The girl sinks to her knees.
A torrent of emotions - hurt, betrayal, but most of all the outright terror of the abandonment hits her, and the tears begin to fall. They splash into the sand that cloaks the planet in a red mass of heat.
Impatient, the large Crolute tuggs savagely at her small hand. She staggers forward, towards him.
But before he can load her onto the sandcrawler, she wrenches free, turns and looks back.
But even where the shuttle had landed, the footprints of the last person she loved and trusted are fading, the desert wind whipping sand over them. Even her tears, what were once shining gems glistening on her face in the blazing sun, have dried without a trace.
The Crolute - Unkar Plutt - fast losing his patience, raises the little girl and places her on the sandcrawler. He tosses her a few strips of cloth which wrap around her, shielding her from the sand and wind.
She reaches to wipe what moisture remains on her cheeks from her tears.
The girl draws the sharp rock is drawn across the metal.
The pain is still there, not as bad as it was before. But it is still present.
It is present as the rock slices noisily through the metal that once consisted of an armour plating. The grating still hurts, ripping at her heart. But it has been two years, and now she is stronger.
She throws the rock down and beats the armour plating with her fist. It has submitted to her will. The odd seven hundred scratches in the plating - starting shallow and wobbly, but growing increasingly deep and straight - testify to her strength.
She is strong.
The girl hopes.
She bites back the tears of joy as the two wires touch, the warm hum of the transmitter running through her hand, reaching and pulling something in her heart that she has suppressed for years. Already a fantasy is forming in the eight-year-old mind, one she has not dared dream for years.
She dashes outside, transmitter still in hand, not bothering to shut the hatch of the ruined AT-AT in her haste. She can already see it in the dim twilight of Jakku. A spire reaching up into the sky. A transmitter strong enough to call them from whatever corner of the galaxy they might be in.
It had been three years.
They could return.
She dashes back inside, food forgotten, and stares out at the Imperial Star Destroyer, lying wrecked on the ground.
It might take a year. Or two. Or three.
But she'd do it.
Scavenging for parts. It would save her.
The girl shouts as the pole spins through the air.
The diminutive Rodian thug dodges nimbly, attempting a counter-feint with his small knife. He snags the strap of her satchel and tugs, but she breaks off and strikes him a weak blow on his torso.
She clutches the satchel around her neck protectively. She needs them. After two years of scavenging and trading, she has enough parts to finish her power source.
She cannot lose them.
He can't be one of Unkar Plutt's thugs. The Crolute junk dealer had whitelisted her from his thugs.
Then the Rodian wouldn't know about her... abilities.
Feinting right, she twirls the staff left and hit him with a solid blow across the jaw with a satisfying crunch. Instinctively, he drops the blade and cradles his hurt jaw, stumbling backwards. Hand going up in surrender.
She does not relent. The red mist that dances in front of her vision does not relent either, roaring ahead with ferocity.
She sees his submission. She bested him. She is powerful.
With another shout of ferocity, she spins the staff forward, smashing into his ribs and feeling the satisfying click of a dislocation. He collapses to the ground.
She pummels him.
Over and over again, discipline and grace lost, she drives the end of the pole into his face. Again. And again.
It's not until she's out of breath that she realizes he's dead.
There is shock - shock natural to a ten-year-old girl who just killed.
But in a few minutes, his body is covered by the shifting sands, and she is gone.
The girlis excited.
It had been one more year - one more year to upgrade the power source, create an explosive beacon that'd shoot her signal into deep space.
One more wire, she re-solders. Then she wraps it in insulation tape. Turning to the focusing device, she flips a few switches, hearing the pleasant hum of the unwieldy device power up.
With a tug of a lever, she activates the primary power generator, and watches blue lines light up all along her diagnostics panel.
She's never gone this far before. She's ready - she's checked everything a hundred times.
The message is loaded. It is simple, a holoimage of her, and a message. She'd spent days finding the right message, until finally she'd settled on a basic, "Hello, I'm Rey. I'm looking for my parents," with a picture and co-ordinates of Jakku.
She cranks a lever, watching the blue power lines vibrate as power begins to course through them.
She has one shot. The powerful transmission would probably short out all the wires from the sheer amount of power running through them.
With a quick, silent, prayer to anything holy, she flips the initiation switch.
It is euphoric.
The blue lines run up and down her console as the machine powers up, the focusing device vibrates, and surges of power begin to build up underneath the tower.
A light blinks.
She quickly re-adjusts a power setting, turning the power levels down, bringing a backup capacitor online as the fluctuating energy builds up.
Another light blinks.
A cold, twisting pain begins to open up in her stomach as she flips another switch on her console. At this rate, the message will be too weak for the capacitors -
Bang.
The explosion - red, not blue, like it should be, blossoms up the tower at the wrong time - her console goes berserk, flashing and winking red as the system breaks down and shuts off, one by one. A gout of flame rips its way out of the tower, and a blue spurt, the only part that remains from the message, burps weakly out of the top of the tower and hisses down as latent energy.
Then, with a soul crushing groan, the whole tower leans over and smashes in the desert sand into a thousand pieces.
Within the day, between sand and the scavengers, nothing is left of the tower but a memory.
And the girl can do nothing but cry.