Chapter Twenty-Four The Inheritance
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Inheritance
The first time Dad let me pilot the Starfarer, he had sat me on his lap, because I couldn’t yet reach the controls, and folded his arms around me, his chin resting on my head.
I remembered how incredibly large the galaxy had looked outside the viewport, how frozen with indecision I felt bombarded by the idea—the poetry—of everywhere.
Come to think of it, looking out into the wide and impossible galaxy felt a little like looking into Sian’s eyes. I should’ve been frightened, or at least a little discombobulated, faced with such bigness, but…
I never feared the expanse of darkness and the light of distant stars.
“It’s big, isn’t it?” Dad had whispered.
Mom was in the copilot seat, humming softly to herself as she made small tweaks to the navicomputer, hypotheses for shorter routes, faster ways to get places, safer lanes. She was always working, always flicking her eyes from the wide sky to the navicomputer and back again.
She said in her soft, patient way, “But don’t let that scare you.”
“Are all those stars places?”
“A lot of them,” Dad replied. “We can go there, if you want.”
“We can find a route,” Mom agreed.
Sitting at the back of the flight deck, my brother flicked through a holobook about Jedi and other fairy tales. He was nine, I was six, and that was the happiest we’d ever be. “Let’s go somewhere cool. I wanna fight some monsters!”
Mom laughed. “How about you, love? Where do you want to go?” she asked me.
I didn’t have a specific answer. “Everywhere.”
Places I didn’t know the names of yet, places I hadn’t even dreamed of.
If I opened my eyes wide enough, I imagined I could see branching paths, glimmering and twisting and turning, knitting together like threads of string, taking me anyplace I wanted.
I used to think that if I chased those strings in the galaxy, I’d find a path that, to anyone else, didn’t exist.
Dad had scrubbed my head with a laugh. “Then let’s go everywhere.”
But we never did go everywhere, especially not after Mom died. No, we stuck to the safe planets, the well-treaded routes.
The memory filled my heart with heaviness as I looked out at the countless stars, the feeling anchoring me to my chair.
My eyes caught glimmers in the darkness.
I felt an incessant pull in my middle. Like gravity.
But every time I tried to fall, the promise of uncharted places pulled away from me like I didn’t belong anymore.
Unchosen.
I eased the shuttle out of the atmosphere, and after a brief check of the systems, I punched in the coordinates for Geonosis, and the navigation did the rest. Once we were clear of the shipping lanes and past the two closest moons, I pushed us into hyperspace, flipped on the autopilot, and unbuckled my seat belt.
We’d catch up to the Starfarer in a few hours. I had to believe that.
All the while I piloted, Sian hadn’t looked outside—not once. Come to think of it, the only time I remembered him doing so was to watch Naboo, and at that point we weren’t moving. Maybe it wasn’t space he was afraid of but travel.
Starstall was an RY-280 that had been almost completely gutted and refitted to hold twenty or so passengers comfortably in its main hold, forty uncomfortably.
It was composed of a single large seating area with seat belts, along with booths in the corners for holochess and other games, and three rooms in the back for storage, a kitchenette, and a three-stall refresher with a single shower.
The storage room was packed full of essentials and a single flat cot.
“I’m sorry you’re still stuck with me,” I commented, getting out of my seat, and he followed me back into the ship. I was starving. There had to be some sort of emergency snacks in the bins, so I busied myself looking in them.
“Eh, Noola and I have been through worse.”
His creature, curled up on a chair, crooned in agreement.
“How long until we reach the ship?” he asked, looking over my shoulder as I took out a rations tin and shuffled through it. Freeze-dried jerky, fruit snacks, some crisps…He took a leaf of jerky and sat beside Noola, breaking off a piece to feed her. “Where are we meeting them?”
“Geonosis,” I replied. “It’s a few hours, and we have to transfer at least two lanes, but it’s pretty straightforward.” I sniffed the fruit snacks, wrinkled my nose at the smell, and decided on the crisps instead. “We’ll catch up.”
“If we don’t run into pirates,” Veebee said.
Sian sighed. “Pirates, mercenaries, the First Order…”
“They only care about the Unknown Regions,” I said. “They wouldn’t come this far in. The guys on Coruscant excluded. That reminds me, though.” I sat down on the other side of Noola and opened the dense crisps. “The story you gave those Jawas about the saber…”
Sian fed Noola another strip of jerky, trying to act cool. “Yeah?”
“Was it true?”
He tilted his head. “Which part? About the people who died for it? Or how important it is?”
“All of it,” I admitted. “Did your mentor…?”
He let out a hard breath. “Yeah. First Order scum killed her. Some hotshot junior officer was after us—she saw him, I didn’t—and she told me to split up.
She said we’d meet on Coruscant. At Baelor’s…
but of course nothing went to plan. Nothing ever did, you know?
So I didn’t expect the best, but I also didn’t think…
” He frowned. “I didn’t know she’d died until those First Order assholes showed up in that shop instead of her.
I’m sure they report to the officer who killed her. ”
I thought back to my first meeting with him. That was when he found out his mentor had died? I felt sick to my stomach. “How evil.”
“A lot of things are evil in this galaxy, Starlight,” he replied gently.
Still. “I’m sorry.”
He seemed amused. “Why?”
“Because you haven’t gotten the chance to mourn.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction, as if he hadn’t even thought to give himself that sort of grace, and he tore off a piece of jerky and chewed it slowly. “S’fine,” he mumbled.
“I don’t really know what you’re feeling, but I sort of know what it’s like,” I ventured, glancing at Veebee and Entoo. They’d shuffled through the bins for something to do and gotten out a deck of sabacc cards.
Veebee shrugged. “She’d hate for you never to talk about her, you know.”
Sian inclined his head, curious. “Who?”
“My mom,” I replied. “She died when I was eight. Do you know the story of my family? The Quays?”
“Can’t say I do,” he replied, which was one of the many things I was beginning to like about him. Everyone I’d ever met knew about the Quays, so to find someone who had no expectations? It was refreshing.
“Well, we come from a long and storied line of hyperspace cartographers and navigators,” I began, “so much so that my mom’s side developed a strange sort of sense—astrogating.
But we call it wayfinding. My mom could pick a point in the galaxy and close her eyes and know exactly how to get there.
And coupled with a navicomputer, she could go anywhere.
She knew which rare lanes to take, which unexplored ones to discover.
She found new ones. A lot of people called it luck, and maybe it was, but I like to think it was something deeper. ”
His eyebrows furrowed in thought. “Your mom’s side? So is it inherited? Do you have it?”
I shrugged. “I think I do? Mom died, like I said, while trying to get home. She took a new lane to make it home for my birthday and…” My voice trailed off, my mouth wobbling.
I pressed my lips together tightly to collect myself and tried again.
“She never made it home. So afterward, Dad refused to let me practice, and Val left before I had ever worked up the courage to ask him to teach me what he learned from Mom.”
Sian cocked his head. “Val knows how to, too?”
“Yeah. He’s three years older than me, so Mom taught him a lot more. He was the one we assumed would inherit the ship, but then he left.” I lowered my gaze to my hands, picking at my nails. “Val was always the better choice.”
“Except he just sold your droids for a blaster,” Sian deadpanned.
I sighed. “Yeah, there’s that.”
“What’s his deal, anyway? He just left three years ago, never sent a message? Never told you where he was? Nothing?”
I shrugged, still picking at my cuticles. “No.”
Sian’s silvery eyebrows drew together, creating a crease between them. “That’s mean—to you and your dad and everyone else, too.”
“He just wanted a clean start—”
“That doesn’t matter, Starlight. That was irresponsible.
I would have given anything to have what he just—just—ignored.
A family. A home. Somewhere he belonged and people who loved him.
And it’s absolutely immature to show up again and expect everything to just… go back to normal! Skootah!” he cursed.
He was so angry about it, he shoved himself to his feet and started to pace the length of the room.
I was surprised, honestly, that he’d had such a visceral reaction.
It bolstered my own feelings about the issue, because for three years Dad had just ignored the fact that Val left without a note, without contact information—without anything—and had expected everyone else to hang their feelings on a shelf, too.
My mouth wobbled a little with emotion, because now here was someone who didn’t know me very well, and certainly didn’t know Val or my family, but was angry on my behalf anyway.
It was mean, wasn’t it? And entitled. And unfair.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and took a deep breath to calm down. “I know you love him, but—”
“No, you’re right,” I said, because I didn’t want him to take back any of his vitriol. “It’s nice to hear, even if I can’t say it myself. Thank you.”
In surprise he replied, “Erm, you’re welcome, I guess.”
The navicomputer made a series of beeps that let me know we were approaching Geonosis, so I pushed myself to my feet, too. “We should get to cleaning up. We’ll be home soon.”
“Oh, good. I was worried this would be an overnight thing,” he joked.