The Witch
Silence follows the blast, then a hard thud as BD-1 crashes to the floor, slipping limply off Cal's shoulder.
"No!" Anna shouts. Cal's already scooping up the droid in his arms, checking him over with meticulous fingers.
"EMP charge," he says ruefully, laying BD-1's senseless form gently onto the lounge table. "We'll have to reboot him, but I think we have bigger problems right now."
The floor rattles again. A shadow passes over the windows—something big, and close.
"They're here already, aren't they?" Greez sounds like he wants nothing more than to close his eyes and take a long nap.
Anna rushes forward through the darkened lounge into the cockpit, leaning over the dashboard and squinting out the windshield. A dingy-looking ship belching smoke from three blazing engines touches down on the dune in front of her, setting off a cascade of sand and dust that briefly obscures it from view. A ramp is already open on the back of the fuselage, dropping two bulky figures to the sand like dung from a bantha's behind.
"We got company!" Anna yells over her shoulder. "More bounty droids!"
"Not just bounty droids," Cal says with a resigned sigh. "We can't be that lucky twice."
As if on cue, smaller figures emerge from the back of the ship, flat helmets and metallic shoulder pads glinting in the glare of the suns. Gouts of fire spew from their slim backpacks as they leap into the air, climbing high above their hulking companions.
"They actually brought jetpacks?" Anna groans. "That is so excessive."
A crash and metallic shriek yank her attention away from the window.
"Cal—Cal, what are you doing to my door!" Greez shouts, his upper hands grabbing at nonexistent hair in exasperation.
"We're sitting ducks in here!" Cal shouts back. "We have to take the fight to them." Leaning back, he braces his feet against the wall, pulling on the emergency release lever beside the exit with all his might. "Shit, Greez, have you ever even oiled this thing?"
"Of course not! I never planned on crashing the ship!"
With a final groan of protest, the lever comes clean off its hinge, sending Cal flat on his behind. The unpowered doors crack open with a groan. Anna rushes forward and pries the doors open with a groan of exertion, spilling hot wind and blinding sunlight into the cabin.
"Cover us, Greez," Cal mutters as he pushes himself to his feet. "This could get ugly." Snatching his own blaster from the couch, he dashes out into the desert with a flying leap.
Drawing her pistol, Anna leaps out of the ship after him, tucking into a roll to break her fall as her feet meet the sand. She tastes the grit in the air as she springs back up, her ears filled with the roar of the bounty hunters' booster jets. Suddenly, she realizes that neither of them have their faces covered.
"Well, well, well. What do we have here, fellas?" a modulated voice mocks from above. "A pretty catch, indeed. That ship'll fetch some nice coin, on top of your heads."
Wordlessly, she and Cal turn away from each other to train their blasters on the two bounty droids moving to encircle them. Hers has one hand completely replaced by a spiked flail on the end of a chain, the black barrel of a laser cannon adorning its other arm.
"Trust me, you don't want this fight," Cal calls out in a raised voice. "We're on our way out of the system. You let us go, we promise we won't bother you or the Brood again."
"The boy is begging for his life," Anna's droid gutters with a deep chuckle that sounds like a dying engine.
The bounty hunter who first spoke lands in front of them in a puff of sand. Up close, it's clear the weapon in his hands is too long and narrow to be a blaster rifle. The flicker of a pilot flame under the tip gives its identity away: a flamethrower. She swallows nervously.
Lightsabers can't deflect fire.
"It's him!" the other droid exclaims from Cal's direction. "It's Cal Kestis!"
Anna's heart sinks. The barrel of her blaster flits between the droid slowly bearing down on her and the second bounty hunter still hovering in the air like a buzzard.
"The Jedi? Well I'll be." There's a hunger in the hunter's words. The tip of the flamethrower ignites with a burst of flame.
"Fine." Cal's voice is toneless. "Have it your way."
A blaster thuds to the ground behind her. The familiar hum of Cal's lightsaber fills the air.
Loosing off two quick shots at the bounty hunter in the air, Anna dives out of the way as the bounty droid sends a hail of plasma bullets in her direction. The whistling of a missile sounds from above, and she feels its twisting path as a presence that prickles the hairs on her neck. Still sprawled in the sand, she throws her free hand in the air, nudging the projectile just enough to crater the ground next to her with a blast that makes her ears ring.
The Inquisitor saber feels like it's burning into her thigh.
Clenching her jaw, she slips the pistol back into its holster and moves to grasp the lightsaber hilt. A flick of her thumb opens the safeties on the practice emitters as she rises to her feet in the settling dust.
"Have it your way," she echoes, igniting the weapon with a twirl. Calm washes over her at the familiar presence of the activated Kyber crystal.
The hunter swoops down over her with a blast of exhaust fumes and the staccato screech of blaster fire. A blade of searing red catches them before they meet their mark. She can hear the second droid firing at Cal behind her. She can feel the buzz of Cal's lightsaber moving faster than it can shoot. She can sense yet more blaster bolts whizzing overhead as Greez returns fire at the attacking bounty hunter.
Anna takes a single breath.
As the last bolt of the hunter's salvo zips toward her, she angles the lightsaber with instinctive precision, deflecting it screaming back at its sender. The streak of plasma strikes one of the two thrusters on the hunter's jetpack, sending him careening out of the air with a startled yelp and a trail of smoke.
"Morons! Stop shooting at them!" the other bounty hunter yells in exasperation.
The droids halt in their advance. Cal and Anna step backward until their backs touch, holding up their lightsabers in defensive stances. For a moment, only the dissonant tones of their mismatched blades hang in the tense air. A cry sounds in the distance as the bounty hunter in the air finally crashes into the dune behind the Mantis.
"Oh, right," the droid with the flail mutters.
That's the only warning they get before three streams of chemical fire sear toward them from all sides. Anna looks frantically between the enemies bearing down on them, raising the lightsaber in a vain attempt at intimidation as she and Cal are trapped between the Mantis's unforgiving hull and a closing wall of roiling flame.
Does having fire powers make one resistant to fire? That would make sense, right?
A shot flies from the doorway behind them, bouncing off the lead hunter's shoulder pad. Without so much as flinching, the hunter pivots, keeping the flamethrower steady with one hand as he draws a pistol and fires in the same swift motion. Greez cries out in pain.
"Greez!" Cal shouts raggedly.
"One down," the bounty hunter laughs. "Nowhere to run, Jedi!"
Cal throws out his hand in retaliation, the air distorting in front of it as he sends the hunter sprawling onto his back. Splitting his lightsaber in half, he whirls and leaps into the air, hurling a blade at the droid closest to him. The stream of fire cuts off with a sharp screech as the droid staggers back, staring dumbfoundedly at the sparking stump that remains of its arm.
That leaves Anna's droid.
She dashes straight at it before she can hesitate, her heart pounding at the sight of the hungry flames pouring from its wrist. Just as the heat becomes painful, she grasps at the air with both hands and tears. The quicksilver responds eagerly, pushing apart the stream of fire with a narrow blast of wind, granting her a path toward her opponent. She can't fight the flames for long. She doesn't need to. Pushing off the ground, she twists through the air to avoid the jet of flame as it reforms under her, singing pieces of loose fabric hanging from her arm wrappings.
"Leave!"
"What the-" is all the droid has a chance to say before the crimson blade of the Inquisitor saber is slicing through its flamethrower hose, cutting off the stream of fire and severing two of its fingers in the process.
"Us!"
The droid rotates with a mechanical whine, chains clinking as it brings down the flail on her head. She sees the blow coming from a mile away, and she dashes into it, swinging the lightsaber down in a strike of her own that slices through the chain. The head of the flail lands behind her in a plume of sand.
"Alone!"
She carries the momentum of the swing into an upward arc, severing the droid's flail-arm at the shoulder in a shower of sparks. The machine bellows in rage.
Then she feels that prickle on her neck again.
She turns in time to see Cal plunge his blade through the other droid's chest from behind. In slow motion, her eyes focus on a metal ball tumbling through the air closer toward her, black and gleaming.
Grenade.
There's nothing but confusion and blinding white. Dimly, she feels her back meet the ground, knocking the air out of her lungs, but that's nothing compared to the screaming pain in her ears. Her brain feels like it's going to vibrate out of her skull.
Sight returns in blurry outlines. She sees the blob of the bounty hunter leap toward the larger blob of the droid Cal just destroyed—the droid that Cal is still sprawled on top of as he struggles to crawl back to his feet.
Cal, look out! she wants to scream, but before the words can leave her mouth her air is cut off by thick durasteel fingers. Frantically, she grasps at the bounty droid's hand, but it hoists her off her feet like a ragdoll. She's not holding the lightsaber anymore.
"Shouldn't have done that," the droid growls, its amputated arm still spitting sparks. Swinging its arm, it slams her into the side of the Mantis's hull in a dizzying burst of pain. "Now I'll make you squirm."
Cal lets out a yell. Over the droid's shoulder, Anna sees the bounty hunter straddling him, forcing a knife through the palm of Cal's hand and down toward his chest.
"Cal!" she chokes, panic rising in a burning wave. For once, she lets it take control, and it surges down her arms like a cold sweat. The droid's fingers begin to glow red-hot under her grasp. Her fingers make indents into the softening metal. It still isn't enough to make it release her. Her vision narrows until she can barely see the light of day.
She must be hallucinating from the lack of air, because she swears tendrils of green light wrap around the droid's body in glowing helices. Then she's falling, barely clinging to the waking world when her limp body strikes the ground with another burst of pain.
"What is this?" she hears the droid shout.
She shakes her head, focusing on the sharper edge of the pain, using it as leverage to crack open her eyelids. The droid still looms over her, its arm raised, ready to smash her into the ground. In her dazed state, it takes her a while to realize it's no longer moving. Thick vines of sandstone snake around its body, piercing its bulky torso and splitting the metal open like flower petals where they re-emerge. The monstrous machine's single eye is dark. Lifeless.
Movement catches her attention: a blur of pale hair and red cloth running—no, flying toward where Cal and the bounty hunter are still struggling atop the body of the second droid. Green light flows from outstretched arms, sending the hunter tumbling to the ground as it strikes. The sand below the man rolls like liquid, crawling up his body in writhing tentacles and dragging him into the ground as he struggles to free himself.
"No, no!" he screams, the modulator in his helmet distorting his panic into something terrible and grating.
The hunter's cries are silenced as his head disappears beneath the sand. The unnatural light dissipates, leaving no trace he was ever there.
Not a hallucination, then.
Before Anna can struggle to her feet, a roar sounds from the dunes behind them. Craning her neck, she finds a trail of footprints leading back to the bounty hunters' ship—a ship whose main thrusters are now re-ignited, lifting precariously off the ground. The rattling whine of the vessel's engines dissipate into the wind as the ship disappears into the clear blue sky, leaving behind a cloud of black smoke.
An animal brays somewhere close by. Anna turns to find a large, blunt-looking reptile with stumpy feet and a huge mouth staring down at her with bored eyes. There's a saddle on its back and a bit in its mouth. Slowly, Anna's gaze moves toward its rider.
On the other side of the Mantis, Cal pulls the knife out of his hand with a groan. When he sees the rider, he goes as still as a statue.
"Cal Kestis," Nightsister Merrin greets. "You're a hard man to find."
When the indicator lights on BD-1's tiny torso flicker back to life, Anna breathes a small sigh of relief. The little droid lets out an inquisitive chirp as his larger eye immediately moves to focus on her.
"Hi, little guy," she whispers.
BD-1 chirps again, wriggling in Anna's grasp.
"You feel okay? We got hit by an EMP." Anna adjusts him in her hands, standing him up gently on the lounge table. "You got knocked out. We had to reboot you."
The chirps are longer this time, more concerned. BD-1's leg moves to point toward the bruises on Anna's neck, then the tears on her clothes, still stained with her blood. The stim compartment on his back pops open.
"I had some already." Anna shakes her head with a soft laugh, ignoring the stabs of pain that shoot through her ribs from even that small motion. Clearly, even bacta has its limits. "I'm fine, I swear! You should see the other guy."
"If by 'other guy' you mean me, you're damn right," Greez groans from where he's lying on the other side of the couch. He nurses a bandage over his lower-left shoulder. "Kriff, I hate being shot."
"You sure you're okay, Greez?" Anna scoots over until she's beside the captain, trying to control her movements so they hurt as little as possible.
"It'll take more than that to knock me down, kid," Greez says with a chuckle that turns into a hacking cough. He takes a moment to catch his breath. "He got me pretty good, though. Good thing Lateros have their hearts in their stomachs." At Anna's shocked expression, he raises an eyebrow. "What, you didn't know that?"
"You never told me that, either, Greez," says an unfamiliar voice from the other end of the cabin.
Nightsister Merrin leans by the still-open doorway, lit on one side by the glare of the desert sands, on the other by the dim cabin lights. Her arms are folded loosely over a deep red tunic that hugs her lithe body in swathes. Bangs of ashen hair caked in dust flutter over her forehead, casting shadows over crimson irises that stare back at Anna with steely intensity.
"Guess uh… guess it never came up," Greez mumbles. The cabin goes quiet for a while.
"You saved us back there," Cal says softly. He sits at the edge of the couch, facing away from them, cradling his broken hand in his lap. It's the first time he's spoken in a while. It's the first time he's spoken directly to Merrin since she showed up. He doesn't turn. "How did you find us? How did you escape?"
Merrin turns her gaze back out toward the desert, making the sunlight refract through her irises.
"There was another prisoner. An information broker. He sabotaged the ship, helped me escape on a shuttle. After we parted ways, I kept my ear to the ground." She raises an eyebrow at Greez, a dry smirk on her lips. "I suspected you would come to Tatooine, Greez. When the Brood started going crazy, I knew it had to be you. Only you could cause so much trouble."
Anna expects Cal to laugh, to leap up from the couch and hug this woman he's spent so long searching for. She braces herself for it, braces herself to clamp down on bitter emotions she has no right to be feeling. But Cal doesn't move.
"That's it, then?" Cal's words are hard. Anna can see the tension in his shoulders.
Merrin raises her eyebrows in confusion. The smile slips from her face. "What do you mean?"
"You've been gone for seven months and twenty-one days." There's an accusatory edge to Cal's voice. "We thought you were dead, Merrin."
Merrin uncrosses her arms, her brow furrowing. "Well, I was hardly-"
"You were bait for the Inquisitors!" Cal is almost shouting now. "Cere's gone because we walked into your trap!"
"Cal, what are you saying?" Merrin pushes off the wall. "I was imprisoned. They tortured me for weeks. I told them nothing. I did everything I could to keep you hidden." There's a deadly edge to her tone now—one that Cal ignores.
"But none of that matters now, does it?" he snaps. His damaged hand falls limply at his side as he surges to his feet. Anna can feel the raw anger radiating off of him in a cold aura. "If you hadn't gone on that mission, if you'd just listened to me, none of this would have happened in the first place!" He takes a single stiff step forward, his good hand clenched into a tight fist.
"Cal, that's enough!" Greez shouts. He tries to sit up, but is interrupted by another coughing fit. Anna rushes to ease him back down.
"How…" Merrin's eyes glisten with tears. "How dare you?"
The slap is so fast the Nightsister's hand is a blur of motion. The sound reverberates in the silent cabin. Cal holds Merrin's gaze for an instant, motionless and trembling. Then he pushes past her, storming off toward the crew quarters without another word. Merrin remains where she stands, her hand frozen in mid-air. Her eyes are still wet, but the tears do not fall.
Anna doesn't dare breathe.
"Not this again," Greez sighs, shattering the silence like glass.
Trundling to the other end of the table, BD-1 chirps a tentative greeting. Merrin lets out a tiny laugh, squeezing a single tear out of the corner of her eye as she leans forward to pat the droid on the head.
"It's good to see you, too." Straightening up, she turns to Anna and holds out a pale, tattooed hand. "I remember you from the prison ship," she says curtly. Just like that, the reserved mask from before is back. "You risked your life to rescue me. I would like to know your name."
"Anna. I'm Anna." Merrin's hand is cool and dry. "Cal's said a lot about you." Anna winces as the words spill out of her mouth. Way to make things awkward.
Merrin barks a single laugh. "I bet he has." She exhales, glancing back out the doorway as she absently rubs her arm. "Look, I know you might not trust me, but we still have a common enemy, and the Empire can't be far behind me. We can't stay here. How long before this thing can fly?"
Right to business. Just like Cal.
"She lost her fin when we boarded the prison ship," Greez says up at the ceiling in a tired voice. "We had some repair droids working on it before the bounty hunters showed up. Guess someone should go up there and reboot them."
"I'm on it," Anna answers, pushing herself to her feet. She feels small toes dig into her back as BD-1 climbs up to her shoulder. "You wanna come too?" she asks over her shoulder.
BD-1 trills an affirmation by her ear. Anna tries to ignore the feeling of Merrin's eyes following her as she makes for the hallway to the stern. The ladder to the maintenance hatch is back in the engine room. Probably where Cal's sulking right now.
She braces herself as she turns the corner. There he is, hunched over the workbench, the creases in the back of his threadbare vest cast into sharp relief by the lights in the ceiling. The sizzle of Cal's multitool on welding mode echoes off the hard walls, accompanied by the occasional spark that bounces off the countertop and disappears into the air. Anna steps closer, leaning to get a better look. Cal's glove lies discarded on the edge of the counter, the tip of the multitool moving delicately over the frayed wires and bent metal of his half-prosthetic left hand. The muscles in his jaw tense and clench as he works. She's close enough now to reach out and touch him, but still he doesn't seem to notice her. Her hand hovers in the air, centimeters from his arm. BD-1 is uncharacteristically quiet.
Her fingers brush his sleeve, and Cal puts down the multitool.
"Hey," he says quietly.
"Hey. Hi," she says back. The silence that follows is thick and uncomfortable. "How's your hand?"
"I'll live. Bastard only got the metal part." Cal holds his hand up to the light, wiggling his fingers experimentally. The gash from the hunter's knife is still big enough to see through to the other side. "Needs some more work, but it'll buff out like the rest."
BD-1 beeps softly from her shoulder.
"I know. I know, BD." Cal exhales. His posture is stiff. He still hasn't looked up from the table. "I just… I need time. I'm sorry."
Anna lets her hand drop. "I'm going to go start the pit droids back up," she announces to Cal's back. She fidgets for a moment, clasping and unclasping her hands. "I'll… I'll be going now."
She makes for the corner of the room, descending the ladder to the maintenance section beneath the floor.
"Anna."
Her hands freeze on the rungs.
"Be careful up there."
"You got it, Master Kestis."
As she stoops down to fit through the narrow corridor, she feels Cal's aura warm just a little.
The ladder to the roof is in the middle of the passage just before the escape pod bay, punching up through the wall between two crew compartments. It's a tight squeeze—this section of the ship clearly wasn't designed to human proportions. She has to hook her knees into the rungs of the ladder to keep herself from falling as she reaches for the button to open the sliding door at the top of the ladder. It opens slowly, sprinkling her with a fine dust that BD-1 shakes off with an indignant chirp.
"What a day, huh?" Anna laughs humorlessly, pulling herself out of the ship with trembling arms. It feels like she hasn't slept in years.
The suns hover low over the horizon, one yellow, one red, casting long shadows over the sea of gold and orange dunes. The pit droids lie at the base of the half-repaired central fin—two tan-coloured bowls of metal lying among the scraps and spare parts scattered all over the deck. She crouches down beside one, picking it up and turning it so its single round eye faces toward her.
"Back to work, slacker," she mumbles teasingly, hitting it on the eye with the side of her fist.
The droid pops open with a high-pitched yelp, scrambling backward away from her before gaining its bearings. It yaps at her in an annoyed tone, gesturing around at the mess. Anna rolls her eyes.
"Don't look at me, I didn't do anything!"
The other pit droid pops up after a determined smack from BD-1. After briefly conferring with each other in unintelligible jibber-jabber, the droids scale back to the top of the fin, dragging precariously large ship-bits with them. With a flare of blowtorches, they set to work with a gusto. BD-1 follows them inquisitively, taking quick scans of the places where damage is still visible on the way.
"Hey, where are you going?" Anna calls. "Come back here!" She shakes her head when the little droid pays her no heed.
The desert breeze is cooler now, more soothing than scalding. Easing herself down to the deck, Anna stretches out over the warm durasteel hull, gazing up at the deep blue sky. One of the moons hangs there, small and round, lit in a narrow crescent by the suns. That's how Arendelle looked when they exited the hyperlane, way back when. She sighs and closes her eyes.
So much has changed. Things are happening too fast. First, the Haxion Brood, and now Nightsister Merrin is back from the dead. Where is all of this leading?
Merrin. Cal's old… partner? Lover? Girlfriend? She takes a long breath. The rational part of her says it shouldn't matter, but that part is small and irrelevant. Does Cal regret letting her go? The way he reacted to her showing up definitely proves he still feels strongly about her leaving the crew, but what does he feel, really?
Does he still love her?
Never mind that Cal would probably jump into a Sarlacc pit before he'd try another relationship given everything he's said—not to mention everything he hasn't. Anna wonders what kind of discipline she would have faced if she'd been a Padawan back before the Jedi Purge. Was it common for apprentices to catch feelings for their masters? Probably grounds for expulsion from the Order, at the very least. She chuckles to herself.
She must have been lying there for longer than she thought, because when she opens her eyes again, the sky is dark. Something chirps urgently from beside her face.
"What is it, BD?" She sits up with a groan, rubbing the bleariness out of her eyes. BD-1 clambers onto her shoulder, shaking her as hard as his little legs allow. "I'm up, I'm up! What's going on?"
Only then does Anna see the massive triangular shadow blotting out the stars on the horizon.
Merry Christmas! Here's to happy holidays and bright futures.