You Must (Not) Let Go

Part 5

Cool water from the showerhead beat down on her head, sluicing over her naked skin. Bastila was nibbling on her neck, hands roaming freely over her body, nimble fingers skirting teasingly across sensitive flesh. The water poured over her face, her nose, covering her mouth, cutting off her breath…

She was slammed into the tiles, knocking her breath out of her. Her ribs creaked painfully as a heavy knee landed in the middle of her back, stopping her lungs from drawing in more oxygen. The smell of rancid sweat and rust and mould surrounded her and hard hands clawed at her, tearing at her flesh, ripping her skin. Her eye was plucked from her skull and she tried to scream but she was drowning in blood.

Sera screamed, the sound coming out wet and garbled through the gunk in her mouth. There was an odd, chemical taste on her tongue. She panicked, slapping at the hands touching her, frantic to get away from her assailants.

“It’s awake! Ghost, go get the bomb!”

More hands grabbed at her, pulling her this way and that. She lashed out, striking anything she could reach.

“Don’t touch me! Get away!”

She pushed herself backwards, trying to put as much distance between herself and… whoever only to come up short when her back thumped into the wall behind her. Her eyes were stinging, something obscuring her vision. Why couldn’t she see properly? Swinging her left arm in a wide arc to keep everyone away, she scraped at the crap covering her face, her mind recoiling when her fingers encountered the obscene cavity in her skull where her eye used to be.

“Go on, go away,” a new voice said, accompanied by the sound of hard slapping and answering yelps. “How would you feel if someone started poking you in your sleep.”

Sera cleared the rest of the gunk from her remaining eye, remembrance of recent events returning in an unpleasant flood. A stout individual in grubby and ill-fitting coveralls stood before her, hands on their hips, short fur lying flat and close to their skin covering their scalp in ragged patches. She was in a… room? Or was it a wreckage? It was difficult to tell in the poor lighting, the walls and ceiling sloping away from her at odd angles, everything looking oddly flat.

“No, don’t wipe it all off. It’s for the radiation.”

“What?” Their accent was weird, one Sera couldn’t quite place. “Where am I? What’s going on?” Her voice sounded creaky and weak, like her throat hadn’t seen any moisture in far too long.

There was a minor kerfuffle off to her left, just out the range of her vision. A slightly shorter member of the stout one’s species pushed through the people crowding into the small space.

“Old Man wants to see it,” they said, grabbing Sera’s wrist and pulling her in the direction they’d come from without so much as a by your leave.

She reflexively jerked her arm back. “Hey!”

“You can’t take it away,” the first one objected. “It’s only just woken up!”

“Yeah, don’t I get a say in all this?”

“Old Man wants to see it,” the smaller one reiterated stubbornly, tugging on Sera’s wrist.

The stout one sighed, breath curling out in large whorls in the cold air. “Fine. But it needs to reapply its gel first.”

“What--” Sera was cut off when she got a handful of the sticky, oily gunk shoved into her face, a rough hand smearing it into every crevice. She flinched away, the stuff burning her eye.

“I know it stings but you’re just going to get used to it.” They looked over their work and nodded in satisfaction while Sera tried her damnedest not to rub her watering eye. “Alright. All yours.”

Sera found herself being pulled along, stumbling on wobbly legs as she was drawn off the bed and through the mass of faces peering at her with interest. She tripped over her own feet, feeling unsteady in the overly-large boots and too-big jumpsuit she realized she was wearing. Sera worked her tongue in mouth, trying to scare up some moisture and make her vocal cords work properly, suddenly realizing how hungry she was. Thirsty too. When had she last had something to eat or drink?

“Hold up,” she said, banging into a bit of piping that was closer than she had thought. “Where are we going?”

For a moment she thought she wasn’t going to get a response. And then…

“Old Man…”

“Okay?”

“...Wants to see you.”

Sera sighed, getting tangled in a hanging cable that she didn’t see. She was led along a winding path, breath freezing in her lungs as they got down on their hands and knees more than once to squeeze through a tight and far too long opening in some foul-smelling rubble. Just at the point when she was about to ask if they were lost, they emerged into a large, empty space that tickled something in slightly fuzzy depths Sera’s brain as indistinct shouts and chatter echoed confusingly off the curved walls. At one end, something glinted dully in the uneven and flickering light from multiple glow lamps and panels placed haphazardly around the space. She was pulled forward once more, only for them both to be stopped by a large, muscular individual, looming over both of them.

“I’ll take it from here, Spike.”

The smaller individual - Spike? - stubbornly stood their ground.

“Old Man says…”

The big one held up a hand. “I know what the King said. But this is the War Leader’s bounty and he wants to present it.”

Sera coughed to get their attention. Then coughed properly when her throat turned out to be more dry and sensitive than she had first thought. “Um.”

They ignored her.

“Old Man’s word is law,” Spike continued undeterred. “He told me to get the bounty for him to look at.”

“The War Leader is the King’s,” Big One emphasized this a bit, “right hand. The bounty will go through him first.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Sera said, suddenly not liking all this talk of “bounties”.

Big One just gave her a look and rolled his eyes.

Spike tightened his grip on Sera’s wrist to an almost painful degree. “Old Man didn’t mention Leader none. I don’t see what he has to do with any of it.”

Big One stepped closer. “Spike, I am bigger than you.”

The two squared it off, while Sera stood, swaying slightly, trying to make sense of it all through a thumping headache. She noticed that she was shivering, each sensation taking its sweet time piercing the fog in her head. Where the hell was she and how was she going to get home? And what the fuck was that smell?!

She dragged her attention back to the present. The two were still glaring at each other but Spike was starting to fidget nervously under the weight of the Big One’s glowering.

“Hey, can I use your comm?” she said, finally getting two thoughts together long enough to form a course of action. “I have someone I wanna contact.” She didn’t want to go another minute without calling Bastila to tell her she was okay. Then I can apologize for being an asshole and we can sit and talk.

Spike dropped her wrist and ran away, head tucked into his chest in shame. Big One’s shoulders dropped, relief plain on his face. He gestured towards Sera without looking at her.

“Come.” He started walking, not turning back to see if she was following.

She didn’t budge. “Is there a comm where we’re going?”

He scowled at her in the dim lighting and flexed at her threateningly. She stared back impassively, not really interested in getting into a fight, especially not after… Warm blood spurted over her fist. There was a broken cry of a child, a pained and haunting scream. She pressed into the wound, blood and viscera engulfing her hand. The smell of copper was everywhere, inescapable, as the life she had ruined sputtered out and died. The blood drained out of Sera’s face, her stomach sickening. Why hadn’t she remembered before? Did the lives of her victims mean so little to her? The Big One’s menacing forgotten, she scrabbled at the collar of her jumpsuit, searching around her neck for Wes’s dog tags while guilt clawed at her.

A slight individual with patches of pale brown skin around their eyes and ears strode up to them, appearing suddenly out of Sera’s blind side. “What is this? What’s taking you so long?”

“It refused to move, War Leader,” Big One said.

“Where is it?” Sera demanded, breath coming out in short, panicked bursts.

“Who cares? Come. We’re late already.”

She started pulling at the jumpsuit, searching in every fold and crevice. “I had a… I was wearing something. A necklace. Where is it?” She had to find it. She had to.

The new individual let out an annoyed huff. “We needed it to patch a water tank. Now, come on. We don’t have much time.”

Shaken by her inability to keep even the simplest promise, she allowed herself to be pushed along, not resisting when the Big One steered her towards the end with the glinting thing. There was a small, rowdy group gathered at the base of the thing, mismatched trestle tables and benches arranged in a loose loop around a fire over which several things were being cooked by the… smell and a mound of detritus and rubble supporting the seat and back of a chair, raised to throne-like prominence above the room. Atop sat one larger and harder than any of the others Sera had seen, a cruel scar running down the deep black fur on their face, through the patch of pure white down their throat and chest. They held a polished metal cup in their hand, from which they took periodic swigs, refilling it from a grubby jug sitting next to their seat, a strong smell of alcohol pervading the air. The thing behind looming over them all, a great, jagged slab of some material Sera didn’t recognize covered in scratches she couldn’t quite make sense of, throwing golden reflections from the sputtering lamps and the fire around the space.

The slight individual, the War Leader, made some sign that Sera didn’t quite see and she felt Big One’s hand grab her by the scruff of her neck. Sera could hear people whispering and nudging each other, awareness of their arrival rippling through the small group. The laser focus curiosity of dozens of eyes converged on Sera and she would have squirmed away from their gaze were it not for the powerful grip rooting her to the spot. Her arm was seized in a painful grasp.

“Don’t embarrass me,” the War Leader hissed into her ear.

They stepped forward without waiting for Sera’s response, raising their hand to catch the attention of the one on the throne.

“My King,” they said, back straight and hands clasped neatly behind them. “The bounty I captured on our last raid has finally awoken. Let me present it to you, my King.”

The one on the throne turned an indolent eye on the three of them.

“Well, well. If it isn’t Little Bone coming with his Right Hand.” The rest of the group sniggered and Sera felt Big One’s grip tighten painfully on the back of her neck. “You here to deliver the last piece of crap from the trip I sent you on? Did you manage to find anything of worth at all digging around in the trash? All I see is some,” he looked Sera over, seeming unimpressed by what he found, “worthless scrap of a criminal.”

The group laughed. Sera flinched.

“Where are you even from?”

“I…” Sera froze, uncertain how much she wanted to reveal but mindful of the War Leader’s implied threat. “I, uh, I’m from a, an agricultural system. A farming planet,” she clarified unnecessarily.

“And where abouts is this farming planet, criminal? How did you even get here?” He said it casually but there was a hungry light in his eyes.

“It’s, uh… My ship was attacked on my way back home and was knocked off course.” She swallowed. “If you give me a map, I can show you where.”

The King let out a soft huff and slumped back into his throne, taking a long drink from his cup.

Sera tried again. “Please. My partner is waiting at home for me. She will be very unhappy if I don’t make it home safe and sound soon.”

He grinned at his underling, long canines gleaming evilly in the light of the fire. “Is this really the best you could do, Little Bone?”

Sera could feel the War Leader vibrating with shame and humiliation from their King’s words, the paler skin on the back of their neck reddening under their neatly shaved fur.

The King barked out a laugh, loud and shocking, making everyone jump.

“I’m just messing with you, Leader! Can’t you take a joke!” He kept laughing, stamping his feet and pointing at his War Leader as if he had told the funniest joke in the galaxy. From the way every single member of the formerly rowdy group watched the King with apprehension, Sera surmised that this was not an uncommon event. “Go on! Sit down, all of you! We’ve been roasting up the last of the meat our mighty War Leader brought back for us!”

Sera heard a relieved sigh coming from Big One still maintaining a vice grip on the back of her neck. But the War Leader didn’t seem quite so thrilled, stalking towards a seat near the throne, head down and jaw tight. Sera, at a loss of what else to do, made to follow, only for Big One to pull her up short and direct her forcefully towards a spot on a bench between two fidgeting individuals. Someone nearby was complaining about something to another, the other responding with calm but annoyed firmness. She sat a little awkwardly, arms folded tight across her chest to ward off the bitter cold. The fire provided warmth but not as much as she would have thought given its size. She glanced around, shifting on the bench until the vision of her remaining eye was centred on her surroundings. Nobody else seemed bothered by it. Was it because of her injuries? She surreptitiously slid a hand up around the back of her neck, the gunk that had been slathered on her having dried and thickened to a viscous mess beneath her fingers. Tentatively, to avoid causing herself any further harm, she sought out the wound where her implant port used to be but was astonished to find a smooth hollow of oddly sensitive scar tissue instead. The wound had completely healed. How the hell long have I been out?! Her head had also been shaved, apparently. Rather badly too, although that was significantly less disturbing than the discovery that an unknown amount of time had slipped by.

Before she had time to spiral into thoughts of Bastila thinking she was gone for good, the person sitting next to her nudged her. She jerked her head up to see a platter of… something being offered to her by her neighbour. He smiled, a little shyly, reminding Sera of someone she couldn’t quite place at the moment, then noticed that others were watching him and scowled fiercely at her. She took the platter. None of it looked appealing but she was fucking hungry and she knew she needed to eat. Selecting a piece at random, she passed the platter on. She sniffed at it, unease rippling in the Force. Everybody else was tucking in, not paying any heed to decorum, so she took a bite. It was meaty. She didn’t like it. Fairly plainly prepared, no sauce or spices. A bit dry and tough too.

Someone was watching her. She glanced up and met the King’s gaze. He was leaning forward, watching her eat intently, almost gleefully, a cruel grin on his face. She took a second look at the rest of the group. They ate as though they were starving, as if it were their last meal, but they also ate grimly, mechanically shoving food into their mouths and swallowing it. Her gaze dropped to the bone in her hand. The metacarpal slipped numbly from her fingers, the flesh still attached to it hitting the table with a soft thunk. Sera clapped a hand to her mouth, gorge rising in her throat. The King’s eyes bore into her, daring her to swallow, to take her sustenance in anyway possible. She tasted bile in her mouth. Could she do it? Did she want to?

Sera pushed herself away from the bench, falling to her knees and retching, vomiting up every shred of sentient flesh in her stomach. There was laughter behind her.

“Mitri, I can’t find my stuffed salish…”

Sera’s eyes snapped up. A small individual, although not that much smaller than the rest, was tugging on another’s arm, sounding whiny and tired.

“Mitri…”

“Nadi, I told you not to bring it up here!”

The little one stamped their foot. “It’s Acid!”

Sera gazed around the group, noting the fidgeting, the size difference between the smallest and the largest, the raucous but simple jokes.

“Where are your parents?” she asked, horrified.

Big One and the War Leader both scowled at her. The King - the teenager - yawned boredly and opened his mouth to respond when a kid ran frantically up to the throne, the ragged spacesuit they were wearing steaming in the cold.

“They got us! Bikova came back early! Rot got caught!” He bent over at the waist, huffing and coughing from exertion.

The King smirked at the shocked look on Sera’s face.

“Get it a spacesuit!” he said, pointing at Sera. “We’re going to show it what happens when someone crosses us!”

A great cheer went up, the smaller kids jumping around, their wretched meal forgotten while Sera was hauled off by two bigger kids at the King’s sign and stuffed into a musty old spacesuit that had been designed for someone much broader and taller than her. Before she could complain about the smell, they dragged her along a twisting and confusing route, her feet suddenly leaving the ground as the gravity gave out beneath her. She let out an undignified squeak and grabbed at the two kids who were inexplicably rooted to the ground.

“Fucking idiot,” the one kid said bluntly, giving something on her stomach an uncomfortably hard slap.

“Yeah! Fucking idiot!” the other said cheerfully.

The suit around her grew heavy, dropping her back to the ground. Oh, yeah. Gravity harness, she thought, feeling like bit of a fucking idiot. Her weighted feet squished into something as she landed, sinking into a surface that was less solid than she realized. She glanced down, her foot illuminated by a thin shaft of bright light. Diapers? She looked around, realizing that they had reached what appeared to be the surface. Not just diapers, trash of all kinds stretching out as far as the eye could see, lit harshly in the unfiltered light of space. Above them, a miasma of trash and dust hung thickly around a dirty brown planet, looking distinctly unspectacular from their vantage point. Sera stared at it, then blinked, trying to figure out where the hell they might be.

“Stop gawping and get over here, criminal!”

A tossed piece of rubble accompanied the deafening blast over the suit’s internal comm indicating where the King was yelling at her from. He and the rest of the kids all stood in suits as worn and ill-fitting as her own, only the King and a few of the larger kids getting close to filling them out. They were all next to a mismatched collection of roughly log-shaped things with a stubby cone on the front that Sera’s brain was trying to convince her were speeder bikes but their proportions were all wrong. And they looked like they were all engine.

The kid who had activated her suit’s gravity gave her a shove in the direction of the larger group. Sera trotted forward, just barely missing the other kid’s jovial shove. The rest had all mounted their vehicle things, piling on three or four per machine, tiny kids in their baggy spacesuits perching precariously between their larger brethren. She was pushed onto one of the vehicles behind and found herself sandwiched uncomfortably between two older kids.

“Um…” she said, eyeing one little one sitting on the very end of a vehicle, swinging their legs back and forth right above the engine’s propulsion nozzle.

“Stop making a scene,” the kid in front of her hissed. It was the War Leader.

Sera searched for the suit’s controls to switch over to a private comm channel but there didn’t seem to be one.

“Shouldn’t these things have seatbelts?” she whispered, hoping to be ignored by the rest of the group’s chattering.

“I don’t know what girly shit you’re talking about. Now, keep your mouth shut and hold on.”

Sera frowned and opened her mouth to respond when the King gave a shout and a roar went up in response from the group. The engines all ignited, exhaust glowing hot and bright in the marginal atmosphere of the satellite. Sera grabbed at the plating of the rattling and shaking vehicle beneath her, holding on for dear fucking life as they rocketed from the foetid trash field towards the planet below, warnings jangling in the Force the whole way. She nearly wet herself when they hit the atmosphere and she found herself engulfed in sixteen hundred degree plasma, only the thin blue sparking of a heat shield and a very wonky inertial damper protecting them from the forces of reentry.

They shot through the atmosphere, coming to a jarring, screeching halt as the kids skidded their still-hot vehicle things across icy ground, using friction as their brake. Sera prised herself off her seat while the rest hopped off gleefully, full of youthful energy, pulling helmets and spacesuits off. She tentatively popped the seals on her helmet, getting a whiff of the damp and mouldy air before removing it fully. There probably wasn’t much need to be so careful, having breathed the same air as the kids for who knows how long back on their base thing. But she’d had a rough day, her head was aching, her mouth still tasted of sick and there was no harm in being cautious.

Frosty tundra stretched out in all directions. A large expanse of chilly looking water lay beyond what she presumed to be a village, rickety agricultural machinery that Bastila would probably be able to identify moving slowly across its surface and a small herd of some sort of chunky animal foraging at its edges. Sera thought there might be a range of mountains off in the distance but it was difficult to tell against the dingy sky. She disengaged the gravity harness and peeled off her spacesuit as she felt her spine decompress, cantering to catch up with the others as they made for the ragged collection of buildings clinging to the grubby earth.

The kids ran through the village, yelling and smashing windows as they went, overturning containers and shoving aside whoever they met. Sera stared after them in horror. Then her brain kicked into gear as she wondered what she was expecting and she ran after them, catching a pregnant young woman as she was about to fall. The young woman gave her a startled look before Sera chased to catch up with the head of the group, not quite sure what she was going to do when she got there.

The bulk of the kids were clustered around the entrance to a beat up warehouse, a crowd of locals forming around the disturbance. Sera struggled to push her way through to the front, getting more odd looks as she passed. There was a commotion and the teenage King emerged from the warehouse followed by a couple of the bigger kids manhandling a man in worn workman’s clothes with a stream of blood flowing through thinning fur on his head out of the building. There was a thick belt in his hand and he was yelling obscenities at the King as he struggled. Behind them came a crying boy covered in welts from head to toe carried by a group of kids. A mixture of alarmed and curious murmurings came from the crowd of onlookers, some scandalized by either or the swearing man’s behaviour and the intrusion of the King’s band, some excited to have some break to the tedium of their lives, some happy to see their son’s and siblings, gone for so long.

Sera wriggled through the mass of people to reach the boy. The older boys didn’t want to let her through but were more interested in watching the altercation between their King and the older man to pay her too much mind. The boy was badly beaten, back a mass of bruises and he was bleeding from several cuts where the belt had broken his skin. He flinched when Sera laid a careful hand on his shoulder, the pained tremors that wracked his body slowly subsiding as she pushed as much healing energy as she could into him.

“Your father should have beaten you harder if you can’t keep your followers in line, boy! You never could--!”

The man’s words were cut off when the King struck him hard across the mouth, turning the crowd’s murmurings angry and disapproving, the King’s face twisting around his scar into a cruel mask. The man spat out a mouthful of blood on the frozen ground and glowered up at the youth, lips curled in a sneer.

“Just you wait until I catch you without your little posse, boy, and I’ll show you how a real man deals with his enemies.”

“That’ll be difficult for you to do after we’ve finished teaching you a lesson, old man,” the King said, wresting the belt from the older man’s grasp and winding it around his own hand.

It was no good. There was only so much she could do to relieve the boy’s pain and next to nothing that she could do towards actually healing him. She took a deep breath.

“Does anyone have a medpac or some kolto that I could use?” she said loudly and clearly, projecting her voice over the noisy crowd.

The old man laughed. “What lesson? Your thieving brat spoiled our last clean tank of water. I was just taking my pound of flesh.”

There were far too many satisfied nods and shouts of agreement from the crowd.

“Please!” Sera said, trying again. “This kid needs treatment! Is there a doctor or something similar nearby?”

The King raised his hand and brought the belt down in a cruel blow against the older man’s chest. “I’m going to break your arms and legs, old man, then I’m going to rape your wife and your daughters while you watch. Then I’m going to--”

Sera’s temper finally snapped. “What the fucking hell is wrong with all of you?”

Her roar cut through the air, silencing every tongue. Several hundred pairs of eyes trained on her showing varying degrees of shock, surprise and anger.

“There is an injured child here! Can you not take five minutes to--”

Her head jerked back a moment too late as the King backhanded her, reflexes slow after so long living in peace alongside the love of her life.

“Do not interrupt me when I am speaking!” the King yelled in her face, breath reeking of alcohol.

Her face stung -- a lot! -- but she was too pissed off to care.

“This child is--!”

She was ready this time when the King lashed out, catching his wrist and glaring at him.

“This child is under your care. His well being is more important than any fucking feud you happen to be having!”

For the briefest moment it seemed as though the young man didn’t know how to respond to this, looking uncertain and very young and lost. Then his expression hardened up and he turned sharply away from her.

“Demon! Reaper! Clear a ring! The outsider thinks it can challenge me!”

There was a flurry of activity. The two named kids moved into the crowd, directing adults and kids alike to clear a space. For their part, the villagers seemed only too happy to stand back and watch the entertainment, small children, both of the King’s band and those belonging to the village, sent off to retrieve refreshments and one or two bets being negotiated. The War Leader walked past her, catching her eye and shaking their head disapprovingly. Before she could respond, a stout man who looked vaguely familiar elbowed his way through the crowd and knelt beside her and the injured boy.

“Hello,” he said genially. “I’m the closest thing we have to a doctor. I’ll make sure young Nico here is taken care of.”

“Shuko, you leave that boy exactly as he is!” the older man who had started all of this said. “He has to learn the consequences of his actions!”

Shuko waved him off, smiling placidly at Sera. “Good luck for your fight with Sandri, outsider. It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.”

“Uh, thanks?” Fight? Fuck, duh, of course. “Um, any advice?”

Shuko shook his head, still smiling that calm, happy smile. “None whatsoever. We haven’t seen Sandri fight since he killed his father a few years ago. Who knows what else he’s learned since then.”

Right, to the death. “Fuck’s sake,” she muttered, dusting off her hands and settling herself into her oversized jumpsuit as best as she could, shifting around to feel for any loose folds of fabric that might trip her up. How do I get myself into these fucking messes?

Turning her back on the injured boy and not-quite-Doctor Shuko, she faced the space that had been cleared for them. The King -- Sandri -- was stripped to the waist, muscles rippling beneath his black fur. Sera didn’t think she’d realized just how tall he was. Shit. Fuck. She took a deep breath. He’s also been drinking heavily, so use that to your advantage. She stepped out into the clearing. A small cheer went up. One or two of the villagers clapped and called the King’s name, only to be shushed by those around them. It didn’t stop the cheers going up though, the crowd seemingly uncertain whether they were supporting the drunken, violent son of the village or the alien newcomer who had cussed them all out.

Sandri shot forward, faster than she was expecting, fist swinging in a wide arc for Sera’s head. She ducked quickly, circling around him out of his reach and aiming a sharp jab at his torso. Her blow came up short, missing Sandri for a good few inches. She cursed and jumped back, stomach clenching. She’d forgotten about her fucking depth perception! Keeping her distance, she blocked each of Sandri’s heavy blows, mind racing for a way around her disability.

No ideas were forthcoming. And Sandri had figured out that she wasn’t some green civilian who had never been in a fight and was tightening up his swings, not giving anything away about his next moves. Could she keep him moving until he tired himself out? When she felt like shit and she still hadn’t had a chance to rinse out her mouth or get some decent food in her stomach? While her opponent was a teenager in the flower of his youth and at the height of his energy? Fuck, it made her tired just thinking about it. So she thought “fuck it”, darted in close and kicked him in the balls.

Sandri went down as a disapproving cry from the crowd went up. He grabbed at Sera’s oversized jumpsuit as he fell, dragging her to the ground. She brought her fist down squarely in his face, just barely missing his similarly aimed blow coming up the other way. The crowd cheered, their previous disapproval forgotten. Sandri kicked at her legs and flipped them both over, grabbing at her neck and face and raining blows down from above. Sera kept her forearms up to protect her head while she used her legs to lever him up off the ground. He got ahold of her neck, squeezing the life out of her. Her throat burned, her vision dulling around the edges…

Her fist crunched into the hard, metal jaw of her opponent, the bones of her hand breaking under the pressure. Uncaring, she drew her shattered fist back and slammed it into the supple blood red armour around her opponent’s side…

Her blow sank into the broken flesh of her opponent, releasing a torrent of blood over her fist…

Blood spurted around her knife embedded in her opponent’s neck. Gloved hand gripping his masked face, she twisted the knife free and thrust it back into her opponent’s flesh…

Her fist flew out, catching him in the throat and the nose in quick succession. Not giving Sandri time to collect himself, Sera kicked explosively at the ground, knocking the young man off her. She reversed their positions quickly, grabbing him from behind and getting him in a headlock. He clawed at her hands, kicking and thrashing to wrest control away from her. But she held on doggedly, feeling his attempts grow weaker as his breath grew shorter. Her head felt light, there was a static buzzing in her ears, but she just had to hold on a little while longer until he was out cold.

~~~

A child, maybe more than one, was jumping up and down nearby and chattering away in a tone that might be considered by some to constitute “yelling”. Further away it sounded like there was… talking? Sera’s eyes fluttered open. There was a painted ceiling above her, blue and green patterns that must have been bright and colourful once upon a time. She closed her eyes again. Her head ached. More than ached, actually. There was a metallic taste in her mouth, her tongue and cheeks throbbing. She made to lift her hand to investigate only to find that that was more difficult than it sounded. She was so fucking tired. She felt like she’d been beaten like one of Mrs Bima’s old rugs and not in the fun way. After many failed attempts, she got her hand up to her mouth and felt around blindly with the tips of her fingers. She whimpered pathetically as the salt on her skin met lacerated flesh. Her tongue and the inside of her cheeks were badly cut up, feeling like she’d been gnawing on them like it was her last meal.

Sera struggled to sit up. She felt terrible, just completely, absolutely like shit. She didn’t think she’d felt this tired and bruised and just sore since, probably since after the Star Forge, actually, when the adrenaline had left her and the physical cost of the day’s battle had made itself known. The difference was she had a warm girlfriend to cuddle with then. Where the hell is she, anyway? Sera turned her head, certain she heard Bastila’s footstep behind her. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. Of course she wasn’t. Sera was still in parts unknown and hadn’t had a chance to call home yet. She shook her head, feeling sluggish and groggy. She had been doing something. Somewhere else, not here. What the fuck was it?

There was a piercing shriek that threatened to separate the flesh from her bones. Then she was smacked in the face with something soft and plush before childish footsteps thundered away from her.

“It’s awake!” the voice yelled excitedly. “Mama, it’s awake!”

So that was a friendly smack in the face then? She ran a hand over her face, feeling delicate. “Ow…”

“Nadi, use your inside voice, please. Lana, would you get the outsider something to drink and set a place for them at the table?”

“It’s Acid!”

“Why do I have to do it? If Nadi’s old enough to run away to the moon, he’s old enough to do some chores.”

“Don’t talk back to your mother, girl,” a different adult said sharply.

Sera struggled up from what she realized was someone’s couch, old and thin and covered in cushions and throws that were themselves old and thin, and tottered through to where the voices were coming from to head off any arguments between parent and child. She found them all in the room next door, a large gathering of mostly what she presumed to be adults and a few children clustered around a table in a room that was really too small for all of them. The not-quite doctor from before spotted her standing in the doorway and raised a glass in her direction.

“The conquering hero returns,” he said loudly, attracting the attention of most of the room. “Cheers!” Then he drained his glass in one long gulp, letting out a satisfied gasp at the end.

Hero? “Ah!” The fight! Of course! How could she forget? How did she forget?

“Come!” He slapped the seat next to him. “We must celebrate!” It seemed as though that had not been his first glass of the evening.

“Um…” Sera slipped awkwardly in between everyone onto the seat, feeling stiff and sore. “Did I win?” It doesn’t feel like it. I had gotten Sandri into a chokehold, ready to subdue him, and then…

The not-quite doctor, Shuko, she remembered, laughed, slapping her back heartily. Definitely not his first glass. The little one from earlier in the day, the little shrieker who had lost (and apparently found again) his stuffed thingy, wriggled in next to Sera.

“You had him!” he said, still not using his inside voice. “You had the Old Man and you were beating him and then you started spazzing out, like…” He demonstrated, flailing his arms and shoulders about, rolling his eyes back in his head. Then he laughed, slapping his hands on the table.

Sera felt featureless dread creep over her. “Uh. Uh-huh.”

An older woman clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Little boys should be seen and not heard.”

Another woman with a pristine patch of white down her chin and throat contrasting sharply with her pitch black fur gave the little boy a hard look. “Especially little boys who abandon kith and kin to live with ravening beasts.”

“Leave the boy be, Anasha,” Shuko said, inebriation making him loud. “It’s only natural for a young man to seek out fame and renown amongst his peers.”

Sera was only half paying attention to all this when she felt a nudge at her elbow on her left side. She turned, pulling her torso and neck around to an awkward degree until she could see another woman altogether standing at her side offering her a glass full to the brim.

“I’m sorry, outsider,” she said with a syrupy sweet tone. “Usually we wouldn’t even think, or at least I wouldn’t, to offer you anything that Riaky had a hand in making but, as I’m sure you are aware, Nico’s eldest fouled the last clean water we had for the week, so I’m afraid you’ll have to make do.”

Sera took the glass. “Um…”

“He should be whipped in the streets for what he did,” an older woman, lean and wrinkled with fur that was mostly grey said, “not coddled by his uncle and allowed to sleep off his punishment.” She shook a knobbly finger in Shuko’s direction. “In my day, our elders never let us get away with any cheek or insolence and we turned out right. None of this fooling around with strangers, chasing after hollow dreams and striking our parents!”

Shuko gave her a quelling look. “It was an accident. They were only trying to get some supplies.”

“Andrian shouldn’t have gotten involved anyway,” said a woman on the other end of the table as she stirred something into her drink. “It’s a father’s job to discipline his children.”

“Wait,” Sera said, feeling a little slow on the uptake. “You’re that kid’s uncle.”

“I am,” Shuko said, smiling. “He’s my younger brother’s boy. Thank you for concerning yourself with his well being, outsider.”

“No problem. Um, it’s Sera.”

A woman bustled through the door opposite, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Food’s almost ready. We’re just waiting for Dara’s stew to heat through,” she said. Sera recognized her as the parental voice from a few moments ago. “Why don’t you go through and wash that industrial stink off.” She addressed this to Sera. “Nadi will show you the way.”

“Acid…”

“Yes, dear. Don’t forget to scrub yourself clean too or there won’t be any dinner.”

“‘Kay.”

Nadi - Acid - grabbed Sera by the arm and started pulling her away. She placed her glass carefully on the table and followed him. He led her to a small refresher where he handed her a damp hand towel, then got one for himself, bouncing up and down on his toes humming a little tune while he cleaned the gunk off his face and neck with practiced efficiency. Sera caught a glimpse of herself in the chipped but spotless mirror, flinching her gaze away quickly. Screwing her eye firmly shut, she followed the little boy’s lead, stopping to sniff the towel before she touched it to her face. Whatever it was soaked with had an odd smell. She scrubbed the weird crap from her skin, skirting over the left side of her face.

Acid finished up before her, running off back to the others. Sera followed more slowly, still drained from her fight with Sandri and the, the seizure or whatever that she’d had after. She rolled her shoulders as she approached the dining room, trying to release the tension within.

“--don’t know where it came from or what it’s doing here.”

“Did you hear? Apparently, young Sandri called it a criminal before he left.”

“Ellina told Vita that Ulale’s youngest, you know, the one that was making free with our Gena, said that Imil picked it up on some inferno of a planet, not a single thing left standing, everything blown to smithereens.” They snapped their fingers to indicate what they thought of that.

Someone clicked their tongue disapprovingly. “Leave it to that one to bring a rascal here. Nothing but trouble he’s been since the day he popped out of his mother’s womb.”

Sera stood frozen just beyond the door, stomach twisting into tight knots. For a single paranoid instant, she believed they would figure out who she was, turn on her and deliver swift and brutal justice. Then she shook it off, unable to stop her shoulders hunching defensively when she walked back through the door. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone soon, back home. She took her seat next to Shuko as large platters and dishes were brought to the table by Acid’s mother and sisters, loading it down until the table groaned. Sera eyed the steaming food suspiciously, remembering her last meal in this system.

“Um…” she said, taking the plate offered to her by a pregnant teenager and picking selectively from what looked the most botanical. Which there wasn’t much of. Everything looked very meaty. “Could I use your comm? I need to call my girlfriend to come pick me up.”

Acid’s mother gave her an odd look. “I think Vlasi Zhaoffedov might have one. You can ask him in the morning.”

Sera frowned, cocking her head in surprise. “Okay?”

A heavy bowl was thrust in her direction.

“Take some of Dara’s salish stew, outsider. She spent all morning cooking it.”

“It’s Sera,” she reiterated, taking a spoonful to be polite.

“So, outsider,” one of the women who had been gossiping about her said, “tell us about your family and where you come from.”

Sera speared a pasty bit of tuber. “Uh, I live with my girlfriend on a station in the Garqi system. We do maintenance work in the area.” She popped the bite in her mouth. It had the taste and texture of packing material.

"Never heard of it!" an old man said into his drink.

“No, no,” the woman said with an insistent smile. “Not where you live now, outsider. Where are you from?”

Sera swallowed, the food going down with some difficulty. “Um. I’m, um…” Fuck. “I’m… I’m from the Deralia system, I guess.” That didn’t sound sketchy at all.

The woman wouldn’t be turned aside. “What about your family? What do they do?”

What’s it to you? “Uh, I don’t really know, actually. I’m, well, I’m an orphan, I suppose.” There’s no reason whatsoever for that to be true. It's entirely likely that you're saying that to milk sympathy. She took another tasteless bite of the food in front of her, chewing and swallowing quickly to buy herself some time. “My, um, my girlfriend is my family.”

This earned her a smile that told her loud and clear how little the woman thought of that.

“Rootless troublemakers,” one of the elderly women scoffed. Sera didn’t think she intended for Sera to hear her. Or at least she hoped she didn’t. “Like Lenta’s bastard, bringing shame on his grandfather, shattering his mother’s mind. Never trust a brat when you don’t know what foul blood it has swimming in its veins. Cursed, cursed, the lot of them!”

“Um,” Sera said, pushing her food around her plate. “So when does the next ship drop by? I need to get home soon.”

An old man, one of the few at the table, laughed around a mouthful of some kind of meat paste. “You’re going to be waiting a long time, I think, outsider. There’s been no ships here for years.”

Sera felt cold dread settling into her bones. Certainly she’d misunderstood. “Uh… Well, where can I hire a ship to take me off-world then? Or charter one to come pick me up?”

“No, there’s no one! Not since those fucking kids scared all the traders away!”

“Now, Arav, that’s being unfair,” Shuko piped up after his long silence. “The traders were stopping coming long before Sandri or anyone did anything. You can’t blame them for that.”

“So…” Sera swallowed. “So you’re saying that I’m stuck here?”

“Don’t you worry, outsider. I’m sure someone will come any day now,” Acid’s mother said, like she didn’t believe it.

“Ha! Don’t get your hopes up!” Arav said gleefully. “Nobody’s going to make it here with all that trash cluttering the system! And that animal, Sandri, keeps it that way, making sure only him and his thugs can navigate out of the system!”

Sera held her head between her hands, staring blindly at the plate in front of her. “This can’t be happening…”

Someone patted her shoulder. “Pay them no mind, outsider. Come on. Eat up before your stew gets cold.”

“I tell you, we should have putten that boy down the instant he raised his hand against his father! No good ever comes from uppity brats!”

Brain numb from shock, she mechanically did as she was told, skewering a fatty chunk of meat dripping with sauce and raising it to her lips. A strong sense of revulsion came over her, snapping her back to the present. The meat chunk looked unappetizingly fleshy to her but she knew others would find it rich and savoury. Canderous would love a meal like this. She didn’t want to eat it, particularly not after… Her mind skittered away from the memory of her last meal, not allowing herself to dwell on it. Do they even know what their kids are eating up there? Perhaps it was better if they didn’t.

She brought the bite up to her mouth again, then thought better of it. She turned to the woman who had offered her the stew and put on her most pleasant and interested smile.

“Excuse me. I’m not familiar with salish. What kind of creature are they?” Please, please, please, don’t say it’s a person. Please, I can’t take it again today. I will cry. Or vomit. Or both.

The woman frowned. “It’s merely common livestock, outsider. I don’t know what you’re used to on your fancy station but we’re simple, unassuming folk here and we eat what we’re able.”

“Doesn’t know what a salish is,” muttered the woman with the white fur on her neck, Anasha, Sera thought she was. “I thought it came from an agricultural system? Full of lies, it is. I wouldn’t trust it to water my garden.”

Sera chose to ignore this. Must be my hearing is better than theirs. Since there were no other objections to the stew other than she simply didn’t want it, she forced the bite into her mouth, chewed it and swallowed it.

Not five minutes later, she was racing to the refresher to empty the contents of her stomach. Her stomach convulsed, forcing half-digested up her throat with such force that vomit and acid poured up and out her nose, burning her nasal passages. The acid stripped the lining from the inside of her nose, causing her nose to bleed, tears streaming from her eye from the pain, blood and vomit mixing together as it splashed in unending waves into the sink she was bent over, clogging up the plug hole. Finally, there was nothing left for her stomach to disgorge and she managed to slowly, painfully get her heaving under control. She leant heavily on the sink, trembling and whimpering softly as the bleeding from her nose slowed and stopped but the acidic stench remained.

“Guess it didn’t like your stew very much, Dara.”

“Cheeky bitch, throwing up all that good food. Doesn’t it know there’s kids that are starving?”

“Ashali, come look, you were right. The outsider does bleed red!”

A hand squeezed her shoulder.

“Here you go, outsider,” Acid’s mother said, offering her the drink she had been ignoring. “You wash your mouth out and we’ll get you cleaned up.”

“Thank you,” Sera said shakily, feeling grey and cold and weak. The liquid was very alcoholic, as she had suspected, but it worked just fine for rinsing the foul taste from her mouth and replacing it with a completely different unwanted taste.

“Leave it to a rootless outsider to ruin a meal,” Anasha muttered before turning away.

~~~

They gave her a bowl of the packing material tubers, plain, with nothing on them accompanied by a few more jabs about ‘wasted food’ from the older women of the group. After the scent of the apparently quite tasty stew (she knew this because several at the table insisted on telling her just how delicious it was) threatened to make her spew her guts out, she retreated with her miserable meal to the couch that she’d awoken on. Acid joined her, very impressed by her display of regurgitatitive prowess, chattering away and asking her all kinds of questions until he grew crotchety and over-tired and his mother carried him away to bed. His sisters, Inabi and Lana, tried to join in but were kept busy with running back and forth to the kitchen, helping their mother keep the meal running smoothly.

She ate in silence after that, weak and shaky from her vomiting, feeling the hard slats of the couch through the thin upholstery poking into her ass. The tubers weren’t very filling, at all, but she couldn’t afford to go any longer without getting any sustenance that wasn’t going to come back the other way two seconds later. Especially when she didn’t know… Fuck, how long have I been gone? It seemed like both a few days and a million years for her, in the way that traumatic events seem to stretch and compress time seemingly at random. She bit her spoon, trying to piece together how the hell she got here. Well, she was here because she lost a fist fight against a teenager and then ate some toxic stew and her body had tried to purge itself. But how had she gotten to this system? Sera frowned. She’d been on a, well, Sith border world that was still holding onto power, presumably. And she’d… Sera swallowed. She wasn’t going to think about it right now. She - And Wes - ended up there because she jammed their communications equipment and sent out a distress signal that had been answered by a Sith patrol. And she did that because she stupidly fell into their trap, got her ship captured and led HK on a hare-brained scheme that got him torn to pieces and stranded T3 on a ship full of armed criminals. Because she stopped off to get flowers to apologise to Bastila. Because she’d been a shitty girlfriend and yelled at her, and then a coward and ran off. Because of a kid bringing up the truth. Because of who she was.

The commotion in the room next door altered slightly and most of the adults all began filing into where she sat. Sera sat up straight, unbending herself from how she’d hunched over herself in shame and grief, and ran a quick hand over her face to make sure there were no tears streaming down her face while they made their long, drawn-out farewells. They ignored her, thankfully, only making some poorly disguised queries to Acid’s mother about whether she felt safe with a… ‘you know’ around.

“Oh, don’t worry about me, love. If I can handle my Tefi and I can certainly handle one skinny outsider!”

This was apparently enough to set everybody’s minds at ease (although, there was also some suspiciously raucous laughter from a few of the women) and soon all of them were gone except for Sera and Acid’s mother.

“Now then, let’s get you settled down for the night. I hope you don’t mind the couch, outsider. It’s either that or my bed and I don’t think my Tefi would be too pleased by that,” she said and then laughed as though she’d made a joke.

“Um, no, that’s, uh… Thanks for putting me up for the night, Mrs…”

“Just Lina, please.” She chuckled. “I should keep you around, outsider, to teach my husband some manners,” she said with a saucy wink.

‘Settling down’ mostly involved being given an extra blanket for the couch, although it was a nicer blanket than the ones already on it. It still wasn’t all that comfortable and Sera worried that she might not be able to sleep all that easily. But she must have been more exhausted than she thought because the next thing she knew she was being woken by loud whispers and there was a bag over her head.

“But I want to come wiithh…”

“Inabi, go back to bed. I’m on important business.”

A small foot stamped. “You’re always on important business! Why don’t we get to come along?”

“Because you’re a girl and you can’t come with!”

“That’s not fair! Nadi gets to go along with you and he’s only little!”

“Nadi’s a boy!”

“No, he’s not! He’s a baby!”

“Not to be rude, kid,” Sera said, her heart starting to race, “but I don’t do well with things against my face. I’m gonna take this thing off before I freak out and embarrass us all.”

“Aargh! See? You woke it up.”

“I did not!”

“That big kid king of yours send you to bump me off?” Sera said with a smile.

The boy blushed under his fur. “No! Old Man just said he wants to talk with you. Think he was impressed with the way you, you know…” He mimed punching something.

His youngest sister didn’t look too impressed herself. “Why does the outsider get to come with and I don’t?”

“Because--!”

His other sister appeared beside him and poked him in the arm. “Hey, you’re going to wake Nadi if you don’t keep it down.”

“I’m trying to keep it down but Inabi--”

“Did not!”

“Hey, shut up.”

“No, you shut up!”

Didn’t someone say that the War Leader - or Imil? - had picked me up on a planet somewhere? “Hey, kid,” Sera said, cutting off their argument. “Have you lot up there got ships that can go off-planet? Like, not just hop to nearby planets but actually go to other systems?”

“Yeah, although I haven’t been chosen to go yet. Old Man’s been sending out raids but so far you’ve been the only real thing brought back. Along with the, you know…” He looked uncomfortable. “The meat.” He shrugged and tensed his shoulders, trying to look tough and unbothered by what his King had fed him. Sera’s heart ached in sympathy for the kid. “Um, we take our flyers out. That’s how we go.”

“You take your…?” Sera closed her eye thinking about the hair-raising trip she’d had on one of those things and the terror and anxiety she had felt clinging to the back of the vessels Wes and his buddies had captured as they rocketed through hyperspace. Fuck’s sake… “Okay, so would it be okay if I looked at the map on your flyer?”

The kid looked confused. “We don’t get given maps. Old Man just gives the group leader a direction and we follow him. At least, that’s what the others say.”

“Wow!” Not even telling your followers where they're going? Paranoid much?

“I don’t care about that!” Inabi said, managing to sound like she was yelling while still keeping her voice down. “Why can’t we come with too?”

“Because it isn’t a good place for girls, okay?”

“But it’s okay for a tiny baby?”

“Yeah, Mitri. How come it’s okay for Nadi and not for us?”

“Because, because…” Mitri looked to her for help.

“Maybe next time, kids,” she said, feeling a little bit dirty about excluding the two girls from something that she felt comfortable involving herself in.

Inabi pouted, tears brimming in her eyes, and ran back to the bedroom. Lana gave Mitri and her a pointed look and followed her younger sister. Mitri shuffled his feet, looking ashamed of himself, then grabbed Sera by the arm and tugged her out the front door.

“Hey,” Sera said, poking him in the arm. “You don’t want to say goodbye to your mother before we go?”

He looked as though he was going to ignore her for a moment. Then he dropped her arm and ran back inside, leaving her looking at the muddy night sky, not a star in sight, their lunar destination hanging grubby and red above her. She rolled her shoulders and took a deep breath and released it while she waited. The tubers were sitting uneasily in her stomach but she felt more or less rested. A little tired, probably from her body drawing on the Force to heal itself, but nothing she wasn’t used to. Not long after, Mitri emerged from his home, surreptitiously wiping at his face and slinging a bag over his shoulder that he hadn’t arrived with. He led her quickly and quietly through the village, avoiding puddles and tools leaning precariously against fences with practiced ease, then they trekked a decent distance across open land, dirt frozen and barren beneath their feet, until they reached his flyer hiding in a shallow hollow. He handed her some more of the gross industrial goop to slather all over herself, as well as a spacesuit that she thought might be the one she came down in earlier that day. She suited up and they were off, back to the greasy trash moon, her only hope of escape.

~~~

The Old Man, or Sandri, or the King, or whatever he was calling himself, was lounging on his throne when they found him, all alone in the area that would be the main hall if the structure were a castle instead a giant heap of garbage, sipping from his polished cup.

“So, you’re back, criminal. Come to beg for forgiveness after your little display earlier?”

Sera frowned. “No? You sent Mitri to come get me.” Is he drunk?

“Oh, that’s right.” He sat up straighter and glared at Sera. “You fight pretty good, criminal, even if you choke at the end. What say you join my crew up here and I’ll forget all about how you disrespected me in front of everyone?”

Sera raised an eyebrow. “Counteroffer,” she said, lacing her words with a touch of the Force to make them sweeter. “You give me the use of one of your flyers and I’ll be out of your hair once I find a way home. Deal?”

His eyes gleamed. “Do you have a destination in mind for my flyers, criminal?”

“Well… Well, no. But we can’t be too far off--”

“No destination, no flyers!”

“Okay. Well, what if we use Vlasi Zhaoffedov’s, I think his name was, comm to--”

Sandri waved his hand dismissively. “He doesn’t have a comm! And even if he did, I’m not asking that old creep for anything!”

Sera chewed her lip, her mind racing. Fuck. “Okay… Okay, well, what if we…” Sera closed her eye, trying to recall what the galactic map looked like. “What if we make a, like a comm beacon or a radio telescope? We don’t even need to send out a powerful enough signal to be picked up by anyone. If we can detect signals from other systems, we should be able to plot a heading to send a team out.”

“You can make this beacon, criminal?” Sandri said, filling his cup with an unsteady hand.

“Yeah, I think I can,” Sera said, her stomach churning. Can’t be that hard, can it? “We might need to clear some of the debris in the system--”

Sandri snarled, a wild look in his eyes. “Nobody touches any of that debris unless I say so! Do you hear me?”

“Okay, but it’s going to interfere--”

“I control this system!” Spittle flew from his mouth as he yelled, his cup sloshing over as he stabbed himself in the chest with a finger. “I get to say who gets to come and go! No one else!”

Sera held up her hands in a placating gesture, sweat rolling down her forehead at his outburst as she radiated as much calming energy as she could find in herself. She could feel Mitri trembling next to her, telling her that, no, she wasn’t over-reacting to the danger this unstable teenager presented.

“It’s all okay,” she said as calmly and neutrally as possible, her head aching dully from overextending her use of the Force. “Nobody needs to make any decisions yet.”

Sandri subsided, sweat dampening his dark fur.

“You make your beacon, criminal,” he said. “And when you find something then you can take one of the flyers. But don’t even think about touching anything without my permission. Now, get out of here before I change my mind and decide to kill you both instead!”

“Thank you for your kind permission,” Sera said as she grabbed Mitri by the shoulder and pulled him away from Sandri as quickly and calmly as was humanly possible.

~~~

“So it’s trash all the way through?”

She and Mitri (or Jawbone, as he had asked her to call him while the other kids were around) were suited up, spine-crushing gravity harnesses and everything, as they clambered through unending mounds of frozen garbage.

“Um, kind of, I guess? There’s a broken ship at the center where our base is. Axxx says it’s a lost pirate ship carrying stolen treasure but we haven’t found anything yet.”

Explains where the gravity and the atmosphere come from. “Ah!” Sera tried and failed to snap her fingers in her bulky gloves. “That’s what the main hall thing is! It’s a fucking effluent tank for a big ass ship! My girlfriend and I have cleaned a few of those out.” Her brain caught up with her words and she instinctively held a hand up to her helmet-covered mouth. “Ah, shit, kid. ‘Scuse my language.”

“S’fine. Um.” He fidgeted, looking wistfully over his shoulder as he had been doing for a while now.

I’m slow. “You wanna go back and play with your friends?” she said, smiling at the kid.

“Um… It’s just that Bloodkill and The Fear, they’ve come up with a new game they wanted everyone to try and I thought…”

“Don’t you worry, kid,” she said, lips twitching. “You go have fun. Thanks for showing me around.”

He hesitated as though uncertain what he should do. Then he turned and ran off back where they came from, moving much quicker on his own than he’d been able to with Sera in tow. Sera waited until he was out of sight (and comm range) before bursting out laughing.

“Bloodkill!” she growled, flexing dramatically. Then she laughed, letting out a rueful “oh fuck!” when she realized she couldn’t wipe at the tears streaming down her cheek.

Her laughter petered out, dying a pathetic death in the solitude of her helmet. Over her comm there wasn’t nothing but lifeless static, inviting a lonely twinge in her stomach. She flopped her arms around limply, feeling silly and awkward standing all on her own in the middle of a trash heap, the impersonal void of space yawning empty and desolate above her.

“Right,” she said into the nothingness, shrugging her shoulders uselessly.

She forced her attention to the particular trash heap she had been led to. Jawbone had said that some of the other kids had found technological waste in this area, broken appliances and computing equipment that they occasionally brought back to their base to futz about with. It didn’t look like much to her. She was struck by a strong wave of uncertainty. What the hell was she doing? Did she really think she’d be able to call aid down from the heavens with whatever pile of crap she was able to cobble together?

Sera smacked herself in the stomach with a gloved fist.

“You’re just feeling weird because your stomach is sore from not eating properly,” she muttered angrily at herself. “Get over yourself and focus!”

Picking a mound at random, she began sorting through it, carefully organizing what she found into different categories of trash at first then just tossing aside everything that didn’t look useful when that took too long. Everything was jumbled together, plastics and metals mixed with food waste and used sanitary products. Thankfully, most of it was frozen on the unprotected surface of the trash moon, only the topmost layer showing any signs of deterioration from exposure to the system’s star. ...Until the pile she was digging through gave way unexpectedly and she pitched forward into a puddle of hot, degraded garbage. Swearing profusely, she checked her suit for any signs of damage, kicking off wet trash that flash froze to her boots as soon as it escaped the reach of its heat source. The surface of the puddle rippled at an impossible angle, remaining fluid while stray droplets froze around i--

“Wah!”

“Argh!”

Sera clutched a hand to her chest, heart threatening to pound out of her rib cage. Acid pointed and laughed at her like she was the funniest thing ever, stomping his feet with delight. He slipped on an ancient grocery bag, falling to the ground with an “oof!” and rolling around giggling in the way only the young can. Sera watched him ruefully, hands on her hips. So much for being immune to sneak attacks. She let him have his fun, helping him up when his laughter dissolved into hiccups.

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack, kiddo?”

“You jumped! Like…” He mimed her actions, making an exaggerated expression of fright before bursting out into peals of laughter again.

“Okay, okay. You got me.” Sera’s brow furrowed. “What are you doing out here anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be planetside with you mom and sisters?”

“I snuck back up when Lazer Eyes came to get Rot!” he said as if that explained everything.

“Okay, but what are you doing out here,” Sera said pointing to the floor, “all on your own? Shouldn’t one of the bigger kids be with you?”

“They’re stupid and busy. I came to tell you that you have to come now or you’re going to miss your dinner!”

Sera cocked her head. “Why? Isn’t everyone still playing some game or other?”

“That was ages and ages ago!” Acid said, flapping his hands vigorously in the air to emphasize his point. “We’ve done a million things since then!”

“Huh.” Sera checked her suit’s chrono. It was broken, giving her the impossible time of 38:74. How long had she been out here in the open garbage fields? Her muscles were sore and she was covered in sweat from the day’s exertion. More disturbingly, her suit’s oxygen supply was getting low, lower than she was comfortable with without receiving a warning notification. Were the suit’s sensors broken or had she simply been too focused on her task to notice, potentially stranding herself far from safety with no air to breathe?

Acid grabbed her by the arm and started tugging. “That’s why you have to come now before all the food’s gone!”

“Hold on a sec,” Sera said while her arm was busy being pulled out of her socket. “Do you know why that is like that?” she said, pointing at the puddle rippling happily at a sharp incline.

The little boy slumped at her lack of compliance. He looked where she was indicating and shrugged. “Mitri said the gravity and heat’s broken up here. Now come on.”

Sera didn’t budge, thinking over the implications of what he’d said. “So the ground might suddenly shift under your feet and trap you? Acid, that’s dangerous. What would your mom say if she knew you were out here on your own?”

“Mama says boys shouldn’t be wimps,” he said mulishly. “Now come on.”

“Promise me you won’t wander out onto the garbage fields again without your brother or me with you, okay?” Sera said, refusing to be turned aside.

“‘Kay.”

He turned and dragged her resolutely in the direction of their base without another word. Sera sighed and let him, hoping that she’d impressed upon him the gravity of the situation.

~~~

‘Dinner’ turned out to be some grey shit in a tube. It was okay. Sera gagged a bit when swallowing but it stayed in her stomach where food is meant to stay, so she didn’t hate it. She sucked another stodgy mouthful out of the tube and turned it over in her hands, looking for identifying marks.

“Hey,” she said to the stout kid who had been there when she’d first woken up. She gestured with the half-empty tube. “Where’d you get these things anyway?”

The kid, who went by ‘The Bomb’ it seemed, looked up from where he was prying a metal badge off one of the datapads Sera had brought in.

“Uh, I think Blackshot found a stash of them when excavating one of the lower floors. The Old Man, pardon me, The King has them all locked up his quarters where he can stand watch over them day and night and make sure they get portioned out evenly.”

“Hmm.” Emergency rations then. I wonder what kind of crew complement this place had? I wonder how old these things are? “They’re very gooey,” she said, taking a long sip from her bladder of stale water to wash away the taste from her mouth. Fuck, what I wouldn’t give for a nice, juicy double bean burger right about now. Piled up with sauce and relish with perfectly fried tuber sticks on the side. Hmm, I wonder if I can convince Jawbone and Acid’s mom to fry me up some of those sad tubers they grow here, see if it’ll buck up the flavour. A nice big slice of cake would be good too. With ice cream. And a hot cup of caf… Dammit, I shouldn’t be thinking about food!

“Hey, kid,” she said with a touch of desperation in her voice. “I don’t suppose you would know where I could get some caf to brighten this bullshit water up, now wouldya? Even some tea would help. Just a tiny bit. It wouldn’t need to be much.”

The Bomb just looked at her, snout wrinkling a little in confusion. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what any of those things are.”

Sera clutched her head between her hands, staring in horror at the dirty and broken floor.

“I’m going to die. I’m going to die without ever tasting anything good or flavourful in my miserable life ever again.”

She wrapped her arms around her head and flopped back dramatically, kicking the floor while she thrashed around crying into her arms.

The Bomb patted her sympathetically on the arm. “There, there.”

She stilled, letting her arms drop back down as she let out a long sigh. “Dammit.”

Sera pulled herself back to a sitting position and shoved the tube between her teeth, chewing furiously on the end to work the last dregs of paste from it while her stomach gurgled and groaned. She reached for another datapad from the unlooked-at pile to distract herself, missing on her first try, then getting it on the second. The outer casing was bleached nearly white from solar exposure, the plastic crumbling in her hands as she pried it open. The insides looked a little better, although she wasn’t particularly an expert. The battery had leaked a little but not on anything important it seemed. Whether any of it will power on is another matter. She worked the faulty battery off the board with her bare hands and a plastisteel shard she’d found on the ground, being careful not to bend or tear anyhting too much. The battery split as it pulled free, the caustic chemicals returning to their liquid form in the relative warmth of base. Sera snatched her contaminated fingers away, instinctively reaching up to suck them cleaning, then remembering at the last second and rinsing them off with her drinking water.

“Uh, you know anywhere I can clean up?” she said, keeping an eye on where the battery had fallen and mentally redirecting stray water droplets away from the highly reactive metal. “Maybe go for a shower to get all the muck off?”

“That’s all the clean water you get for a day,” the kid said, indicating the water she was busy spilling all over the ground.

Sera snapped her hand up, stopping the flow. “You’re kidding!”

“Hey, Killer! Built your magic tower yet?” one of the older kids yelled in her direction to the great mirth of his comrades.

“Huh?”

“Going to blow us all up next, Killer?” another said, pointing at the smoldering battery at her feet.

Sera felt a tendril of distress piercing her confusion. “Um…”

The Bomb came to her rescue. “Everybody’s saying that you’re an escaped convict that exploded something big to get away. That’s why you survived when everything around you was flattened and dead.”

Sera opened her mouth to refute his claims and froze, excuses lying thick and dishonest on her tongue. Were they even wrong when she’d been covered head to toe in Wes’s blood? Blood that she hadn’t chosen to spill? She felt herself go pale. She may not have caused the destruction of the Sith base directly but did that even matter when she had done so much worse? When she’d shattered whole planets, casting a dark shadow that loomed over the galaxy to this very day?

She shivered and gave no answer. The other kids took this lack of response for confirmation and whooped and hollered their amusement. She hunched over, the weight of her guilt pressing her in on herself while the others laughed and joked at the stain on her soul. Eventually, they got bored and left, off to harass some other luckless asshole. When she finally unbent, her cheeks were wet with tears. It didn’t matter, she told herself as she reached for another datapad. Once she was home none of it would matter.

~~~

A boy called Scab had three dead older brothers. Sera learned this on her second day there. Or was it the third? The details were a little vague, Sera wasn’t sure if the topic was still too sensitive for the kid or if he was simply too young to have been aware of everything that had happened in the first place, but it seemed to have involved Sandri in some way. A lot of the boys had dead older brothers all seeming to involve the same mythic event. There was an air of mystique about the boy they called King and Sera couldn’t decide if they were more afraid or in awe of him. No matter how many times he raged in a drunken fit or bullied the younger boys, smashing through the living quarters to yell at a kid for some perceived transgression, they always looked at him with respect, followed his every word. And no matter how many times he laughed and joked with them, no matter how many times he grinned with pride when one of them called him ‘Old Man’, there was always a glimmer of fear in their eyes when he was around. Like being in a cage with a wild animal.

This reflected glory did not fall upon his second-in-command, his War Leader. There was some complicated drama there that Sera didn’t fully understand but none of the others really talked about it. Probably because they all knew whatever the deal was already and thought it was all thoroughly pedestrian and obvious. Like saying that the sky was blue. Or a muddy grey in their home planet’s case. The kid was serious and strict, seeming uncomfortable in their own skin sometimes, but was also quick-witted and organised, which earned him a degree of derisive respect from the older boys that made up Sandri’s inner circle.

His standing was helped by his close friendship with the Big One who followed him around everywhere and got on well with the bigger, stronger boys, being a big, strong boy himself. Who also happened to be Acid and Jawbone’s cousin.

“Eh?” Sera said in surprise, her hand stuck up the butt of an ancient holoprojector of unknown design and make. Her eyesocket was itching up a storm. Her muscles were tired and sore. She needed a shower. The lightly damp rag of questionable cleanliness that she’d been using in the frigid privacy of the janitor’s closet that functioned as her sleeping quarters only helped so much. The freshly pooped turd that had been left outside the door by some mischievous child (judging by the squeals of delight when she’d stepped in it) hadn’t helped either. She’d spoken to Sandri about it but he’d only slapped her on the back and asked her if she couldn’t take a joke. It seemed to have solidified her reputation as ‘an old person’.

Jawbone looked a little embarrassed but Acid, back out on the trash fields despite her and his brother’s protests, leaned forward on top of a gutted fridge with a sunny smile, kicking his booted feet behind him.

“That means we’re siblings!”

“That means our parents are siblings,” Jawbone corrected. “Our mom’s brother married Reaper’s dad’s sister who was Meat Head’s mom before she died and he married Arav Riaky’s youngest daughter who had Meat Head’s baby brother.”

“That the old bugger I met at your mom’s dinner that night?” she said, head swimming with names.

“Uh… Uh-uh. That must have been Arav Atov who owns the water pump sheds. Arav Riaky has his own stills but he doesn’t come ‘round anymore because, I don’t know, I think he and mom had a fight or something.”

“Huh,” she said, working a clip from its setting. “I would never have guessed. You and him look nothing alike. Uh, no offense.”

“None taken,” the kid said with a smile.

Acid slapped his hands against the fridge. “I heard Papa tell Mama that he wonders if we really are his children sometimes the way she carries on!” he said far too cheerfully.

Sera stared in horror. “Uh…”

Jawbone took his little brother by the shoulder. “We’re related to Meat Head by our mom. It wouldn’t matter who our dad was.”

“And then! And then!” Acid said, clearly liking the attention. “She said it’s any wonder that half the village aren’t his children the way he can’t keep his p--”

“Argh! Didn’t Jackhammer say that he’d show you, Shiv and Icepick how he spits real far?” Jawbone said desperately, bright pink beneath his fur as he hustled his little brother away.

“Why do they get to learn as well?” the little boy whined, all thought of parental infidelity forgotten.

“It’s fine! I know you’ll be able to show them up!” Jawbone glanced over his shoulder and shrugged apologetically before the two brothers disappeared behind a small hill of frozen food waste.

Sera snapped her jaw shut, then let out a disbelieving breath. “Fuuuuck…” How do I respond to that! Should she have told the boys that wasn’t normal? Should she have been supportive or ignored what Acid said altogether or what? “Fuck’s sake!”

She shook herself and filed the problem away to be dealt with some other day. First she had to get this stupid receiver unit free from its stupid bracket. She still had no other tools than her plastisteel shard. Either there were no tools of any kind on this trash heap of a moon or the kids were guarding what they did have pretty jealously. So she was going to have to source her own tools or tool-shaped objects. Which she would. When she had time. Brute force would work just fine for now.

Her plan to assemble a mostly functioning datapad and connect it to a really big antenna hadn’t been as successful as it could have been. She told herself that this was fine. It was only her first and simplest plan and she had plenty more tricks up her sleeves. Besides, she could always iterate on the idea at a later date. But it had still been a blow, disappointment sitting heavily in her stomach when she’d switched her cobbled together datapad on expecting to pick up nearby signals and getting nothing. It should have worked. If this system was just a short distance away from one of the quieter spacelanes as she suspected, she should have been able to pick up transmissions between trading vessels if nothing else. And she couldn’t even tell if she’d constructed her makeshift comm correctly. What if they were out there, waiting to rescue her, and she couldn’t reach out because she’d miscalculated how much power her device needed? Or a part wasn’t as functional as she thought it was and she was listening to a deaf comm, waiting for some miracle?

So she’d changed tack. Juhani always said she was a dependable team mate and she wasn’t going to let her team down now! Even if her team currently only consisted of herself and Bastila. Her heart twinged painfully and she had to stop for the moment, closing her eye and letting her helmet rest against the pocked and rusted shell of the holoprojector. She missed Bastila so damned much. Even though for her it had only been… days? Weeks? Sera felt her gaze drift to an indeterminate point in the sky. How was she? What was she doing at this instant? Was she missing Sera as much as Sera missed her or had her affection started to fade with Sera’s absence? Would she even still want Sera with a great big hole in her hea--

Sera stopped herself, squeezing her eye tightly shut until she could focus again. This wasn’t the time or the place. She had to get home first! Then she could-- She had to get home. Forcing herself upright, she turned her attention to working the receiver free from inside the holoprojector. Datapads were only designed to send and receive signals over a relatively short range. Planetary scale. Occasionally on a system scale, if you got lucky. Holoprojectors had more robust internal radios, designed to pick up signals from relays all over the sector. A broader spectrum of signals too. If she could make an antenna, or maybe a dish, to catch anything passing their way… Then she just had to build and calibrate a computing unit to interpret the signals, maybe write some software for it, figure out what direction to point her telescope in to not miss her hoped-for target by several parsecs… It was going great! It was going to be great!

~~~

There was a tiny pocket of gravity and atmosphere several kilometers from the main gravitational cluster that the kids used as their base by Sera’s reckoning. It was a little smaller than she liked without Bastila in her ear distracting her from how low the ceiling was and how close the walls were but it would make the perfect site for her telescope. Once she cleared a space for a platform and found the signal booster that she needed and…

Sera ripped her helmet off and wailed into the frozen air.

“This is taking too long!”

~~~

The grey stuff ran out. Or maybe they just weren’t giving her any anymore. Sera told herself she didn’t care. It tasted like shit anyway and didn’t fill her up properly. But her empty stomach growled and ached and she was forced to scrounge for scraps in the trash fields while the boys brought back precious morsels from their raids. Not that anyone had enough to eat. When she’d first got here weeks ago (or was it now months… fuck, how long had it been?), she would have presumed that the older boys, the elites among the elites who all stood over those toiling on the planet below, would take the larger portion for themselves and leave the smaller kids to fight over what was left. But if they did so, there was no evidence of it. Big and small alike complained of hollow bellies and half-remembered feasts with their families.

“Fried tripe. With a nice fat blood sausage on the side. That’s what I want.”

Sera stuck her tongue out in disgust. She was sat in her spacesuit in the main hall area mending a tear in her jumpsuit. She would have been happy to be elsewhere, working on data processing software for her telescope, but the needle was borrowed and the owner didn’t trust her to take it too far away. Besides, she was lonely.

The kid slapped his friend next to him. “Hey, Lazer Eyes. Remind me to steal a salish next time we go down.”

“Who’s going to cook it for you?” Lazer Eyes asked. “You gonna be gnawing on raw meat when we get it back here?”

“I’ll have to steal your mom to cook and clean for me too. Hey, Killer!”

Sera leveled a flat look at him. “Don’t call me that.” The effect was ruined when she jumped as the needle stabbed into the pad of her thumb. Again.

The kid waved her objection aside. “What are you hoping for on the next raid?”

“Yeah, what kind of treasures keep a murderous lunatic up at night?” Lazer Eyes said laughing.

Sera scowled at her mangled jumpsuit, seam pricked with blood, a deep ache of longing consuming her. Dammit, she wanted to be near Bastila again! To tease her, to laugh with her, to argue over silly and not-so-silly things with her. To have her naked on my lap, writhing and moaning against me while I finger her until she comes. Fuck, now I’m horny!

A thought struck her. “Ah!”

Two pairs of eyes looked at her with alarm. “What?”

She stared at both boys intently as thoughts and plans fell together in her mind, hands numv with the cold grasping at the air as if to hold her ideas in place.

“Your flyers! You salvaged the hyperdrives and engines from abandoned equipment left in the main hold of this abandoned ship.” Her fingers tightened urgently in the nothingness. “What if! What if I use the comms station of this very ship to get a message out!” I knew I got my best ideas when I’m horny and tired!

“It’ll be the same as the last five times you asked,” Demon said, contempt curling around the edges of his snout. “We don’t know where the bridge is. Most of the ship has collapsed. You would have to dig straight down through all the trash and piss and shit to even have a hope of finding the command sections!”

Sera hunched her shoulders tight in on herself, feeling disappointed and angry with herself.

“Don’t remember asking you five times,” she muttered, reaching for her cobbled together datapad. “Maybe three or two…” She opened the only thing she was certain worked on the datapad, a long plaintext document, and made a note of her idea and Demon’s rebuttal, so she wouldn’t forget at the end. Then she tapped the return key a couple of times and typed:

miss bastila :(

She saved her changes and put the device into sleep mode to save power, sighing as she did so. She blew on her hands and chafed them together to warm them up. One of the generator’s had blown a fuse earlier that week and they were back to charging their battery bank with people power, taking turns in a large rattling wheel to generate electricity. Several of the kids complained that it was like being back home.

“What about The Old Man’s treasure room?” Lazer Eyes said, scratching lazily at his stomach.

“That’s just a rumor. Nobody cares about that.”

“Wonder what he’s got stashed in there,” he continued, undeterred. “Bet he’s got a whole store of food there all for himself. Man, I’d love to get a taste of some of the weird crap he must have come across in his travels. Just to get my hands on something sweet again!” He mimed taking a massive bite out of some imaginary treat.

“Sweet things are overrated,” Demon said disinterestedly.

“My girlfriend makes this chocolate…” Body paint. “Sauce,” Sera interjected. “Uh, for, like, ice cream and stuff? Absolutely amazing! She has some secret ingredient that she puts in it that I’ve never been able to get out of her.” No matter how many times I hold her down and try to tickle her into submission. She let her head fall back and sighed, remembering the last time they’d brought it out the back of the fridge. “What I wouldn’t give to taste that again.”

Sera pulled against her restraints, wriggling as Bastila’s tongue licked slow circles around her nipple, cleaning the sweet brown sauce from her skin.

“Hey!” Sera said a little breathlessly, tugging her wrists in a different direction to see if that would work. “If you’re gonna torture me, at least gimme a taste!”

Bastila took Sera’s nipple into her mouth, sucking and biting gently down until Sera moaned and bucked her hips under her girlfriend’s weight. Then Bastila released her nipple with a pop and sat back, leaving lipstick kisses all over Sera’s breast.

“Now, now, dear. There’s no need to lose your temper,” she said, wiping her mouth clean with a delicate finger. Her hair was down and she was dressed in light, airy pants that stopped just below the knee and a shirt of pale mauve that opened in the front that Sera knew from experience could easily be pulled aside to reveal the soft breasts within. She was struck by the sheer beauty of this woman who chose to put up with her, her elegant poise, her wicked, if dorky, sense of humour. Not for the first time, Sera wondered how she had gotten so lucky to have Bastila Shan in her life.

Bastila reached out and patted Sera’s cheek, running an affectionate thumb over her lips. A shudder ran through her as Bastila pulled down gently on her lower lip, slipping her thumb into Sera’s mouth. Sera did her best to resist Bastila’s seduction but in the end it was a losing battle and she sucked at her lover’s hand greedily, betraying her need. She whimpered pathetically when Bastila pulled her thumb free.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Bastila continued with a smirk. “You’ll get yours when I’m good and ready.”

Sera growled, frustrated arousal throbbing in her groin. Bastila simply smiled serenely, settling back on Sera’s decidedly unclothed frame. She reached for the jar on the nightstand, casually stirring its contents while Sera fought with the sturdy cuffs chaining her to the headboard. For all her demure smiles and untroubled brow, Sera could feel the heat radiating from between her girlfriend’s legs. And she wanted a piece of it, dammit.

Bastila scooped a generous spoonful out of the jar and presented it to Sera.

“Open wide.”

Sera snarled but opened her mouth, sticking her tongue out to catch any falling droplets of chocolate. Bastila moved the spoon towards Sera’s mouth, tipping it at the last second and spilling sauce all over Sera’s chin and neck.

“Oh no! Look at the mess you’ve made!” Bastila said poorly masked glee, spreading the chocolate sauce over Sera’s collarbones and chest with the back of the spoon. “Oh dear. I can’t take you anywhere, can I, darling?”

“Just you wait until I get out of these cuffs, woman,” Sera snapped, hips bucking upward seeking release. “See what I’ll do to you then!” Gonna strip you naked and kiss you all over, make you come in my mouth ‘til you know what you mean to me.

Bastila chuckled as she bent down, licking and nibbling her way up Sera’s neck, not leaving a single drop behind.

“Promises, promises,” she whispered into Sera’s ear before claiming her lips for her own.

Sera huffed out a massive sigh, staring up at the distant ceiling. She had taken matters into her own hands, so to speak, once she had figured out how to lock her tiny janitor’s closet. But her own hand was a pale imitation of having her girlfriend’s naked body pressed against her own.

“Do you know what it’s talking about?” Lazer Eyes muttered to Demon.

“Going on about it’s supposed girlfriend again,” Demon replied. He turned to Sera. “We know! You’ve told us already!”

Sera pointed a resolute finger in his direction. “And I’ll tell you again! Because she’s great! And I miss her! Aaargh!”

She flopped her arms over her head, whining and kicking her heels petulantly against the floor. A savage hand caught her in the back of the head and she tipped forward sharply.

“What the fuck are you doing eating my food and drinking my water without offering me anything in return?” a voice roared into her ear. Apparently, ‘Angry Sandri’ was making an appearance today.

“I’m not doing nothing,” Sera protested, rubbing her head. “I’m fixing my jumpsuit, so I can get back to making you a telescope. Ow!”

“I don’t give a fuck about that!” he yelled, eyes flashing. “Go down there and get some food from the village before I decide to have you for dinner!”

Then he stormed off as swiftly as he had arrived, raging at his underlings as he went, smashing anything within his reach.

“That boy needs to go to an anger management class,” Sera muttered. “Okay, I’m guessing trading goods and services for what we need is off the table.”

This earned her a withering look.

She sighed. “Alright, fine. Even though trading and cooperation are the bedrock of civilisation, I’ll have you know,” she finished under her breath. “Am I going alone or does anyone feel like coming with?”

“It’s a raid, Killer, not a day at the races,” Demon said derisively.

“Yeah, how’re you going to carry everything with those skinny arms of yours?” his friend said with a hearty guffaw.

“Don’t call me that!” Sera growled out.

Demon pulled himself up to his full height, looming menacingly over Sera.

“What are you going to do about it, Killer? Are you going to beat me into a pulp to get me to stop?”

Sera snarled and hunched her shoulders unhappily, the thought of raising her hand against a fourteen-year-old, against anyone, making her sick to the stomach, making her want to tear the flesh off her bones.

“Aw, leave it.” Lazer Eyes yawned as he patted his friend on the back, his mouth a great maw of teeth and tongue. “You two can fight it out later when we’ve all eaten. Now let’s go. I want my salish.”

Demon puffed his chest out threateningly, staring her down, then pushed past her with a sharp shove of his elbow. Lazer Eyes followed more calmly, although he didn’t spare Sera even the smallest glance. Sera tied off her thread as best as she could and gathered her things. What an absolutely fucking fantastic start to an operation.

~~~

They gathered at the lower edge of the base’s gravity where the flyers were kept. It turned out they could only take three flyers for a raid. Who knew why. King’s orders, apparently. Since Sera didn’t have a flyer (more specifically, wasn’t trusted with one), she had been forced to ask around for a ride. Hadn’t that been a lesson in humility. Sera didn’t think she’d been told ‘no’ so many times in her life. It had been the War Leader who had finally said yes, agreeing more readily than Sera had expected. He was standing apart from the rest of them, making his own preparations.

A small body thumped into her from behind, then ran away shrieking with laughter before Sera had time to react. Shiv and Icepick, two of the youngest boys, tore around the staging area, generally making nuisances of themselves. It had been Sera’s idea that they take some of the smallest kids with them in the unspoken hope that they stay planetside and get a proper meal. She did her best to convince herself that she wasn’t regretting this idea.

Lazer Eyes sighed. “We should get some girls up here.”

“Ha! Maybe we can get Meat Head to share his faggot with us,” Demon said, tugging his boots on tighter.

Jawbone appeared from around the back entrance to the base looking a little harried. He turned his head this way and that, eyes searching every inch of the space.

He caught Sera’s eye. “Have you seen Acid?”

“Not today I haven’t,” she said slowly, sifting through her memory. “Oh, wait! I think I might have seen him pestering Insanity to tell him a story.”

“That was yesterday,” Demon said flatly.

“Oh.” Sera scratched the back of her head, cheeks heating in embarrassment. “Then, no, I haven’t seen him today. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I just…” His mouth was tight with frustration. “I wanted to send him down with you and now he’s run off where I can’t find him.”

“Do you want us to wait until you find him?”

“We don’t wait for no brats!” Demon interrupted sharply. “We go when the Old Man says we go and he says we go now!”

Sera tensed. Was this worth making a thing out of? She opened her mouth.

Jawbone decided the matter for her. “He can go down on the next raid. I’m tired of him thinking he can play around as he pleases! I don’t care how much he whines and complains. If he can’t learn to act responsibly, he’s going to stay planetside with the rest of the babies!”

He stomped off, muttering crossly about his little brother. Sera wondered if she should go after him to see if he was okay but Demon was already huffing indignantly and collaring one of the over-excited little boys to ride with him on his flyer. Lazer Eyes got the other one and Sera took up position behind the tight-lipped War Leader, struck by the parallel between the other tiny tag-alongs and her own social standing in the scheme of things.

The trip to the planet’s surface was about as nerve-wracking as the first time she made it. Sera was certain she heard an extra rattle or two from War Leader’s flyer as they entered the atmosphere.

“You sure you don’t want me to take a look at it?” Sera said as she clambered off the flyer. “I’d only be tightening a few scr-- Holy fuck! Look at the sky!”

It was a thick, orangey-red, the heavy, dusty air dampening and muting everything around them like a nightmare.

Her companions looked distressingly unperturbed.

“It’s thoroughly normal, bog-standard summer sky, Killer,” Demon said, rolling his eyes.

“This is summer?” Sera took note of her body shivering within her double layer of jumpsuit and spacesuit. “How can you tell?”

Demon stripped down to his worn trousers, muttering something that sounded like “wuss” as he turned away. Sera shrugged and straightened her shoulders, pulling her eye away from the murderous sky above.

“Okay,” she said in a firmer tone, circling her finger in the air to gather them all to her. “Let’s go over the plan to get in, get what we need and get out without any unnecessary mess or fuss. Understand?”

“Whatever.” Demon flapped a disinterested hand over his shoulder as he slouched off.

“Hey!”

A small foot to her backside stopped her from getting any further. She whirled around to see Icepick running away, laughing at his own cleverness.

“Come on, that wasn’t very nice!”

“I just want my salish,” Lazer Eyes said, leaving her to her predicament.

“Eat shit, Killer!” Shiv yelled defiantly as he lobbed a clod of dirt at her head.

She pulled her head to the side, her reflexes having not completely abandoned her. Her physical conditioning apparently had however and she got an earful of dirt.

“Please don’t call me that,” she said as evenly as possible, her temper frayed.

“Please don’t call me that,” Shiv repeated back mockingly.

“Killer, Killer, Killer!” Icepick sang as he danced in a taunting ring around her.

“I said don’t call me that!” she snapped.

They squealed and ran off gaily, more entertained than frightened. War Leader shouldered his empty pack and walked up to her.

“I have business of my own.” He stabbed a hard finger into her chest. “Don’t get in my way.”

Then he disappeared off in his own direction and Sera was left standing all alone like an asshole.

“Fuck!”

Sera scrubbed at her face, avoiding her empty eyesocket by traumatized reflex, the frustration and annoyance bubbling within her making her need to move or else explode. She let out a huff, then kicked the dirt and yelled inarticulately into her hands. Finally, she let her hands fall and she leaned against War Leader’s flyer.

“Fuck’s sake,” she said softly. Why couldn’t she keep her temper around a bunch of kids? Why did she fuck everything up constantly? Was this what she turned into when put under the teensiest bit of pressure? She bent forward, banging her head against the still-hot flyer.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

It didn’t help. She was still disappointed in herself. There was nothing else to do but bear the burden of her shame and failure and continue on. Strive to be less of a fuckup in the future. She grabbed her own empty pack, checked her datapad for what she needed to get and set off on the trail to the village.

The sun was just setting when she got there, glowering red of the sky giving way to dusty grey. Sera could feel the fog of pollution settling into her skin, her eye, her mouth. The air tasted foul and Sera wished she had thought to bring a rag to tie over her face. Her stomach grumbled, empty and hungry. There was a dull, sinusy ache behind her eyes that had steadily increased over her time in this wretched system. It tended to flare whenever she drew on the Force to perform some minor task or draw some part just within her reach, not unlike she was overextending herself. Leading her to suspect that the scraps that she scavenged weren’t enough to meet her body’s needs and she was using the Force to sustain herself. Like a fucking monk. And her skin itched all over. But that was just rash from her radiation gel.

To her surprise, there were still people about in the village, hither and thithering as though the pollution were no bother. Maybe the whiskers help to filter it. Or they just have stronger lungs than I do. That was… fine. She could sneak around a settlement that she was unfamiliar with, with people she didn’t know. At least they weren’t likely to kill her. Probably.

She proceeded with caution, making a slow circuit around the outskirts of the village to get a feel of the layout. This was impeded by the massive stretch of frigid water bordering one quarter of the village. It was fairly shallow, or seemed to be, and she began slowly wading through, occasionally stopping to detangle her foot from the long irrigation lines or whatever it was that they were pumping in down in between the aquatic vegetation. In the dim twilight she could just make out the large, lumbering shapes of what she presumed were salish, munching lazily on their evening meal. Two shadowy figures moved amongst them, whispering to each other as they fought to coax one of the plump beasts from the safety of the herd. They stilled when they heard her approach.

“Fuck off!” Demon whispered harshly, chucking a handful of wet plant matter at her. “Get your own salish!”

“Don’t want your fucking salish, twerp,” Sera muttered as she backed away quietly. “Haven’t you been fucking paying attention?”

Rather than retracing her steps all the way to the edge of the lake, Sera cut through the buildings built over the water. The village was a little quieter now and she snuck cautiously into each house, going through her list, spreading the burden of her theft as broadly and thinly as possible. She didn’t even stumble into a rake, catch the rake at the last second before it clattered into some clay pots only to knock a ladder over with her ass and have to run away very quickly before getting caught too many times. The houses were a study of the village and its inhabitants. Painted ceilings seemed to be the trend, all variations on the theme of being underwater looking up at the sky. Some were more stylized, some were a good deal more grubby than Jawbone’s mom’s ceiling that she had woken up under, many needed a touch up, chips of paint and ceiling drifting down on Sera’s head as she inched her way across creaking floor boards. But they all looked up onto a sky that was bluer and fresher, warmer than anything she had experienced in this system so far. And she had no idea what any of it meant or if that was just the paint they had.

The rooms and their contents varied as well. Mostly in terms of their upkeep. Size didn’t seem to be an indicator of relative wealth, with the less fortunate residents seemingly relegated to dwellings and buildings with cracked walls and leaking floors and ceilings. Sera didn’t take anything from these houses, closing the door gently and moving onto their neighbours. There were more empty houses than she was expecting as well. Many were dilapidated and completely gutted of anything useful. Those houses didn’t surprise her. The musty smelling ones with furnishings but no one to use them did. Like shrines to dead family members but an entire house rather than a shelf or a single room. It made Sera wonder how many people there truly were on this planet.

She found Jawbone and Acid’s house and considered popping in to say hi to their mom and tell her how they were. But there was a tall man in the house that she presumed was the kids’ father and thought it better not to interfere. Not-Quite-Doctor Shuko was snoring in a worn chair. Sera got what she needed and tiptoed out quietly without disturbing him. There was one house with electronics and other hardware labelled and stacked neatly on shelves floor to ceiling… and a pervasive sense of dread and violence dripping off the walls. Sera grabbed what looked the most useful and got the fuck out of there. Then doubled back, cursing at her own cowardice, and snooped around the house as quietly as she was able, only leaving when she found nothing untoward besides the horror gripping her heart. Shaken and more than a little upset, she moved on, making a note to ask around about the house.

She heard voices when she entered the next house. Turning to go, she paused when she recognized one of the voices. Curiosity getting the better of her (Bastila would have called it nosiness), Sera inched closer, getting down onto her haunches and peaking into the next room. War Leader was standing, hands held tightly behind his back, in front of a small woman reclining on an old couch.

“...then Yeniil and me got a few of the younger kids to help out with moving our bigger water tank to a more stable position,” the kid said. “It was more complicated than I thought it would be with the weight of all that water and keeping it clean but we figured out a system where we could line our barrels up and pour the water between them one at a time and make it so even the littlest kid could help out. We didn’t even lose all that much water in the move and now our tank isn’t at risk of cracking from all the gravity shifts.”

He paused to take a breath, face bright with pride in his own accomplishment. Sera realized with a start that the woman was focused more on the threadbare blanket over her knees than the child standing before her. Scraps of nonsense floated out of her lips as she picked at the blanket, eyes following her own hands as though they belonged to another. War Leader’s face fell for a split second before being plastered over with a forced cheerfulness.

“Uh, anyway, we, uh, we had a problem with one of the pipes that brings air into the sleeping quarters,” he said, twisting and clenching his hands behind his back. “It was fine. Everyone woke up with a headache but Vasi was able to clear the blockage before anyone collapsed this time. Um.”

Sera eased away from the door, feeling like shit for snooping on the kid’s misery. Her heart ached, wondering how lonely he must be.

“What are you doing here, you little shit?” a masculine voice demanded.

Sera flinched, so lost in her own thoughts that she’d stopped paying attention to her surroundings. But the voice wasn’t an angry homeowner come to wreak vengeance on an intruder.

“I wasn’t doing anything. I was just--”

“Don’t give me any of your excuses, brat. How many times have I told you that bastards aren’t welcome in my house?”

“I’m not making excuses,” War Leader pleaded. “I only wanted to see Mom, nothing more!”

“Who are you to think you can see my daughter without my permission? After the way you repaid me for feeding and clothing you? For giving you a roof over your head? Stand up straight when I’m talking to you, boy! Do I need to get my belt to remind you how to be a man?”

There was no sound for the moment save for War Leader choking back sobs. Sera froze halfway between crouching and standing, torn over whether intervening now would only make things worse for the kid.

The older man spat. “I should have smothered you in your sleep. I should have made Lenta have an abortion. Get out of my sight, you simpering whelp.”

Sera’s brain kicked back into operation, telling her that she needed to move. But it was too late. War Leader crashed through the door and froze, staring wide-eyed at Sera as tears streamed down his face. A series of emotions played across his face in rapid succession: shock, fear, confusion, shame, anger. Sera opened her mouth to tell him that it was okay and that he hadn’t done anything wrong when the turmoil settled into a mask of cold fury and he stormed out of the house that was his home. Sera hurried after him, heedless of the noise she was making.

War Leader was stalking away from the house, hunched shouldered and radiating spiky, unhappy energy. Sera trotted to catch up, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. He whirled around, swinging his fist in a savage backhanded arc.

Sera stumbled back. She raised her hands placatingly. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”

“You didn’t see anything, do you understand me?” he snarled, tension coiled in his body like a cornered animal.

Sera felt tears running down her cheek. “Kid, none of this is your fau--”

“I don’t want to hear any of it! You go and get the others,” he stabbed a finger in the direction of the village center, “before I decide to leave you down here to rot!”

“Okay, but I really think we should talk--”

He was gone before she could get any further, an angry cloud of pain disappearing into the cluster of unknown buildings. Sera ran a hand through her short crop of hair, then held it over her mouth and wept, shoulders shaking in grief for a lonely, miserable kid.

She allowed herself a moment, then took a deep breath and shook herself. Now to find the others and get everyone home safe and sound. She scanned her surroundings, looking for any sign of Demon, Lazer Eyes or the two smaller boys. Spotting movement in the distance, she strode forward to see Icepick running into a house by the lake. She followed him in, catching the door just before it slammed shut.

He was already waist deep into a pantry cupboard, scratching around noisily and throwing things into a sack. Sera knelt down and rapped her knuckles gently on the cupboard door, making him jump and bump his head.

“Come on, time to go,” she said softly, mindful of not disturbing the house’s owner.

Icepick popped out from inside the cupboard with a face like thunder, rubbing the back of his head.

“You can’t tell me what to do!” he whispered harshly before running away.

“Hey!” Sera grabbed for him but missed, flopping heavily onto the hard floor, thin jumpsuit providing no cushioning whatsoever. “Oh, fuck, my bones!”

She clambered up, massaging her poor bruised body and following the sound of young feet thumping through the house.

Shiv came wandering out of a storage room, seemingly drawn by the sound of his brother’s passage.

“Did you get all of the…”

He trailed off, eyes becoming wide when he saw Sera standing over him. His eyes darted to the side, then he picked up his sack and ran, narrowly escaping Sera’s grasp.

“Get back here!” she whispered furiously. “It’s time to go!”

The only response she received was a high-pitched “Fuck you!” before the little boy disappeared further into the house. Sera threw up her hands and followed at a slower pace, feeling a million years too old for this. The next room was a long, low space that must have once served as an entertainment area for a large family but was now only furnished with a couch and armchair that looked like they had not been touched in years and a desk and chair that did. The desk was tidy, with nothing on it save for a small lamp, a lush potted plant atop a pristine doily, a few writing implements, and a neat stack of flimsi in a folder. There was a filing cabinet tucked into the corner behind the desk out of the way of traffic. Sera looked at it curiously as she wandered forward, then jumped when a hard finger poked her in the back. She whirled around to find Demon giving her a filthy look.

“You’re supposed to be collecting supplies, not wandering around like a tourist!” he said in a low voice. “What are you doing here?”

Sera relaxed, letting her hands fall to her sides. “I was trying to get the two kids but they won’t--”

Lazer Eyes appeared from behind his friend smelling like blood and offal. He peered at her in the murk.

“Shit, man, have you been crying?” He started laughing, low enough to escape detection by vigilant ears but loud enough to prove his point.

Demon snorted. “Yeah, what happened? Did an animal look at you wrong and hurt your feewings?”

“Did your imaginary girlfriend break up with you?” Lazer Eyes muffled his guffaws with one hand and slapped Demon on the shoulder with the other.

“I stubbed my toe,” she said tersely. “Now, can we please wrangle these kids?”

“We’ll get them,” Demon said, doing his best ‘threatening thug’ impression. “So long as you stay right here and don’t get in our way.”

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want you to cry all over them,” Lazer Eyes chuckled, still impressed by that joke.

Sera rolled her eyes but kept her mouth shut. They strode off, the floorboards shaking under their less than careful footfalls. Tired in more ways than one, Sera slumped into the chair by the desk, stretching her weary legs out as she waited. Her eyes fell on the folder in front of her. It seemed to have a label on it that she couldn’t quite make out in the gloom. She contemplated switching the lamp on but she had learned the hard way that the overburdened power inverters that these folk tended to use made an unearthly racket after a full day of heavy use. Curiosity getting the better of her, Sera lifted the cover of the folder up with one finger and peeked inside. Didn’t look like someone’s sketch pad or the first draft of their opus about the Ductavis Era told solely through erotic poetry. Bummer.

One of the twins shot past the desk, followed by Lazer Eyes thumping after him towards the pantry. Sera winced and caught hold of the potted plant before it could rattle off the desk.

“Careful,” she said softly.

An eloquent finger was thrust in her direction from the open door. Sera scowled and turned her attention back to the folder, flipping the cover open. The sheets contained within were covered with numbers, long columns of neatly ordered figures filling page after page. At first she presumed she was snooping on somebody’s accounting records, then she realized the numbers were data entries. She squinted and frowned, bringing the sheets of flimsi up to her face as it dawned on her what was being recorded. That can’t be right. That’s… That’s far too low. She flipped through the pages, making sure she was reading the right element, making certain she was reading the values at the correct scale.

Demon strode past her with the other twin trailing after him dolefully, nursing a reddened cheek.

“Got everything?” he said into the hall, not bothering to modulate his voice.

Lazer Eyes popped through the hallway door holding a length of dried sausage in each hand.

“Bro, you should see the stuff she’s got back here. We’re gonna clean her out!”

Sera looked up from the stack of flimsi in her hands, mind buzzing with what she’d just read. “I don’t think you should do that.”

“Fuck you,” Lazer Eyes said, waggling a sausage in her direction.

“Yeah, fuck you!” Shiv squeaked, then shrank back wide-eyed when Demon turned a baleful gaze on him.

“We do what we want in this village,” Demon said, pubescent voice low and threatening. “We take what we want, when we want. And no outsider gets to say otherwise.”

“All done!” Icepick announced, grunting when Lazer Eyes deposited a heavy sack on his small shoulders.

“I don’t think they can afford--”

The room blazed with light, blinding them all with its suddenness. Sera stumbled out of the chair, feeling something whoosh inches away from her face.

“What are you doing in my house, you thieving animals?”

Sera blinked rapidly to clear her vision. The older woman with the patch of pure white fur running down her neck, Anasha, stood in the other door to the room wearing a faded nightgown clutching a very big stick in both hands. The boys yelped and scrambled over each other to reach the exit, shaking the floorboards in their haste. Sera watched as the potted plant slipped off the desk. She reached out a hand to catch it but missed and it crashed to the floor, shattering and sending dirt and delicate green leaves everywhere. Anasha’s mouth twisted in grief.

“Little brats, destroying everything you touch! What will be left of our village by the time you’re done?” she demanded, brandishing her stick.

Sera moved to gather the remains of the plant from the floor, only to have to jerk her head out of the way of the swinging cudgel.

“S-sorry,” she said and made a break for it, heart heavy as she ran from the house. Ahead of her, the children howled with adrenaline-fueled laughter into the night, racing with youthful glee to the rendezvous point. They crowed about their success as they bounded onto their flyers, animosity between big and small forgotten in the glow of their shared exploits. Sera said nothing as she mounted a flyer behind an equally subdued War Leader, shoulders hunched in misery.

They spent a silent trip back to the trash moon listening to the others chattering away happily. The flyers had barely touched down when War Leader hopped off and strode quickly away from the group, head held firmly down. Sera pulled her helmet wearily off and rubbed her face. What a disaster.

Jawbone pushed his way roughly through the crowd of waiting children ready to relieve them of their spoils. He was white as a sheet beneath his fur.

“I can’t find Nadi.”

~~~

Sera didn’t wait to check with Sandri before organizing what kids she could get ahold of into a search party. Leaving the smaller kids behind to search the safer parts of the base, she suited up and led a group of slightly older kids, ones that were willing to listen to her, out onto the trash fields. She had thought, hoped that their suits might contain some form of locator that could expedite their search. But The Bomb told her in a trembling and distracted voice that none of them had been able to get the main monitoring and communication system working since the old foreman had opened a vein several years back. So they were stuck with old-fashioned methods.

The surface of the accreted waste had never been mapped, the children having never seen the need, but there were general regions that they were all familiar with. She divided the older kids into groups of three and four and assigned them to specific directions, reminding them to take care and not overextend their search before returning to base to refill their supply of oxygen and water. Forming a team with Spike, Sandri’s messenger from when she awoke, and a boy named Lock, she began searching the narrow wedge of trash between the base and the gravity pocket where she’d established her observatory. They walked along carefully, turning over loose piles of garbage, looking for any signs of recently collapsed debris. Her observatory was empty with no sign that anyone had been in there since Sera had last left it. They removed their helmets to replenish their oxygen and rehydrate, drinking their stale water in tense silence. Then they continued on, spreading out into the untouched fields of trash beyond her observatory. It made no logical sense but Sera found that they all shouted Acid’s name into their comms, their voices taking on a desperate edge the further they got from the safety of the base.

She had no way of knowing exactly how long they walked, heads bent to the ground, stopping occasionally to overturn some faded and long-forgotten piece of furniture or mound of ancient tampons looking for signs of life. She kept a watchful eye on her oxygen meter and called out to the others, telling them to head back to the observatory when it approached the halfway point. Turning around, a flash of red caught her eye. She rushed forward, stumbling as she ran towards the capsized shell of a speeder they’d passed by only minutes ago. Grabbing hold of the lower edge of the door frame, she lifted with all her might, the empty husk unbelievably heavy in the rogue knot of gravity pulling towards the moon’s core. She screamed inarticulately for help, the other two rushing to her side and lending their strength. They heaved, lifting it enough that Sera could rest the frame on her shoulder while Lock and Spike dug through the rubble beneath. But she didn’t have to look to know that they were already too late and she sobbed in the privacy of her helmet as they revealed the crushed and broken body of little Nadi Svita.

~~~

Sera returned Nadi's to his parents. Mitri couldn’t bring himself to face them, locking himself in a store room and refusing all comfort or food. Sera could still hear his desolate wailing when they returned to the base carrying their dreadful cargo. She packed Nadi as neatly as she could into the cleanest box she could find, breaking down again when she came to his little stuffed salish. He had had it with him when he went out that day.

For once, no one complained when she announced her intention to take a flyer down to the planet’s surface by herself. It was midday when she reached the village, the treacherous weather almost pleasant, certainly the most beautiful day she’d experienced since she got there. The village was bustling, everyone hard at work, an almost fevered hubbub filling the air. She received many a hard look walking through the village center pulling the box behind her on the smoothest sled she could fashion on short notice. Sera realized with a start that they were all understandably pissed off at waking up to a ransacked village this morning. Their stupid raid felt like a lifetime ago now.

After several false turns, and getting spat on when she stopped to ask for directions, Sera found herself outside Mitri and Nadi’s home. She raised her fist to knock and had to stop, grief seizing her as it hit her again what she was there to do. She stood frozen, trembling with poorly contained tears. Tightening her grip on the sled until it hurt, she focused on the pain, letting it push aside all other thoughts. For now, anyway. Taking a massive breath, she let it out slowly, then rapped her knuckles on the door.

It took a while for anyone to answer, the lively sounds of a happy family engrossed in the business of their lives threatening to undo her again. Sera heard Lina Svita pull herself away from her daughter’s attention, laughing at something a deep male voice said before opening the door with a face bright and warm like the day outside.

“Outsider, I didn’t think we’d ever see you again,” she said smiling. “Although, I’ve heard you’ve become quite the local, terrorizing the village in the night and all.” She chuckled merrily at her neighbours’ misfortune.

She must have seen something in Sera’s expression because her smile faltered, eyes flicking uncertainly to the box at Sera’s side.

Sera swallowed, not knowing what the hell to say or how to even start. How would I want to hear about my kid’s death? I wouldn’t. I just fucking wouldn’t. “There’s been an accident,” she said as steadily as possible. “Mitri is fine.” Sort of. “But--” She stopped, feeling tears welling up within her, not knowing if she could continue. Lina stared at her with wide, apprehensive eyes. “But Nadi--”

“Tefi!” Her voice had a taut, panicked edge to it as she screamed into the house. “Tefi, come quickly!”

A tall man appeared in the doorway bearing an upsetting resemblance to his youngest son. He glanced questioningly between the two of them, then to the box, squaring his shoulders and standing protectively over his wife when he noticed her distress. Inabi and Lana peeked anxiously around his legs while he frowned down sternly on Sera, daring her to make a wrong move. But there was something naked and brittle in his gaze and his jaw was tight as though waiting for a blow. Sera’s heart felt like lead in her chest. Like a great ball of lead that had cracked in two and plummeted through her insides.

“Ma’am, may we come inside?” Sera pleaded softly. “I don’t think we should talk about this in public.”

Lina turned from her and walked inside without a word, back rigid, gait swift and unnatural. Her husband stood for a moment, arms crossed, staring Sera down. Then he abruptly stepped aside and gestured for her to come in. Sera ducked her head and reached for the sled, easing it over the threshold as gently as possible, careful to not let it jostle as she dragged across the floor.

The small family arrayed itself around her. Lina had her arms tightly folded across her chest, vulnerability giving way to a defensive pugnacity. Tefi Svita stood as he had at the door, strong and unbreakable but looking lost in the depths of his eyes. The two girls stood uncertainly beside their parents, knowing something was up but not knowing what exactly. They looked like they were about to cry, little Inabi already sniffling around her fist while Lana clutched her to her side.

Sera inhaled through her nose, feeling like all the air had been squeezed out of her lungs. She laid a hand on the sad little box.

“I’m sorry. Nadi is dead.”

A sob escaped Inabi before being cut off when she buried her head in her sister’s shoulder. Tefi blanched beneath his fur, doubling over as though he’d been punched in the stomach. Lina bristled, quivering with rage and hurt.

“What did you do?”

Sera flinched. “We, we believe that he was out exploring the far fields of the moon on his own when an anomaly in the moon’s artificial gravitational field collapsed the garbage he was standing on,” she said with as much clarity and equilibrium as she could muster. “He was crushed by the remains of a speeder.”

“Well, what were you doing at the time?” Lina threw out, the tightly wound anguish within her unravelling in a messy explosion of pain. Tefi lumbered forward, wrapping his arms around his wife. “How do you even know that’s what happened? You don’t know that that was my little boy!” She was shaking by the end, face wet with tears as she pleaded her case against reality.

“Ma’am, I was there. I helped retrieve his body,” Sera said, her voice cracking. “I wish with everything in me that it wasn’t so but--”

“I want to see it,” Lina demanded suddenly.

This froze Sera to the spot. “Ma’am, are you sure that’s wise?” she said grief stricken, hoping to dissuade her as gently as possible.

“I want to see it,” Lina enunciated in clipped tones.

Tefi tightened his arms around her but there was a wild and savage glint in her eyes. The two young girls held onto each other, wide, frightened eyes darting back and forth between the adults. Sera ducked her head and stood back, unwilling to fight against her anymore. Lina glared fiercely and pulled out of the protective circle of her husband’s embrace, hiking her skirts up as she knelt in front of the little box. Sera swallowed, knowing all too well the sight Lina was about to be subjected to. She watched helplessly as Lina opened the rickety clips and lifted the lid. The other woman’s eyes went wide, skin turning ashen beneath her fur. She clapped a hand over her mouth, making a keening sound that cut right through Sera’s soul. Tefi reached her first, gently prying her shaking hands off the lid and holding her close while tears streamed down his face. Sera reached out to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. Lina struck out, slapping Sera’s hand away.

“Why didn’t you do something?” she wailed. “You’re an adult, even if you are an outsider! Why didn’t you… Why couldn’t you… My poor little boy!”

She crumpled in on herself, howling out her grief in great wracking sobs. The two girls stayed huddled in a tiny, lonely pile in the corner of the room. Tefi wiped his face against his shoulder before looking up at Sera.

“I’m sorry, outsider,” he said. “I think you should go.”

Sera looked around the little family, one son dead, the other in self-exile from grief and shame. And her standing there. Intruding on their tragedy. She nodded once and let herself out, heart sitting heavy and desolate in her chest. It made her own problems seem so small, to have a loved one ripped away when your back is turned.

“Fuck’s sake.” She ran a hand over her eye as the dam within her broke and she sobbed, walking blindly through the town.

“False tears won’t help you, outsider.”

Sera looked up through bleary eye at the hard voice. The older woman, Anasha, was standing directly in Sera’s path. She would have walked straight into her if the other woman hadn’t spoken.

“I’m not… They’re not false,” Sera protested weakly, hearing a slight whiny note in her own voice.

“I don’t care about your excuses, you filthy wastrel!” The other woman was quivering with passion. “I’ll not have you truck with a pack of bastards and layabouts running rampant through our village and think you can just come waltzing back whenever you feel like it.”

Sera let out an exasperated breath. “They’re just kids. In a shit situation. Not a threat to galactic stability, come on.”

Anasha’s face tensed in anger. “They’re tearing everything to shreds! Running around taking everything as they please without ever giving anything back, without ever thinking of their duty to their parents and kin! Do you know,” she said, wagging her finger for emphasis, “Arkav Vichena has not been able to run his farm at full capacity since half his workforce ran off to play bigshot on a pile of stinking garbage! And then they dare to come back, pinching food they had no hand in producing, stealing the sweat of other people’s brows! But no,” she sneered, “they’re just kids in a shit situation.”

Sera felt tired all of a sudden, thinking about the lack of food, the fear of the base’s atmosphere switching off without warning. The cold, the radiation. Little Nadi crushed to death while he was playing. “You don’t… You have no idea what it’s like up there.”

“Well, they’ve made their bed and now they must lie in it. I’ll not tolerate a single one of those brats to come back. Not until they’ve paid their debt in full. And I’ll not have you preying on our sympathies either. You must find your own way!” Anasha said with finality.

“Look, I’m not…” Sera stopped, rubbing tears out of her eye with the heel of her hand. “That’s not why I came. Can you just please do what you can to look after Lina and the rest of her family? They’ve had some bad news, the worst news, and they could really use… Just please kind to them?”

Anasha’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly and she glanced in the direction that Sera had come from. Then she moved forward like a hovertrain and Sera had to stumble out of her way or else be bowled over.

“Just one thing,” Sera called after her.

She didn’t think the other woman was going to stop. Finally, she did, looking back at Sera disdainfully.

“What happens if the harvest fails?”

Anasha raised her chin defiantly. “I don’t see how that’s any of your concern, outsider.” And then she was gone, turning her back on Sera as though she were nothing.

~~~

Life returned to a kind of normality. Mitri eventually emerged from seclusion, joining in with the games and adventures with the others as he had before. Almost. He was quieter, more serious, going off on his own occasionally or staring listlessly into the distance when he thought no one was watching. He hadn’t been back home again and the other boys didn’t seem to have the courage to ask.

Sandri had been… less than pleased with the way she had taken over the search for Nadi and the subsequent return of his body without clearing it with him first. He muttered darkly about usurpers and backstabbers in her vicinity. Not doing anything in particular. Just reminding everyone that he could if he wanted to. But it seemed as though he had not been unaffected by the death of one of his youngest liegemen, drinking more and more obviously. Sera was beginning to wonder if she’d ever seen him sober. It didn’t seem all that healthy and it was starting to worry her.

She didn’t see much of the two boys who had helped her excavate Nadi’s body, Spike and Lock. This wasn’t completely uncommon as she tended to spend most of her days either scavenging for parts or working on her telescope. Also, she was an adult and an outsider, so… She wondered how they were dealing with what they’d been though. If they’d been able to talk to someone they trusted about the experience of pulling the body of a peer out of the wreckage that had killed him. If it was keeping them up at night. She hoped they were okay. She didn’t think they were.

And as for Sera herself…

The 12-volt rail sparked, sending a painful jolt through the hand Sera was using to hold the board down.

“Fuck! Shit fucking piss dammit!” She spat out the frozen bit of… whatever that she’d been gnawing on and stuck her singed finger in her mouth. “Stupid fucking cock-sucking thing!”

It wasn’t supposed to be live. The power regulator she’d found was supposed to be keeping the electrical current running through the lights and the tiny fan she’d set up to circulate air but not through her main compute unit until she switched it over manually. The regulator must have glitched. Meaning cosmic radiation must have bypassed her rudimentary shielding. Meaning that the memory modules she’d painstakingly programmed had been corrupted. Again.

She put her face into her hands and screamed. It had taken so long to get her programmes on there. Since she still hadn’t found a way to get her datapad and the compute unit talking to each other properly, she was going to have to type every single line of code. Again!

Screaming helped to lessen her frustration. As did kicking at the compressed mound of pamphlets for a certainly now-defunct health spa that made up her floor.

“Fuck,” she muttered into her hands.

She was tired. The image of Nadi’s crushed body had joined her brain’s repertoire of nightly nightmares alongside the memory of her killing Wes. They had gotten worse since she’d last seen Bastila, slept by her side. Still meaningless nonsense, her nightmares had gotten more bizarre and mangled, making it harder for her to drift back to sleep once awoken. Not that she didn’t deserve to have her sleep disturbed every night for the rest of her life because of… everything.

Sera sighed and pulled herself as upright as the interior of the observatory would allow. The power regulator wasn’t going to fix itself no matter how much she thought hard thoughts at it. Slept like shit too the last time Bastila was taken from me. Like claws tearing at my brain… Sera shook her head to dislodge the intrusive thoughts. Don’t. Don’t think about Malak, don’t think about Bastila being captured. At least Bastila was safe and secure back home. Probably cursing her damned girlfriend for running off and leaving her with all the work but that was okay. It was better this way. Better that Sera was the one in a pickle and not anyone innocent.

The power regulator was buried under a carefully arranged stack of crumpled soda bottles and wadded up grocery bags round the back of her observatory. Had it not been thick enough to absorb the radioactive bombardment from space? Maybe the polyethylene had become too degraded after fuck knows how much solar exposure. Shit, am I overdue for my radiation vaccine? Fuck, when did we go get them done? Was it before or after we did the Allatu Prime job? No, no, that’s what the gel is for. Sera straightened and rolled her neck, shaking her hands out to rid herself of the sudden panic that had overtaken her. Brain full of fucking cobwebs… She slapped at her cheeks to wake herself up, succeeding only in smacking herself in the helmet. Sighing at herself, she got down onto her knees, groaning like an old lady as she bent to inspect the power regulator.

She was halfway through disconnecting the regulator from her electrical system and resetting it to proper function when a sound stood out from the normal audio landscape of the inside of her suit. The laboured breathing of another filtered through over the internal comm. Putting her makeshift shielding back in place, Sera stuck her head around the igloo of trash covering the support structure she was constructing. One of the larger kids came clambering over the unpicked fields surrounding her observatory, stopped and stood swinging his hands awkwardly in front of her door.

“Need an oxygen refill?”

The boy jumped. Some of the kids, the bigger kids that didn’t roam the exterior of the moon as much, didn’t quite grasp how the open comms worked, not on an instinctive level. Sera raised a hand to catch his attention.

“Uh, thank you, Killer. Much appreciated,” he said, flustered. It was the big guy who hung around War Leader a lot.

“Go on in and take what you need. Just mind the motherboard on the floor. I was still working on that.”

“Actually there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Sera waited but he didn’t move and didn’t say anything further. She sighed.

“Okay, just give me a minute to clean things up here and I’ll meet you inside.”

The boy was sitting with his back against one of the sloping walls of her observatory, helmet off, knees held tight against his chest. He was glancing around idly, frowning curiously at the faded stack of pamphlets beneath him (“DIAL 555-202-0169 FROM YOUR NEAREST COMM TO GET STARTED ON YOUR JOURNEY TO YOUR TRUE SELF! CALL TODAY!!” Sera had read them so many times hoping for something new to stimulate her brain but they never changed). The cramped interior looked a lot smaller with another person in it. Sera removed her own helmet and folded herself down opposite him, the space so narrow so could have reached out and swatted him if she wanted to.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

“We, uh, that is, the War Leader is planning an excursion to retrieve some information. Are you interested in helping?”

“I dunno. That’s not a whole helluva lot to go on, kid,” she said, reaching for her unfinished wad of frozen whatever. “This an excursion off-planet? Or off-moon, rather?”

He eyed her with a look of politely masked disgust as she popped the nameless thing back in her mouth. “Not off-planet. He’s…” He paused as if uncertain if he should continue. “He’s planning on breaking into the King’s treasure room.”

Sera frowned. “I thought that was just a rumour?”

The big guy shook his head. “No rumour. The War Leader followed the King one day when he was… out of sorts but was unable to get inside then. He’s been seeking out an alternative entry ever since.”

“Okay, not to be rude to a child asking me for help,” she said around the slowly thawing thing, “but what’s in it for me? I’m not interested in your treasures.”

“His treasure room is where the King keeps his maps.”

Sera stopped chewing. “I thought he didn’t have any,” she said after a long moment.

“He only says that. I don’t know why. But he must have some way of picking a destination for our longer raids.”

“Huh.” Sera started chewing absentmindedly again, turning this new bit of information over in her mind.

“So, are you interested? He means to set off later today.”

Sera looked at her compute unit, in pieces, months away from even being close to completion. “Count me in.”

~~~

“You know, I’m surprised War Leader asked for my help.”

The long lunar day had progressed further towards sunset this close to the base, rather than the weeks long midday at her observatory that was currently fucking with Sera’s circadian rhythm. Long, pitch-black shadows stretched out beneath them as the sun crept ever so slowly towards the horizon. Down in the village, they would have appeared as little more than a slim, grubby sliver in the sky. Unless it was still daytime down there. Sera had lost track.

The boy took a long time replying. “Um. Why do you say that?”

“Uh… No reason.” So he hasn’t said anything about that little scene the night of the raid. “I just don’t think he likes me very much.”

“What? No, no,” he said lightly. Too lightly. At that moment, they crested the last mound on the back approach to the base, War Leader coming into view waiting for them. Sera didn’t need to see him to know that she was being scowled at.

Ah.

The big guy coughed self-consciously. He held up a hand. “Just give me a moment.”

He scuttled off and Sera crossed her arms, shifting her weight on her legs to find a more comfortable position to wait in. There seemed to be a heated argument going on between the two just out of comm range. War Leader was shaking his head and gesturing furiously while his friend pleaded and placated. But the big guy seemed to be gaining ground. Sera turned away when she saw the smaller boy leaning into a hand laid tenderly against the side of his helmet. Not long after, she heard the bigger boy entering her comm range. She turned to see him excitedly gesturing for her to join them while War Leader glared at her stonily.

“I presume Meat Head’s told you about what I’m planning to do,” War leader said a touch sullenly as soon as Sera was within comm range.

“Just in a broad sense,” Sera said, a little breathless as she clambered over the uneven garbage. She seemed to be tiring a little more easily these days. “He didn’t give me the why though.”

Sera heard War Leader huff over the comm. “I don’t see why that’s important. You want to leave, he has star charts, what more do you need to know?”

“Pardon me for being cynical, especially since you’re twelve, but it’s never a bad idea to know why people want you to do things. That’s my tip for you today. You’re welcome.”

“I don’t actually need your help, you know? I could just go all by myse--”

The bigger kid, Meat Head, cleared his throat abruptly, cutting his friend off.

Now that she was closer, Sera could see War Leader looking shamefaced.

“The King has lost his edge,” he said a little reluctantly. “Once upon a time the threat of his temper was enough to keep everyone in line. Nobody would have even thought about running around in the far fields on their own for fear of what the King would have done to them. Now he drinks all day and the others all do as they please. They need order. If I can get my hands on those maps, I can give that to them.”

“Kid,” Sera said gently, feeling deeply upset, “what happened to Nadi was a tragic, awful accident and I don’t think Sandri being even more of a tyrant would have stopped him doing what he wanted.”

War Leader’s mouth narrowed into a thin line. “You are an outsider. You don’t know our ways.”

“You don’t think that maybe,” she persisted, “what all of you kids need most is to leave this gang thing behind and go back home to your parents? Let them do their job and look after you?”

The young boy’s eyes flashed. Next to her, Meat Head cleared his throat furiously, sounding like he was going to cough up a lung.

“I will never allow any single one of us to be dragged back to that village! I would burn the whole place to the ground if I could!” He was quivering as he said it.

“You can’t look after everyone! There’s only one of y--”

“Enough of this!” he said, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “I mean to steal the King’s star charts, not waste my breath debating with the likes of you! Now, are you coming with or not?”

Sera looked to Meat Head for support but he was just giving her a look that said ‘shut up’. She threw her hands up in defeat. “Fine. Is it just us three going?”

“Just you two,” Meat Head said, casting a quick glance at his friend. “If we’re both gone, people will notice that something is amiss. I need to stay in the base so nobody suspects what the War Leader is planning.”

Sera cocked her head. “We’re not going through the base?”

“It’s too risky,” War Leader said, still sounding a little tense. “The others would snitch on us before we got anywhere near the central ship. We need to go over and enter in round the back. I’ve…” He looked a little uncertainly suddenly. “I’ve found a way in but…”

“But it’s too dangerous to go in on your own,” Meat Head said, eyes boring into the younger boy insistently. It sounded as though they’d had this argument before. “I’ll not allow it,” he finished softly.

“I-in any case,” War Leader said, unable to meet his friend’s eyes, “We’ll go along the outside until we get to the entrance I found. Then we just need to retrieve the maps and then we can do whatever we want. Okay?”

“Sounds good to me,” Sera said slowly. The two kids perked up. She held up a hand. “Just one thing…” They both groaned, War Leader slumping his shoulders and rolling his eyes, looking like a twelve year old for the first time since Sera had met him. Sera grinned. “What about our oxygen? My tank’s pretty empty as is and I don’t think it’ll last me a long journey.”

War Leader groaned loudly at the sky in frustration. “We can do that along the way! Now let’s go!” He turned and stomped off without looking to see if Sera was following, grumbling under his breath.

~~~

It wasn’t far to their first checkpoint; a tiny hole excavated into a small mountain of used sanitary items that seemed to characterize this side of the main base, just big enough to stick your head and shoulders inside. Sera took a deep breath and screwed her eye up tight before taking her turn. Even with all that she had gotten used to of late, things that she would never have even contemplated before, sticking her head in a small, dark hole almost entirely composed of ancient bodily functions was still just a touch out of her comfort zone.

They continued on mostly in silence, with only the occasional warning for a loose patch of garbage or gravity unexpectedly sucking at their boots. War Leader have to grab Sera’s shoulder several times to stop her walking into a danger her single eye couldn’t see. After the fifth time and a grumpy complaint from her companion that he would have been quicker on his own, Sera took more care observing the dim environment, twisting her head this way and that until she felt her head was going to pop off her shoulders. That was how she spotted it, glinting in the thin sliver of sun still visible on this side of the moon. Sera cackled in delight, forgetting that she had company with her, and darted forward to snatch the thing up. She felt War Leader grab the back of her suit as she bent and scooped the rotary motor out from under a tangled mess of wires, laughing in maniacal triumph when it was revealed to be whole and seemingly unbroken.

“We are not here on a scavenger hunt!” War Leader snapped.

“Are you kidding? I’ve been looking for one of these to make my antenna turn for ages!” she babbled excitedly. “With this,” The motor caught the sunlight and gleamed brightly as she shook it, “I’m one step closer to completing my telescope. You think I’m going to pass up an opportunity like that?”

“We don’t need your stupid telescope now!” he said, irritation simmering beneath the surface. “That’s what the maps are for!”

“True. But we don’t have them yet,” she said, stowing the precious motor in the weathered grocery bag she used to carry her datapad. “And even if they are exactly what we want them to be, we still might need additional astronomical data to safely make a journey to the nearest star system. I mean, look at that!” She flung a hand out, tracing the arc of the galaxy above their heads, vivid and all-encompassing in the marginal atmosphere. “That stupid bullshit is several hundred parsecs deep! Do you have any idea how pissed I will be if we miss our destination because our angle in relation to the disk is just a little bit off? If I was interested in making wild guesses, I would just load up a flyer and fly straight that way,” she stabbed a finger in the rough direction of the galactic center, “until I ran out of food and water and hope my corpse hit Coruscant and not wind up floating for all eternity light years above it. Or fry myself flying right through a nebula.” She flapped her hand angrily at the stars. “I would like some solid options!”

War Leader was quiet for a moment. “That’s really where all the people are?”

He said it softly with a quiet note of wonder in his voice. Sera glanced over at him. He was staring up at the dense cluster of stars that Sera had pointed at as if he had never seen the sky before.

“Kinda. Really there’s people spread all over the galaxy doing their own thing but the deepest concentration is clustered around the Galactic Core. If you look there,” She leaned closer to the boy and pointed to what she estimated the correct group of stars were, “that bright spot there is Coruscant, sitting in the center of our galaxy.” She paused. “Technically, it’s not actually in the center of the galaxy, they just use it on the maps too-- That’s besides the point. Completely covered in city. Lots of people from all over everywhere…”

“Okay.” War Leader turned away, his face a pale pink beneath his helmet, and resumed walking briskly towards the next checkpoint.

Sera followed suit. “There’s this really big zoo that we didn’t get to go to, you know, my girlfriend and I, the last time we were there. A lot of really good food there too, some of the best in the galaxy. Horribly expensive. Couldn’t afford it even if I were saving up for…” I’m going to miss our anniversary. “Uh. Um. Anyway. Anyway, the food stalls are pretty good there if you know where to look. You get these vegetables on a stick fried in batter that they serve with a sauce and you eat it right there in the street that are really good. Really crunchy, this real burst of flavour when you bite in.” War Leader picked up his pace and Sera trotted to catch up. “The station where we live isn’t half bad either. There’s this curry place in the lower sectors that I’ve been dying to try but we haven’t had time yet.” Her gaze drifted to the sky, eye unconsciously fixing on a particular point. “Our local bakery is pretty good too,” she said distantly. “They have good breakfast pastries. Fancy knotted pastry filled with custard. Little fruity things that Bastila likes, reminds her of her childhood. Perfect for a day off…” Dammit…

War Leader whirled around. “I don’t want to hear anything about your stupid life!” Then he ripped his helmet off, right there out in the open.

“Ah!” Shit, had she annoyed him to the point of suicide?

But his eyeballs didn’t pop out of his skull, blood spewing from his mouth as his lungs ruptured. He just stood there glaring at her. Sera gingerly raised her hands to the release clamps of her helmet, keeping her eyes locked on the kid in case this was some kind of trick she hadn’t thought of. She flicked the clamps up, ready to seal her helmet back on her head if something went wrong. Musty air filled her helmet. War Leader rolled his eyes at her.

“Huh.” She pulled her helmet off, standing bareheaded under the frigid emptiness of space. What a bizarre feeling.

“Listen to me,” War Leader said intently. “We are here to do one thing and one thing only. I don’t want to hear any more about your precious girlfriend or what life is like out there or any of it! I just want to get these stupid maps, do you understand?”

Sera nodded, a little bemused at being lectured by a twelve year old. “’Kay. Wait, are we here already?” she said when the kid got to his knees and began rummaging in the trash. All she got was a stern look. She shrugged. “Oh, alright.” Turning away as he worked, she stretched her hand out, feeling for the edges of the pocket of safety. The whole area was completely indistinguishable from the hostile landscape surrounding it. “Say, how did you find this place anyway?”

He was already waist-deep in the hole he’d excavated by the time she turned back. “I was… That’s none of your business! Now, are you coming with or not?”

He slipped out of sight without waiting for an answer. Sera shrugged and clambered down more slowly, feeling old and stiff. Gravity shifted as she passed through the opening, pulling her boots awkwardly to the side of her body. She wriggled and kicked to right herself. Her foot connected with something soft, eliciting a pained grunt.

“Watch it!” War Leader said, giving her a hard swat, then grabbing her by the ankles. Sera found herself being dragged through stinking garbage on her stomach before thumping face first onto a floor thick with dust from a not inconsiderable height. She opened her mouth to complain and sneezed, over and over until her eye ran and her face was gummed up with snot.

“Fuck.” She rolled over and sat up, peering blearily at the buckled corridor lit dimly by their suit’s shoulder lights. It looked pretty shit as fair as spaceship corridors went. There wasn’t a sum of money in the galaxy that could have convinced Sera to travel aboard a ship in such a state but it was recognizably a spaceship, which was more than could be said about the kids’ base that allegedly formed part of the same structure.

“So this is it, huh?” She looked around for something to wipe her face on, gave up and reluctantly used her sleeve, smearing dusty black snot in a wet line down the arm of her suit.

War Leader wasn’t looking at her. Probably for the best.

“Yes. I’ve, I’ve never ventured further than the end of this corridor.” The boy swallowed. “I, there wasn’t enough time. I had to get back. The others would have noticed that I was gone.”

“Hmm.” Sera groped blindly through the hole to the exterior for her grocery bag. “So… And this is just me clarifying, zero judgment whatsoever… You don’t actually know if this section of the ship leads to your King’s treasure room?”

The kid stared at her, going pale, the bright red beneath his fur. “I know exactly…! Are you trying to start a fight with me?” he spluttered.

Sera held up her hands placatingly. “No, no. I just wanted to make sure…”

“I know where we are!”

“...That we weren’t going to wind up running in circles. I never meant to imply…”

“We’re in the right place! To get to his treasure room, the King has to travel deep into the center of the base,” He gestured as he spoke, pantomiming the layout of the base, “past where we all stay, lower than he allows anyone else to go. We have traveled over the outside of the moon to above where the treasure room should be. Now we just have to find it!”

Sera gave him a thumbs up. “Okay.”

He stared at her dumbfounded, looking as though he had a million things he wanted to say to her and didn’t know where to start. She gestured towards the empty corridor with an open hand.

“After you.”

War Leader threw his hands up, letting out a squeaky yell of frustration. Sera let him. It was good to be able to express one’s irritation with life and the universe when one needed to.

The next corridor was equally thick with dust, their boots leaving a clear track for them to follow back to their entry point if they got turned around. Sera had cracked the first service panel they came across open, hoping to get some kind of lighting system working. Even emergency lighting would be better than the thin beams of light from their suits bouncing around all over the place. But it was to no avail. To be sure, the switches and the wires all seemed to still be there but the light fittings were simply gone. Everything about the place gave the air of what it in truth was; a decommissioned ship, probably merchant of some kind, being stripped and then junked. The artificial gravity and atmosphere had in all likelihood only been left functional to allow the junkyard workers to do their job.

The doors were a little more hit and miss. Most were jammed open. This was fine. They went through each one to briefly explore whatever room or corridor that lay beyond, although there was a brief argument about them not needing to go through, they were only there for the maps. Sera won the argument with the point that they didn’t know where any of the rooms might lead to but conceded the point that she didn’t need to look under all the furniture for hidden items. Problems only started to arise when they came across more and more doors that were closed. They ignored them at first. No point in wasting time on a locked door when it was just as likely to lead somewhere accessible via another door. Then they reached a dead end. What looked like a gutted supply closet. They debated their options and decided to force the last door they had passed by rather than walk half an hour to reach an unexplored open door. Kicking didn’t do much other than tire them both out and confirm that there was empty space on the other side if the hollow sound of their thudding was anything to go by. Sera got her tools out, really just various bits of metal and plasteel that functioned close enough to real tools, and removed her gloves to avoid nicking her suit when she ripped the wall panel off. War Leader leaned against the wall and removed a lump of dried meat from his pack.

“How long is this going to take?” he said, tearing off a sizable chunk with his teeth.

Sera’s stomach rumbled enviously. She took a sip of stale water to quiet it. “Can’t really tell until I get a proper look at the mechanism.” Wonder if they’ve got anything in the kitchen here. Dammit, I need to find a stable food source.

“We can’t afford to…”

“I know, I know. If this takes too long, we’ll try another door.” She jammed her fingers under the gap she’d created and rocked the panel back and forth until it popped off the wall. The layout of the door mechanism was foreign but logical after a few moments poking around. A thought popped into her head.

“Um, so you know I bring my girlfriend up a lot?”

War Leader sighed. “I thought I said I wasn’t interested.”

“No, what I mean is, you know I’m a girl too, right?” She glanced over at him. “Like, the woman that I’m in a relationship with is the same gender as me? And there’s nothing wrong with it? Everyone’s okay with it?”

“They only don’t care that you’re a girl because you’re an outsider and no one expects anything good from you anyway,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It wouldn’t be the same for one of us. It just wouldn’t.”

Sera cocked her head and frowned sympathetically. “I know that it’s useless self-indulgence, according to some, but they’re wro--”

“I said I’m not interested!”

“Okay, okay,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. He settled back against the wall, shoulders hunched while he scowled at nothing. Sera turned her attention back to getting the door open, sticking her hand inside the cramped space of the wall and feeling around awkwardly for the lock catch.

“I’m sorry what I said earlier,” she said softly after a moment. “About all of you going back to your parents. I know that that isn’t exactly… ideal for everyone and I’m sorry that I brought it up without thinking.”

He didn’t respond, standing stiff like a statue.

“You know, when we get these maps… I’ll still need to talk to some people to sort things out, discuss things with my girlfriend,” she clarified, “but you’re always welcome at our place if you need somewhere to stay.”

The kid snorted. “What are you talking about?” he scoffed.

“I’m saying that you don’t have to go through life alone!” she pleaded. “The galaxy is a big and dangerous place. Even if I can’t help you, I will make sure one of my friends will, make sure you’re fed and clothed and schooled and taken care of. No matter what happens, I want you to be able to live your life the way that you want, to be whoever you want to be.”

War Leader barked out a laugh. “Why should I listen to you? What do you know about anything? You are a murderer,” he sneered. Sera flinched. “Who lives in the trash and eats garbage all day. What makes you think you have the right to have an opinion about anything?”

“You’re right. I don’t deserve anything.” Her voice quavered. Shit. Don’t fucking lose it in front of other people! “I don’t deserve to get home. I don’t deserve to see Bastila again or be a parent or have any kind of happiness in my life or anything. You’re right not to listen to me!” The last came out as a sob, tears spilling down her cheek. She clamped her mouth tightly shut and turned her sighted eye away from the boy but nothing could stop the tremors wracking her body. She shot up.

“I’m sorry, I need to check the other conduit.”

She strode off, almost ran really, without checking to see if he bought her flimsy excuse. Finding the first open room, she crumpled into a ball, holding her head as she cried. Stupid. She thumped her head against the wall. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. The tears flowed unchecked down the right side of her face, her bone dry left cheek and hollow eyesocket a cruel reminder that she wasn’t who she claimed to be. That she was a monstrous individual that chewed up lives and spat them out broken and spent. She dug her fingers into her flesh, wanting to tear herself to pieces. The pain was only a tiny fraction of what she deserved because of all she had done.

But she couldn’t stay there huddled against the wall forever and there were only so many tears within her. She still had to help War Leader get away from this place anyway. She stood, tracing a matching line of snot and tears down her other sleeve, and walked back to where she had left the kid, feeling absolutely flat. He hadn’t moved and seemed content to ignore her meltdown much to Sera’s gratitude.

“Right, this shouldn’t take long.” She reached back inside the wall and depressed the locking catch, pulling her hand quickly out of the way as the door sprang open.

They continued on in silence, walking as far apart as the narrow corridor would allow. They made fair progress, something about the way the rooms were laid out off the corridor tickling Sera’s brain, making her think they were getting close. Another closed door appeared ahead. Sera moved immediately to the panel on the wall, confident she knew how to handle this problem now. She repeated her process, squeezed her hand between wires and support struts and the tight, jagged surface of the inside of the wall, depressed the catch and… nothing.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

She pulled her arm out and shoved herself into the shallow hole, twisting her shoulder awkwardly to illuminate the interior of the wall while the panel bracket pressed into the side of her face. Finding nothing and her face and shoulder starting to hurt, she was about to advocate for ripping the entire wall apart by force when light from her suit caught the corner of a second locking catch at the base of the door, secured in the open position. Contorting her spine uncomfortably until the shoulder light shone upwards at the correct angle, she looked for the third catch that logic dictated was at the top of the door. And there the fucker was, blocking their progress like an asshole. Muttering obscenities under her breath, Sera stuck her arm back into the opening and reached in vain for the offending catch, stopping to remove the bulky top half of her spacesuit to allow herself to insert more of her shoulder into the wall. She clawed and grasped for the catch but it was to no avail. She was too short. Thoroughly pissed off, Sera depressed the middle catch with her right hand and slapped her left hand to the outside wall, pulling the top catch roughly flat with the Force.

“Ah!”

A blinding headache tore through her skull, almost distracting her from pulling her hand out of the way as the door snapped open.

“What? What’s the matter?” War Leader said, finally paying attention to her again.

She held up a hand. “No, it’s nothing. Just…” Wait. Was she about to have another seizure? Sera froze, paused mid-motion in the process of pinching her nose. No, nothing seemed to be happening. Or had she already had one, blacking out and waking up without ever knowing what had happened? Fuck, how many times had she come close to snuffing out her life unbeknownst to her out on the trash fields. No, no, she would have noticed. She felt like shit after her duel with Sandri all those weeks… Sera stopped. How long ago had that been? Week before last? No, that can’t be right. We had the, the funeral for Nadi round about then, right? Or was it the week before that? Everything seemed to be blurring into one, indistinguishable mass of time. Fuck, how long had she been sitting in her observatory all on her own? She’d had her period shortly after waking up in the base -- That had been a blast to deal with around a bunch of squeamish teenage boys -- but she couldn’t remember having another one after that. Was she simply not due yet? That seemed increasingly unlikely. Was her nutrition so fucked up that her cycle had simply stopped as her body shut down unnecessary functions to keep her vertical?

Sera squeezed her eye shut and rested her forehead against the wall, clutching her head to stop the thoughts cascading endlessly through her brain.

War Leader poked her shoulder. “Hey.”

Sera started. “No, no, I’m alright. I just…” She rubbed at her face. “I need to get away from this place soon.”

War Leader stared at her as if she’d said the most obvious thing in the galaxy. “Yeah? The sooner you start moving, the sooner you can be gone from here.” He waved his hand impatiently at the open door. “After you.”

“Right.” She pushed herself away from the wall and shook her limbs out to wake herself up. Shrugging her suit back on, she stepped through the door. Instantly, she knew that something was different about this room. The floor was free of dust and there were signs of recent life about the place. Squinting, her heart rate picked up as her brain recognized the space as the bridge of a ship. They’d found Sandri’s treasure room.

She heard War Leader’s breath hitch as he stepped into the room behind her.

“So this is it?” he whispered, voice trembling with awe.

“Looks like,” Sera replied equally quietly. She wasn’t sure if it was the culmination of all their struggles to escape this system lending an air of sanctity to the room or simply the fact that they were truly sneaking around another’s private space now but it felt wrong to speak any louder than was needful. War Leader moved with purpose towards the prow of the ship, ancient transparisteel holding back tonnes of garbage from crushing the main computers underneath. Leaving him to it, Sera poked around at the banks of computers lining the walls, surprised when they powered on without a hitch. A system layout popped up on a monitor.

“Huh.”

“What?” War Leader said distractedly from the other end of the room.

“No, it’s the atmospheric controls.” She flicked through the options displayed on the screen. “I think it uses some kind of low-power loop to determine where needs fresh air. If I had Bastila with me, I think we could stabilize the atmosphere across the whole moon. And before you complain,” she said, cutting him off, “she’s my business partner, so that was work talk, not personal talk.”

“Hmph!”

She returned to the main screen, searching for the ship’s schematics. “I wonder if the gravitational controls work the same way…”

“None of that is going to matter soon. Soon we’re going to be far away from here and will never have to think about this stupid planet ever again.”

Sera shrugged. “Fair enough.”

She pulled out a chair and sat down at the computer with a groan of relief. How long had it been since she’d sat on anything with proper lower back support? Not much longer now and I can sit in as many shitty office chairs as I like. She browsed idly through what was left of the main systems, amusing herself with a little one-button game that someone had side loaded into their console. Behind her, War Leader muttered something too low for her to make out.

“What you say?” she said softly.

“This can’t be it. This can’t be all of it! There must be some other map that I haven’t found yet!” He rushed to flick a neighbouring computer on, banging it impatiently when it didn’t boot up fast enough.

Sera sat forward, leaning her elbows on her knees. “What do you mean ‘there must be another map’?” she said slowly.

“We’ve been to all those places!” he said, not bothering to be quiet now. “There was nothing, absolutely nothing! The only thing we ever picked up was you!”

Sera ran a hand over her mouth, staring into the middle distance pensively as the boy ran back and forth between the computers getting increasingly frantic.

“It’s not necessarily the end of the world,” she said after a moment. “I’ve worked with incomplete star charts before. We just need a point of reference. Maybe, maybe if we go back to where you found me…”

“Oh, yes. I’m definitely going to find something useful from a massive hole in the ground. I’ll get right on it.” He moved to a computer on the far wall. “That rotten asshole. I’ll tear his guts out where he’s hidden--”

“There aren’t any other maps.”

They both jumped, whirling to where the voice had come from. Sandri was slouching in one corner with a jug in one shaking hand and a cup in the other. He jerked a thumb at an open air duct behind him, the wall below scuffed and dirty as though someone had used the duct to access the room on a regular basis.

“That big muscle head of yours is easy to read,” he said by way of explanation. His voice was slurred and he seemed to be using the wall for support. “Not that any of it matters any more.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Sera saw War Leader tightening his grip on one of the chairs, jaw tense and eyes furious.

“What do you mean by that?” she blurted out, more to head off any chance of violence.

Sandri frowned. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said, filling his cup to the brim. “We’re stuck here.”

*****

My god, I didn't think I was going to get this done this year...

Part 6 will follow when I've actually started it. Oh my god, I'm so worried that this is turning into boring crap.