Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(56)

“Norra!”

She tilts her heels back and pops the brakes. The bike skids to a halt in a spray of sand. She was right—the pilot of that ship is a bounty hunter.

There, on the far dune next to the shuttle, stands Jas Emari.

—

Jas takes the shuttle up toward the red-rock canyons, and there, as night falls, they park the ship in the shadows of a rocky overhang.

Without even caring whose ship this is or where Jas got it, Norra greedily feasts on food from a locker. It’s not good food—it’s a survivalist ration of kukula nuts, dried galcot, and kalpa sea-threads. But just the same, it may be the best thing she’s ever eaten. And they have a water recycler, too. That she gulps down. It’s cold and hurts her throat and it’s amazing. Everything is amazing. She wants to sleep. She wants to dance the way Bones is dancing right now. Dance, then sleep. Sleep, then dance.

I’m alive. I’m with Jas. I’m fed.

Jas stands in the doorway as Norra fills her cheeks with food. The bounty hunter has her arm against one side of the frame, her hip cocked and pressed against the other. “You look hungry.”

“They barely fed us.”

“Me neither. Trust me, I had my gorge-on-everything moment, too. Sorry I didn’t come sooner. I was in a similar predicament.”

“How? What happened?”

Jas tells her. About Niima the Hutt, about Mercurial Swift, about stealing this ship. “Your head,” Norra says, suddenly seeing the crust of blood and the missing horns. “You need bacta.”

“I need nothing. I’ll be fine.” Jas, always stoic. “My horns are broken but they’ll grow back. Over time. Don’t worry about it. What we need to worry about is our next move. We have a ship and I checked the computer—it has Imperial clearance codes. They work for now, though if Swift reports it to the Empire, that may not last forever. But with clearance codes in hand…Norra, we could leave Jakku. Right now.”

Reflexive fear rises inside Norra’s heart at just the thought of once more flying through the Imperial fleet massing here. Like the Death Star run all over again. But no. This would be safe. They have the proper codes.

And yet to what end? Their mission is a failure.

“I…suppose we should do that. Get back to Chandrila. Tell them what we’ve seen here.” She sighs. “Though that means none of this was worth it. We found nothing. Sloane gets away and we’ve made no difference.”

Jas arches an eyebrow. “Well, there is one thing.”

“What?”

“I found Sloane.”

Those three words. Colder and more refreshing than any water. Norra can barely breathe. “Tell me.”

“I didn’t see much. It was as they were taking me in. The Hutt was getting ready for some kind of…expedition. The whole place was like a nest of redjackets knocked out of a tree. Sloane was with them.”

“And do you know where they were going?”

“I heard a little. They were going to head past the canyons. There’s some valley beyond it. That’s where they’re headed. Part of some caravan.”

“And Sloane? What was she doing there?”

Jas shrugs with her eyes. “No clue. She didn’t look like she wanted to be there, but she wasn’t a prisoner. And…I almost didn’t recognize her.”

“Why?”

“She wasn’t in uniform. No Imperial gear or markings or anything. She looked like any other dust-sucker or scavenger. She was talking to someone, a man—another scavenger, I guess. And that’s all I saw. They dragged me back into my cell.”

Norra finishes chewing one last kukula nut. She stares off at an unfixed point as she speaks. “We could go home. Or we could go after Sloane.”

“Unless you want to set up shop on Jakku as a couple of sand merchants, yes, I figure those are our choices.”

“We should go home. That’s the smart thing to do.”

“It is.”

“Though we don’t always do the smart thing.”

“We rarely do, it seems.”

Norra sighs. “What about you? What do you think?”

“Norra, I’m a bounty hunter. I’m like an anooba with scent in its nose. I don’t like to stop until the target is clamped tight in my jaws. But I’m not the boss here. You are. You brought us here, so I leave it to you.”

“I want Sloane.”

“Then let’s go get Sloane.”

Norra stands and thrusts out a hand. Jas takes it and shakes it. They embrace. It feels good. Bones is there suddenly, thrusting his jagged-toothed droid skull in between their hug. Slowly, his metal arms enfold them, patting them both awkwardly on the back.

“HELLO. I AM ENJOYING THIS HUG, TOO. HUG HUG HUG. A HUG IS LIKE VIOLENCE MADE OF LOVE.”

Jas asks Norra, “And where did you find him, exactly?”

“I didn’t find him. He found me.”





Jom Barell is drowning. He cannot get air and he struggles against the sea as it drags him down. His lungs burn. Something coils around his foot—sea-vines or an eel. He can’t get traction. His hands flap like the broken wings of a dying bird, a bird who can’t lift off, who can’t escape what’s coming—the salt water fills his nostrils and his one empty eye socket and the other eye bulges like a cork in a bottle about to pop— “Wake up!”