the time—she has no goggles, and the streaming sand burns her eyes. And it’s not like she even knows where she’s going. Right now, the priority is get away in any direction. The direction she picks is the one they chose at the outset: In the distance she sees canyons and plateaus. The same ones, she believes, that they saw when they crash-landed here.

So that’s where she points the front prongs of the speeder.

The blue sky begins to dim, bleeding at the horizon line. In the distance she sees a pair of goggle-eyed humanoids half her size digging in the sand. They don’t even look up as the bike zips past.

She hears something. An engine. A ship. That can’t be good. The Empire controls the airspace here. Ahead, a small shape in the air grows larger and larger until she can see that it’s a shuttle. Imperial, probably.

Norra turns the speeder next to a heaping dune and lurks in its shadow as the ship passes overhead.

It’s not Imperial. It’s some other make. Corellian, she thinks.

It burns sky and keeps going until it’s gone.

Norra tells Bones to hold on again, then she throttles the speeder. It leaps forward like a haunch-whipped varactyl—and again they’re up and racing across the sands, fat plumes of dust filling the air behind them.

Soon, though, she hears that ship once more, and she hears it too late to hide. The shuttle blasts past. It’s not the Empire, so they should be safe, right? Except now the vessel is slowing down. It eases to a stop, hovering above the next dune—slowly its blunt front end starts to rotate back toward her direction. Oh, no. Whoever it is, this can’t be good. They have to keep on moving.

Go around, she thinks. She turns the speeder so it’ll take a far path around the shuttle. Just in case.

But as she whips past, someone is yelling.

At her? To her?

Wait. They’re yelling her name.