Star Wars: Rebel Rising(6)

At first, Saw just tied the droids up along the inside of the fallen comm tower. He had Jyn run the gauntlet, striking as many droids as possible. Soon after, he started to make it more complicated, using ropes to swing the droids around, throwing rocks and sticks at her to simulate battle strikes. Sometimes he would don a hollow droid head like a helmet and attack her himself.

“I thought you said the Empire doesn’t use droids as much anymore,” Jyn said one night as they chugged nutritives. She pulled the can away from her lips and glared at it. She could have made something tastier, but Saw didn’t like the hassle of food.

Saw grunted. “The Empire learned how to fight in a war against droids,” he said. “Droids and clones. It helped them to forget that war is about people.”

Jyn set her can down on the table. She was still hungry; she had been hungry ever since the day her mother died, and nutritive milk never filled her the way real food did. Nothing but grassroot stew and roasted skycorn and warm crusty bread and nerf-milk cheese would help the emptiness in her belly, and she wasn’t going to get any of that anytime soon. If ever again.

“Droids are sometimes harder to fight than people,” Saw continued, his voice contemplative. “They can be like hive insects, sharing the same mind, the same commands, able to work both individually and as a unit. You can’t think about taking out just one at a time; you have to think about how to wipe out the masses as well.” He leaned toward Jyn, jabbing one stubby finger at her, his chair squeaking in protest. “Or you have to take out the one giving the commands. Kill them all, or kill the head.” He shrugged. “Same difference.”

Jyn fiddled with her empty milk can. She liked spending her days learning to fight. When she was sparring, she didn’t have time to think about how much she missed her life from before. But she was also worried. She knew she wouldn’t be with Saw for the rest of her life.

“I should be learning,” she said softly.

Saw looked confused. “Learning? Am I not teaching you?”

“Not math and history and science,” Jyn said. “I should…” Her voice trailed off. “Mama used to teach me.” She thought about the lessons they had shared, the way Lyra had turned baking into chemistry class, or the way Galen had taught her about crystalline spectrometers.

An emotion Jyn didn’t recognize flashed over Saw’s face. Before she could ask him about it, he pushed away from the table and went down the hall toward her room. He came out a moment later with the old datapad.

Jyn had never even bothered to turn it on in all the days she’d been with Saw. But he touched the side now, and it lit up as he passed it to her. She turned it over in her hands, looking at the features. A low-light holoprojector and a networking card that would connect her to the HoloNet.

“I’m teaching you everything I can,” Saw said. “Anything else you want to know, you have to teach yourself.”

Her gaze drifted from the datapad in her hands to the scarred, rough knuckles of his.

“Okay,” she said. “Can I go to my room now?”

Saw blinked in surprise. “Of course. You can go anywhere you want. This is your home.”

Jyn made sure her bedroom door was closed before curling up on the mattress on the floor. It was so quiet and dark. Before her mother had sent Jyn to the cave to wait for Saw, Lyra had given Jyn the kyber crystal necklace and told her, “Trust the Force.” Then she’d said, “I’ll be there.” Jyn had taken that to be her mother’s promise that she would find her in the cave, but for a moment, Jyn wondered if it meant something different, if she had been saying she’d be in the Force.

Jyn sat in the center of her bed, her legs crossed, and closed her eyes. She focused on the silence and stillness of her little room. She willed herself to feel the Force. If there was anyone who could help her now, could help her reach her father, it was Mama.

She waited for the Force to prove that it was real.

It did not.

Jyn pulled the blanket over her head, then reached for the datapad. She booted up the Imperial HoloNet broadcast. The dim blue light filled her room, and she turned the sound on low, certain Saw wouldn’t want her to be listening to the enemy. With every new story, Jyn wondered if she’d hear something about her father. Surely Galen Erso’s capture would be newsworthy? She just wanted to see him again.

But there was nothing.





The next day, there were no droids hanging from the fallen comm tower. Instead, about a dozen stormtroopers hung by their necks.

Jyn’s stomach lurched as she approached. The stormtroopers’ armor was still gleaming white and black, but it was scuffed and there were reddish-brown stains on some of it. The wind blew, and the bodies shifted on their makeshift gallows, clanging against the metal tower. The sound was hollow and reverberated and was somehow…somehow wrong?

Saw moved behind her. Jyn turned, and he offered her a blaster.

Jyn looked from the blaster to the stormtroopers and back again. She moved to flick the setting from kill to stun, as her mother had taught her. Saw wrapped his hand around hers, forcing her finger to keep it set to kill. “Never do that,” he said in a gentle voice. “If you’re going to shoot a blaster, you always shoot to kill. Always.”

Jyn swallowed. The stormtroopers hanging on the comm tower weren’t moving; they must have already been dead.