Coarse winds whipped around Jenny and Rey as they sped across the desert sands.
Jenny rode behind Rey on the speeder, her arms wrapped around Rey's waist. She wore an extra pair of Rey's goggles. The heat of Jakku only became more sweltering with another body pressed closely to Rey's own, but Rey decided there were worse bodies to be pressed against.
Rey simply didn't believe Jenny's wild claims about traveling through time, but Jenny insisted on retrieving her ship, and Rey couldn't resist helping the bright-eyed girl out.
Jenny was indeed bright-eyed, staring at the wastes of Jakku like they were comprised of priceless jewels instead of sand.
"I think I see the ship!" Jenny cried happily over Rey's shoulder.
Rey spotted it too: The odd, ballistic-style fins stood out clearly in the distance.
As each click passed, Rey's muscles tensed further and her fingers twitched more and more eagerly for the staff secured next to her feet. She knew the high odds of encountering other scavengers at the crash site.
When she slowed her speeder to a stop a few minutes later, Rey realized scavengers wouldn't be a problem.
There wasn't anything left to scavenge.
"Oh Jenny..." Rey said sadly. "I'm sorry."
Jenny's ship resembled an animal carcass whose bones had been picked clean. Only the thin frame and the fins remained. The plates, the cockpit window, and the entire interior were gone.
"No!" Jenny cried.
She hopped off the speeder and scrambled through the sand, placing her hand on a portion of her ship's thin frame.
"No-no-no-no," Jenny moaned.
Rey climbed down and walked slowly up behind her.
"I am sorry," Rey repeated. "But if you need to get off-world, we can find a way. It won't be easy, but-"
"No, you don't understand!" Jenny shouted.
Rey stepped away from her, surprised by her sudden anger.
"Jenny..."
The other woman's blond ponytail swung through the air as she spun to face Rey.
"You don't get it!" Jenny yelled. "That ship had my vortex manipulator! It's the only way I can travel through time! It's the only way I can find my..."
Her voice trailed off. She dropped her head and clenched her fists by her side.
Rey shifted on her heels, unsure what to say or do.
Jenny suddenly snapped her head back up.
"You said scavengers did this? Where do they sell the parts?"
Rey shook her head.
"No, no, that's not going to work-"
"The bloody hell it won't!" Jenny snapped. "They stole my stuff!"
Rey reached out to touch Jenny, to comfort her, but her hand halted. Rey's fingers brushed together, and she realized she was afraid to touch another person beyond simple necessity. She wondered what that said about her.
"It doesn't work like that around here," Rey explained. "Once a scavenger salvages something, the salvage belongs to them. It's the unwritten order around here. Then they sell their salvages to Unkar Plutt, and he never gives them back."
Jenny folded her arms. Her petite jaw tightened and her bright eyes seemed to blaze.
"Oh, he will," she said.
"You can't-"
Jenny stepped directly in front of Rey, her face centimeters from the other woman.
Rey tasted a faint hint of chamomile on Jenny's breath. Unlike the harsh, hard world of Jakku, Jenny's lips appeared soft, smooth…
"I can, and I will," Jenny said emphatically, jarring Rey back to the present. "Will you help me, or do I have to do it myself?"
Rey sighed.
"Those parts are long gone."
"Fine," Jenny snapped.
She strode past Rey and began trudging through the sand.
Rey watched her in exasperated disbelief.
"Are you going to walk the entire way?" Rey called.
Jenny didn't answer.
Rey gritted her teeth.
"I'll take you!"
Jenny stopped and turned.
Rey jogged over to her.
"I'll take you to the outpost," Rey said, "but I can't help you get your parts. I can't risk getting exiled by Plutt. Trading parts to him is the only way I can survive out here."
"I understand," Jenny said. She smiled. "Thank you, Rey."
Rey gave her a small smile in return.
"Let's go," Rey said.
An hour or so later, they crested a tall dune and spotted the outpost below them.
Niima rose out of the desert, not like a rose, but like a dusty, thorny, beaten clump of weeds. Dirty tents, rickety tables, ramshackle stalls, rusty silos, grainy wells, pungent smoke clouds, and the ugly fixture of Unkar Plutt's Concession Stand seemed to emerge from the desert wastes with a sad, dingy aura that could be swallowed up in a sandstorm or heat wave at any moment.
And this place was the center of Rey's life, she reminded herself sadly.
She slowed her speeder and parked it on the outskirts of town.
She and Jenny removed their goggles. Rey grabbed her staff while Jenny climbed off the speeder.
Rey left her ride behind to trot after Jenny. Rey knew the speeder's fingerprint interface wouldn't allow anyone to steal it, and she had more important things to worry about right now.
Mostly the fact that Jenny was striding straight for the cleaning tables in an obvious fury.
Pieces from Jenny's ship decorated the cleaning tables like a smorgasbord. Hull plates, pilot's chair, window panels, wiring clusters, and more danced in the hands of dozens of people as they eagerly scrubbed them.
Rey even sensed a, dare she think it, festive atmosphere at the outpost, something she never recalled occurring here. Thanks to Jenny's ship, the usually dreary, depressing lives of the outpost visitors had been injected with new life.
"Hey!" Jenny shouted angrily at the people cleaning the ship's parts.
This time Rey did reach out and grab her, if only to stop her from making a huge mistake.
"Listen," Rey hissed to her. "I know you're angry, but if you start trying to take all those components back, the entire outpost will turn on you." She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering. "I've seen it happen before. You've only got one chance at this. You want this vortex thing most of all, you go for that."
Jenny grimaced at her.
"I thought you weren't going to help me," Jenny said.
Rey bit her lip.
"I'm already here," she replied. "I might as well do some good."
Amid the anger painted on Jenny's face, Rey saw a brief, grateful smile.
"Where would my vortex manipulator be by now, do you think?" Jenny asked her.
Rey slowly pointed to a spot near the cleaning stations.
An old sand crawler sat there, worn and rusty. Salvaged metal hung in a large, arced canopy overhead. Purchased salvage sat in piles and stacks all around, and a line of weary scavengers wound in front of the rusted structure.
"In Unkar Plutt's Concession Stand. Your vortex part was probably one of the first things traded to him."
"Okay," Jenny said.
She marched forward.
"Wait!" Rey called.
Ignoring her, Jenny soon broke into a jog, rushing through the outpost and straight toward Plutt's booth.
"Kriff!" Rey hissed.
She ran after Jenny.
The entire outpost, everywhere Jenny looked, filled her with indignation. The people here skulked around as if carrying a burden even when their hands and shoulders were empty. Constant danger, boredom, and despair had ground this outpost's visitors into submission.
She soon found what she greatly suspected to be the source of this outpost's problems, the cancer at its heart.
This Unkar Plutt was a vaguely person-shaped lump sitting behind the window of his booth. His stout build ended in a thick, fleshy, hairless skull with a broad, flat nose. A piece of metal covered his head like a cap, and an assortment of rectangular, metal plates hung from his neck and shielded his body. A layer of fatty flesh gushed from below the blotchy head, while a long-sleeved shirt struggled to contain even more layers of fat.
The barbed wiring Plutt hid behind, the way the people in the line groveled before him, the way he sneered at them with his flabby mouth, their leanness compared to his fattiness, told her all she needed to know about what kind of man he was.
As she ran, Jenny reached into her shorts pocket and pulled out her psionic badge. Its palm-sized, semi-transparent, triangular surface flashed briefly in the desert sun.
She didn't like using the badge. Its effects often proved...unpredictable. But right now her gut told her she needed it.
She pressed it against the left side of her chest, over her heart, well, one of her hearts, and felt it adhere to her shirt.
Looking down, she checked that the Intimidation side faced upward. Then she pressed the badge.
The badge chirped once, and then she felt the static buzz as the psionic field expanded over her entire outfit.
She kidded to a halt in front of the rusty, worn booth.
The person at the front of the line, an alien with ribbed horns and some sort of ventilation mask, rounded on her.
"Wait your turn, you..." he started to shout in his language, before going silent.
Gasps resounded all down the line of people. The psionic badge was doing its job, creating a psychic field around her body that projected an image back into the onlookers' brains. What image? Whichever one they would find the most intimidating at that exact moment.
Jenny waited uneasily. This process was always a lottery. You never knew what each person saw.
Most of the people in line weren't even human, but the badge was rated for over a hundred types of cerebral cortices. Hopefully, that was broad enough.
Soon, a common word began drifting from person to person in frightened whispers:
"First Order...First Order...First Order..."
So that was it.
Jenny straightened her back, held her arms confidently behind her, and raised her chin.
"I am here on official business!"
She winced. She'd made her voice a tad too deep, laying in on a bit thick.
"You lot will now disperse," she continued with less bass but the same authority. "Immediately."
The onlookers in line shifted uneasily and exchanged anxious glances with one another.
"Did I not make myself clear?" she tried again. "Off with all of you. Quick as you can!"
Finally, the line broke apart as each person wandered away from the booth.
At that moment, Rey arrived beside her.
"Jenny..." she started to say.
Then her eyes widened as she looked Jenny up and down.
"What is the meaning of this?" a deep, almost gurgling voice demanded.
Drawing a deep breath, Jenny slowly turned to face Unkar Plutt.
"You received a component this morning, highly rare," Jenny said, forcing all the authority and confidence into her words that she could muster. "Similar to a space drive. Probably the only one of its kind you've ever seen. By Order of the First Order, you will surrender it to me."
"First Order, hmm," the blob gurgled thoughtfully. "Why is it of interest to you?"
Jenny clenched her fists.
"None of your concern. Hand it over at once."
"Hmm," Plutt burbled again. His deep-set eyes appraised Jenny coldly. "What if I make you a deal? You First Order types like deals, don't you?"
He glanced over at Rey. Jenny heard her boots shift in the sand.
"Take this one instead," Plutt said.
Jenny looked over at Rey. The other woman's suntanned face reddened. Her eyes aimed an unblinking, steely gaze at the blob of a man. Her staff slowly moved into a defensive pose.
Jenny's hearts began beating faster, blood pounding steadily louder in her skull.
She turned back to Plutt.
"What do you mean?" she asked quietly.
Plutt held out a wrinkly, fat-fingered hand.
"She's mine. Sold to me when she was a child. I give her free reign because she got to be more trouble than she's worth. But I will give her to you...for free."
He bared his rotting teeth in a lecherous grin.
"Surely some of your officers could use a little...recreation time, am I right?"
The pounding in Jenny's skull grew louder until it almost deafened her.
"I assure you," Plutt continued, "she will provide plenty of recreation."
Jenny's hand hovered near her blaster. She imagined whipping it out, pulling the trigger, and burning a smoking, gaping hole in his head.
Instead, she dipped down, drew a stun baton from her boot, and snapped it to full extension, all in one flowing movement.
She leaped toward the booth, grasped the window ledge with one hand, and slapped her boots onto the side, using her leg muscles to hold herself in place.
Before Plutt could react, she shoved the baton into his jaw and pressed the button.
His body jolted from the electric current, blubber jiggling disgustingly, and he cried out in a throaty howl.
Jenny tossed the baton to the ground, clawed the front of his shirt, and bashed his head against the barbed wire. Once, twice, three times, until bloody gashes raked his blotchy skin.
Then she dropped off the side of the booth and dragged him with her, slamming his neck onto the window ledge. She tugged him down by the collar of his shirt, forcing his head to stick out the booth's window.
A second later, her blaster pressed into his forehead.
Plutt gagged and spluttered, body still quivering from the baton's jolt.
The pounding of Jenny's hearts quieted.
"Jenny!" Rey cried from behind her in a tone of utter shock.
Two masked and hooded figures materialized from behind the booth, one carrying a type of pistol and the other wielding a rifle.
"Stop!" Jenny ordered, pressing her pistol more deeply into Plutt's skin for emphasis. "Lower those guns, unless you want your boss's brains all over his storefront."
The figures slowly complied, laying their weapons on the ground.
"Good. Now, turn around and march in the opposite direction, both of you," Jenny ordered.
The two guards titled their heads toward each other as if exchanging glances, then obeyed, pivoting on the spot and steadily marching in diagonal lines away from the booth.
"Faster!" Jenny called.
Their paces picked up, kicking up sand beneath their feet.
Jenny looked over at Rey.
"Mind popping into that booth and getting my vortex manipulator?"
Rey kept her gaze on Plutt, a look of shock in her hazel eyes.
"S-sure..." Rey answered. "How will I know which one it is?"
"You scrounge parts for a living, and it' s a very unique part. You'll figure it out." Jenny said.
Rey finally darted around to the back of the booth.
Plutt's deep-set eyes bored into Jenny.
"You're not First Order," he slobbered. "Who are you?"
"Right now, seems like I'm your reckoning," Jenny said.
"You won't kill me," Plutt said. "You don't have the will."
"Oh, I've got a proper reserve of will. You'd be dead by now, otherwise."
"Mmm," he grunted.
His face appeared distorted, the layers of his fat pulled downward by gravity.
"You..care for her, don't you?" his deep voice sneered.
Jenny said nothing, but the drumming of her hearts increased again.
"She is nothing, you know that," he said. "She comes from nothing, and she's lived her whole life as a filthy scrap rat."
Jenny's finger depressed the trigger of her blaster slightly before she even realized it.
"Shut it," Jenny whispered.
His hanging jowls smirked at her.
"But you, you're quite the find," he burbled. "Resourceful, smart, and you walk like a woman from another realm."
His smirk deepened.
"I could sell you for far more than some Lieutenant's trinket."
Jenny's hearts pulsed in a drumbeat of rage.
"Got it!" Rey called.
At the sight of Rey standing beside her again, Jenny's pounding heartbeats calmed once more.
Rey held the familiar cylindrical body, cold-blue button pads, and tentacle-like wiring of Jenny's vortex manipulator.
"Aren't you a sight for sore eyes," Jenny said.
She'd meant it for the manipulator, but her gaze met Rey's as she spoke.
Rey bit her lip. Jenny looked quickly away.
That's when Jenny noticed the crowd of onlookers that had formed in a ring around the booth. They kept their distance, but the people murmured and whispered to each other while pointing at Jenny and Plutt. Even most of those at the cleaning stations had left their work and carried their prizes to join the gawkers.
"We've got what we came for," Jenny said, staring at Plutt. "Now we just need to take out the trash."
She grunted and heaved on Plutt's neck. He growled in protest. Jenny's arm and leg muscles strained, but in the end, she succeeded in dragging the blob out his window and throwing his girth onto the ground.
"You're the rat, Plutt," Jenny spat at him as she plucked off her psionic badge. "And ugly to the core."
She looked up at the crowd.
"Can any of you spare some rope?" she called.
"Nice work, boys," Jenny congratulated the pair of flat-faced aliens when they finished tying Plutt to a metal column not far from his booth. "Maybe tighten that knot. Yeah, that one right there."
Plutt growled and twisted against the ropes. He tried to speak, but the ratty gag in his mouth muffled his words.
Next to Jenny, Rey watched Plutt with an almost unreadable expression, but Jenny thought she picked up some quiet triumph in the woman's eyes.
Jenny stepped in front of Plutt and addressed the crowd.
"I'm a stranger here," Jenny began, loudly and clearly, "so I have no right to tell you how to run your town. All I know is that this scumbag has bullied and manipulated all of you for a long time, and now he happens to be conveniently tied up at the moment."
Murmurs spread through the crowd, growing steadily louder.
"Just for once," Jenny said, "your futures are in your hands. Do with that what you will."
She walked back to Rey.
The murmurs rose to full-volume conversations all across the crowd, and most of those conversations did not sound pleased…with Plutt.
Plutt's gaze locked with Jenny's, and she was pleased to see a glint of desperate fear.
She lifted her middle finger in his direction.
"What does that mean?" Rey asked.
"Old custom from where I come from. It means go bugger yourself."
Rey's eyebrows rose, but then she smirked.
The next instant, her own middle finger waved in Plutt's direction.
Jenny laughed.
"Attagirl!"
Jenny and Rey slipped away from the crowd.
Jenny searched the outpost and soon found what she wanted. She darted over to her canvas backpack and picked it up.
"I'm going to grab a few items for the road," Jenny said. "Mind keeping a lookout?"
"What are you taking?" Rey asked in a concerned tone.
"Oi, I'm basically leaving my entire ship here. I think I'm due a few consolation items."
Rey bit her lip.
"All right, all right."
She stepped away and turned to face the crowd.
Jenny hurried around the outpost, grabbing items here and there that she knew would be useful. It was like a scavenger hunt for her personal belongings.
When she finished, she hoisted the pack onto her shoulders and found Rey, still with her back to her and standing guard.
Jenny found her eyes tracing Rey's poised, athletic contours. Rey's sun-kissed skin glowed vibrantly, while her light clothing teased the lean muscles and subtle curves beneath, the entire package standing out from Rey's dry, drab surroundings like a regal, captivating oasis in the desert.
Jenny blinked out of her trance and walked over to her.
She lifted the vortex manipulator.
"This needs a ship. Shall we?"
"Sure thing," Rey said with a grin.
They left the increasingly angry crowd and hurried across the outpost to the landing field.