Star Wars: Rebel Rising(65)
Extremists were the problem. The rebels and the Empire, the people who couldn’t exist without drawing lines and daring others to cross them. Jyn very consciously turned her eyes away from the Imperial banner. She was done with giants. She could be an ant.
She ran over her options as she was carried closer and closer to the top of the space station by the lift just past the entrance desk. A hundred credits. The clothes on her back and a small pack of supplies. At least on the station, she wouldn’t need to worry about environmental hazards or dangerous animals…but beyond that, she couldn’t really consider anything or anyone safe.
She’d heard Saw talk about Five Points before. It was a last-resort sort of place, a den of infamy where the Empire didn’t rule; the gambling lords did. Bounty hunters often met there to pick up new jobs. The black market thrived.
Jyn tucked her hundred credits in a hidden pocket of her pants. They would not last long. She had to find food and a ship out of there. It didn’t matter where.
The lift doors opened, and Jyn stepped into the station’s main hub. Five Points was nothing compared with the city-planet of Coruscant, but it was a hundred times larger than the town on Skuhl had been. With a finite amount of space, the inhabitants of the station occupied every area. Living cubes were built all along the walls, so high that if she stood on top of them, Jyn’s fingers could have brushed the ceiling. Despite that, many of the solar lights embedded in the metal ceilings were burned out—or perhaps just broken—casting the entire city into a perpetual twilight.
Someone bumped Jyn’s shoulder, hard, and she scooted out of the main line of foot traffic. She leaned her back against the wall of a nearby shop, her eyes alert, watching the various types of people walking by.
“So I knew Crawfin was on my tail, yeah?” someone said in a deep voice. A large man with broad hands was talking animatedly to a Twi’lek. The Twi’lek kept her eyes on the ground, not on the man who was clearly trying to impress her. “So what did I do? What’d I do? I took my ship straight into Smuggler’s Run. Knew he couldn’t catch me there. Hid out, caught a hyperspace route, and here I am.” The young man puffed out his chest.
“Uh-huh,” the Twi’lek said, glancing at the comlink strapped to her wrist.
The couple continued down the street, but Jyn bit her lip, thinking. Smuggler’s Run…She could use some of her credits to comm Saw. He owed her.
She snorted at her own stupidity. She could no more contact Saw than she could her father. Both men had proven exactly where their loyalties lay. Her father cared more about his science and the Empire than about her. And Saw cared more about himself.
Jyn scanned the crowd again, though, half wondering if Berk, the man Saw had hired to spy on her, was out there. Her hand went to her hidden pocket, the hundred credits. If Saw knew…
He left me to die, she told herself.
She could still smell Tamsye Prime, burning.
No Saw. This was just Jyn being weak. Her home on Skuhl had been destroyed by the Empire much like her home on Lah’mu had; stormtroopers had invaded like parasitic space ants, eating away at another place she had felt safe. Saw had saved her once. But she would never ask for his salvation again.
She pushed off the wall, heading aimlessly down the street, absorbing Five Points. She chanted in her head with every step the things she needed: food, shelter, a ship off this place. Food. Shelter. Ship.
Saw may not have been the answer to her problems, but at least his training would come in handy. At the heart of every punch and each cold night, he had been teaching her how to survive in this galaxy. Food. Shelter. Ship. Survive.
She needed a job. Anything would do. Well—not anything. Not yet anyway. But definitely something. She could forge Imperial freight route passes—that could work. There had to be a demand for those, considering the new blockades and checkpoints.
She felt the brush of a touch on her hip, near her pocket, where her only credits were. Instinct took over; she snatched the slimy wrist of a Caldanian and twisted it away from her. The Caldanian cried out in pain, a gurgling, low sound, and Jyn tightened her grip.
“Let go of my man,” a Gigoran said. His translator was old and broken, the words barely understandable through the crackle in the speakers, further drowned out by the respirator he wore over his mouth.
What an odd pair, Jyn thought, evaluating them. The Gigoran’s long, fine white fur was matted and dirty but still stuck to the Caldanian’s dark-brown, slimy skin. Tendrils of the Gigoran’s fur clumped around the Caldanian’s elbows and in the hollow spaces that encircled his long neck.
The crowd drifted apart, leaving Jyn, the Caldanian, and the Gigoran in a pocket of space between a wall and a dead-end alley. Jyn could potentially burst past the two and into the crowd, but she was fairly certain that would do her no good. Not there. She couldn’t see them, but there were surely others watching like carrion birds, waiting to see whom they could pick off next.
Jyn cracked her knuckles as the Gigoran and Caldanian grew closer. Fine. She was going to have to rely on Saw’s other lessons on survival.
The Caldanian struck first, which Jyn had been fearing. Caldanians didn’t have bones, just a flexible cartilage that they could change the rigidity of. The surface of their skin was also covered in a tacky mucus that could potentially slow her down. She needed to strike hard and fast, and she couldn’t waste time getting too close.