Star Wars: Rebel Rising(7)

This is a training exercise, she thought. Nothing else.

“Take aim,” Saw said.

Jyn held the blaster in front of her with her right hand. It shook, so she raised her left hand, gripping her right wrist to steady the blaster. Breathe in. Aim. Breathe out.

Shoot.

The stormtrooper’s body danced against the metal comm tower, swinging out like a puppet whose strings had twitched.

“Good girl,” Saw said. He took the blaster from Jyn and handed her a pair of crudely carved clubs about the length of her forearm. Hand-to-hand combat.

On Coruscant, her mother had signed her up for kinesthetic and gymnastic lessons. “Because you always have so much energy!” Mama had said with a laugh. But maybe that hadn’t been the whole reason.

Jyn tested the weight of the clubs. She thought about how much force to apply against the flesh inside the armor.

“Go,” Saw ordered.

Jyn took a deep breath and slowly approached the closest stormtrooper, the one she had shot. It was easier, somehow, to think of beating the dead body of the stormtrooper she’d already shot once. She reared back with all her weight and slammed the club into its abdomen. The stormtrooper swung wide, and Jyn fell to the ground. She had struck with the expectation of hitting a body in armor; instead she realized that the stormtrooper armor was empty. Jyn squinted at the other stormtroopers strung up on the tower and noticed how easily they moved in the wind. None of them were people, just the outer shell of armor.

“Again,” Saw said in an even voice as Jyn stood back up and brushed herself off.

Her arm ached from how she had fallen, and she dropped the truncheons with a soft thud at her feet. “I can just use a blaster,” she said. “I don’t have to do all this.”

Saw made his way slowly to Jyn, then knelt on one knee in front of her so he was looking right into her eyes. “I have seen freedom fighters survive in battles against blasters and laser cannons,” he said, not even blinking. “And I have seen rebels take down armies with nothing more than rocks and sticks.”

He picked up the truncheons and pressed them into Jyn’s hands.

“Again,” he said, standing up and stepping back as Jyn assumed her fighting stance.

Jyn forced herself to picture the troopers who had killed her mother, to remember the fear she had felt when they chased her, the rage when they took her father. She felt those memories inside her like a burning ember in her belly, and she only let the clubs fall from her numb fingers when she was certain her fire wouldn’t dim.



Jyn soon learned why Saw had bunkers with beds in them. The first ship landed on their little island the next month, and soon after, another. People greeted Saw like an old friend, stared at Jyn curiously, and filed into the rooms with beds as if they’d stayed there many times before.

They brought their own food.

“Only Saw could live on that crap,” one of the new arrivals, a Twi’lek named Xosad Hozem, said as he unloaded groceries into the cabinets. “You’re a cute little thing,” he added to Jyn, curiosity in his voice.

“Go to your room,” Saw said, and Jyn fled.

The others were loud. They talked a lot. They drank a lot. But they were mostly friendly. There was Xosad, the Twi’lek Saw knew from “the good old days,” and a crew of young men he’d brought with him—two more Twi’leks and a Togruta. Reece Tallent was a human, about twenty or so, Jyn guessed, with dark brown hair and nice blue eyes. He had a similar accent to Saw’s, and Jyn wondered if they were from the same planet. A woman came often as well, closer to Saw’s age, with black skin that seemed to sparkle blue in the light and hair that grew straight up from her head. She was so beautiful that Jyn couldn’t help staring at her, and she spoke her name with a lilting, musical voice: Idryssa Barruck. She carried a pair of machetes on her back, thick heavy weapons that didn’t seem to fit her lithe gracefulness.

Idryssa also brought clothes for Jyn. Saw had been giving her old things—oversized shirts Jyn wore as dresses, pants she cinched in with a leather belt. Idryssa brought Jyn real clothes and had a private conversation with her about hygiene and health. Jyn suspected Saw had invited Idryssa in part just to talk to her, and she appreciated both the kindness and the fact that he never brought it up.

After getting to know Idryssa better, Jyn was brave enough to go into the big common room while everyone else was there. Saw noticed her first and nodded that it was okay for her to pillage the cabinets for food.

“My men have been to Christophsis, and there’s nothing there,” Xosad was saying. The Togruta nodded in agreement.

“The Empire had done some mining there, but they were gone when we looked, and it didn’t seem like they were coming back,” he said.

“Ilum is another story,” Idryssa said.

Jyn paused as she reached for a wrapped pastry in the cabinet, a rare treat in Saw’s outpost. She recognized that name, Ilum. Her father had spoken of it before, but he had told her it was a secret world, used by the Jedi. Jyn could see her father clearly, standing in their apartment on Coruscant, talking about how the Jedi had kept such a valuable planet to themselves for so long and how the Empire was now protecting it. Jyn would have forgotten about the conversation had it not been for the disapproving scowl of her mother as she shook her head at Papa’s words.

Jyn wasn’t surprised that Saw knew about Ilum; he had been following Papa’s work since he’d helped them move to Lah’mu. But these other people seemed to know just as much.