There was silence in the Graveyard of Giants as the sun hovered just above the horizon painting the sky with brilliant pink. The march back home was routine, but it seemed further and more grueling than before. Rey filled a sack with freshly plundered trinkets; a 1605 Series Nine controller board, two modular transistors, and a micro form factor data wafer; barely worth the hours of scavenging required to obtain them. But it would be enough at least for another days worth of food, and that was all that mattered.
"Today was a good day." She thought aloud, a mantra she repeated from time to time to remind her, simply, that it could easily be worse. She could have found nothing at all.
Taking an alternate path back to the base of the fallen Star Destroyer she had been pilfering for what seemed like endless months, she realized Unkar Plutt's shop would be closed for the night and she'd have to wait until morning. Her stomach growled, but there was no rush to get back to her encampment. There wouldn't be any food waiting there for her anyways.
Instead, she weaved her way in and out of cracked Durasteel cylinders admiring the construction of the once mighty vessel which was now a silent skeleton forever doomed to erode in the sands of Jakku. One day, it would disappear into the dunes themselves becoming a permanent, mountainous part of the landscape. Rey wondered sometimes what else lay beneath the sand of the planet she reluctantly called home and how long it had been there.
Tattered wiring hung down unstripped of its internal precious metal, a project better suited for daylight and dangerous even then. Connected up more than twenty meters above, even for an experienced climber like Rey it was a dangerous proposition. And once again, probably not worth the effort and risk though very little of her work was.
A scraped knee here, a broken ankle, cracked ribs, and even a dislocated shoulder, Rey had seen her share of injuries. But she had watched a friend with her own eyes as she fell to her death from atop the crumpled thruster of a junked freighter and thought about it sometimes even though many years had passed. She had no friends left; just hostile aggressors, competitors, and the loathsome Plutt to look forward to seeing at the end of each monotonous day.
Just as Rey was passing through the last cylinder, something caught her eye. Half covered in sand and obscured by a cracked fuel sell was a dome shaped object barely visible to the naked eye. She must have walked past it a dozen times or so during her months of scavenging the wreckage and simply never noticed.
A dead Astromech droid!
Rey hurriedly dug it out of the sand and admired it. It had a black finish, ravaged by the sand and time itself and blended in with the contrasted tones of the interior of the vessel. It no longer had the shine of Woodoo hide typically seen on Imperial R series Droids but was beautiful all the same. It clearly hadn't worked in years, undisturbed and preserved and Rey wasted no time disassembling it down to the inner chassis to inspect the hydro-glycolic fuel cell within. Of course, it was dead, damaged in some sort of impact but the leakage within had apparently not corroded the rest of the internal components.
The sun was now dangerously low on the horizon, and it was becoming harder to see. Rey pulled the heavy Droid out of its place and laid it down flat, lashing rope around its legs and dragged it behind her as the sun set in the distance and gave way to the cool winds of night.
"A cracked power umbilical. Burned powerbus cables. Well, that's just typical."
Rey flopped down on her backside next to the droid, leaning her tired body against it. Like most things she did, it would take more effort than it was worth to get the thing up and running again.
"Tomorrow you're being sold to Unkar as scrap." She pouted, fondling a the remains of a shattered actuating coupler between black dirty fingers. "Tonight, you're my guest. Most company I've had in some time."
She pulled together whatever scrapped rations she could find and gobbled up a tiny meal, barely enough for even a short burst of energy. She looked the Droid up and down, admiring its construction.
"I can't begin to imagine all the things you must have seen." She said in awe, picturing great battles above the surface of Jakku and beyond. "All the places you must have been too."
It was hard not to admire the handiwork of the Empire. Everything was constructed with such cold uniformity, but there was a pleasant simplicity about it. Something sterile and discomforting always permeated her raids on fallen cruisers, and the stories she had heard as a child while shadows of the old empire still haunted parts of the galactic core like lost specters in time painted Imperial machinations in a certain negative light. At the same time, in her own very unique way she had spent more time on Imperial cruisers than most Imperial troops themselves had within their lifetime and she knew them in and out, part for part. A certain level of admiration was part and parcel with her career as a scavenger.
Droids didn't know any better. They were programmed to serve their masters. No different than R series units used by the old rebellion and the current resistance which she had caught glimpses of from time to time, the Imperial Droid she had found had no say in the matter. He must have served his masters well, though she dreaded to think in what possible ways.
Rey slowly began to drift off into a slumber as she daydreamed, the world melting away before her replaced by a heroic fantasy somewhere in a system far from any desert, far from Jakku, far from the life she had been forced into.
"Anything else?" Sputtered the curmudgeonly Junkar Plutt as he thrust a half portion of rations in front of Rey's face.
"Nothing today." She replied with disdain as she snatched them eagerly and turned to walk away.
"It's been a slow week for you, girl." Unkar shouted after her, gloating. "It's only gonna get harder for you the hungrier you become."
"Right." She snapped.
A week had passed and Rey had become distracted, almost obsessed with repairing the Imperial Astromech Droid. She'd traded part of her ration for a measly hose fitting from Gurney Hek who had haggled with her endlessly until she was clearly being taken advantage of. She knew it was out of spite; Rey had stuck him in the head after he tried to scavenge a Repulsorlift Igniter from her speeder, so she had left him with a mark he'd remember. He still couldn't walk straight and bared his razor teeth at her whenever she came into town. But at least now she had everything she would need to get the Droid working again, including a new fuel cell. Admittedly, it was a different voltage and using it could risk rupturing the primary stabilizer of the Droid, but it was all she was going to find and she was lucky to have it. All on its own it was worth at least four days of rations.
Rey excitedly made her way back to the encampment, clutching the last of bits required to repair her Droid close to her. She was starving, almost literally, her ribs exposed when she removed her soiled wraps. But she had gone through worse, and was relying on the fact that this excursion would be worth the effort. With an Astromech at her side, more dangerous exploration could be done safely and that meant more parts for Unkar Plutt and more food in her belly. It also meant having a bit of companionship, and the best kind too; the kind that never argued, complained, and most importantly was reliable and trustworthy.
Rey despised the idea of being called master. Watching Droids sold only to be disintegrated or broken down into component parts, as though there wasn't enough slavery in the Western Reaches made her ill. While Droids were certainly not independent, they had an intelligence and sentience about them. Rey viewed them no different than people. In many ways, she respected them far more.
Without even taking time to eat, Rey got to work on the droid, replacing a torn hydraulic hose with the one she had traded with Gurney for. Several hours of dirty work passed. Rey's fingers had never been so sore or torn up, micro lacerations all over her hands from the delicate work that had to be done in order to replace several key servo mechanisms in the interior of the Droid. But after work on the chassis was done and the outer shell of the thing was replaced, all the was left to do was remove the battery casing and replace it with the new fuel cell.
Rey felt butterflies of excitement in her stomach as she quickly popped in the new cell, attaching the conduit back up, and seating it in the casing. She pushed it hard back inside the droid and flipped the jumpers back to their default position.
Silence.
Rey listened carefully, ignoring the whistling evening winds of Jakku. And she heard it; a minor whirring inside, indicating that the power had begun to flow.
With a shaking finger, she began the startup sequence. Pressing toggle after toggle, one, two...
A loud snap and a puff of smoke as Rey jumped to her feet, startled. From the top of the droid a capacitor had burst through the top of its head; a blown motivator.
"Damn!"
Rey realized what had gone wrong. She had forgotten to reset the voltage inhibitors. She kicked the sand wildly, cursing herself. Such a simple step that she had neglected in the midst of her excitement. Full of anger she paced back and forth with clenched fists as the Droid sat and smoldered. And then she stopped dead in her tracks.
On the back wall of Unkar's shop, there was a replacement motivator.
She had seen it every time she did a trade with him, sitting there for months on end. The new fuel cell was obviously in good condition if it was outputting enough voltage to require an inhibitor. He'd trade for it surely. He had too.
Rey's stomach began to growl. She decided to retire for the night; one more day, and she'd have a working companion. And equal. Someone that could help her in her work.
Someone to share her time with.
"Gurney tells me you been doing some trading with him too, have you? What's that all about? Wastin' away, and you're bringing parts to him? What do you need powerbus cables for anyhow?"
"It's not any of your business, Unkar." Rey said. "And I'm not here to trade for rations today, either."
Unkar leaned in with an amused grin. "Oh aren't you? What'll it be then?"
Rey pointed at the back wall. "That motivator. Does it work?"
Unkar turned slowly away from her to look at it, humoring her, though he knew perfectly well what he had.
"Ah, yes. An R series motivator, that. Interesting that you'd be asking for Astromech parts."
"It's for my speeder." Rey said with meek reservation.
"I'm sure."
"Anyways, what'll it take?" Rey raised a sack to the counter, and dumped an assortment of parts she had kept stockpiled over the weeks before. There were at least ten rations worth of parts, and the way Unkar's eyes widened, she could sense it.
Unkar scratched his chin with a long sigh.
"Double that and maybe we'd have a deal."
Rey perked up, furious. "What?"
"It's not everyday you run across an R series motivator. I'm sure you'd know something about that, seeing as how you're so interested in Astromech Droids, mm?"
"But that's not fair!"
"Life isn't fair, girl." Unkar grunted. "You want something else? I'll offer you a half portion for everything here."
Rey slammed her fist on the counter. "That's not even a fraction of what its worth!"
Unkar hissed, "Perhaps if you weren't holding out on me, I'd be more willing to lend a hand. But since you seem to be insistent on keeping a stockpile of little secrets from me, how do I know I can even trust that these parts here are viable."
Rey let out a shout of frustration before shuffling everything back in her sack and storming off back to her speeder.
Her temper tantrum was pleasing to Unkar Plutt.
Another week, no more parts, no more food. A dead Droid in her camp, and Rey was feeling very weak. Unkar was refusing to do any reasonable trade, and she knew why; he figured out what she had in her possession. And anything valuable on Jakku belonged to Unkar Plutt, or it belonged to no-one.
She put her hand on the Astromech droid, running her fingers along its smooth surface and looked at it with some longing.
"I'm sorry." Was all she could muster as she flipped it on its back gently, and lashed ropes around its legs for the journey back to Niima Outpost.
As she dragged the thing to her speeder, Rey felt her eyes welling with tears. She was immediately embarrassed by the impracticality of wasting her bodies water in the hot desert sands. And the tears dried up as quickly as they had had started to run down her face, an instance of incredible isolation and loneliness replaced with anger; anger at the Blobfish Unkar Plutt.
Plutt slammed ten rations down in front of her with a sneer as she released the droid to him. She double counted them to make sure they were all accounted for, and then looked up at him.
"There's a perfectly good fuel cell in that Droid. I'd like to be compensated for that as well."
Unkar snarled, and slammed another package down on the counter; a half portion.
Rey took it, feeling wary and unable to argue.
"Fatten yourself up." Unkar suggested. "Or you'll soon be a skeleton in that graveyard yourself."
Rey gave a sullen nod and plodded away.
Another day, another scratch in the wall. A freighter had lifted off into the night sky leaving a vapor trail behind it. Rey watched from her encampment as she filled up on a days worth or rations, emptying the last of her water into her mouth. She felt refreshed.
The winds of the desert cooed a song and blue her hair out of her face. She wondered what it would be like to sit at the helm of a ship, to go wherever she pleased.
In the distance she saw Teedo marching along on his Luggabeast on the horizon. Talking to himself in a shrilly reptilian voice. He turned to look at Rey for a moment before mumbling something and continuing on.
Alone, in the desert of Jakku. Just like her. Just like everyone at Niima Outpost. Just like the Droid who had rested in slumber for decades before Rey had pulled it out of the sand.
She wondered if someone would find her one day and pull her out of the sand as well, awaken her from the slumber of her lonely work.