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The desert has known many names.
Wasteland. Junkyard. Burial ground and birth place, hellhole and haven. Home.
The desert does not care much for these descriptors. For what single word can encapsulate such vastness, such sprawling, primeval might? Such beauty and such decay? Such extremes of existence—only elsewhere to be mirrored in its denizens themselves.
Some of these inhabitants consider the desert cruel. They curse its shifting dunes and scorching heat until they rasp their last breaths. Others evangelize on its benevolence, the oases found while on the brink of despair, the delicate flowers unbowed by the sun. Still others scoff and smirk and remind their fellows that the desert has no feeling—a cold, indifferent husk, the ghost of former verdant life.
All of this is true.
The desert is many things to as many different people, doling out kindness or cruelty with the shifts of the wind. It does not stoop to consider the individual, for what would be the use? Mortal lives are all the same—igniting and burning out so quickly, like flint struck with hard stone.
But every so often, something changes. An exception to the rule. Someone comes along, and the desert sits up. Pays attention. Rises from its half slumber to peer into their heart.
If it likes what it sees? They will be chosen.
And if it doesn’t? Well—let’s just say there’s a reason for all the bones littering the sand.
***
The girl stood no higher than an average astromech. Sand abraded her lips, rubbed her nose blaster-burn red. The loops of her hair were roughened into coarse tangles. Her slippers, half sunken in the dunes.
But her cry was as powerful as any krayt dragon.
One might think it was those powerful lungs that drew the desert’s notice. In truth, it was less the volume of the noise than the intensity of the emotion behind it.
Jakku is no stranger to grief. Some of its people stumble here by accident, untangling themselves from their ships to find a place baked with enough misery to match their own. Others arrive expressly to wallow. To brine themselves in knockback nectar and useless, sour-tasting guilt.
But—that was the thing.
The girl was different.
She had no sin or blame to mar her pain like the others, whose sorrows were crusted with vice and guilt like flies staining the surface of a pool.
No. Just grief, raw and unfiltered, like pure coaxium. Powerful enough to set the world on fire. But innocent enough that she’d never think to try.
The desert knew this, just as it knew that the ones the girl was crying for were never coming back.
It watched as she clawed at the air. As her knees gave out and buried themselves in the blistering sand. As her fists clenched until her fingernails drew blood, a bright smear of crimson as she swiped away her tears.
And the desert made its choice.
***
The girl was not much older when she made her first discovery.
At first, they were as small as they were few and far between. Shiny bits of metal. Woven cloth inked with faded bursts of dye. The odd oculator of a droid, wires crumbling to rust.
Nothing among them had any real value. But to the girl—to the girl, they were everything.
She kept them carefully wrapped in her canvas sack, safe from the elements and out of sight from Unkar. He had no reason to covet them—after all, even he wouldn’t be able to scrape a profit out of them—but instinctively, she knew that he would find some way to take them away. Unkar was a jealous creature. His life orbited the possessions he worshipped like the sun. The idea of anyone under his keep having their own private treasures—even as trivial as a fingernail sized slip of metal—would drive him mad.
Unkar was mad enough already. She kept them hidden.
Years passed. The girl filled them with work—sorting through the rubbish brought to Unkar—and observing. Everything. The Teedos roaming the wastes. The socket eyed Uthuthma, chains rattling from their craggy necks. The Wookies who visited the spaceport, impossibly tall, towering like what she thought trees must resemble. Sometimes she would creep out at night and listen to the harsh melody of their voices. Later, curled in her cot, she would touch her hand to her throat and try to replicate those strange roars. Sometimes she even heard them in her dreams, filling the air as she skimmed across the sea, hurtling toward—she never made it that far.
But mostly, she watched the scavengers.
Young and old, wizened and spry, they emerged from the sands like insects under a setting sun. They bore sleds and carts of materials, or they carried it all on their backs themselves. And no matter how bent or broken they seemed, they walked with a special ownership, the pride of supporting themselves on their own wit and work ethic alone.
The girl watched everything. And when she made her first real discovery, she knew what to do.
***
“Where’d you get this?” Unkar Plutt asked, holding the scrap up to the light.
“Already told you. I found it.” The girl crossed her arms, bottom lip jutting stubbornly.
Unkar huffed a laugh. “Nobody finds 7th core compressors just lying around the desert, girl. Now tell me, who’d you steal it from? The Irving boys? Lovas? Azadi?” When the girl was silent, he leaned forward. “Afraid they’ll come after you? Don’t be. Remember, you’re under my protection.” He paused, a smile slicking on his face. “For now.”
The threat was clear. But the girl would not change her answer, for it was the truth. The scrap piece had simply appeared to her, shifting out from under the sands as if a gift from the desert itself. And so she’d picked it up, brushed it off as best she could, and brought it home to her guardian, if she could call him that. Slaver was more accurate, but even at her age the girl knew that Jakku was as much suited for semantics as it was for deep sea diving.
“I didn’t steal it, I found it. Now, can I please get a portion for it?”
At that, Unkar busted into harsh laughter. “A portion? For this piece of junk?”
“You did just say it was valuable,” she pointed out. “But if you don’t want it, maybe some of the others…”
Unkar stopped laughing abruptly, fist closing over the scrap piece. “Listen here, girl. I don’t know which scavengers you’ve been talking to or who’s been filling your head with filth, but as long as you’re under my roof, under my protection, then anything you find, it belongs to me. No payment.”
The girl considered. “Okay,” she said simply.
Unkar blinked, then sneered. “Lost your smart mouth, eh?”
“No. I’m just agreeing to your offer. I strike out on my own, no protection or shelter, and you’ll start paying me, yes?”
“That’s not—I wasn’t—“ Unkar spluttered, but the girl smiled and stuck out her hand.
“Perfect. Then it’s a deal?”
The deal was the deal. The junker shook, the girl’s tiny hand eclipsed by his own. But even her grip was fierce beyond its years. Like it knew it would spend its future clawing tooth and nail for everything it would ever hold. Like it was ready.
When the girl gathered her canvas sack and headed into the desert, she knew she ought to be afraid. But the sun was warm and the sand obliging and even the wind a soft tumble across her skin, and she couldn’t help but feel like she had the whole desert on her side.
***
Time moves differently for a desert. Past, present, future—they were concepts it knew like a second language. Its mother tongue? Eternity. Deep and bottomless and circular.
So when the desert saw the girl walk into it for the first time, it also saw her walk away for the last.