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It takes her three days.
She’d tell herself it’s being cautious. After three days, the scavengers will have already been through, any raiders will have lost interest and, most importantly, the Empire will be long gone. So it’s sensible. But Camie doesn’t tell herself that. She knows it’s cowardice. She waits three days after the fire and explosions break out to go see what’s left of the Lars homestead because she’s scared.
She steals one of Fixer’s speeders and takes off in the early morning, the first of Tatooine’s twin suns barely over the far horizon of the salt flat. She can hear him snoring upstairs as she unhooks his speeder from the charging station and walks it outside. He’d stop her if he knew, and she wouldn’t blame him.
The wind catches her hair the second she starts moving, the sand thrown up by the repulsors clinking against goggles a size too big for her small face. She should buy her own goggles. She should buy her own speeder. She should buy herself a ticket on the next ship off Tatooine and take Fixer somewhere nice and safe. But she won’t do that. Camie Marstrap has always known she’ll die on Tatooine.
She just hopes it’s not today.
In the far distance, she spies a herd of dewbacks plodding slowly out of the stretching sun. She should have waited for Fixer, maybe woken him up. He and Deak have been talking non-stop about the Larses since they’d spotted the Imperials headed there three days ago. Windy had been up in arms immediately, and it took all three of them to keep her from rushing off before the dust had even settled. Give it another day, and the lot of them would be going regardless of how dangerous it was. So Camie had to go. She has to go first. She has to see…
The speeder rattles underneath her. Fixer’s good with people, good with droids, but he can’t work a speeder to save his life. Camie can—or, really, she had to learn, since she’s with him and he runs a repair station and somebody needs to keep food on their dingy, miserable table. Are the Larses dead? She hasn’t let herself think about it. Somebody needs to keep the lights on. Might as well be her.
“You just don’t care!” Windy had said, wrenching her arm out of Camie’s grip once she’d promised not to jet over to the homestead while it was still on fire. “All you care about is you, and making sure you’re comfortable!” Camie had shrugged. Windy had been right, or close enough to it that it didn’t matter. She also hates Camie, which is fair. Camie hates her right back.
A rock, knocked loose by the speeder, shoots up and cracks Camie in the forehead. Normally, that’d be enough. Normally, that’s when she makes them all stop, fuss over her until she feels satisfied, and guilts them into heading back from whatever stupid adventure they were dragging her on. Usually flying in those stupid hoppers. Every time they decided they wanted to do loop-de-loops and shoot rats like a bunch of assholes, Camie was left sitting on the speeder and watching sand blow. She juices the speed. She needs to be back before Fixer wakes up.
The smoke has faded by the time she arrives. You can see for klicks on the flat, so everybody knew something was happening the second the smoke went up. Nobody went, though. Tuskens, sure, you help each other out. But if the Empire shows up? Or the Hutts? Huff Darklighter came into the shop the day after the attack and started going on about how the Larses had gotten what was coming to them or something. Fixer was madder than a Jawa asked for a refund, so Camie’d had to remind him you don’t call the richest guy on the flat a “karking stripe of Hutt shit”, even if it’s true.
She hops off the speeder, pushes the goggles up onto her head. The grit has made a scurrier’s nest of her hair. Fixer bought her a comb for her last birthday. Said the handle was inlaid with a dragon pearl. Bantha crap, obviously. Nice comb, though. She’d pawned it in Mos Eisley to get some power packs for their workshop. She locks the speeder’s controls. Fixer never does. She has to lock down the entire shop when he’s not looking.
There are only fourteen families working the salt flat. Camie could name them all from memory, and finds herself starting to do so as she walks towards the sand-coloured dome of the Lars homestead. The Darklighters first, which is why Huff is such a sleemo. There are blaster marks pockmarking the sides of the dome. The Whitesuns and the Larses were second, though they didn’t merge until much later. She sees drained blaster packs thrown haphazardly in the sand. The Marstraps are the newest, which is why her Da is always on about making sure everyone respects them. Camie comes round the bend and sees two skeletons burnt down to nothing. When did the Sunbers come? Was that before or after the Loneozners? After the Steerkills, obviously. Two bodies, not three. And then the Bennejais. Not three. Then the—
Camie falls to her knees. Two bodies, not three. And not burned down to nothing. There are still some scraps of clothes left. The one on its back, on top of the blasted-out remains of a gonk droid, has some scraps of yellow around its ankles. That must be Owen. And the one facedown, hands spread wide as though shot while begging for mercy. Blue scraps around the shoulders. That means that’s Beru. Two bodies, not three. Beru had loved blue, it made her think of the oceans she’d never seen. It had been her one guilty pleasure. Not three.
Camie rolls back on her feet. Her mom had died when she was six. Some Tusken raid or something, it doesn’t matter. Silya Darklighter had had her own daughters to deal with, Huff had been married four times before Camie turned sixteen, Kinga and Porsso Sunber are both men, and Laissa Loneozner hates Camie just as much as her son loves her. When Camie was eight, Beru Lars had shown up at the Marstrap homestead with some sweets, some wraps, and a conversation that Camie’s father had been glad to make himself scarce for. Camie hadn’t thanked Beru, but she hadn’t taken it personally.
When they started visiting the Lars homestead more frequently, Beru had always asked Camie how she was doing. Didn’t matter what short, unhelpful response she got in return. Beru Lars always seemed to have old clothes for Camie that she “just didn’t wear anymore”, or those paissa sweets nobody ever remembers she likes. She hadn’t even minded when Camie called their droids walking garbage.
Camie gets to her feet. There used to be graves marked around here. Three, or four? She’d asked once, bluntly. Long time ago. Owen Lars had said she was too clever for her own good, which is the only compliment he ever paid her. But he never complimented Deak or Windy or Fixer or Tank or Biggs. The graves were gone the next time she thought to look.
She has to step around the burnt corpses to get into their home. The smell is faint, but in forty years her grandson will ask her if she knows what dead people smell like and she’ll be back here again, nineteen and out of her mind, walking blithely past the charred bodies of people she’s known her entire life. He won’t ask the question again.
The raiders have been by. The floors that Beru kept clean as she could are covered in piles of dust and sand, and containers and shelves have been knocked over and set ablaze. Did the Empire ransack the place after they set it on fire? Did the raiders torch it so nobody else could get anything worth selling? Camie remembers, as she pushes past the mess into the central hub, that Beru had some ugly windchime she kept in the doorway. A gift from her sister or something. It’s gone.
She walks into the kitchen, having to shove the door the last couple centimetres open. The food’s gone, the cooling unit already dry from days left open. Even their dishes are gone. Nobody with any sense would want Beru Lars’ ancient pots and pans. They took forever to heat up and the handles were always falling off and she’d say “Oh, well Owen made them for me” but everyone knew it’s because they were as poor as the dirt they slept in. There was a cup that Beru only ever trotted out for visiting parents, this blue thing that Camie always made sure to use when she was visiting to spite everyone. It’s gone too. Not that it matters. Camie had told Beru it was expensive when she gave it to her, but she’d actually just stolen it from Huff Darklighter when his back was turned. She’s not sure how Biggs turned out so tolerable with a dad like that.
She doesn’t want to be in the kitchen anymore. She keeps remembering waiting there, eating terrible snacks and drinking lukewarm milk while everyone took ages to get ready to leave. Owen had once clapped her on the shoulder as he walked past, which she lorded over Windy for months because it drove her insane that Owen liked Camie better. There’s a shard of plate on the ground. Very familiar, but not one of the ones that Camie ever used.
There are no signs of any of their rusted-out droids when Camie walks into the workshop. Fixer had said he’d heard from Deak that the Larses had bought some new ones, but Camie can’t see any trace of that. Maybe they’re with all the destroyed stuff dragged outside with those corpses. Maybe the raiders took ‘em. The workshop was always the worst. Everyone loved droids and skyhoppers and getting their hands dirty and they spent hours just fiddling around while Camie sat there, bored out of her mind. It was never even to sell the things they were working on. The lot of them just did it for fun, and got all upset when she would tell them they were wasting their time.
There’s a toy on the ground, on the far side of the room. The entire oil bath has been ripped out of the floor, so she has to take a meandering path to get to the little old thing. They took the oil bath but not the main hose, so there’s some dried oil that sticks to her shoe as she steps through it. She almost scoffs. Owen Lars kept his workshop pristine, so he’s got to be rolling in the grave somebody should probably start digging for him.
She recognizes the toy. Hates it on sight. A stupid skyhopper, a miniature of the stupid skyhoppers they kept renting and flying and crashing and fixing when they could have been saving up for new vaporators or droids or clothes or a kriffing one-way ticket to literally anywhere else. Fixer’s lucky that old man Tosche doesn’t care if he crashes his hopper, the amount of times he’s done it (because Tosche doesn’t care about a damn thing Fixer does, so long as he keeps Tosche Station in the green). And of course dear, sweet, perfect Windy is more than willing to convince her sarlacc of a mother to lend out the Steerkill hopper to her awful friends. But nobody could convince Owen Lars to buy a skyhopper, no matter how much he whined and whined and whined.
Camie’s hands clench around the stupid thing, her vision going blurry as the tears begin to fall. She sinks to the oil-stained floor and clutches the pathetic toy to her chest, hoping that maybe she can crush it in her embrace. Two bodies, not three. Beru Lars will never bring her clothes again, nor will Owen Lars nod as he walks by. But Luke—
Camie begins to sob, wretched horrible things that shame her beyond belief. Owen and Beru are dead, sun-bleached skeletons on the sand, but Luke was not here. If Luke is dead, he didn’t die with his family.
Camie stops pretending she’s here for any other reason. She hated Luke, hated his stupid hair and his stupid face and his big bright eyes and the way he always looked so dejected when she called him “Wormie”. She’s spent her short, little life making Luke’s as miserable as possible, because she hates it here and he hated it here and somehow he’s never been as miserable as she is. People like him. Windy once said she only tolerates Camie because she’s Fixer’s girlfriend, but she was always the first person to suggest they go round up Wormie even though he’s the most annoying person on the planet and spent every day just following Biggs around. Then Biggs left and he did whatever Windy said. Camie could literally be sitting at his kitchen table, eating his food and using his favourite cup and he’d be up in the clouds until she flicked a crumb right between his gormless eyes.
Yesterday, Fixer had told her someone down by Mos Eisley had seen Luke with the old creep from the Jundland Wastes. Then Windy had said there wasn’t no way Luke would leave Owen and Beru. Then they’d argued for so long Camie had kicked them both out because customers were starting to get antsy and nobody else is going to keep Camie Marstrap fed besides herself.
She’d broken the toy once. Gotten real tired of Luke looking at that thing and not paying attention to the actual world he was on. He’d started to cry, big baby tears running down from his big blue eyes. She’d had to fix the damn thing, but she’d made sure not to give it a new coat of paint or anything, just give it back exactly as mediocre as it was. Then he’d thanked her and started crying again. Camie looks down at it now, sees the cracks and wear she’d been very thorough in recreating, and wonders if Luke will ever thank her again.
She gets up. She can’t be here anymore. She has what she came for—or, at least, she doesn’t have what she was dreading. She moves to drop the toy but doesn’t. Maybe she can sell it. Maybe she can hide it away until she needs to guilt Fixer about something. It doesn’t matter. She folds up the wings and stuffs it down her tunic; she’ll figure out some use for it on the way home.
She begins retracing her steps, back out of the workshop, past the abandoned kitchen and towards the stairs leading out. The mess is appalling. She doesn’t dare check the bedrooms. She hears a noise. It’s a speeder. It’s someone else’s speeder. She doesn’t have a blaster. Blasters are for fighters, and Camie Marstrap has never gone looking for a fight in her life. She runs up the stairs, goggles jangling down to her neck, in the hopes that she can get back to her own speeder before whoever it is catches her.
She doesn’t.
Her heart stops as a familiar speeder comes to a stop next to her own. There’ll be no way for her to get out unnoticed. A figure in custom flight gear hops off the new arrival and pulls off their refurbished helmet, letting a train of long red hair blow in the morning wind. They scan the area until they catch sight of her, and their eyes widen.
“Camie?” Windy exclaims. “What are you doing here?”
She says nothing, clutching the hidden toy to her chest as Windy’s eyes slide down to the two sets of bones at Camie’s feet. Windy’s hands fly to her mouth. She rushes over to the corpses, ignoring Camie completely. She sidles past the girl she’s known her entire life as Windy falls to her knees and begins to cry.
Camie makes it halfway to her speeder before Windy remembers she’s there. She twists around and pierces Camie with her stare. “Wait, Camie, you went inside? Did you see—”
“Two bodies,” Camie says, hands clenched in her lumpy tunic. “Not three.”
Windy stands, unable to keep from staring at the skeletons. Tears fall freely down her wind-chapped face. “Did you—” she starts to say, gulping back sobs with an ugly sound. “Are you—”
“Two bodies,” Camie says again. “Not three.”
Windy nods, sniffing grossly. “We should… We should get the boys and come back. We need to… we need to bury them. I just wanted…”
“Whatever,” says Camie, turning back to her speeder.
“Wait, Camie!” Windy runs up to her, grabbing her shoulder with a dirty glove. “What are you doing here? Why did you come by yourself? Does Fixer—what have you got in your shirt?”
Camie blinks. Says nothing.
Windy’s cheeks puff up in frustration. “Camie, please. What did you take? It might help—”
“It won’t help,” Camie mutters, rolling her eyes. “They’re dead.” But when Windy keeps staring at her, she gives up. Slowly, hating it, hating Windy and Fixer and Beru and Luke and herself and herself and herself, she pulls the ridiculous toy out from concealment.
“Oh,” says Windy, her eyes beginning to water again. “The wing is bent.” She puts out a hand to take it, but a twitch goes through Camie’s arm and yanks it out of Windy’s reach.
Windy looks at the toy, then looks at Camie, and it’s the worst feeling Camie’s ever felt. Then she rushes forward and pulls Camie into a hug. She’s sobbing, and it’s awful and Camie hates it, and they sink to the ground and they’re sobbing, and it’s awful and Camie hates it, and Windy won’t let go, and Camie needs to get back before Fixer wakes up because she needs to clean the shop and unlock the tools and hide the toy and Windy just will not let go.
“It’ll be okay,” Windy mutters, sticking her sand-and-tear-streaked face into Camie’s hair. “He got out. It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t care,” Camie replies, digging her fingers into Windy’s broad shoulders in the hopes that she’ll let her go.
“It’ll be okay,” Windy says again, proving she’s just not listening. “We’ll go get the boys and then we’ll come back and bury Owen and Beru.” A sob rips through her. “And then we’ll find him. We’ll find him, I promise.”
“No we won’t,” Camie mutters, the sand in Windy’s hair making her eyes scuffed and painful. “I’ll never see him again.”
And she doesn’t.