Trikkan's star is still wrapped up below the horizon when Jess and I take our landspeeder out to the lowlands. The air is damp and smells of warm, fertile earth, and the first glimpses of this cycle's crops are just peeking through the soil. Mist plasters my hair to my face and turns it from a dry blonde to a wet, ashy brown. Jess wears a knit cap I'd made him the winter before, and smiles at me whenever he catches me watching him steer.
"Do you think anyone'll be there?" I ask over the hum of the landspeeder's engine.
"Race isn't 'till tonight," he replies. "I think we'll be safe."
I know he's right, but I can't help but feel uneasy. Since the first speeders and ships were brought to Trikkan, since before I can trace history, the females of the planet have been banned from using anything beyond maintenance droids and landspeeders for work. There is no piloting, no racing, and certainly no playing around with scraps from the rebellion, which is what Jess and the other males from neighboring fields have been doing since they were dug up a year ago.
It had come as a shock to all of us when Lim Kar-Tao bumped into them while searching the lowlands for a new spot to grow saltgrain, a white, mealy crop favored by the resistance and the first order alike for feeding large units of soldiers. The pair of rebellion-era x-wings and a singular tie fighter had slunk their way out of the fertile mud most likely in the same fashion that they'd disappeared. Within hours, men from neighboring farms has come to pull them onto solid ground while their partners watched from a distance.
It was apparent, once the ships were in full view, that they'd most likely landed on the planet for a parlay, an exchange, a rogue mission. Spies on either side must have been meeting, because there was no evidence that the crafts had crashed. Neither was evidence of bodies in cockpits. Little Trikkan was probably the perfect place for spies to hide.
Still, thirty-five years of mud preservation meant any chance of flying the ships first thing was shot. Men began scrambling to claim the ships, each citing their experience and their desire to fly. Some even argued that their ancestors had been rebels, and deserved the x-wings in their memory. In the end, however, Lim had the final say, and decided to pool resources from the others for all to share in the rebuilding and racing of the ships.
"Everyone needs a little bit of fun," he said, his almond eyes shining. The others agreed, and Lim nominated a reluctant Jess to repair an X-Wing. Jess had clearly taken care of his landspeeder better than the others, he said, and had even made intricate modifications that would take the skill needed to fix and man a ship so beyond our collective understanding.
Really, I'd done the landspeeder maintenance, but Jess didn't want to embarrass me and I was thankful. I was never one to buck the system; I only fixed the speeder so I could do something with my ever-busy hands.
It felt good to fix the X-Wing with Jess. We were still easing into life in our own compound, still getting to know each other as partners. We found a bank of manuals in the library near Trikkan's Port City, Anemo. Little by little, the mighty hunk of junk was polished and tweaked until it could lift off the ground. It still couldn't jump to hyperspeed (we needed an old droid model), but it could go pretty damn fast. Jess had gotten to be a fast and cunning pilot, and we made it almost a weekly occurrence to sneak out to the ships the dawn of the race and practice new techniques.
The lush fields suddenly disappear beneath us and the landscape takes a sharp drop-we've reached the lowlands, just below the cliffs on the edge of Lim's land. The cliffs are dotted with dark, dry caves-one of which houses the ships. We land on a rocky platform near it as the sun begins to peek above the deep green horizon and light the sprigs of saltgrain gold. The clouds are clearing to make way for dawn.
Jess and I hop out of the speeder and head into the cave, powering up the X-Wing, watching it's panels glow in the cave's hooded light. I hand Jess a battered helmet, the only one we could find that could reach from the old ship to my comlink, and he hoists himself into the cockpit.
I whisper into the comlink as the cockpit closes. "Just circle like normal."
He winks at me as the X-wing jolts off of the ground, and my heart jumps. The danger of it all, the alien nature of a ship from a time and place so far away stirs something in the pit of me that I can't place.
I have a memory as I watch Jess dodge around the track Lim and the others have made in the field-of my chubby childhood hands adjusting the comlink wire on my family's droid, bought used from the traders in Anemo. It was the first droid we'd ever owned that could link us to our neighbors, and the community was collectively dipping their toes in the waters of astromech droids with fear and trembling. I remember the sound of the droid's happy chittering when its comlink was finally usable again, the sound of Jess's boyhood voice, the first voice I tried to hear over the garbling transmission. The worried look of my mother, who called for my father, who slapped my wrist and told me to leave the fixing to him The galaxy, he said, was a dangerous place, and only the bravest of us could reach beyond our safe planet, where the soil bowed to us and we bowed to no one.
"How's that?" Jess asks me through the comlink, and I'm snapped back into my place at the mouth of the cave.
"A solid run." It takes me a moment to find my words again. "Do you remember last week's match?"
He scoffs. "I wish I could forget it."
He lands and I show him what I've drawn out on a pad I keep in my back pocket. "You're getting caught in these pockets between the other ships...they can pull ahead of you, cut across everyone else and win-"
"-which is what happened last week, and the week before-"
"-which is why you can't try pulling forward, and, as we learned the hard way, falling back and cutting around doesn't work. So what about...over?" I trace my finger along a looped line above a picture of our X-wing.
I can tell Jess is trying his best to take me seriously, but his first response is itching to jump off of his tongue.
I prompt him, playfully. "What?"
He shakes his head, and a dimple peeks out from an upturned corner of his mouth. "I know that this is against the rules, and I know that you know that, so I'm curious about what you mean by over."
"I'll show you."
My stomach churns as I reach out for the helmet, which has been propped against Jess's waist while we talk. He reaches for the comlink, and, as I hand it to him, he pulls me into a sloppy, loud, happy kiss. My fear melts. He pulls a streak of hair from my face and places the helmet on my head himself, hoisting me up into the cockpit of the X-wing and smacking my butt as I make my way into place.
In seconds, I'm flying, faster than any land speeder, looping around the lowlands along a track through the saltgrain that wraps around jutting boulders and tumbling streams. Man-made obstacles have been set-up, too, early First Order posters with Snoke's eyes blacked-out, scarecrows made to resemble resistance fighters with "May The Force Be With You" signs on their chests. The first time I'd been in the cockpit the rush of the air, the hum of the engine, the focused view throughout the helmet disoriented me. By now, I have come to love the noisy, focused solemnity of our X-wing.
I round one of the cliffs and come back into view of the starting and finishing line, buzzing Jess over the comlink.
"When they pull up beside you, you'll increase altitude ever so slightly, like this-"
I let the X-Wing rise as it pummels towards the finish line. "Then, you'll-"
I let adrenaline take over, because without it's guidance, I'll freeze. A jolt of the handles to the left and all of a sudden, the dense, wet ground is the sky and the sky is hidden under the metal belly of the ship. Then all is right again, the X-Wing corkscrewed back into the same place it started, only meters to the left, but clearly out of its area. I hear Jess exclaim on the other end of the line, and a laugh bubbles out of my churning stomach.
"You're crazy!" Him voice sounds as breathless as I feel.
I land the X-Wing, trying to conceal how hardly my knees are knocking together as I hop out.
"I don't think I'm any crazier than anyone out there." I nod to the heavens. "It just makes sense."