They'd been walking for hours, and Luke's head was hurting even more than his feet. He squinted at the light from the scanner, trying to disentangle the projected tunnels from each other, and his headache pounded harder.
They reached another crossroads. "Which way?" Aphra chirped.
Luke glared at her. "Can't you take this?"
"You're the assistant. Which way?"
Luke shook his head, focused—then couldn't focus, so just went with his gut. "That way." He jerked his thumb to the right. The tunnels were still ornate and gorgeous, a part of him had to admit, if incredibly eerie. Carved, bug-like faces leered out at them from the arches and the walls, and the arched ceiling of the tunnels was thick with what looked like excrement.
Aphra shone her light down it. "Looks like it's sloping downwards. Perfect!" She skipped ahead, and Luke staggered after her, grimacing. The tunnel was indeed slowly pitching downwards, at an angle that was slightly uncomfortable for his hips to tackle. If Geonosians could fly, the laws of gravity wouldn't bother them, but he was finding this a struggle.
He glanced towards Aphra. She didn't seem to be having trouble, but she never did. He'd never seen her so much as falter when striding towards a potential source of profit or new-fangled weaponry. She stumbled, certainly—he'd been with her over half a year and had lost count of the times she'd been knocked on her backside by gang members, Imperial stormtroopers, guard droids, explosions, and on one memorable occasion a furious Mon Calamari woman with a handbag full of jewellery—but she never faltered. Hesitation wasn't in her vocabulary.
Nominally, it wasn't in Luke's either, but Aphra was on a whole other level.
"We're never gonna find anything in here," he commented, glancing around with a faint sneer on his lips. It was sand. Dust and sand and death. He had plenty of that on Tatooine. He'd escaped all of that on Tatooine. "Nothing interesting, at least—"
"You think the stuff I'm interested in can be found in fancy locations, kid?" Aphra glanced at him over her shoulder. "Nah. This is pretty par for the course for me! If the interesting stuff was in the flashy locations, well, it'd already have been taken by those other archaeologists more interesting in showing off than the reward. The ones all about flash."
Luke frowned. "You're all about flash."
"You sound like Sava Toob-Nix. Anyway. Since those stupid holodramas came out ten years ago every idiot wants to be an archaeologist and find lost treasure. Fight snakes and kiss pretty girls and liberate weapons from the evil oppression of stormtroopers." She cocked her head. "Huh. Maybe that is me. I'm just actually good at it."
"I dunno. I've never known you to kiss girls."
She paused. It was a minute hesitation, but he caught it. "Yeah, well. It's been a while. Had to leave her behind." She turned back towards the tunnel. Luke's lamp bounced off her head, sending her shadow looming across the sandy floor.
Luke frowned. "What happened to her?"
"She became a smuggler. Tries to kill me every so often." She sighed dreamily. "She's still got it."
Luke stifled a smirk. That seemed to be too much for Aphra; she glanced over her shoulder at him, lips pursed. "I'm still better than that guy on the holos!"
"I liked those holos."
"Oh, I bet you did." She faced ahead again, her voice echoing and bouncing back to him. "Bored farm boy watching the daring, dashing, devilishly handsome archaeologist diving into danger," she flung her hand out dramatically, "going on adventures in deserts that are actually interesting, finding new things, getting rich and famous off of them—"
Luke reddened, glad that she wasn't facing him. It alarmed him how accurate the image she painted was. "I bought the tapes for cheap on a trip to Mos Eisley," he said, "and we never got regular holonet access—"
"Oh, I've been there. I get you."
"You grew up on a farm?" Luke asked.
"For a few years. My mom dragged me out there after the Clone Wars broke out 'cause she thought it would be safe. But safe just means boring. Eventually, she got murdered by a bunch of mercenaries, and I got to get out of there!"
Luke stopped walking. "What?"
Somehow, it had never occurred to Luke that Aphra could have had parents, or guardians at all. She certainly didn't have friends—though she did have enemies. He supposed he'd just imagined that she'd burst into existence on a random scrap heap one day, tattoos, aviator cap, and goggles already in place, and started worming her way into trouble.
She glanced back at him irritably. "It was the Clone Wars. Everyone has a sob story. All it takes is one shot"—she pulled out her blaster and shot it at the ground; he jumped at the boom, how it echoed—"and you're dead in a ditch. Keep moving."
"I—" He tried to imagine that, a woman looking like Aphra getting gunned down, and all his imagination offered was an image of Aunt Beru being forced to her knees by… someone. Someone Imperial. Stormtroopers? Officers? Jabba's men, paid off? He still didn't know; just someone faceless in their evil.
The acrid smell of ozone Aphra's blaster had left behind turned his stomach. He remembered the empty homestead.
"I guess I don't blame you," Aphra continued. "If I'd had those holos on that farm, I might've liked them as well. I bet they inspired a whole generation of archaeologists."
"I took extra courses sometimes," Luke admitted, "in the non-harvest months, when my uncle didn't need me. There wasn't much choice, and it mostly focused on local history and archaeology, but—"
"On Tatooine? That can't have been fun." She turned around to look at him, though. "You were a nerd?"
"I—" Did he tell her?
No, he decided rapidly. She definitely didn't need to know that.
But Aphra never missed a trick. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You were about to divulge something embarrassing, and I demand to know what it was."
Luke huffed a breath out between his teeth. He was never gonna hear the end of this. "It was a while before I made friends. I liked reading on my own a lot. At one point. Or not reading, not novels—that was never easy—but manuals, comics, even the Imperial recruitment pamphlets—"
He cut himself off at that last one. It made him uncomfortable, thinking about how much he had wanted to join the Empire. He'd even submitted an application once, before rapidly withdrawing it when his uncle said no.
Now…
Aphra was still staring at him. "And?"
His ears flushed crimson. "They used to call me Wormie."
"Short for—"
"Bookworm." He hesitated, then adding: "Or it was because I was small and always got into trouble. They took any excuse."
Aphra snorted. "That's brilliant. I'm gonna use that."
"Don't you dare." His stomach swooped. He didn't know how to articulate how much that nickname had always told him that Camie knew he didn't belong.
Instead, he looked at her sideways. "You can't tell me you never had any embarrassing nicknames."
She shrugged. "My dad called me Boop."
"Boop? Why—"
"Who knows why my dad did anything?" Luke faltered at the sudden bitterness in her tone, but it vanished almost immediately after. "But Wormie… a nerd…" She reached back to ruffle his hair; he ducked out of the way, but not fast enough. "I did a great job choosing you as my assistant, kid."
"You didn't choose me. I stowed away on your ship."
"I chose not to space you."
"You would've done that?" He watched her shoulders. They didn't flex or tense. They barely moved at all.
She shot him a look over her shoulder. "Well, yeah."
Luke didn't have time to feel hurt by her callousness. Because she was looking at him, she tripped over something right in front of her, and his bleeding heart distracted itself.
"Watch out!" Luke reached out to steady her. She was a little too far ahead for him to reach, but his grip closed around her arm anyway, a few seconds before his hand actually caught her. It stopped her from eating sand, at least; she regained her balance and looked down.
"Huh," she said. Luke tensed. Had she noticed what he'd done? "What've we got here? Looks like—"
"A battle droid," Luke said.
When they both stood over it, shining their lights down on its scuffed and dusty carapace, its features became clearer. The light pink of its armour had been rubbed and scraped off by sand, leaving it striped with rust. Its long head, with two beady bolts where humanoid eyes would be, lay crooked beside it, totally disconnected from the rest of its body. It lay sprawled on its side, clearly having toppled to the ground in an undignified heap and been left there, two blasters limp in its durasteel hands.
Aphra whistled, low and long, and knelt beside the droid. "Nice. Always love a good battle droid."
"Didn't you just say your mother was killed by—"
"Mercenaries, kid, keep up. We had nothing to do with the Clone Wars."
Luke looked down at the droid's still form. "Is it from the Clone Wars?"
"Possibly. Unlikely. It's in a state, but Geonosis was only invaded twice and defected by the end of the war." She picked up the droid's head and waggled it at Luke. "This guy looks a biiiit too pretty for a hunk of junk older than you."
Aphra was the archaeologist by training. But Luke really thought he didn't. "You… can tell that at a glance?"
Apparently, though he fought to keep his scepticism out of his tone, she could feel it in his gaze, even if she wasn't looking at him. "Don't give me that look. I just know something you don't."
He crossed his arms. "You seem to know a lot of things I don't."
"You're learning!" She brought up the head to squint at it again. It looked like she was having a staring contest with a defunct droid. "The Droid Gotra reached out to me a few weeks back. They had a tipoff that someone had fired up an old droid factory on Geonosis and started making these guys again. I was meant to help them liberate the droids from their carbon-based oppressors."
"We're working for the Droid Gotra?" That was a lot less exciting than he'd expected, but it did pay well, which was all Aphra cared about.
"Nah." Aphra tossed the head aside with a clunk. "We're not. Still, it's useful information to have." She reached out to the droid's torso and flipped it onto its front. "Move over here, give me some light."
Luke manoeuvred around to the other side of the droid and knelt opposite her. He reached out to angle the droid so it was underneath the beam of his lamp—then yanked his hand back, half a second before something flashed out to slice it in half.
Aphra whistled again. "Interesting," she murmured. "Very interesting."
The two—no, four—blades that had shot out were broad, thin, and angled away from the droid's torso. They shielded the control panel on the droid's back from direct access, but Luke couldn't see any other use for them. "What are they?"
Aphra reached out a finger to tap them. One was bent out of shape, crinkled like fine flimsi. "Wings."
"Wings?"
"Look." Aphra's hand traced the shape of the metal folds, how they adorned the battle droid's back. "What else could they be?"
"Do you think it can fly with them?"
Aphra grinned at him, and Luke knew he shouldn't have asked. "Only one way to find out."
Luke rolled his eyes but couldn't suppress his own smile of excitement. His tools were on the left side of his rucksack, easily accessed without even taking the pack off, and he was poking at it just as soon as Aphra was. She picked up the head again to peer at the connecting port where it had been knocked off.
"Look at this. The screws holding the head on got loose."
Luke was quietly surprised she'd spotted it so quickly. The actual fault, when he squinted, was tiny. But that was Aphra. She talked about a mechanical language that whispered to her, made it easy for her to cut through the buzz of life and understand the cold, straightforward science of machines.
Having known her for a while, Luke couldn't disagree. When she was speaking to organics—especially ones she'd double-crossed—she did nothing more than deepen her own grave. Machines were always the diggers that got her out of it again.
"Looks like some of the wiring's been nibbled at too." She lifted the head above hers and peered up into it, the wires dangling around her face like tentacles. "And the metal on the head has. None of it broke through, though. No important damage."
"Nibbled?"
"There's a lot of critters on Geonosis that could do something like that. My bet would be phidnas." At Luke's baffled look, she elaborated: "You'll probably have the pleasure of seeing some later—if there are any alive. They're adorable little parasites! They glow in the dark, they explode, the Geonosians mixed their shavit with rock powder to build these beautiful hives…"
Luke blinked. "We're walking through bug shavit?" And then: "They explode?"
"What's not to love?"
"I don't…" But before Luke could ask if there were any other potentially dangerous Geonosian species he should know about, Aphra bent her head down again.
"No wonder it shut down when its head fell off," she said. She'd unscrewed the back panel of the battle droid's pink head and was showing him the inside. "It's got an independent processing unit in here. That's a little computer brain that controls the rest of the body."
"I do know what an independent processing unit does." He reached out his hand, and she offered the head to him, letting him inspect it. The bite marks marring its carapace were pretty clear—and kind of alarming, now he knew what had caused them. "I thought Clone Wars battle droids were centrally controlled?"
"They were—until the Separatists started letting the Geonosians improve their designs. Geonosis was where all the factories were, anyway. It was their idea to introduce independent processing units to the droids, make them think quicker and more individually. They could respond to the specific clone trying to kill them, that way."
"Good to know." Geonosians were builders, then. Builders and innovators. Luke weighed the head in one hand, then brushed his hand along the droid's back. "The wings… were they on the original designs?"
"Nah. I bet the physics was too difficult to work out. But maybe they had the chance to improve on the designs before… You know." She drew a finger across her throat. "Why wouldn't you want to build a droid in your own image? If you can fly, you'd want your droids to keep up with you."
"I guess." Luke checked the wires—they were still safe and intact despite the nibbling, as Aphra had said. But he'd wanted to confirm that himself. Aphra's standards of 'safe' didn't meet his uncle's. And they certainly didn't meet the law's.
Again, neither did Luke's, but he still wasn't this bad.
Aphra turned away to rummage in her own tools. "Good. Now, I've got an idea—"
Luke took the spare parts he'd brought with him for entertainment and worked on the droid's neck. It was a quick fix—the droid wasn't damaged, just disconnected—so it wasn't until after he'd finished that Aphra had the chance to smack the screwdriver out of his hand.
"What are you doing?"
"I—" He glanced from her, and her best what have you done face, to the droid. When he dropped it, it fell back to the sandy ground with a thud, but he could hear its processors whirring. "Weren't we fixing it?"
"Not until I'd made my own improvements—finder's keeper's! I was gonna reprogramme that!" She knelt beside it and seized its head. She still had the access hatch to the independent control circuit disconnected in her hand. "Idiot. Now, let's—"
The battle droid sat up. Aphra yanked her hands and her head back before it headbutted her, but its fist whipped out to sock her in the face anyway. She swore and fell on her backside.
"Now look what you've done!"
Luke scrambled to his feet. The droid did too, with far less grace. Its joints groaned, clanked, and chittered—no. Its voice box was doing the chittering—a complicated, alien string of phonemes and syllables Luke didn't recognise.
He reached for his blaster, but Aphra's scathing look stilled his hand. "I can't use it if it's got a hole in its head!"
Luke hung back; Aphra lunged for it. She got her hand around its neck before it rotated, fixing beady optical sensors on her, and swung its arm around in a flash to backhand her across the face. Her knees hit the sand and skidded—and she slammed into the wall. Luke winced.
The droid turned to look at Luke, those optical sensors impassive. Luke moved his hands away from his blaster in the universal sign of surrender. It didn't seem interested in attacking him.
From the floor, Aphra spat through a mouthful of sand, "Oh, you coward."
"Roger roger," the droid said to Luke.
"What?"
The droid took off.
Aphra scrambled to her feet. "After it!"
They ran.
At first, it looked promising. The droid's steps were as graceless and clanky as the rest of it for the first dozen paces, until it was almost within arm's reach. Luke stretched out his fingers… only for then its wings to flash out and nearly sever them from his hand. They whirred so fast they blurred in Luke's human vision. One second to warm up, then it hovered about a metre in the air—and shot off.
"It does fly!" Aphra shouted to the side. "It does fly, and we could've had a flying battle droid, but nooooo…"
Luke tried to run faster, as if that would make up for it. "Well, we're not gonna catch it now!"
"But where's it going?" She gasped for breath as they careened around a corner. The bounce, bounce, bounce of the beams of light from their headlamps made Luke feel queasy. "If there are working droids, there's gotta be a working droid factory, like the Droid Gotra said—slow down, you clanking rustbucket!"
The droid did not slow down.
The whirring of its wings reached a pitch Luke could no longer hear as it darted forwards, then around another corner. Luke skinned his elbow slamming into the wall on that turn, but he shoved off it and used his momentum to keep going.
Aphra was keeping pace with him. "I've got an idea!" she shouted. "Grab the rifle from my pack!"
"What?"
"Do it!"
Luke eyed her, eyed the droid, eyed the next bend he was gonna have to navigate, and swiped out his hand in one desperate movement. It did, thankfully, snag the rifle Aphra had strapped to the side of her rucksack, and he ran with it in his hand for a few seconds as he tried to adjust his grip on it.
Aphra ran faster. She was gaining on the droid somewhat, her legs pumping faster than Luke had ever seen anyone run. He supposed if anyone would be good at running—away from or toward danger—it would be Aphra. "Switch it to setting three and fire at the droid's torso!"
Luke fumbled for the trigger, then the button to flick between settings. It wasn't where it was on his blaster—which, like most, only had two settings: stun and kill—so it took several steps before he hit it once, twice, thrice. The click jerked the whole rifle in his hand. He lifted it, closed one eye, opened it again, zeroed in on the droid, and fired.
A wire soared out, with a sucker at the end. It planted itself on the droid's torso, the rope trailing behind it.
Then the rope snapped taut and yanked Luke off his feet.
Sand scoured his face, his cheeks. He bounced along, too fast for his eyes to make out discerning features in the tunnel around him, his speed matched only by the speed of the droid's flight. This, he thought, flipping onto his back so at least his face was alright, was ridiculous.
Aphra was hooting behind him. With glee or mirth, he couldn't tell.
He scrambled to his feet and tried to steady himself. The sand churned underneath him, a thin layer for him to skate on, the soles of his boots thick enough to protect his feet from damage. He wobbled but reached out to steady himself with the instinct he'd only recently learned the name of, and kept his balance.
The droid turned its head. It regarded him and the wire connecting them dispassionately—come to think of it, it was odd they didn't give droids optical sensors on the backs of their heads as well as the front, especially battle droids—then kept flying. At least it didn't pick up speed. At least…
Light shone at the end of the long, dark tunnel. Luke's eyes widened.
"Aphra!" he shouted. "I think that's the outside. It's dragging us out there!" They'd never find their way back in.
Aphra cursed. "It'll escape that way!" she whined. "If it gets the wire off, it'll fly into the sky; you gotta hold on!"
If the droid tried to fly away into the atmosphere, Luke was not holding on. His last name was metaphorical at best.
They were lucky, though. As they rocketed towards the light, it turned… amber. Gloopy, somehow. Luke hadn't seen what sunsets were like on Geonosis, so perhaps that was what this was, but it seemed too yellow for the red sky outside. When they turned another corner, Luke realised why.
"Phidnas," he said. Aphra had described them well. They were cute, in a small-glowing-bug kind of way. They sat on the walls, armoured beetles the size of his fist, passively emitting pools of golden light into the darkness. When Luke's craned neck planted the white beam of his headtorch on them, their heads and legs shrank back into their luminous shells.
"They're beautiful." He blinked, and they blurred in front of him at the speed he was going. "Agh!"
The droid flew upwards.
There was a tunnel above them. Luke hadn't noticed them before—tunnels that not just went left and right, but up and down. Had they not reached those junctions yet? Was this the first?
"Ow!" The wire caught on the edge of the tunnel and swung, slamming Luke into the glowing ceiling. He coughed, his head pounding, opened his eyes to see blinking yellow lights zooming away from him. Something exploded.
He passed out.
He woke up a few seconds later, on the ground, hacking up sand. Aphra was yelling at him, but thankfully the ringing in his ears meant he was physically incapable of listening to what she was saying.
"What—"
"You let go of the wire! It got away!"
"Kriff you, Aphra." He tried to sit up, had to stop himself from throwing up, and lay down again. "It flew up. I didn't expect that."
"Clearly not! You're lucky you didn't destabilise this entire catacomb network!"
"I'm not the one who fired on it!"
"Fired on it?" Aphra looked up, to the side, then back at Luke. Luke followed her gaze. Whatever explosion that had been had punched a hole in the ceiling. "You think I did this?"
"What else caused it?"
Aphra kicked one of the chunks of rock that had toppled to the floor. Flipped upwards, a phidna scurried away from her foot, deeper into the crush of rocks. "Didn't I tell you these were explosive?"
Luke ground his teeth. He waited a moment longer, then sat up—slowly enough that he didn't pass out again. The pounding in his head was starting to fade, though he was sure he'd have a black eye for days. "Those bugs. Exploded. Because I crashed into them?"
"You're lucky gravity dragged you out of the line of damage."
He shook his hand. That explained the ache in his side and what felt like a thousand pieces of shrapnel clinging to him. "Mostly."
"I should start collecting them," Aphra mused. "Phidna resin is a great thing to have in your arsenal."
Luke lay down on the floor again.
It was a while later, after Aphra had run out of accusations for how he'd ruined her brilliant plans, that she managed to cajole him to his feet.
"I'm sorry," she said. She was blatantly not sorry at all. "I should've been clearer that I wanted to reprogramme that droid. Since we've met, I've given no reason for you to believe at all that I am an opportunist with an interest in turning every situation to my advantage."
He ignored her sarcasm and hoisted his rucksack. "You're right. You should have been clearer. You know that I like fixing things more than anything else." He flashed her a smile. "I forgive you."
She rolled her eyes. "At least we know there's something here," she said. "And now, they know that we're here. So, we should move, in case they send other battle droids after us."
"You sure you don't wanna reprogramme those ones?"
"I know my limits, kid. Get the scanner."
Luke sighed and didn't reach for the scanner. "There's only one way we can go." He gestured to a passage on the right. It was a four-way crossroads: three paths branching out on this level, one branching above them. They'd come from one, another was blocked off, and the third was upwards.
Aphra peered up, of course. "We could still follow the droid."
"I don't exactly feel like climbing now. And with what?"
"You think that wire was the only rope I had?"
Instead of answering, Luke marched off in the direction he'd chosen. Aphra laughed and followed, which only filled him with a little bit of relief. He'd known she was joking. Mostly.
"You've got great aim, though," she told him. "You nailed that wire to the droid in one shot."
"It was nothing." He looked at her sideways, then looked away. "Way easier than bulls-eyeing womp rats back home."
"Oh, I've heard of those things. Nasty." She clapped him on the shoulder. "But you… did good."
He squinted at her, suspicious. "What are you gonna get me to do next?"
Her grin was a flash of teeth. "I haven't decided yet. But I need you in a good mood for when I do."
The tunnel, as they followed it, sloped upwards—thankfully at a gradient Luke's ankles could handle. The concentration of phidnas on the walls started to lower, until the only light they had to see by was their headtorches. Luke whiled away part of the walk by wondering what it was that attracted them to certain walls and not others. Activity? If the place was dead or abandoned, that shouldn't vary much. Nutrients? The walls were made of their excrement. Just tiny little bug clans, with declarations of bug allegiances and something approaching territorial dominance?
It meant that when the light changed again, they both noticed it. They noticed the smell, too. The air was still hot, still stuffy, and still felt all but poisonous to breathe, but it was also… fresher.
Aphra sighed. "Did we take a wrong turn? Have we left the catacombs?"
Luke picked up his pace to go and check.
The tunnel did lead outside—eventually. The red sunlight splashed the sand on the ground, the ornate arches, the stippled walls in a way that was unmistakeable. Eventually, it was light enough they could both switch off their headtorches. As they neared the exit, alcoves lined the walls, dripping black shadows. A pungent smell made Luke gag and Aphra put her hand over her mouth: rot and decay.
The heat smacked Luke the moment he stepped out from the tunnel's cool shelter. He stood in a wide, circular expanse of sand. Orange-brown stone rose around it, the same substance and design as the catacombs themselves. It seemed to ripple, folding over in neat, flat rows behind a thick wall, like the stacked planting beds of the Marstraps' hydroponic gardens. Higher still, the twisting spires and arches of Geonosian architecture soared around the steps, along with several grand balconies.
The sun bore down on him at an angle from the other side of the ring, glaring in his face.
"This is an arena," Luke realised. Aphra, still hiding in the shadows from the sun, raised her eyebrows when he turned back to look at her.
"Anything interesting?" she called.
"Come out yourself."
"But you're already there! Testing for minefields so nicely."
Luke rolled his eyes. But he took the point. When he stepped forward next, it was carefully, and where the instinct-called-the-Force seemed to say it was alright. He walked into the middle of the arena and looked around. There were three pillars at one end of it, so he jogged over there to have a look.
Notches in the stone told him that the pillars used to have something attached—a structure? Chains? Decorations?—but time had worn the notches smooth and unusable. In fact, there were four pillars: one had fallen over. Cracks lacerated its body like scars. Luke put his hand on it.
His knees buckled. Pain ripped along his back, his flesh splitting open and blood pouring out. He shouted, catching himself on the pillar as he fell, and the pain intensified again.
He pushed off and stumbled back, blinking hard. Still, his mind folded inwards. White, brown, claws, the hot scent of fur, and a low growl monopolised his senses; the crash of light, sound, smell, pain colonised the space behind his eyes. He let himself drop to his knees, let his hands sink into the sand. Let the grains run through his fingers, grounding him.
The sand was old, calm, and infinitely eroded by the winds of time. As the grains trickled out, the thunderclaps and lightning flashes of memory trickled out too, until only a few pieces were left. His pain faded. When he touched the soft flesh of his back, he was unharmed.
"Luke?" Aphra shouted.
"I'm fine!" he shouted back. But he looked around. A sonorous rhythm was building in him like the thundering approach of Tuskens. He staggered forwards, back into the centre of the arena, and looked around.
When he closed his eyes, he heard blaster shots, lightsabers buzzing, the crashes as they collided. Shouting, thundering, the cacophonous clamour of a thousand chittering Geonosians. It swept over him, drowning him in rich, vivid clarity. He stood in the centre of a death match.
The stands writhed with movement; the air pulsed with anticipation; the sand throbbed with pain. Then a wind howled through and cleared them of their memories. When he opened his eyes again, all was silent.
The sand was red, thick, and clumping under his feet.
Aphra touched his shoulder. He jumped, whirling on her. She gave him a sceptical look. "What's going on with you?"
"What happened here?" he asked.
"You think I know?"
"I…" He broke himself off. He couldn't talk about what he'd seen, surely? That would just tell Aphra he was Force-sensitive, and he liked Aphra, but Ben's journals had emphasised that telling this to the wrong person was a death sentence. The Jedi were dead. Luke's father was dead. Luke was all that remained—for a reason.
Ben's journals had always seemed incredibly lonely.
He had to say something. "There's so much death here." He could smell it, though nothing corporeal yet existed to generate that statement.
…except there was.
He turned away from Aphra, back towards the tunnel. "Hey, Luke," she called. "Luuuuuke."
"There's nothing left in this arena," he said. It was empty—abandoned. But… "When we came through, did you smell that?"
"That horrible stench?" Aphra wrinkled her nose. "Yeah."
Luke took one step back into the tunnel they'd come from and smelt it again: wet, rank, and rotting. It got stronger when he turned to the left—towards one of the alcoves that flanked that wall. Tilting his head down, he turned his headtorch back on and immediately scrambled back.
It was a long, dark drop.
His hand covered his nose and mouth, as if that would block the smell. He shone the light straight down, and thought he saw something moving at the bottom.
He hurried to the next alcove. There was a hole in the floor there too. Each one he checked was less an alcove than a drop to another chamber, below them—and below the arena. And through that drop came something vile.
The sunlight dripped thin, rosy fingers down into it, but not enough for Luke to see properly.
Aphra caught up to him. "Wow." She tilted her head, leaning over to peer down into it. She clearly noticed the writhing shapes Luke had, because she drew in a breath. "There's something alive down there! Actual, moving organic matter! Droids don't move like that." She hummed. "I'm surprised we didn't notice that on the way in."
"It was dark. We'd turned our headtorches off." He swallowed. "We thought the smell was coming from the arena."
"But it's not."
"It's not."
"You know what this means."
He looked at her. Her grin made his shoulders sag.
"C'mon. We gotta find out what that is."
Luke thought about the death written into every square inch of the arena's dusty floor, the invisible blood that must be splattered up those pillars, and said nothing.
It was honestly the best thing he could have said, because Aphra had already taken off her pack and started digging in it. "I told you had more rope," she declared triumphantly, pulling out a fistful of guy ropes.
Luke peered uneasily into the wriggling abyss.
"Do you have a harness, at least?" he asked.
Kindness is not a virtue we are used to experiencing. Not from outsiders. The wider hive they call the galaxy is full of life forms unlike us—soft and fleshy, who walk on two legs with no wings. Humanoids are not kind to creatures they call bugs, and from the moment they encountered us, they called us bugs.
When the creatures we created who are not us, but are like us—who are neither born from children nor made by children, and must rely on pitiful language to understand us—break down, often they are not fixed. We are few. They are left behind, their experiences digitised and shared through light, sound, electricity rather than the unity we all share. They function as dead, but for once death should not be celebrated. Their death does not lead others from the first to the second life; their death does not cause decay. It simply causes degradation.
But you have resurrected one of ours.
Changed, was the desire! One of you wanted to change him, turn him against us, as our queens have often done to humanoids in times of tactical desperation. You would use his own circuits as we would use your own biology, the pile of nerves you call a brain, to twist him against what he was built to do. To make him something he is not.
But the other of you did not. You have fixed him—and pursued him, but in vain. Pity. Perhaps, had you been brought here, our questions would have been answered.
We appreciate kindness. We appreciate help. And with the conflict between you, we have to wonder about your purpose here.
Are you here to help us?
And if you are not… could you be made to?
