Star Wars: Eyes Like Stars

Chapter One The Daughter

CHAPTER ONE

The Daughter

I was lost.

Frustrated, I checked the directions on my datapad again, turning the minimap around to try to make sense of this maze.

It kept freezing, the piece of junk. I’d spent way too long trying to navigate my way through the complicated layers of Coruscant, a planetwide city made like a thousand-tiered cake, to find Baelor’s Baubles and Bibelots.

I was supposed to be back on the ship by now, before anyone noticed me missing.

Kotti could hold off my dad only so long, and I’d already wasted all my time lost in Spindlehub Square, trying to find this place. I was so close—probably.

Kotti had warned me that my stubbornness was both endearing and exhausting.

“You’re like a starving rancor when you’re after something,” she’d once commented, sore and tired after traipsing through an entire market in Mos Espa on Tatooine, searching for a stall selling the best dustcrepes.

“You’re either going to get it, or you’re going to die trying and bring everyone else down with you. ”

I had decided to take that as a compliment then, but now I was second-guessing myself. And it made me nervous. On the ship, I knew everything. I knew the routines, I knew the itineraries, I knew every nook and cranny—

Out here, everything was new.

It’s good for you to get out and see things, I told myself to quell my anxiety. You’re being silly. What’s the worst that can happen?

My minimap told me I was very close to Baelor’s Baubles and Bibelots. It should be right down the next shady alleyway. (It was always a shady alleyway.) If Dad knew I was this deep in Coruscant, he’d never let me leave the ship again.

A message pinged on my device. It was from Kotti.

Where are you??

I decided to call her instead on my comlink and took it out of my oversize leather jacket. “I’m almost there, Ko, no worries.”

Static came over the link, and then her voice punched through with sharp panic. “Almost there? You’ve got to be kriffin’ kidding me, Ardent,” she whined.

“The map is really confusing.”

She groaned. “Your dad’s getting suspicious, and if he finds out that I’m helping you, my job’s totally skiffed. I said you were in the ’fresher, but I can’t keep him away for much longer.”

“I’ll be back soon, I promise,” I replied, squeezing between two large taupe beings and down the shady alleyway in question. As long as my dad didn’t notice me missing, everything would be perfectly fine. “I could be taking a long shower.”

“You’ve already been in there twenty minutes.”

I winced. “Then tell him I’m on my cycle.”

“Are you?”

“I mean”—I thought about the timing—“soon?”

She gave another hard sigh through the comlink. “You owe me.”

“I’ll buy you a juja-cake from Gharnie’s,” I promised.

“Two of them,” she replied, and I agreed because I had a feeling I wasn’t as close to the shop as I’d thought I was, judging by the dead end I had just encountered. “Just hurry back. Things feel weird.”

I rolled my eyes, because she said that about everything. Coruscant had one of the many ports we frequented, and Dad wouldn’t dock at any port in the galaxy that wasn’t 100 percent safe. He was allergic to danger. Had been since I was born.

I’d inherited some of that, I thought.

This level made me nervous. If I weren’t looking for the shop, I’d gladly return to the ship immediately. Who knew what sort of puddles I was stepping in, or people I was brushing up against, or smog I was inhaling—

I tucked my comlink into my jacket pocket again and retraced my steps, setting down the next dark alleyway. This one looked promising. “And once you get this, Ardent, you never have to leave the ship again,” I promised myself.

Neon lights blinked above me, their reflections bright in the puddles at my feet. I skipped over the deeper-looking wet spots and side-stepped trash as I followed the directions on my datapad. Was ruining my only good boots worth coming all the way out here to find a romance serial?

Yes—I had it on good authority that Baelor’s had the rare last installment of Under the Tan-Tan Sun, a serial I’d been looking for the past few years. It was almost impossible to find anymore because the series was close to twenty years old, but a guest last tour had suggested I look at Baelor’s.

So here I was.

Something cold dripped on my nose and I shivered, pulling my worn jacket around myself tighter.

It was too big for me, but it had belonged to my mom back when she flew freighters for the Republic, and while it didn’t smell like her anymore, I felt a little braver with it on.

Besides, it looked cool and vintage and was much better than my tour uniform.

The alley let out into a bustling street in Spindlehub Square, vendors hawking their wares as buskers played outdated glimmik for a few creds, the smell of burning fried mynock making the air smoky and thick.

Coruscant had a certain kind of thrill. It was the Core World—a hub for hundreds of planets—so cultures and people and stories mingled together like threads twisting into knots.

By the numbers on my datapad, I thought I was finally in the right location. Which meant it was somewhere around here. I pushed myself up on my tiptoes to see over the crowd—

And there, nestled between a noodle joint and a clothing store, was a tiny shop with a large front window display showing ancient-looking tomes and strange gadgets from across the galaxy. The hand-lettered sign above the door read: BAELOR’S.

Thank the stars.

I hurried across the street and ducked into the shop.

Inside, every surface was cluttered with…

stuff. Antique knickknacks with notes alleging that they were from far-off places, or originally owned by long-dead Jedi or mercenaries or nightwitches—Nightsisters, I corrected the note silently—and Sith.

I was quite sure that the Senate insignia ring in the window had not belonged to Emperor Palpatine, but of course I couldn’t prove it.

This place was tacky and almost certainly pawning off junk, but there was something immediately lovely about it, too.

I loved a good story—a good fairy tale. I was raised on the best of them.

I loved how they could transport you to faraway times and faraway places.

How they could protect you from heartache and shield you from grief.

How they could make you feel understood in a galaxy that often made you feel so incredibly small.

And how they sometimes made you care about whether the fictional queen of fictional planet Naroo would be murdered in cold blood by her would-be droid-assassin lover.

Okay, maybe that was just romance serials—but it was still a fun story.

There were shelves and shelves full of old texts and holobooks between old gadgets and half-broken artifacts, and a separate shelf for books on datatape.

There must have been hundreds, all stacked on top of each other haphazardly, impossible to look through if you didn’t already know what you wanted to find.

As I wandered deeper into the shop, a gadget caught my eye.

It was a simple flat plate of copper with rotating disks on top of it that you could spin or flip, and on each circle were different symbols, and on the disk itself was the smallest map of the known galaxy I’d ever seen.

The note simply read, Tool once used by hyperspace prospectors to navigate the stars.

Something deep inside my chest tugged toward it, like my lungs were caught on a fishhook.

Navigating the stars, huh?

I picked it up. The device was lighter than I thought it’d be, so it couldn’t be made out of copper. Whatever it was, though, it was old. My fingers traced the markings on the outer circles. They were worn, almost illegible, but any navigator worth their weight in creds would know what they were.

A star chart.

Was it real?

“You break it, you buy it.”

Startled, I jumped and spun toward the checkout counter, where a grumpy reptilian Rodian sat, flipping through a holobook of Alderaanian poetry. I quickly put the device back. “Sorry. I—I was just looking.”

“And touching.”

“Sorry,” I repeated. “It’s very pretty.”

He inspected me for a long moment and then closed his holobook.

“Not many people pay attention to that old thing. It’s a celestialabe.

You know, before droids charted ships through hyperspace, there were navigators who did that.

Some were rumored to have a special knack for it—astrogating, they call it. ”

“Ah.” My heart jumped into my throat. I twisted my fingers together, looking down at my filthy boots. “That, um, that sounds dangerous.”

“Most things that matter are.” The Rodian waved his hand in the air. “But now we’ve got droids and maps and charts, and the celestialabe is obsolete. Then again,” he added, a sparkle in his black eyes, “maybe it’ll point you somewhere you’ve never been. Maybe with it you can astrogate, too.”

“That’s not how astrogating works,” I said before I could stop myself.

He narrowed his eyes at me. They were large and buggy. “It’s not?”

“I mean, that’s what I hear,” I quickly amended, and decided to change the subject before I torqued him off further. “Actually, I’m looking for something in particular. The last installment of a serial novel.”

The shopkeep sat back on his stool. “Are you now.”

“It’s kind of rare, but someone told me if anyone would have it, your shop would.”

“And they’d be correct.” He motioned to the shelves upon shelves of holobooks and datatapes. “Name?”

“Under the Tan-Tan Sun.”

The two sucker-like antennae on the top of his head stood up. Then he leaned forward, scrutinizing me, and asked, “By Alkenine Gro’sha?”

I leaned in close, too, holding on to the edge of the counter. “Yes! I’m desperate for it.”

The old shopkeep studied me in a new light. He gave a slow nod. “That’s an odd serial for someone your age. How’d you hear about it?”

“My mom,” I supplied simply. He didn’t need to know the rest.

“She’s got good taste.”