Sand.
It was everywhere. It was in everything. It was inescapable.
Rey ran her fingers through the fine sand about her, her mind wandering.
Inescapable.
She'd heard one of the off-worlders, a visiting chagrian philosopher whose blue-grey horns were as lofty as her pride, use that word to describe the sands of Jakku, once when she was at the Niima Outpost just lounging around under the shade, begging for scraps. This was when she was much younger, and before she'd learned it was easier to go to the metal corpses of former warships and take the scraps for herself.
Scraps for scraps.
She pushed her fingers deep into the soft sand, deep enough that the sand went up to her wrists and the tips of her fingers were digging into the packed cooler layers. Nobody who had grown up in Jakku would ever think of sand as inescapable. It would be like saying that air was inescapable.
Sand just… was.
It was everywhere, in everything. It was-
"Inescapable," she whispered.
How she'd loved hearing that word said. How exotic, it had sounded. How romantic.
Maybe to others, the word brought about feelings of being trapped or doomed. But not to Rey. Rey had never ever felt trapped or doomed, especially not by sand. So, she liked the idea of it- the romantic, far out idea of something being certain and inevitable. Fated.
Still fantasising, she let her mind wander, letting it wander down her fingers and right out of it into the sand. And suddenly, she was connected to the Jakku around her. She was connected to the shifting bands of fine sand, with its sun-burned uppermost layers right now being treaded on by boots and hooves and machines and its deep cool darkness known only to the worms and gnaw-jaws and, deeper still, to other far more mysterious, far more terrifying creatures. And to Rey.
Rey had always felt an affinity to her seemingly barren and inhospitable planet. If she hadn't known for sure that she'd had human parents, human parents who'd long ago abandoned her here, she might have even believed she came from Jakku itself. It was this affinity, this special connection that had kept her from brooding too much on her parents' betrayal or starving in the desert.
Through her connection to her planet, Rey sometimes found rare desert plums and tuanulberry bushes and patches of growing plants with edible taproots, their living, pulsing energy like beacons of light in her searching mind. But those finds were few and far between; not enough to sustain her.
Luckily, Jakku hid other valuable secrets.
Her mind caught at that moment on something foreign and inorganic: another interred remnant of the galactic civil war swallowed up by sand and time. Given its size and how deeply buried it was, she guessed it to be a U-wing. If it was, she hoped its hold was empty. The Graveyard of Ships was more than just a graveyard for ships, and sometimes she would pry open grimy glass canopies and dented metal to be greeted by their deceased occupants.
Any scavenger would attest that it was easily the most unpleasant part of the work, and it always gave rookies a fright to discover a blaster with a shrivelled hand still attached to it or a completely mummified pilot still sitting in his cracked cockpit.
Luckily, in a decade of scavenging, Rey had only had to conduct seven proper burials. Some of them had been mass burials, and five had been in the last three years; Rey had only recently discovered her ability to not only become one with her surroundings, but also to manipulate them. This meant that, with some work, she had first dibs on these formerly inaccessible starships; but it also meant she was more likely to find other than just abiotic parts in them.
After probing to make sure that there were no other sentient life forms in the vicinity to bear witness to what she was about to do, Rey put her will into the compressed mass of buried glass and metal, and into the sands of her Jakku, making the sands both loosen over the ship and push up under it, causing it to gradually rise.
It was taxing work; the ship was huge and the sands heavy. It took her almost an hour to get it to rise until it was sitting just two metres beneath the surface, and by that time, she was sweating and hungry and mentally exhausted.
Rey opened her eyes and got up wearily. The sun was on its descent and the unearthed husks of starships around her cast their dark and lengthening shadows on the shifting sands. Another two hours to sunset, but Rey was already drained. The rest of the work would have to be done tomorrow, unless she wanted to arrive in the morning to her brand-new meal ticket being picked apart by her competitors.
Striding to her speeder, she climbed on, powered it up, and headed for the outpost.
It was busier than usual. Rey navigated deftly through the narrow rambling streets until she came to Unkar's concession stand.
"Yer early," observed Caron, one of his goons. He was leaning against the side of the blockhouse, picking his teeth. He craned his neck to check out Rey's haul. "Not much you got there. That'll barely buy you dinner." Running an eye down Rey's sweaty form, he cracked a crooked smile. "If yeh wanna earn dinner some other way…"
"Oh, you want this?" said Rey, tilting her body salaciously. She hadn't survived in Jakku by not developing a thick skin for this sort of behaviour and not learning to play the game. "I'll give it to you, baby. After we're married. You know how long I've loved you, why do you keep me waiting?" She pursed her lips at him and made smacking noises.
Caron's smile dropped. He rolled his eyes and continued to pick his teeth, watching unhelpfully as Rey untied her load and dragged it to Unkar's barred window. The blobfish was inside, counting credits and talking to himself. His eyes snapped up at Rey's approach. "You're early," he snorted. He cast an unimpressed eye at Rey's offerings. "One-third portion."
"What?" Rey folded her arms. "I know this is worth half a portion at least."
"I'm not going to reward laziness. Next time you want to come back early, come back with better than that. Come back with a hyperdrive motivator. Heh heh heh." He slapped the packet on the counter and returned to counting his credits as his goons began hauling Rey's scraps away.
"Hmm," Rey hummed, thinking of her ship waiting for her under its blanket of sand. Maybe she would come back with a hyperdrive motivator. She took the packet. "How much will you reward me for a hyperdrive motivator then?"
Unkar looked up again. "In good condition, forty portions or ten credits."
"Hmm." Rey walked back to her speeder, stuffing the paltry rations into the pouch attached to her belt, and thinking. Ten credits…
"Rey," Caron called out. She turned and waited for him to approach her. He held out a sprig of three tuanulberries. "Plutt didn't want these. Said they're sour. I don't like sour neither, and I'm not giving it to Jarik or Rholar, those scrag-ended sons of banthas. You eat 'em."
Rey narrowed her eyes at him. "If you just want me to owe you-"
"No, nuthin' like that." He thrust the sprig at her. "Go to the market. New ship arrived a few hours ago. Humans, and they've been doing nuthin' but eating and talking. Maybe yeh can steal better than yeh can scavenge. Or go to Bay Three. Off-worlders there are runnin' around like steelpeckers with their heads cut off. Heh heh heh."
Rey got onto her speeder, frowning. She had planned to go back home, rest, and prepare for an early start alone with her new find tomorrow, but she was also curious. Off-worlders here were a calm lot, except those that arrived via unfortunate disaster, and they hadn't had any of those in a few years.
What could have sent that bucolic group into a tailspin?
Abandoning her conservative plans, Rey decided to head for Bay Three. The market was along the way, and if she saw anything interesting, she could always stop.
The road running by the open market was packed. More packed than she had ever seen it. Residents of Blowback town and Cratertown were recognisable among the crowd, and the newcomers that Caron had mentioned popped out immediately.
There were at least two of them sitting at one of the dirty long tables in front of Rangu's Cantina, and they were very conspicuous human adult males. One was dark skinned and bulkily built with bright blue eyes and blue hair twisted into a top knot. The other was pale skinned with a prominent nose and a dark mane of hair falling to his shoulders. He looked up, made eye contact with Rey, and his mouth moved.
The blue-haired man's head snapped up, and he also made eye contact with Rey. He got to his feet and started in her direction.
Alarmed, Rey looked about, decided it was more than likely that he was indeed coming for her, and pushed forward on her speeder. But the crowd hindered her; she made it barely twenty metres when the human reached her.
He nodded at her. "You. Are you native?"
"Yup," acknowledged a displeased Rey, who already had her quarterstaff in hand and was preparing to wield it.
Technically, Rey was also an off-worlder, but she hadn't thought of herself as one since she was seven or eight. And anyway, that was only a technicality- her earliest memories were of Jakku; she was as good as a native.
"Good," replied the man. "Just what we're looking for. Come sit with us. We'll give you a hot meal."
"No," said Rey shortly, immediately turning her head away and edging her speeder onwards. She knew off-worlders like these. Bored and lonely and in search of female company during their short stop for refuelling or supplies or whatever it was that forced them to land in Jakku, the human ones never failed to make an attempt at Rey.
He kept up with her at a light jog. "Look, it's just food and talk, and you can leave whenever. We're bored and we're sick of talking to hutts and teedos."
Rey ran her tongue along the backs of her teeth before huffing a "Fine." She would be stupid to resist a hot meal under those conditions. And anyway, the open market was bright and teeming with life, and the constable kept a tight rein there.
Manoeuvring her speeder into a sharp turn, she headed back to Rangu's Cantina and hopped down with her quarterstaff. "I'm bringing this," she said, throwing the off-worlder a dark look. "Try anything funny and I'll hit you."
He shrugged. "I'm Ushar," he offered, leading the way to the table where his friend waited in the strange company of two teedos, a hutt, and another two humans, one of which was the well-known wife of a bezorite miner.
"I'm Rey," said Rey, following closely. "Looks like you already found human company."
"Could always use more," he said. They reached the table. "This is Rey. She's native," he announced to the other human male, who irritably indicated that space be made for Rey. The teedos left, grumbling. The miner's wife turned up her nose at Rey and left also, taking her friend with her.
The man sitting across the table from Rey raised his brow.
"Oh," said Rey, reading his face. "Don't take it personally. They don't want to sit with a scavenger. I'm Rey. A scavenger."
"Hm." Dark eyes ran from her face to her weather-worn outfit and to her staff leaning against the table. "I'm Kylo."