Sorry! My life took a chaotic turn in the last month, but (fingers crossed and silent prayer to the Force) it's better now. I just never got around to reading over this and posting it. I'm back in school, and I will post weekly after this, I hope.
9
We had a long report to give Tiku Lasir. I started to fall asleep at one point, much to his amusement.
I didn't go to the archives that day. I wasn't getting anywhere as it was. The most interesting thing I had learned was that "Ara-Sini," the greeting that visitors to Sechiru and Onasik called, means "Among friends." Whenever I had heard it, though, it had been a question. Were the people of Kebro always unsure of who was a friend?
We resumed our work as usual the next day. But since seeing the building of corpses, I looked at the city differently.
No more idle dislike. There was something wrong with the city. The scarlet sand and rain was wrong. The casual killing was wrong. The abandoned buildings were all wrong. I wanted to go back to Coruscant. I understood Coruscant. But I couldn't leave this place the way it was. I had to help it somehow. I was beginning to see Daru's perspective on that.
One night, I dreamed I was a Mibir and was flying over the red city. It wasn't until I saw Tiku Lasir flying with his huge wings that I realized that I was a Zabrak and Zabrak don't fly. Naturally, I started falling then. I landed on a building top, oddly enough, with Daru. He said that Zabrak can fly, but they can't go up without help. We jumped off the building and we did, indeed, fly gracefully over the city as we floated down.
Moyek found the dream highly amusing when I told her. It was hard for me to look at Tiku Lasir and Daru with a straight face that day. I wished I could see Tiku Lasir fly but couldn't imagine Daru doing it.
I managed to tell Daru about it the next day as we took a break in the Sechiru shelter. He was there with seven of his itaka. I hardly ever saw all of his people at once. There was always someone either injured or busy elsewhere. Sechiru was their home, though.
"Didn't you know?" he teased me. "Zabrak can fly. All the time… in their dreams." He leaned against the wall and stretched out his legs. "It's hard not to dream about being a Mibir when more than a third of the people you know are. I probably know more Mibir than Zabrak."
"Aren't Hssak really the majority on Okutu?" I asked. "But Mibir seem to be the majority here, and you don't have any Hssak in your group."
Daru nodded. "Hssak, then Mibir, then Shinsayama, then Zabrak, but you don't see that precise order in most places. In the real capital, Shinsayama and Zabrak dominate and there are very few Mibir. I don't have any Hssak because they work better in their own groups. You've seen the group of teenage Hssak."
There was one working for us, run by an adult. They lived at the Onasik shelter. They were fierce.
"Daru," I asked sleepily. "Why d'you speak Basic so well? You're better than Tiku Lasir."
"Am I really?" He sat up straight and looked excited.
"Yeah. You speak like it's your only language. He speaks like he's being really careful."
"I really speak better than he does?" Daru and his itaka loved Chisu Lasir, though none had met him. "I know why, probably. Most schools use Okutushu to teach and have one class in Basic. My school taught in Basic, and after school, I would stay at a Human neighbor's apartment until my parents came home. She and her kids spoke Basic."
I nodded. That was probably why he wasn't so racist, too.
We heard the hisses that were the Hssak version of "Ara-Sini" above. Daru, Moyek, I, and several others jumped up.
"Aya!" Daru called in response, the Okutushu word for "yes" or "it's true."
Our rest was over. We had to work. But how I loved those breaks at Sechiru.
We must have gone a week without running into Fang or Master Sual. We met at least one pair of Jedi every day, but somehow we didn't find Fang.
It was drizzling bloodrain when we did. We were wandering, wondering if it was enough rain to discourage fights. Hssak didn't mind water as much as Mibir did, and not everyone can get to a clean shelter easily. Fang and Master Sual were doing the same thing.
We didn't have much to say. We were all tired.
Then, through the bloodrain, something strange started.
I felt it or I heard it. I don't know which. It seemed to waver between audible and not-quite-audible. It slid at the edge of my consciousness, grating in my head, too high to be heard but to loud not to be sensed.
I winced and turned my head, rubbing my ears. Fang winced, too, and Master Sual turned to a building on the side of the street.
"What is it, Akite?" Moyek asked me.
"I don't know," I whimpered.
"What do you hear?"
"I can't even tell if I hear it!"
"A Hssak is screaming," Fang said shortly. "Most adult Zabrak and Humans can't hear it, and Shinsayama can't even as children. It's too high."
The noise disappeared for a moment and I sighed in relief. Master Sual was trying to open a locked door on the building. I hurried over to help.
"I'm too old. Ouch," Moyek said. She's pretty young, and most Jedi don't complain about age, but Moyek does anything that Jedi don't do because, in her own words, "They don't do it." She drives several masters crazy with that.
"Do you hear it?" I asked Fang as we slid the door open.
"Mibir, Togruta, Twi'lek, and Paifei hear it easily," he replied.
"Paifei?" I echoed. "What are they?"
He looked at me from his nearly two meters with his gold eyes. "Me," he said.
We'd always suspected that Fang wasn't human. Finally, it was confirmed. It turned out that when he first arrived on Okutu, Tiku Lasir had immediately asked him if he was a Paifei, and when Fang said that he didn't know, the Tiku told him that he must be.
I didn't hear much about the species from Fang, since what we found in the building distracted us, but I looked it up in the palace. The normal holonets didn't have nearly as much information as the palace archives. In fact, the rest of the galaxy seemed to have hardly heard of them.
Paifei are a near-Human species from the planet of Saang. They average at two meters and have skin in shades of gold. They mostly keep to themselves, but a group settled on the planet Mibi, where Humans had already come. There, they created a new species from Paifei and a large flying mammal of Mibi with a bit of Human added in. And then, the inhabitants of Mibi had cast their creations away. I was amazed that the Mibir could stand Fang at all, but he said that they tended to respect him more than other Jedi. Moyek says that you have to love your family no matter what. I asked how she knew something like that, since Jedi don't have family. "The Jedi are a family," she explained.
Back to the screaming Hssak – something I'll never forget and never like to think back on. We followed the sound and the Force-feelings of agony down to a basement that was unnervingly like the Sechiru shelter.
I won't share what the young Hssak looked like. Three Mibir had been torturing them. They were only younglings. Clan-age at the Temple, probably. Like the innocent little younglings I played with every afternoon when I was waiting for a master after Oreti died.
But they weren't in a safe place like the Temple.
Moyek and I arrested the Mibir, and Fang and Master Sual tried to help the Hssak. I later heard that one of the four survived. Maybe Jedi don't take revenge, but I knew then that I had to find some way to stop this in the name of the young Hssak.
But violence seemed as integral to Okutu as rain – bloodrain, as it was – and you can't stop rain from falling from the sky without destroying a planet as thoroughly as Coruscant was destroyed.
