Chapter Twenty-Eight The Elderels
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Elderels
Until then, we waited.
I tried not to look like a bundle of anxiety, so I took myself out to the edge of the ravine to pace. My fingernails were almost bitten down to the quick already.
After Yavin 4, the itinerary took the ship to quite a few stops before ending on Endor’s forest moon.
I’d been truthful when I said that catching up to the Starfarer would be impossible, so this was the right choice.
It had to be. I’d rather something happen in the middle of nowhere than above a planet full of people.
Not that anything will happen, I told myself. There were hundreds of guests on board. Dad wouldn’t let anything happen to them. He’d give his life to protect them—the entire crew would.
That was what worried me.
That and the blaster now in Val’s possession.
“Hey.” Sian drew me out of my thoughts. He stood a few meters away, hands in his pockets. He nudged his head away from the facility. “Want to take a walk?”
“You go ahead.”
“It’ll take your mind off things.”
“I doubt that.”
“Fine, then will you take a walk with me so I can show you something?” he asked. “My mentor and I found it last time we were here. I think you would appreciate it.”
“What is it?”
He put a finger to his lips. “Why don’t you come with me to find out?”
Infuriating—he was infuriating and…I probably did need to take a walk.
At least it would be different scenery than a sheer drop to my death.
So I caved and told him to let me grab my satchel and tell the droids.
They had holed up in the lander with the air ventilation on to keep themselves from corroding too heavily.
I glanced into one of the reflective sheet metal surfaces of the bulkheads, my face distorting like a ripple in water, and quickly looked away.
It didn’t matter what I looked like—why should I care if my hair was frizzy or my eyeliner running? I didn’t.
The droids were on the deck, playing a game of sabacc when I found them.
“Sian and I are going for a walk,” I told them, grabbing my cross-body satchel from the pilot’s chair and pulling it over my head. “So, if I never come back, look for my body at the bottom of the ravine.”
“Hilarious,” Veebee said, shuffling the cards. “Just…be careful. That sounds like a lot of work on my part. Especially with only one arm.”
“I’ll help you reattach it when we get back,” I promised.
“No, Entoo can reattach it.”
I hesitated, because she always wanted me to. “Are you sure?”
“I can’t rely on you for everything. Besides, it is my fault we are in this mess,” the droid went on, her gaze flickering to me. “I was not paying attention to your brother when he sold us. I was looking at spices. If I would’ve taken you seriously, we wouldn’t be here. I feel like I failed you.”
I knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have asked you to go. It was reckless.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed, “but it is in my programming to want to be useful. Though I feel like I have never been that to you, not since you saved me from the junkyard. You are the first person I remember, asking me every question I couldn’t answer yet.
Who was I, what was my name, did I want to come with you.
” She tilted her head, thoughtful. Then she closed her card hand, set it face down on the deck, and turned to me.
“Ardent, I am an amalgamation of dozens of different droids pieced together. Not quite one type, not quite another. I am finicky. I am peculiar. I am testy. I am very likely to explode. And you did not care. You do not care,” she corrected, her bright eyes studying me. “You are my family.”
“Vee…”
“So do not take this apology away from me,” she said pointedly.
I barked a laugh. “I love you,” I said as I hugged her around the middle.
“Ah. Yes. Touchy-feely.” Veebee awkwardly patted my head. “But would be remiss not to say: This is a terrible plan, Ardent. The statistical odds that the Starfarer is perfectly fine and we simply missed them on Tatooine and misheard your father are low. Very low.”
“I know.”
“Then you know that either Sian is lying or Val is.”
My throat tightened. “Yeah.”
Entoo beeped and picked up their cards nonchalantly.
“You’re right,” Vee agreed. “We can kill them both if we need to. Now go have your walk and your fresh air, and we’ll attempt to not corrode while you’re gone.”
So I left the lander to walk into the sweet-smelling air again.
I noticed the strange sharpness in my head after I’d breathed it in a few times.
These flowers really were menaces. I followed Sian back to the edge of the ravine and down a narrow path cut into the side of it.
The drop was steep, so I trained my eyes on his back so the height wouldn’t make me dizzy.
It did still make me nervous.
“So, where are we going?” I asked, pressing as close to the ravine wall as I could.
“To a temple of sorts. I figured, since you like stories, you might like this one.”
That did intrigue me. “A story?” But then a piece of the path by my boot crumbled, and all I could see was—
Down.
“We’ve got time, if you want to hear it,” he replied, glancing over his shoulder only to find me frozen in my footsteps, staring down the cliffside at what I knew was my doom. He backtracked to me and offered his hand. “Hey,” he ventured gently.
All I saw was rushing water far, far below.
So he took my hand and squeezed it tightly. The touch startled me, and I finally tore my gaze up to his. Rushing river was replaced by infinite night sky, and my fear settled again. “Just keep your eyes on me,” he said quietly. “I promise it’ll be worth it.”
I’m not used to taking chances, I wanted to say, but I was embarrassed to admit it.
I wondered what he’d say if he knew that the first time he met me on Coruscant was the first time I’d ever left the ship on my own.
And the first time I’d lied to my dad about it.
The first time I had managed to squirrel myself out from under his watchful eye.
If I’d been more like Val, maybe I could’ve fallen into a thousand adventures by now. What kinds of stories would I have found out there in the stars? What kinds of people would I have met, secrets learned, mysteries solved?
I mourned that girl who didn’t exist.
I would’ve liked her very much. A girl like her would’ve been perfect for someone like Sian.
Not me.
“I’m fine,” I whispered, dropping his hand. If he looked disappointed, I decided not to notice as I kept my hands firmly on the rock face, feeling the smooth stone beneath my fingertips, and waited for him to descend. “But I’d like to hear the story.”
So he led me down the ravine and told the story.
Thousands of years ago, this planet was inhabited by a people his mentor called the Elderels.
Not much was known about them—their great libraries were burned, their records scattered—but of the few facts that remained, his mentor knew that they were a fierce and protective species who excelled in the arts—
“Watch your step,” he added, motioning to a gap in the path, and helped me over it. His fingers brushed the small of my back, featherlight.
I let go of his hand again, though I didn’t want to. The farther down we went, toward the calm aquamarine river below, the darker the stone walls became.
He told me the Elderels excelled in music. They spoke in songs, but not like the ones we knew. They communicated through some sort of aeolian notes.
“Aeolian?”
“It’s the sound you hear when the wind whispers across the rocks, over the sands, through the trees—my mentor said it was the sound of the galaxy in motion.”
“I always thought the galaxy sounded like the hum of a ship,” I mused.
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “You really did grow up on that ship, didn’t you.”
I shrugged. “What does the galaxy sound like to you?”
He gave it some thought while helping me down the last switchback that led to the bottom of the ravine.
Beside the rushing water was a small path that snaked into an alcove that couldn’t be seen from the top of the cliff, hidden away.
Secret. “I don’t think I remember thinking it sounded like anything.
Silence, probably. Yeah, a lot of silence. ”
“That sounds lonely.”
“So does the galaxy sounding like a ship,” he replied, and then winced. “Sorry—sorry. The flowers…that was rude.”
“True though,” I admitted. It wasn’t like he was wrong.
He helped me down the last bit of rock, hand in mine, but when our feet were on solid ground, I decided not to let go again. I folded my fingers through his, as if to tell him that I wasn’t alone now, and neither was he. He squeezed my hand back.
My heart did a funny flip in my chest.
“What happened to the Elderels?” I asked, trying to ignore the feeling as he angled his head toward the alcove.
“Why don’t we see for ourselves?”
Cut into the rock was a temple of swirling stone chiseled to look like waves of water or waves of hair—I couldn’t quite tell.
The pillars stretched twenty meters high, framing a stone door that had cracked centuries ago and was now broken on the ground.
There were patterns carved into the door, but they were so faded I couldn’t tell what they’d once been.
Sian led me to them and into the temple ruins.
The air inside was cooler and strangely dry. But stranger still, the sweet scent of the flowers was gone. I felt like I could finally breathe again.
And lie again, I thought, though that meant he could, too. I didn’t realize how comfortable I’d gotten simply telling the truth.
I’d spent so much of the past few years lying—small lies, about how I was feeling, what I wanted in life, being satisfied on the Starfarer, happy on the Starfarer, enough on the Starfarer—
I wasn’t at all.
The salt from the river must have absorbed the smell, and it didn’t look like the flowers could grow in darkness—they had only been in the shafts of light in the research facility—so it made sense that there weren’t any down here.
Then Sian inclined his head, and we walked on.