Chapter Twenty-Two The Incident
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Incident
Turned out, the Advozse refused to trade a few hours on their speeder for a ticket off-world, so Sian put a hand on their shoulder and looked them in the eye.
The Advozse tensed, brows wrinkling all the way up to their cranial horn.
I couldn’t see their eyes—Advozse had very sensitive vision, so this one wore goggles—but the rest of their face cracked with abject horror, and then…
Nothing.
Their shoulders slumped. Their arms went lax.
Sian patted their shoulder and muttered, “Aplot, ma bukee,” and shoved the ticket into their pocket anyway. Then he motioned for me to follow him to the speeder.
“What did you do to them?” I asked, worried, as he climbed onto the vehicle and Noola scrambled into his jacket. He fastened her in to make sure she was safe and secure.
“You know when I asked if you were okay looking into my eyes, when I tried to hypnotize you?” he replied, flicking a switch to turn over the engine.
It sputtered to life, levitating the speeder off the ground.
“That’s kinda what’s supposed to happen.
People normally get disoriented. Confused, sometimes. Or worse…”
I glanced back at the Advozse, who had pushed up their goggles and was rubbing their eyes. “Will they be okay?”
“Yeah, it’ll wear off. They’ll just have a headache for a minute. We’ll bring their speeder back,” he promised, and told me to get on.
I motioned for him to scoot back. “No, I’m driving.”
“You?”
“I promise I’m a better driver than you,” I replied, and it didn’t even take him a second to think about it before he scooted back in the seat.
I climbed up front. I tested the brakes and the acceleration, revving the engine to get a feel for the speeder, and then I told him to hang on.
He wrapped his arms around my middle tightly, and I ignored the way my stomach flipped at his touch as I whipped the speeder around and set off down the dusty main road into nowhere.
The sandcrawlers couldn’t have been too far ahead.
And luckily, they weren’t.
The problem was, however, getting them to stop.
“Get out in front of them!” Sian yelled above the wind. “And park sideways! They won’t want to run you over!”
“You sure?” I shouted back.
“Probably!”
Well, that was a better idea than nothing. So I sped ahead of the caravan. About two hundred meters away, I parked horizontal in the road and waited.
The vehicle had kicked a dirt cloud high into the afternoon sky.
The sandcrawlers chugged along quickly. There were three of them in a V formation, and as they came up to me and the speeder horizontal in the road, their flotilla slowed to a stop.
The dust cloud drifted past us, and as it dissipated into the sky, Sian snuck away from the speeder.
We had cobbled together some semblance of a plan while waiting for the caravan to catch up, though I was only half sure it would work.
It’d worked in Under the Tan-Tan Sun, but asteroids never struck the same planet twice.
From an open hatch of the closest sandcrawler, a Jawa shouted something.
I squinted, wishing I had a translator, but my only translator was currently being held captive by the same Jawas I was trying to reason with.
I knew enough Trade Talk to get the gist of what they’d said, though: “Get out of the way or we’ll run you over. ”
“I just want to talk!” I shouted back. “I think you’ve got something of mine!”
The Jawa chattered, and I picked out enough words to roughly translate it to, “We don’t have anything of yours!”
“Two droids! I don’t remember selling them to you!”
The Jawa in question slammed the hatch shut, and through the metal hull of the sandcrawler I heard them shouting back and forth to each other. Bickering, much like a disgruntled family. I steeled myself, hoping I wasn’t about to find myself in the middle of a firefight—or worse, bartering.
Then the sandcrawler gave an exhausted sigh, the loading ramp fell to the ground with a clang, and three Jawas shuffled out.
They came up to my elbows at best and were dressed in dark brown robes with munition strapped to their chests, yellow eyes glowing brightly like twin moons under their dark hoods.
I met them, twisting my fingers. Why did Sian get the easy job? “I’d like my droids back,” I repeated. “Please.”
The first Jawa folded their arms across their chest and chattered. I made that out to be something like, “What’ll you give us?”
Oh, no. Bartering it was.
“I won’t give you anything,” I argued, crossing my arms over my chest to mirror their stance. This one was clearly the leader. “They’re my droids. You stole them.”
The second one said in a high voice, “We traded for them.”
“Traded? I didn’t trade anything,” I challenged, and the three Jawas exchanged confused chatter. Apparently, they didn’t care who had traded the droids. I sighed and said, “Fine, let’s trade for them. Again.”
The third Jawa muttered something to the first two, but I couldn’t make it out.
It didn’t matter. I just had to keep them talking until Sian scaled the side of the closest sandcrawler and got the droids.
Entoo’s signal was coming from the first one, so I knew at least the astromech was there. Veebee was probably with them.
At least, that was my hope.
The three Jawas discussed among themselves quietly before one signaled to the other two.
With a loud sigh of exhaust, the other two crawlers in the caravan started moving again, giving us a wide berth, and left for the canyon in the distance.
I hoped that meant the Jawas were willing to hear me out or, better yet, just give me my friends back.
Finally, the first Jawa asked, “What’ll you give us? Something good.”
“Something better,” the second one corrected.
My communicator crackled as Sian radioed in, quiet enough so only I heard. “Found them. Erm, parts of them.”
I curled my hands into fists. These guys really did work fast, didn’t they?
They had a reputation for a reason. I just had to stall them long enough for Sian to get my droids out of there.
Neither of us had weapons, and I had a feeling the munition on the Jawas’ chests wasn’t just for decoration. Sweat prickled on the back of my neck.
“Well?” the third Jawa asked. “What to trade?”
From my communicator, Sian said, “Keep them talking. I can’t seem to find the astromech’s head—chuba.”
Chuba? What did chuba mean?
There was a thunk from inside the sandcrawler and then a flash of electricity. Sian flew backward out of the transport and landed hard on the ramp. He rolled over himself and stopped, blessedly face up. “Ow,” he croaked.
A fourth Jawa marched onto the ramp, shaking an electrified baton, their voice loud and accusing.
I winced. I didn’t need to understand the words to get the gist this time.
Things were about to go very, very badly.
“You’re stealing!” cried the first Jawa, taking an angry-looking ion blaster from their robes. “We don’t like stealers!”
Think, I told myself, mind scrambling for something—anything. So I gasped in offense, slapping my hand to my chest, and feigned naivety. “I am not a stealer!”
“Aren’t you with this?” The fourth Jawa jabbed their electrified baton into Sian again as he got to his feet. There was a pssst, and he jerked in pain—with a yelp—and dropped to his knees.
I winced. “I…don’t know him?”
Sian gave me a tortured look.
The fourth Jawa prepared to strike him again.
“Well!” I quickly added. “I don’t know him well! He just wanted to…um, to make sure the droids were intact. You stopped, so we figured…”
“He snuck on,” the fourth accused.
I blinked slowly. “No, he didn’t,” I said, my voice strangled yet calm.
“He walked up the ramp. Didn’t he,” I added as a not-question to the Jawa’s three friends.
They’d all had their backs to the ramp the entire time, so they couldn’t say and ended up shrugging in answer.
“See? He just wanted to see the droids.”
The fourth Jawa narrowed their eyes. “You could ask.”
Then they marched back up the ramp, grabbed a rope, and tugged at it. The arm of a crane swung out, and strung upside down from it was Veebee, an arm missing and one eye cracked. From here, I could also see Entoo inside the crawler, already half stripped of their exoskeleton, hood completely gone.
Oh, poor things.
VB-35 saw me and limply hung there, as if she’d lost the will to live. “Oh, take your time,” she commented dully. “I will just be here, hanging around.”
“Trade?” asked one of the Jawas. “Big trade.”
Right. Big trade, and I didn’t have anything on me to do that with. Jawas were scavengers, so I was sure the rarer the haul, the better. So what was rarer than a cobbled-together junk droid and an astromech?
I wrinkled my nose. “You know, I think I changed my mind. They aren’t worth much.”
Veebee stared at me. “Thank you. I will remember this.”
I ignored her and cleared my throat. “Sian, don’t you have the—the—” I had to stall while I thought about what to actually do. “The thing?”
He stared at me from where he knelt, crispy from being shocked and dusty from being sent rolling across the ground. At that moment I could see all hope leave his eyes. “The thing,” he repeated like a dead man.
I bet he was regretting not taking that shuttle off-world instead.
“Yes, the thing. The thing we’re going to trade. The thing that’s really valuable,” I insisted, trying to clue him in to play along. I didn’t care what he had—a knife, a belt buckle, something. As long as it was a thing.
He gave me a long, steady look and then took a deep breath through his nose. “Right. The thing.” He held up his hands to show the Jawas that he was going to reach for something and slipped his hand into his pocket.
Stars, I hoped it was something good and not—
Oh, void take me.
He held up the lightsaber, still wrapped in brown cloth.
“This what you were thinking?” he asked.