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“Wait,” Luke says, something uneasy bubbling up in his chest. “Wait, I don’t-– we shouldn’t go in there.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Fixer says with a snort, and shoves his way through the gate. Windy follows him, chin raised defiantly, and that sets off a sort of stampede-– with two of their friends already inside, the rest of them can’t hang back or they’d be cowards.
Luke goes in last, that sense of dread and unease still building, growing. The closer he gets to the gate, the worse it feels-– it’s like there’s some kind of huge hurt animal in there, something ugly and angry and scared, and it’s drawing him closer and pushing him away both at once. And then he takes a last step over the threshold into the abandoned camp, and all of a sudden it’s crushing him, he’s on the ground, shaking, gasping for breath...
Owen has to come pick him up from the Darklighters’ place, which would be humiliating if he didn’t still feel so terrible. He gets into the landspeeder and sits with his head down, silent, expecting a lecture about the trouble he’s caused, the afternoon’s work interrupted. But Owen doesn’t say anything until they’re well away from the house, and when he does it’s, “Huff said you were sick.”
Luke gives an unhappy, one-shouldered shrug. “Kinda.”
“You kids been fighting?”
That, Luke knows, means those other kids been pushing you around?-– he’s the youngest of their little gang, not by a lot but by enough to make a difference, and he suspects Owen still thinks of him as the little kid tagging along after them on the playground.
He shakes his head. “No.”
Owen gives him a sideways look. “Drinking?”
“No!”
“All right, all right,” Owen says, raising one hand from the controls in mock-surrender. “You don’t want to talk about it. Fine.”
They ride in silence for a while, Luke turning the strange awful feeling over in his mind, gnawing at it. They’re almost back to the farm when he decides he can’t contain it anymore and blurts, “You know that old camp up by the bridge?”
Owen slows the speeder almost to a halt and frowns at him. “The Tusken camp?”
“Yeah,” Luke says-– he didn’t know it was a Tusken village, there’s not enough left of the houses to really tell, but as soon as Owen says it he knows it’s the same place. “The abandoned one. What happened there?”
“Nothing good,” Owen says sharply. “Were you up there? I would’ve thought even you kids had enough sense to-–” He bites off the end of the sentence, seems to think for a second, and sighs. “Who dared you to go in there?”
“We all kind of dared each other,” Luke says, because it’s more or less true, and also it means no one’s parents will get a stern holocall from Beru about their bad behavior. “It wasn’t-– how’d you know someone dared me?”
Owen raises his eyebrows. “I wasn’t born an old man, you know. So. Is that what happened? You took a dare, you went in and... what, someone jumped out and scared you?”
“I wasn’t scared,” Luke protests. He looks down again, twisting his hands in his lap-– he can still feel that awful surge of dread if he thinks about it. “I was... there’s something wrong in there. Something bad was about to happen. I could feel it coming. And it’s dark in there.”
Owen’s quiet for a long time. After a while Luke steals a glance over at him, tries to guess what he’s thinking-– this seems like something more than you idiot kids, how many times have I told you to stay away from there. But Owen mostly just looks tired, and maybe a little sad, and after a minute he puts the speeder back in gear and drives them the rest of the way home without saying anything more.