A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE
The galaxy languishes beneath the Empire's boot-heel
rebellion after rebellion quelled by the Stormtrooper legions
and the incredible might of the Imperial fleet.
The Emperor has enshrined himself as an all-powerful dictator
and rules from Coruscant with the aid of his lieutenant
and apprentice in the dark arts of the Sith
the deadly and unpredictable Darth Vader.
Hope stands on the edge of a knife, ready to plummet
into a future of oppressive and authoritarian rule.
Two children, separated by an ocean of void
may be the galaxy's last chance...
CHAPTER ONE: BINARY SUNRISE
LEIA
Leia's uncle held her small hand in his rough, callused one as they walked over the dunes in the fading light of their dull world's second sun. They paused a while to watch wild dewbacks moving in a herd across the sands. Muscles shifting under pebbled hides burned grey-green in the sunset, big mouths crushing moisture from sparse vegetation while heavy tails swept back and forth. A big old bull let out a moaning cry and the others echoed it.
"I want aunt Beru," she said. They'd been walking for hours and her feet were sore.
"And I'd like a hot cup of Corellian whiskey," her uncle answered. He was a worn-looking man, tall and solid with a short cap of greying hair and a face tanned and roughened by the desert suns. "It's not far now, Leia. You're seven now; be a big girl and don't complain."
Leia blew out a moody breath and scuffed her shoes through the dirt. Their path grew stony as the day wore on. They left the dunes behind them, passing into a narrow gorge with red stone walls and a floor of rattling scree. Leia gripped her uncle's hand more tightly. She'd never been into the maze of canyons and gulleys north of their little moisture farm. Her uncle had strictly forbidden it. Everyone knew that a witch lived there, a crone who dealt with Sand People and read fortunes in the guts of womp rats. The older children talked about her, sometimes.
"I'm scared," she said. Her voice echoed small from the stones.
"Be quiet," said her uncle.
They walked on, their shadows chasing them along the canyon walls. The sky was huge above them. Scant clouds scudding there. They crossed a sulfur flow, an egg-smelling vein of undrinkable water overarched by a bridge made of hide and ronto bones, something Tuskens might have built, or one of the hermits who lived out in the deep deserts of the Dune Sea. Leia's uncle hummed to himself as he walked, but there was no joy to it. Tuneless, nervous. He'd been angry earlier when she'd hid from him among the junk and half-completed projects in his workshop. "I don't want to go into the desert," she'd wailed. "I don't want to go!"
"You're going," he'd said, his hand like a vise on her arm as he'd pulled her out of the cupboard.
Bad dreams for a week after she'd heard him mention it to aunt Beru. "Time to take the girl out there," he'd said one night. Leia, hiding in the hall, listened with trepidation. Breath bated.
"Kenobi can stuff himself," Beru had replied tartly. They were in the kitchen, he seated at the counter with a drink, she canning the last of the gur-fruit. "She's too young."
"She's going," said her uncle.
"If you won't stand up for her, I will." Fire in her aunt's soft voice.
"He's a wanted man." Her uncle downed his drink and poured another. A finger of golden liquid bought dearly in Mos Espa. "You think he wouldn't come and take her? That other one...she's worse. You say what you need to, but she's going."
Beru stood, jar in hand, anger written on her face, and then she let her shoulders slump. Fruit swam like molten gold in the old glass jar she held. "I'm afraid, Owen."
He rose and kissed her on the cheek, then took her in his arms. "I know," he said, "but we don't have a choice."
That night Leia slept and saw a strange vault-ceilinged place where light shone through tall windows onto little corpses under shrouds. A voice came through the drifting smoke and shadow. A figure stalking in the dark, and words that rolled like mist over the floor.
The next morning she asked her aunt again about her father.
"He died in the war," Beru told her, hurrying through the morning's chores with uncharacteristic brusqueness. Her eyes red-rimmed. "I didn't know him well, dear."
The desert cooled as she walked on beside her uncle.
"Carry me," she said, tugging on his arm.
"You're too heavy these days," he answered.
"Where are we going?"
Tramp of his worn-out boots through gravel and grit. He slowed his pace, ran his free hand through his sweat-matted hair. In a shaded bend they paused to rest, washing down radiation tablets with water cooled in their thermal canteens. Leia sat on a ridge of wind-carved stone and swung her legs over a crevasse where the bones of a womp rat lay. "I want to know about my father."
"He died in the war." A tired answer, often given.
"What war?"
"You know what war." He rose, knees cracking. "Get moving. We're almost out of light."
Night fell. Leia bit back tears as she stumbled on over the canyon's winding floor, her heels blistered, her legs leaden. She wanted to go back to the farm, to hear aunt Beru's voice reading their story, the one about the Jawa warrior and the old krayt dragon, and then to drift off into sleep. No dreams. No canyon. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tunic, sniffling.
"Stop that," said her uncle, not unkindly. He pulled her onward with a gentle tug.
"But I don't want to go." The tears came then. He picked her up, too heavy or no, and trudged onward as she slipped into unconsciousness with her head pillowed on his shoulder.
Leia woke near dawn, the red light of the first sun wavering on the horizon, the walls of the gorge replaced by open sky. Her uncle had stopped moving. She could hear his ragged breath, smell his sweat through the bantha wool of his tunic. They were on a mesa overlooking the dunes, a crumbling scarp of rock and sand. High crags above, dwarf trees clinging to the slopes. Urusai roosted in the branches, their wattled beaks agape in the cool early morning air.
"I've brought her," Owen said.
Leia lifted her head. She rubbed sleep from her eyes, squinting, and saw a little hut of pressed dirt and old duracrete standing on the mesa's lip. A woman in a heavy black skirt and a form-fitting moisture sleeve that covered her from chin to ankles sat in a folding canvas chair outside it. She was lean and bony, arms corded with muscle, head shaved bald and peeling in the bitter sunlight. She smoked a deathstick in a slim bantha-horn holder. Her eyes were colorless, her small feet bare. She set a queasy feeling in the pit of Leia's stomach.
"It's all right," Owen said. He set Leia down, then knelt and hugged her, squeezing too hard. "I'll be back in a week. What should you do while I'm gone?"
"Be a big girl," Leia said. Her voice trembled. She felt too light, like her feet were going to
leave the ground at any minute. Like she might be blown away by the hissing wind. The witch regarded her with those pale, pale eyes. An urusai flapped down from the cliffs to land ungainly on her shoulder. It screamed and shook its wattles.
"You hurt her," Owen growled, speaking as he straightened up, "and there'll be hell to pay. You hear?"
The witch said nothing. Owen's words faded.
Her uncle's hands left Leia's shoulders. She heard him walk away, back down the mesa's crooked slope and toward the gorge. Gone into the shifting sands.
The pale witch rose, smoke leaking from her nostrils, and crossed toward the spot where Leia stood. Her urusai took flight with an indignant squawk, lofting itself off the mesa and out over the dunes below, dwindling to a speck. Watching it, Leia lost track of the witch until a bony claw seized her chin and dragged her eyes up to pale pits in a sunburned face, narrow, thin, teeth crowded in a scornful mouth.
"You look weak," said the witch.
Tears stung Leia's eyes. She forced herself to meet the witch's glare, though her shoulders shook and she wanted nothing but for her uncle to return and say that it was all a joke, a trick, a bad dream. She knew he wouldn't, though.
"Are you afraid, child?"
That voice, so much thinner and colder than Aunt Beru's. The witch was taller than Leia's aunt, too, and smelled like sweat and death sticks. Her fingers dug cruelly into Leia's face.
"No," Leia managed to choke out as the first sobs welled up.
The witch released her and stepped back, folding her thin arms. A hot wind from the desert stirred her skirts and blew red grit across the mesa, scouring woman and girl, hissing against the worn bell of the cliffside hut. A strange smile crossed the witch's features. Gone in an instant. "You will be."
She turned and went. Leia, swiping mucous from her lip with one small fist, followed after her through the billowing dust, aching for home.
LUKE
Luke walked at his father's side into the Senatorium. Bail wore a stiff, high-collared robe in senatorial black. The other senators, all of them human except for a nervous-looking Ithorian and a smug, cream-furred Bothan, filed around them in a nervous stream down the chamber's narrow throat. A few had aides, fewer still children or wards in tow. Red-robed Imperial Guards stood in silent ranks along the walls, black expanses of basalt rising a thousand meters to vaulted ceilings and frescoes lost to distance and gloom. The Imperial Palace was vast enough to boast its own climate, ragged clouds swirling in its highest reaches.
"You must be silent, Luke," said Bail. "You are to neither move nor speak until the session is over and the Emperor has dismissed us. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Father," said Luke. He wiped his sweating hands on his tunic, watching a purple-faced Moff in a uniform dripping with commendations upbraid a silent Imperial Guard for checking his identification.
"Do you know who I am?" the Moff blustered, snatching back his ident chit and thrusting out his chin in defiance.
The red-robed guardsman, tongueless, face hidden by his tall red helm, said nothing. Hundreds of his brothers at arms lined the grand processional, still as statues except where they glided into the crowd like clawfish to conduct random checks and sweeps. The sniffers built into the walls, Bail had said, were sensitive enough to detect even the smallest explosive devices and the merest traces of poison, but a man could be a weapon, too. The Guard existed to winnow out threats no sensor could detect.
One passed within a yard of Bail and Luke, robes whispering over the processional floor. Luke fought to keep from flinching. He looked up at his father, but Bail's expression was stony, his posture stiff and distant. He didn't so much as blink when the guardsman paused to examine him. They carried on down the processional and the Guard looked away, reorienting his attention on the hapless Ithorian already beset by two other robed sentinels and a leashed massif snuffling and snapping at the slow-moving sentient's robes.
"Father—"
Bail shook his head. "I said quiet, Luke."
Stung, Luke glanced back over his shoulder as the massif's baying echoed from the walls. The Ithorian was underway again, but one of the guardsmen trailed behind him like a blood-red shadow. The alien senator looked uneasy, fussing with his robes and breathing heavily through his twin mouths. Luke's tutors were always circumspect when it came to Imperial policy toward aliens, but Luke knew enough at nine years old to guess the truth. They were being pushed out, ground underfoot, their rights in the Senate slowly stripped away.
Aren't we going to do something? Luke's nails dug into his palms.
The Senatorium opened up vast and dark before them. What faint echoes of their footsteps had survived in the processional faded into its lofty recesses. A rail-less bridge of durasteel, thin as a wrist, spanned a bottomless pit to where the boxes of the Senators hung suspended from the tiered branches of a poorly-lit frame. Aides, translators, and other staff already waited there. Luke followed his father to Alderaan's box where the royal flag hung bright against the monumental chamber's oppressive gloom. Bail's protocol droid, C-3PO, stood waiting for them in Etiquette Mode. He bowed stiffly at their approach, but Luke paid him no mind. Something else had his attention.
The Emperor's vacant throne, hanging above the void like a spider at the center of a vast and swaying web, loomed thirty meters higher than the senate's tiered seats. Great swags of silk which vanished up into the darkness hung from the throne's canopy and from the glow-lances radiating from its crown, giving it the look of a grandee's howdah, or of a stage scaled and focused to exalt a single occupant. The throne itself waited within like the dry socket of a pulled tooth, darkness pooled around it.
Minutes passed as the senators took their places. In a special gallery above, the Council of Moffs muttered and quarreled in an unruly mob around the skeletal figure of their leader, Grand Moff Tarkin. Luke knew the man's gaunt face from the holo-news. He was always making speeches about the glory of the Empire and the importance of loyalty, and of reporting any sign of wrongdoing. In person he looked starved, his features severe to the point of parody. Luke felt a surge of instinctive dislike as the thin man smiled coldly at some joke made by a squat, sweating Moff standing at his left hand.
"Luke."
Bail's voice cut through Luke's idle investigation of the vast Senatorium. Luke didn't need to ask why. Silence had fallen. The Emperor had arrived.
He sat, the hoary wreck of him, in the shadows of his imperial throne, his yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness, his jaundiced and ruined skin shifting as he smiled. A thicket of brown teeth revealed, then shut away again behind ulcerous lips. Luke swallowed. His heart pounded in his chest. Sweat dampened his armpits and trickled down his back. His knees shook. The chamberlain at Palpatine's right hand seemed like an afterimage, a frail thing lost in his shadow.
"The Imperial Senate is now in session."
The Emperor's voice banished all warmth from the already frigid Senatorium. It was as if a corpse had sat up in the middle of its own funeral, shedding twigs and cinders as its pyre disintegrated and its clothes and hair kindled, and spoken. The sense of wrongness flowing from the bent and ravaged figure on the throne was total, a nauseating tide that tugged at Luke's guts and filled his mouth with a sour, metallic taste. How could this be the Emperor? How could the galaxy have let it happen?
Tarkin spoke, his dry, aristocratic tone at least recognizable as human speech. "The Council of Moffs brings a motion before the Throne."
"The Throne will hear the Council's motion." Again, the creeping dread, the sweats and shakes. The Emperor's eyes were like pits.
"The Council moves that the zone of quarantined space surrounding Serenno be expanded to the ninety-ninth remove within the quadrant and that the duration of said zone be extended to accommodate the fleet's continued efforts to contain the debris and unexploded munitions still in orbit around the afflicted planet."
Luke had no idea what any of it meant, but he saw the anger and frustration on the faces of the Senate's few alien representatives. An emaciated Neimoidian went so far as to bury her face in her hands while the Gossam delegation conferred furiously among themselves. In Serenno's box, Amaldis Dooku dropped into her seat with a look of utter despair on her face. An estranged second cousin to the Confederacy's butchered leader, Bail often complimented her willingness to remain in the Senate and suffer the Emperor's cruel mockery of her position in order to lobby fruitlessly on behalf of her exiled and unhomed people.
Palpatine's chamberlain, a tall, slender woman in an insectile headpiece and long cream-and-purple robes, made a note on her ornate datapad. "The motion is before the Senate."
"Kuat seconds the motion," said a spidery, dark-haired man Luke didn't recognize.
"Motion is seconded," the Chamberlain trilled. "All those in favor, say "Aye." Those opposed, "Nay.""
Amaldis Dooku stood, composing herself. Blunt-featured and greying, she nonetheless commanded a measure of her cousin's legendary gravitas. The eyes of the Senate settled on her hooded eyes and bowed shoulders. "Serenno lodges a formal complaint against this motion. It is inhumane, without precedent, and a death sentence for the Serennese refugees struggling for survival in the ports and ghettos of the Outer Rim."
A moment of silence followed. Luke almost dared to believe that someone would speak out on Amaldis's behalf, but then hands rose like a forest and shouts of "aye" filled the echoing dark. Amaldis resumed her seat with steely dignity, defeated.
"Serenno's complaint is noted," the Chamberlain said. She looked back down at the datapad's screen. "The ayes have it. Motion carries."
A frenzy of voices rose to fill the silence, the senators of a thousand, thousand worlds begging for the floor, but the Emperor ignored them. The curtains of his floating throne drifted shut as though blown by a lazy wind. The glow-lances bristling from its canopy winked out one by one as the entire massive contrivance began to ascend toward the blackness above. Does he live up there? Luke wondered, craning his neck back and squinting until his eyes watered. He could make out nothing of the distant ceiling.
"Come along, Luke," said Bail.
"What?" Luke tore his attention from the ascending throne. "That's all?"
Bail chuckled ruefully as they left the box, C-3PO trailing behind them with small, officious steps. "He'll make the Senate wait until tomorrow to resume proceedings, or he'll call us in the middle of the night; it's how he keeps us in line."
Luke looked across the Senatorium at Amaldis, lingering in her box, knuckles white on the rail. A deep unease settled in his stomach. "What happened to Serenno, Dad?"
Bail's expression darkened. "The war. Don't dawdle, Luke."
They streamed back into the Processional in a silent throng of black and grey. It seemed to Luke as though everyone but the Moffs was angry over the result of the session and its sudden termination, but something in the air kept people quiet. Luke felt it, too. A prickle on the back of his neck and the itching, ugly thought that no sooner had the Emperor left the Senate's sight then he had crawled into some vent or hidden place to peer down on his shivering subjects, an oversized insect gloating over its laden web.
A wail broke Luke's unpleasant daydream. The hall was deathly still around him and his father's hand was on his shoulder, fingers digging in. Ahead, two Guards had backed the Ithorian senator against a wall. One held the leash of a massif straining to get free. The other had his force pike's built-in blaster leveled at the groaning alien. Behind the Ithorian the wall went up and up forever, a black expanse of stone as dark as the void outside the porthole of Luke's stateroom on the Tantive IV. The massif barked and whined, drool hanging in ropes from its panting jaws. The Ithorian's wide-set eyes rolled in terror.
"Dad, we've got to help him," Luke whispered.
"Be silent, Luke." Bail's grip on his shoulder was like iron. "Listen to what I told you."
The Guard holding the massif's leash signed something with his free hand. The other Guard nodded thoughtfully, then lowered the heavy blaster's barrel. A wave of palpable relief spread through the hall as the Ithorian's shoulders sagged and a vague murmur of conversation rose up to fill the suffocating silence. Luke caught the Ithorian's eye and gave the alien a tentative smile. The Ithorian's eyes crinkled at the corners in rueful humor.
And then the Guard shot the senator of Ithor through the knee. Howling, the Ithorian fell just as the other Guard released the massif. Claws scrabbled on stone. Screams rippled out through the crowd as senators and staff scrambled away from the scene of carnage, from the horrible sight of the Ithorian's flesh stretching in the massif's jaws as the beast's thick neck rippled and shivered, and then finally one of the flailing alien's throats tore free of his body in a spray of gore. Luke heard himself scream as though from a long way off. He wanted to run, to turn away, but his father's hand held him in place and his eyes seemed glued to the spectacle of the massif's gory snout plunging into the wound it had made.
The Guards looked down in silence at body twitching on the floor, at the beast that feasted on the Ithorian's flesh, the blood invisible against their robes.
"That's the enemy, Luke." Bail spoke in a voice so low that only Luke could hear him. "Never forget it."
MARA
The taste of dirty water woke Mara from uneasy dreams. Spluttering, she kicked free of her cot's thin sheet and tore the source of the foul taste, a sodden rag bearing the stains of decades of floors scrubbed, off of her face. She gagged and spat phlegm and filthy liquid as she tumbled to the warped dormitory floorboards, gasping in pain when her still-healing hand slapped against the hardwood.
"Happy name day, wormskin," said Tarul. The Nikto girl loomed over Mara, her henchmen to her either side. Tarul squatted and retrieved the rag. "Did you just throw away my present?"
Mara spat again to clear her throat, then pushed herself up onto her elbows. It was still dark outside. Moonlight fell across the floor between the narrow cots where the orphans of Indru House slept. "I've seen you eat trash before," she snarled. "Is that why you stuffed that thing into my mouth? Did you think I was hungry?"
The Nikto's rough, pebbly lips twisted into a scowl. "Wrong answer."
Mara's desperate roll into the cover of her cot was doomed from the start. Indon and Bizo, Tarul's twin Rodian lieutenants, jumped past their taskmaster to haul Mara out from under the bed and pin her to the ground as Tarul leaned forward, pinched her nostrils shut, and then forced the rag into her mouth when suffocation forced it open. The thick, astringent taste of piss and floor wax flooded Mara's tongue. Tears of shame burned at the corners of her eyes.
"Spit it out and I'll break your other hand," the Nikto hissed in Mara's ear. She straightened up, hard black eyes raking the dormitory as the other children did their best to pretend at sleep. "Let's take her outside, boys. That old rag isn't enough to clean a dirty wormskin like our Mara."
The twins piped their mirth, their sticky fingers adhering to Mara's skin as they dragged her to her feet and toward the dormitory door. She broke a toenail on a loose board when Tarul pushed her from behind. The pain made dark spots bloom, but she forced herself to pick up her pace. Her left hand ached and throbbed as Indon tightened his grip on her arm; the bones hadn't been set after what Mother Deren had done to her when she'd been caught filching from the kitchens. You were too slow, she berated herself as Bizo boxed her ear, making it ring. You're always too slow. You see it coming and you just stare. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Mother Deren herself, matron of the orphanage and nominal steward of its inmates, was coming up the stairs with a bottle of Corellian brandy under one arm and an unlit deathstick in her mouth when Tarul and her cronies manhandled Mara out onto the third-story landing. The pinched old stick of a Twi'lek, haglike as ever in her tatty floral night robe, paused, looking up the staircase at Mara with the cloth stuffed into her mouth and her arms pinioned behind her back by Indon and Bizo. For a moment, Mara dared to hope that the matron would intervene, that whatever shred of decency lurked in the old Twi'lek's breast would at least transmute this torture into a punishment for the four of them for being out of bounds after hours.
"We caught her stealing again, Mother Deren," Tarul offered sweetly, proffering a palm-sized tin of brined crustaceans. "She was hiding food under a loose floorboard. We didn't want to bother you, so we were taking her down to the kitchens to put it back."
Mother Deren said nothing, but the look she gave Mara couldn't fail to communicate how little the Twi'lek cared about the truth of Tarul's accusations. A bitter smile hoisted the old woman's lips as she resumed her ascent, each step creaking under her slippered tread. How can she decide what happens to me? Mara thought, staring at the matron in transfixed revulsion. Who put her in charge of whether I live or die?
"I want you back in bed before the breakfast bell," Mother Deren said as she climbed past them, trudging up toward her office and apartments on the fifth floor. A moment more and she was gone. Mara sobbed into her makeshift gag as Tarul grabbed a fistful of her hair.
"Guess she's still mad about last week, huh?" the Nikto simpered. She grinned, displaying needle-sharp teeth. "That means I can do whatever I want."
They dragged her down the rickety stairs, out past the sleeping Zabrak watchman at the desk and into the frigid morning air. Grey dawn tinged the sky over the peninsula, the rocky spit of land where Indru House sat rotting and staring out at the sea. At the sight of the whitecaps breaking on the stony shore, Mara thought for a moment that Tarul meant to drown her in the surf, but instead the older girl led her accomplices around the ramshackle orphanage to where the rusty outdoor 'fresher stood, the one the staff used to sterilize the nurse's equipment and to hose down produce. The stall was scarcely bigger than a coffin, its interior reeking of mildew and cleaning solution even from fifteen yards away.
The thought of being forced into that fetid tomb made Mara wild. Her heart thundered as the slab of shadows beyond the 'fresher door swelled with her approach. She fought. She drew her legs up and flung her weight against the twins, twisting madly, shrieking through the gag in her mouth, but the Rodians kept their grips and Tarul seized her ankles and hauled her onward toward the waiting darkness.
"All you wormskins always stink," laughed Tarul. "I'm doing you a favor."
The twins bundled Mara into the 'fresher, throwing her down onto the hard duracrete, and Tarul slammed the door before she could make another bid for freedom. Mara's labored breathing echoed from the walls. She couldn't see an inch; no light remained. No, was all her brain could conjure as she spat out Tarul's putrid gag and beat her fists against the plasteel door, held from outside by a lock or else by the twins. Sharp pain in her left hand rewarded her as unhealed bones ground together and jumped out of what tenuous joint they'd achieved. She wailed, the sound low and ugly in the confined space, and threw her shoulder against the door. "Please, Tarul!" she screamed.
Cuts, burns, beatings, and the thousand other indignities of life at Indru House held no fear for Mara. She didn't dream of drowning, of falling, of womp rats or acklay spawn gnawing at her heels. The horror holos that set the other children shivering in their cots always left her cold and unaffected, an adult at a puppet show for toddlers. It was the dark that scared Mara Jade.
Hot water blasted from the 'fresher's unseen jets. Mara screamed again, scrambling away from the stream just as the other nozzles began fitfully to fire. Scalding waves pulsed over her body, battering her to the floor, squeezing the breath from her lungs. The weight of it kept her flattened, steam swirling around her, Tarul shouting something indecipherable through the cataclysmic sound of the water. And then it stopped. Mara, ears ringing, skin raw, lay curled into a spluttering, wheezing ball on the 'fresher's duracrete floor. Hot water sluiced around her, draining slowly.
Tarul's voice sounded thin through the door. "Had enough, worm?"
"Yes," Mara sobbed. "Please. I'll do anything, Tarul. I'll...I'll do what you asked me, about your parents —"
She knew she'd made a mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. The other children hated Mara, but they knew to listen to her hunches, and they knew her dreams came true. Sometimes they'd come to her alone to ask for things, to beg her to read their futures, for help with getting chosen by the families that came infrequently to inspect Mother Deren's flock. Tarul, alternating every other word with threats, had asked Mara to find her parents.
They wouldn't leave me here if they knew I was alive, she'd said, and underneath the snarl had been an ocean of misery and calcifying loneliness. Mara had refused her out of spite, not that she knew how to do what Tarul asked anyway, and lost a tooth for it. Now the 'fresher rattled back to life at Tarul's command. The other girl was swearing, her voice thick. "You lying scum," she choked. "You dirty wormskin bastard! Nobody wants you! Nobody'll ever want you!"
The sound of claws on the control pad. The 'fresher rattled back to life, the water this time bitterly cold. Mara let the 'fresher's current shove her into its farthest corner, buffeting her body back against the unyielding wall. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see. She wrapped her arms around her head and hunkered down as best she could, heels sliding on the slick duracrete, her skin slowly going numb under the relentless tumult.
It was hard to say when it ended. Her ears were still ringing. Her breath felt loose and ragged. Her fingers and toes were hot and swollen, her lips bloody where she'd bitten herself, her face, back, and front dull and tingling. When the door opened she could hardly stand. Three halting steps delivered her into the arms of the morning. The sun was bloody on the horizon, a wound in the sky, and its light danced on the waves. It took a moment for Mara's brain to register that there was no sign of Tarul or the twins.
In their place stood a tall, powerful figure robed and helmed in red. In their arms, neatly folded, were a dark smock and leggings, cleaner and finer than anything Mara had ever worn. The figure held them out, stepping forward to loom over her with silent deference, and she accepted them in numbed silence, marveling at how good they felt against her brutalized skin. Unthinking, she stripped off her torn and sodden nightgown and dressed herself in the red stranger's proffered gifts. It all fit perfectly, snug and warm as a glove.
"Thank you," she said. It was all she could think of to say.
The red-robed figure nodded, then extended a gloved hand. Mara took it.
"Who are you?" she asked the apparition.
They only led her on around the south wing of Inru House, their footsteps loud in the dawn hush, to where a sleek, predatory shuttle with wings folded up like a hawkbat's and a tremendous dorsal fin sat waiting on the heath, its landing gear giving it the appearance of an oversized beetle. Mother Deren, whom Mara had never seen leave Inru House in all her years beneath its rotting roof, stood outside with two more of the red-robed figures and a handsome man in a crisp black uniform with some sort of insignia on his chest. Blue and red squares, like the Imperial officers in action holos.
"You'll find that everything is in order," said the handsome officer. "There will be no further delays, matron, nor another attempt to extort financial favors from Imperial personnel."
Mother Deren's cheeks flamed. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean!" she spat. She caught sight of Mara approaching with her towering escort and her bony hand leapt up to point in accusation. "It's not extortion, is it? Asking for a poor pittance after I've broken my back for this one? Kept her on long past her endowment's bankruptcy! Treated her like she was my own—"
"It's intact," said the officer. He looked impatient now. Impatient, and angry. "And please, don't dishonor yourself further with claims of love and loyalty when you've made your fortune on the backs of that girl and those like her. Why anyone saw fit to leave children in your care is beyond me, madam."
Mother Deren was speechless. Her mouth hung open. Mara, looking on, felt an impossible surge of joy, a buoyancy so tremendous that the gloom inside the shuttle didn't even bother her as her escort led her toward it. She laughed as the shadows swallowed her, pressing her broken fist against her mouth and giggling at the sight of the old woman standing flabbergasted in her housecoat in the shadow of the orphanage.
"Do you know why I've brought you here, child?"
The old man sat on a window seat in the star destroyer's stateroom, the void at his back. He wore a grey robe and beneath its cowl his face was a ravaged landscape of wrinkles and scars, his skin a jaundiced yellow-green, his eyes like carious pits. His teeth were rotten.
The great ship had looked so small at first during the shuttle's ascent through the atmosphere. An arrowhead silhouetted against the moon. On approach, it had swollen until it eclipsed the stars behind it. "To meet you, m'lord," Mara said, digging her toes into the soft carpet.
"Yes," the old man said. His smile was putrid, though she thought he meant for it to comfort her. "Do you know who I am?"
"No, m'lord," she said. "I'm 'shamed. I'm sorry. Mother Deren didn't tell me."
"Mother Deren…" His voice was like a rusty hinge, his intonation at once mocking and understanding. "You hate her, don't you?"
Mara knew a test when she saw one. She looked the old man in the eye and quashed her first, impulsive response. Every second of every day. "No, m'lord."
He seemed almost disappointed, until a second smile broke across his hideous features. "Remarkable," he said. "Few people can lie to me, fewer still as well as you have. I'll ask again. Do you hate her?"
Mara felt the moment shatter. It was like that, sometimes. A broken mirror of possibilities branching off in all directions. She saw herself grown at this man's side, a blade-slim figure in a black bodyglove, a weapon in human form. She saw herself old and grey in a fetid jungle. Cradling a wailing baby. Dragged out of the old man's stateroom in a body bag in just a minute's time. She saw all that would be, and all that might. Shards of a hundred selves.
"I do hate her," she said, wetting her cracked lips.
"Yes," the old man said. "I can feel that you do. Would you like to see her die?"
Mara frowned. She flexed her half-healed hand, feeling bone grind against bone. When she spoke, her voice sounded small. "You can do that?"
His smile returned. A view of the orphanage on its lonely spit of land replaced the starfield at the old man's back. A holo-broadcast like the ones Mother Deren watched in her office, but crystal clear and in perfect color, the old woman herself still shivering out in front of her fortress. Mara thought she could see some of the other children watching from the windows. She looks small, she thought coldly. She looks small and old and stupid. Why did I let her close my hand in the door? I could have shoved her over. Could have broken her hand.
"How will it happen?" The voice belonged to someone else. It must have.
The old man's sallow finger found the comlink built into the window seat. The hiss of transmission filled the stateroom. "Lieutenant Needa," he said in his stentorian croak. "Kill her."
On the screen, the tiny figure of the officer, his hand to his ear, nodded and then approached the red-robed sentinels standing guard over Mother Deren. He said something to them and Mara's heart began to thunder. The world narrowed to the screen, to the moving images behind the old man's cowled head. The red-robes turned as one and Mother Deren, her sense for trouble always sharp, fled, sprinting flat-out back toward Indru House with her robe hiked up around her knees. The taller of the two red-robes raised his force pike and flung it like a javelin. It caught the old Twi'lek between her shoulders and she spun like a dancer, her lekku flying, before collapsing to the dirt. The red-robe marched forward and retrieved his pike. He had to brace his boot against Mother Deren's back to wrench it free.
Mara stared at the screen, her breath coming fast and shallow.
He had moved behind her, somehow. His hands were on her shoulders. His rotten breath washed over her. "Would you like to see it again, child?"
"No," said Mara, staring at the matron's corpse. "Make them kill Tarul."