Chapter Text
Rey crested the hill and let out a long string of curses. She slammed the brakes on the speeder she’d retrofitted two years prior, letting it idle in the air, before cutting the engine. The speeder slumped into the sand. She rested her gloved palms on the handlebars and peered down the dunes at the insects crawling around the star-destroyer at the base of the valley.
They looked like insects, at least. Plutt had promised her she had first dibs on the ship. And of course the karking bastard had lied to her face. Or hadn’t cared enough to check it out himself. Teedo and all his little sand-grubs were down there, buzzing around the wreck like a bunch of confused hornets. Rey had not had to fight for a wreck in months. She’d worked hard to acquire a reputation that ensured she was rarely challenged for spoils. But Teedo had apparently decided he had the numbers to risk. It was at times like this that she regretted not bringing her blaster. A few warning shots, and she could probably scare a few off.
But there was a strange code of honor among the scavengers of Jakku, and part of that code was a disdain for firearms. If you needed a gun to defend your spoils, you were seen as as an incompetent idiot. Only a coward would bring a blaster to a brawl. Or an impatient person, which Rey was. It was a shit rule made up at a time when guns were scarce on Jakku in general. Most of them, in fact, were buried deep in fields like this.
The battle that had occurred here nearly three decades earlier had destroyed the planet’s only major city, made most of its people nomadic refugees, and had been preceded by years of Imperial rule and very strict weaponry laws. Unkar was an Imp holdover, everyone said as much. He’d snitched out half his old drinking buddies when Gallius Rax took over.
Rey had never met Rax, but he was so despised on Jakku that his surname had devolved into an actual slur. Only a rax would betray his own people. A son of Jakku who had returned to destroy it in the hopes of winning a war he was already fated to lose.
Rey didn’t feel much pride in defending Jakku’s honor, though. She was not a daughter of this planet. She wasn’t from here, she didn’t belong here, and one day, when she’d saved up enough credits, she was getting on the first freighter that refueled here- whether it was pirates, slavers, or kriffing spice runners- and she was getting out. She didn’t care where she went (though she did, she dreamed of someplace green, at night, when the cold winds rattled the AT-AT she’d made her home), and she didn’t care what she had to do.
This was not her home, these were not her people- she had no people- and she owed them nothing. Nothing. She had to remind herself of this, or she’d end up like the dead-eyed, weather-beaten women at market, haggling to buy bread for their starving children, married to gaunt, scarred men who often vanished into the desert nights, never to return.
She slid her quarterstaff free from the straps securing it to her back, and pushed up her goggles. They’d limit her vision in a fight. Then she slid down the dunes, not bothering to waste her breath until she was on firmer ground and advancing on Teedo’s crew. Teedo saw her first, and started chittering in disgust. She understood exactly what he was saying, but half his crew didn’t seem to have a clue, which was only to her benefit.
“Come any closer, Innie, and I’ll break your karking neck,” warned Karn Javor, a stringy boy with rusty stubble covering his head.
Rey ignored him. Karn was all of fifteen. She kept her gaze on Aten, the eldest of the bunch- save for Teedo, who had to be middle-aged… for a Teedo. Aten was human, like most of the planet’s population, with dark skin and a raised scar down the length of his nose. He wore his hair braided back and tied in a knot with a blue scarf, and while they’d fought before, neither had enjoyed it. Aten was around twenty-four, with a wife and a baby on the way.
Rey hoped to appeal to his more peaceable nature. Every fight was a risk. She had two knives in her belt, and he had a mace holstered on his back. If one of them took a serious injury it could get infected and kill them. Slowly. No antibiotics here, unless you had plenty of money and could afford to wait weeks for a package to arrive from off-world.
“Plutt gave me his word this was mine,” she said. “Call off your boys and let me have the guts. I’ll give you the turrets and the thrusters, how about that? That’s some choice bits.”
“Let you have the guts?” Karn squawked, nudging one of the other scavengers. They were all young- young and stupid. That’s what dealers like Plutt liked best. No one middle-aged could survive this kind of work, nor handle the brutal conditions. “You think we’re stupid?”
“You don’t even have the gear to get down into the recesses,” Rey said. “I have my hook and rope.”
“Then why don’t we take it off you?” Karn sneered, unsheathing a vibro blade.
“Watch yourself, before I show you how to use that,” Rey told him calmly.
Aten looked at Teedo. “We need to cut a deal.”
“There’s five of us, and one of her!” Karn yelped. The others were fanning out like wild dogs.
Rey hoisted her staff into two hands, and crouched. “What did I say about that blade?” she asked Karn, with just enough bite to tempt him.
He charged her. She hit his wrist hard with her staff; she heard bone crack. He dropped the blade with a scream. One of his friends swiped at her with a flail; Rey ducked behind Karn and pinned him to her chest, her staff against his throat as he struggled to breathe. He squirmed against her, warm and reeking of sweat and dried urine.
“Innie bitch!” he gasped out.
He called her that because of her accent. Where she’d been born, it was not in the Outer Rim. She talked ‘proper’, like an Inner Rim human, like she was from, Rey thought, some place halfway karking civilized. Maybe she was. She didn’t remember her parents. Didn’t want to. They’d dumped her here when she was five. Fourteen years ago. Who left a little child to survive by herself? Sold her to Plutt, then vanished.
Sometimes she convinced herself they’d been running from something worse than cold nights and scorching days. Sometimes she told herself they’d meant to return, but fate had intervened. But when she sat alone in the hollowed out AT-AT at night, eating the same gruel as always, picking lice from her hair, watching her face grow older and harder by the year in a rusty little mirror, she knew the truth.
No matter where she’d been born, they’d dumped her here like trash, because they’d known, even then, that she was worthless. If she’d come from the Inner Rim, well, that bastion of democracy hadn’t wanted much to do with her. And it didn’t matter now, because the New Republic was a gasping, dying beast, and the First Order would finish it off sooner or later, and it wouldn’t even matter. Maybe soldiers would come here, looking for recruits. She’d join just about anything to get off this rock.
Karn was starting to whimper. She let him go, because Aten had waved off the others, who sheathed their knives, grumbling.
“You want the guts?” said Aten. “You want to climb down in the belly? Go ahead. We’ll take what we can from the turrets and the thrusters. The sun is setting soon. We don’t have time for this.”
“Thanks,” said Rey.
Karn shot her a hateful glance and limped off with his friends, clutching his wrist. Rey picked up the vibro blade, which stilled in her palm. When it flared to life again, it startled her, and she dropped it. The sands covered it in an instant, and she walked away, looking for a porthole, a door, a vein that could take her into the belly of the beast.
She had to crawl on her belly through a narrow vent, but eventually she came out into a dust-covered corridor, and she followed, a glow-stick in hand, until she found the signs directing her to engineering. That was where the good stuff was. She could hear the distant sounds of Teedo’s crew chipping away at the turrets, but the musty dark in here was a comfort.
Rey had never been afraid of the dark. It was at times a warm blanket for her. No one could see her, hurt her, now. Once she was in the engine rooms she wrestled open a hatch. She wanted battery packs. They would have powered off when the ship crashed. Some would still be intact. Plutt would sell them for a good price, and she would get her cut.
She set up her hook, double-checking it would not slip from the support beam she wrapped it around, then tied the rope around her waist, and slowly, slowly, descended through the hatch. She hung in the dark, glow-stick in one hand, groping around with the other. When she felt a battery-pack, she pried at it until it popped out of frame, and then she put it in the sack at her hip. Then she descended a little further, and did the same.
Time passed quickly in the dark. She could have been down there for ten minutes, or maybe an hour. She was removing the fourth battery pack when she heard screaming. Raiders, she thought. She stayed where she was, expecting to hear the clanging of weapons against metal, doors slamming open and shut. But then there was silence, then screaming again, and then a low roar, like a sandstorm. But louder. Angrier. Far too loud to be a speeder, or even a fleet of speeders, or even a freighter landing nearby. It sounded like-
“DESTROYER!” she heard the muffled yells.
A star destroyer. Landing on Jakku?
The entire wreck shook as the destroyer passed overhead, flying low. Rey jolted into actions, scrambling back up the valve, hand over hand on the rope. When she reached the top, she fumbled with the hook, and slung it over her shoulder as she raced down the corridor, then crawled back through the vent. Fresh air seized her like an electric shock.
Night was falling outside; Teedo was screaming, and Karn and his friends were pointing at the pure white trail of exhaust left in the darkening sky.
“Destroyer- went that way- it’s the First Order- gonna die- Imps are here-,”
“ENOUGH!” Aten finally bellowed over the yelps and whines.
Rey jumped, panting, and busied herself with coiling her rope and hook, so no one would see how badly her hands were shaking.
“No one is going to die,” said Aten. “They were headed east, away from Niima. We’re fine. Whatever they want- whoever they want- it’s not us. Probably looking for some deserters who washed up here.”
“They don’t send kriffing destroyers after deserters,” Karn muttered. “That was a big one. Nearly three-thousand meters, I swear it. You see how many turrets? Hundreds and hundreds of guns-,”
Aten ignored him, looking at Rey. “You get what you came for?”
Rey nodded, but her gaze kept drifting up to the exhaust trail. She heard vultures shrieking in the distance. The wind was moaning around the wreck.
“Alright,” said Aten. “Let’s go.”
But he was wrong. There were soldiers in Niima. Rey had not seen soldiers in Niima in many, many years. Stormtroopers in gleaming white armor, spotless, were headed toward the dead Hutt’s temple. The slaver who’d once ruled this area was dead, but many of her former slaves and cultists still lived there. The leader was a waspish woman called Leta. Rey doubted she would have anything useful to tell them. She refused to speak anything but Huttese, despite not being a Hutt herself.
And Plutt only smirked at her when she asked about the troopers.
“Why so curious, sweetheart?” he asked, shifting through the battery packs. “Looking to join up? I’d sell your contract to them- for the right price. Though you’re a little old to be a stormtrooper. They like to take them when they’re young.” His gaze crawled up and down her body.
“We don’t have a contract,” Rey said. “Not one I’ve ever seen.”
“Course we do,” he said. “I kept your ungrateful behind alive for the first five years after Mom and Dad left you here, isn’t that right? You weren’t pulling your weight then. You owe me time and labor.”
“I was a child,” Rey snapped.
He gave her a sardonic grin, as he finished rifling through the batteries. “Got enough for quarter rations tonight. Lucky girl.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Rey. “Quarter rations? That’s worth way more. You could sell it to the troopers!”
“Oh,” he said, “I will, make no mistake.” That same gummy smile. Plutt was a Crolute; born and bred for the water, not the arid desert. This planet was killing him, but not fast enough for Rey’s liking.
“I deserve more than that,” said Rey.
“You do business with me,” he said. “I decide the price.”
“Then I want the credits outright. Forget the rations.”
He looked at her incredulously. “To buy what with? A pretty dress? You don’t eat, you don’t work. I’m not sending you out to faint in the desert and end up as carrion food, girl. You’re my best scav.”
Rey opened her mouth to argue further, but there was the muffled sound of gunfire. Screams broke out in the market, and Rey and Plutt both ducked low, before rising again when it became obvious the threat was not immediate.
“Finally,” he rasped, licking his lips. “They’re clearing out those temple freaks.”
“Leta’s people don’t even have guns,” Rey said, gazing at the temple in the distance, which was beginning to smoke, the wooden roof ablaze. “They’re massacring them.”
“It’s about time,” said Plutt. “Mark my words, girl. There’s going to be a new way things are done around here, from now on. Watch your step.”
Rey shook her head in disgust, took her quarter rations, and marched back to her speeder. Not for the first time, she was relieved she didn’t live in town. There was no one close by to help her if she grew ill or was attacked out in the dunes… But there was also no one close enough to hurt her.
As a child, she’d slept like a dog under some rags at the back of Plutt’s workshop. Sometimes surrounded by other filthy children. When she was a little older, eleven or twelve, she’d noticed the way some of the boys eyed her at night. She had never regretted moving out to live alone. She added water to the ration pack and fried it into a crispy ball of dough over her tiny stove, then sat down to eat it.
The wind-chimes she’d made tinkled in the portholes, and she’d built of a sort of nest-like bed for herself out of scavenged cushions and blankets. She had no toys or books- she could read, barely, but couldn’t write- and certainly no holo programs to watch vids on. Her stomach still growled when she finished her rations.
When she was done, she stripped off her dirty clothes and put on her sleeping robe, knotted the belt around her waist, then chalked another mark in the wall over her bed. Then she laid down to sleep. But it didn’t come quickly. She kept imagining the roar of the Star Destroyer returning and jolting back into frightened alert. She tossed and turned, listening to the wind play with the chimes, until finally, finally, she slept.
Often she dreamed of wide open, green spaces, or a raging sea surrounding rocky islands. Tonight, though, she dreamed of a woman. She dreamed a woman sat beside her, in fact, in the AT-AT. The woman was old, though not ancient- at least fifty, with a pale, lined face, striking green eyes, and wore her hair hidden under a fluttering black veil. She took Rey’s limp hand; it was as if she knew Rey were asleep, but conscious of her presence.
“I’ve come back for you, sweetheart,” she said, soothingly. But her eyes were hard as jade stones. “Just wait a little while longer. Stay here. Where it’s safe. Wait for me. Just a little longer.”
Rey felt a rush of rage, rather than relief or sadness. She wanted to rip her hand away. Who was this woman, to talk to her like that, to make promises? The kinds of promises Rey had been left with? You are not my mother, she thought, I would know, I would, you can’t be my mother- who are you? What do you want with me?
She struggled to speak, but the woman let go of her hand, and smoothed back wisps of hair from Rey’s face. “Be patient,” she whispered, and then she was gone.
When Rey woke, it was still the dead of night. She was alone. She sat up, shivering, pulling the blankets around herself. She glanced at the marks on her wall. They were as she had left them. Save for three more. Ones she could not have made- she could not write words. But she could read.
WAIT
FOR
ME.
Rey stared at them, realizing slowly, numbly, that it had not been a dream at all. The woman was here. She had come here. She had left that message. She had held Rey’s hand, and called her ‘sweetheart’. Told her to be patient.
Rey kicked back the blankets, slammed her palms against the metal wall, and rubbed, furiously, until all the chalk marks had smeared into a white cloud. She spat on the wall, and rubbed some more, cursing, panting, enraged in a way she had not been in years. When she was done, her hands were filthy with chalk and grime. The wall was clear. The message was gone.
She was done waiting. She snatched up her goggles and her staff, and went to get changed.