Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(98)

—

Norra came out of a docking bay along the side finding a base mostly empty: no troopers, only droids and a few officers pecking about. At the time she thought, This is it, this is the end of the Empire, they just don’t know it yet, and strange as it is, a sense of hopelessness settled over her, and with it, a feeling of lost purpose. The Empire had been her enemy for so long—what happens when it’s gone? It’s like putting out a fire by sucking all the oxygen out of the room. The fire’s gone, but now how do you breathe?

She had to put that aside, though, because as she reminded herself: She still had a purpose. Find her husband. Find Sloane. And one minute she’s wandering the labyrinthine base, stepping past an abandoned, gutted supply room—and the next she’s rounding the corner and meeting her quarry face-to-face.

It takes her a second to recognize Sloane.

It takes her even longer to register her husband saying her name.

Next thing she knows, she’s got her blaster pistol up and pointed right in Sloane’s face. Instantly she wants to pull the trigger and vacate the woman’s brains from her skull—a surge of anger geysers up inside her like a spout of corrosive acid. No justice. Only revenge. But Brentin steadies her hand. “Norra. No.”

“Brentin,” she says, the name spoken not happily, but with trepidation and grief. “Get your hand off me. Why are you here? Why are you with her?” Paranoia unspools inside Norra’s mind. She fears suddenly that he’s still programmed, still enslaved to the chip embedded in his brain stem—

Bones takes the cue and grabs his wrist, twisting it so hard he cries out in pain. The droid smashes her husband against the wall.

“YOU HURT TEMMIN.”

The heavily modified B1 droid begins to bend the arm back farther, farther, farther, until Norra can hear the bones creaking and straining—

“Bones,” she says with a reluctant admonition. “Stop. Just hold him.”

“Norra,” Brentin pleads, “I’m not with the Empire, I didn’t mean to do those things, is our son okay—”

Sloane, with her hands up, says: “He’s right. He was made to do it.”

“Shut your mouth,” Norra hisses at her. “Both of you. Be quiet. We don’t have time for a conversation. What’s going to happen is, we’re going back to my ship. We are getting out of here. And soon as we have a window, I’m taking you both back to Chandrila.”

“It’s not me you want,” Sloane says.

“Norra, she’s right—”

“Quiet, Grand Admiral.”

“Look at me. Do I look like an admiral anymore? I’m sneaking around an Imperial base with a rebel. Norra, don’t be an idiot.” At that word, Bones extends his other arm—the one not poised to break Brentin’s limb—and extends his concealed vibroblade. It thrusts up under Sloane’s chin. It nicks the skin; a bead of blood swells up like a little balloon. “I’m…sorry for calling you an idiot. But there’s more going on here.”

“Norra, please listen to her.”

Sloane continues: “A man named Rax—he’s in charge of the Empire. He’s the one who put a chip in your husband’s head. He’s the one who set up the attack on Liberation Day. I was just a…” Sloane cringes, as if this is hard for her to admit. “I was just a distraction. He’s the puppeteer. There’s something out beyond Niima’s canyons and caverns—a valley. Rax is protecting something there. Take me there. We can finish this.”

Indecision wars inside Norra’s heart.

She wants to shoot Sloane right in the chest. Or club her in the head. Or drag her by the hair back to the shuttle. She wants to kiss her husband. And kill him. And throttle him to ask him why, and apologize for leaving him behind, and pretend like none of this ever happened and that she and her son and her man are still back on Akiva, living their best life.

Norra tells herself: Sloane is lying. The woman is a practiced deceiver. And Brentin is on the leash of whatever control chip she hammered into his head. And yet she’s clearly right. Sloane is no grand admiral anymore. She was brought here as a prisoner. The Empire no longer calls Rae Sloane its leader or even its daughter.

What if she’s right?

What if that man, Rax, is the answer to everything?

Norra tells herself, I don’t have to care about that. I can do the job I was brought here to do. Capture Sloane, save her husband, and go home.

But what if that doesn’t fix anything? What if Norra has a chance, one chance, to stop the real monster behind the scenes? What if this Rax is really the puppet master Sloane claims he is? Can Norra just…let him go?

“Let’s go,” she says.

“Norra, wait—”

“You better be right about this Rax,” Norra says. “Because if I find out you’re wrong or that you’re playing me? I’ll have my droid here break every centimeter of every bone in your bodies. Are we clear?”

Sloane grins. “Clear as the blue sky, Norra Wexley.”





It is the first time Galli has been off Jakku in ten years, and only the second time ever—at least, as far as he can remember. He does not know who his parents are or where they came from. Sometimes he imagines that they came from some faraway place, a place of rivers and forests. A place with a sea. Other times, he is angry at them—and he thinks, Who my parents are does not matter. They aren’t my everything. They aren’t my anything. He envisions in these times of anger that they are dirt merchants or sand farmers from Jakku and it will be his great pleasure to transcend them.