#Because Kylo Ren sees her whole life in excruciating detail like a camerman who can't leave and he cries

[stormears]

The Sun on Jakku

Except from a fic I started before TLJ even had a trailer and I’m still attached to it, so here’s a 7,000-word long “snippet” of chapter 1. The full WIP currently stands at 13k words and is not going to be a 30k-ish oneshot like I originally thought. 

Experience has taught me that copy-and-pasting text from a word document into a Tumblr textpost invariably makes random words that are next to each other smush into one word. I’m not going through a 7k long post to clear all of these. (I did it once on a 3k fanfic and different ones just showed up in its place.) 

Recovering from his greatest defeat and humiliation, Kylo Ren lies in Medical and bleeds and sees visions of a little girl in a desert, growing up and starving and learning and fighting and feeling what he felt when he was young. He stills and watches her, for hours. For years. He’s with her right now.

She cut his face and he can’t see. The wounds are catching up to him, now, while he lies on his back in the snow. It brings a shiver through him. He turns, trying to move, to change, to see her and spit out the blood pooling behind his teeth. Kylo succeeds in spitting out the blood.

Underneath him, the planet surface groans and trees groan. Inside the chasm, the core and eternal fires are melting the dozen trees they had swallowed a minute before. He feels the heat, the sweat. Across the chasm is her but he can’t see her. He looks and is immediately obscured by the blood leaking into his left eye. The bowcaster wound screams disapproval through his gut and he falls onto his back again. She’s gone. The scavenger—into the snow—desert girl he carried her away she’s gone. The core belches fire somewhere near him and throws snow and hot wind at him, hard. He falls sideways a bit. A snowdrift collapses and spills onto his knees. The lightsaber rolls back and claps against his unwounded side. He doesn’t care. Every thought in his brain is running wild and crashing and he can’t focus. Can’t think.

Kylo can’t remember the worthless Stormtrooper’s number. He grinds his teeth. Hates him. Hate. He hated his father once. This unwelcome thought stops the very flow of his blood and he hacks out air and blood and maybe something else, maybe another scrap of whatever core of strength inside that kept him standing up today. Han Solo is dead. Han Solo. Worthless, indifferent bastard who loved him once. Once.

Once.

Scavenger gone. Father—father—

Someone grabs at his left shoulder, near where Scavenger jabbed into his muscle. Kylo yells and reaches for the attacker with one hand and clamps into a fist. He heaves it backward and his fist comes away holding square bits of some sort of droid armpiece. Whatever is left continues to pull at his shoulder.

Hux appears. His hair is loose, falling onto his cheeks. Like the scavenger’s had been.

“Sedate him now or we’re not making the ship.”

“Hhhelp me u-up, Hux. Now,” Kylo spits at him. But the redheaded rat only stares at him, upside down, while Kylo feels an uncomfortable prick in his collarbone. After he blinks away that odd pain, the trees are walking away. His head is lifted up. The chasm is out of sight and his clothes and head and everything around him is hotter than ever. Uneven patches of brown and white earth are floating past beneath the level of his eyes.

Kylo can’t feel his arms and cannot see the straps tying his body to a low flatback droid. He hears Hux behind him, yelling again. He tries to yell too.

“She’s getting a-WAY,” shouts a stranger who sounds a lot like him. He’s confused. It hurts. His face hurts. He tries to think about her—again—and the picture of her and the three funny hair buns blurs away like he’s become momentarily drunk. What comes back is a wide, wide view of a dirt field, the color of old and yellowed paper. There’s blinding sunlight here. It’s so bright, too bright, but opening and closing his eyes isn’t doing anything. He yells for Hux. Maybe he can do something.

Surely Hux heard him because he’s yelling for him to shut up. Kylo is hit by a stray branch from a tree that is falling down nearby, punctuated by a droid’s urgent beeping. Hux yells at them, too.

Somewhere underneath him is that familiar, controlled lurch of a landing ramp withdrawing. It goes hssssshshh when it closes and seals. The mixture of night and firelight slips away and he can see more sedated colors now. There are brown storage compartments marked in Basic that he can could just barely read if he wanted to, and big square things that are probably medcarts, a couple of them in a line. He knows this ship. It belongs to one of those small men on Hux’s bridge. The ship is still swaying, or he is. On top of the pain in his head and his side, now his stomach is quaking.

“Commencing evaluation,” says a droid. He turns his head the other way and closes his eyes.

In the semi-dark he tries to turn his thoughts away, too, away from all this hurt and the shame coming back to him so quickly and it’s so strong—like his own strong hands or his dad’s old hands on his own face because—and now he clamps his mouth and throat shut because he might vomit.

He sees her in his head, not ten minutes ago. She’s desperately blocking his side strike and backing away but she won’t get away, he won’t let her. The tree cover is too thin and he thinks in the moment that there’s nowhere on Starkiller where she can truly hide from him. He blocks her thrust one-handed and continues walking her to the cliff edge. His face is stinging, but behind his closed eyes he can see and feel the long, warm breaths she took after he offered himself to her. He wanted her to accept so badly. He waited.

He waited on her word and she turned on him. One heartbeat he listened to hers and the next, she was striking like a young god with menacing, targeted blows that made his arms tremble as he blocked. She stabbed him and cut him. Heat invading his skin and his face deeper than it ever should. Too shocked to scream. He fell onto his back in front of her. He was shedding tears through the burning pain and trying to get up and see her again. He fell because of his weak shoulder. Pain.

That he let her awaken that wild fighting prowess just inches away from him is as far from his master’s command as he could stray, but he didn’t care. Not anymore. Not…really.

A second droid with louder, bumpier wheels comes in and maybe joins the first droid in poking him but he refuses to pay their nasty beeping shells any attention. This is better. This picture he sees and how he can still hear the wind and the faraway missiles and her own breath, very close. One of the droids punches something into his flesh. With his mind he punches back. The thing’s head or whatever’s on the top half of it blasts into the wall and then blasts into a lot more pieces than it had before.

The scavenger grasping at his wrists while his saber spits and melts snow. Damn her damn her damn her for winning and running away. She fought him like she knew how he moved. Like they had the same brain but she was too ignorant to know it. Kylo reaches his hand out a little more and throws what remains of that second droid and curses again. He wants to crush the other droid, too. Crush this whole ship and his head and his stinging face.

His whole body shakes and erupts with electricity for a single second. Kylo chokes and his head flops the opposite way. Above him is Hux again, frowning like he does.

“Will you stop!? I’m trying to save your life, you worthless fucking child!” Hux screams and Kylo squints his eyes a little as though he might block some of the noise. He sees but does not fully register the tiny stun-blaster in the general’s left hand.

Hux slaps his gloved hand onto the spot where the second droid had jabbed him. It’s his right shoulder, he realizes. And that gloved hand is touching his skin and not his outer coat. Because her strike tore through part of his coat before it got to his face. Hux’s leather over his own skin feels some sort of unpleasant. Kylo is squirming away from it before he realizes he’s doing it. “I am trying to stitch you up and keep you alive. If you really want a pus-oozing scar underneath your clothes, you can have one. See if I care. I received no command to make you comfortable.”

Kylo hears most of the words and sees a mostly-clear mental picture of the little scavenger’s cloth-wrapped foot rising up to kick him in the chest. He is shaken. Everything inside scrambled.

Kylo attempts, “Is Starkiller gone?”

“Gone.” It was that and nothing else, as Hux would not explain further. The shame is coming back to him. Kylo bites down vomit again.

“Th. Thhhe scaven-ger.” He tries. His throat has a little blood in it, still. “Gone?”

Hux’s face changes somehow but Kylo’s weak eyes can’t pinpoint what part shifted or moved. “Probably not. A few officers glimpsed the Correllian freighter escaping with the rebels.”

“She’s on the Millennium Falcon?”

A snide smirk splits the general’s mouth. “That’s what it’s called? Yes. She was probably on it. I wouldn’t guess for a second that we were lucky enough to be rid of her.”

At first he’s thinking of her escaping the doomed planet. Escaping death. Then the phrase Be rid of her makes him think of her sharp-edged mind under his hand in the interrogation room. Her green eyes so desperately clinging to a spot on a wall to avoid him as he hovered. Kylo sees pictures of little droid parts held by small gloved hands and thinks about people throwing them away and being rid of them? This idea seems to appear from nowhere in his head. He blinks twice. Of course Hux would be staring at him when he can’t think clearly. When he’s ruined. This is horrible. He grits his teeth and glares. Shuts all the mess away.

“We’re meeting the Supreme Leader.” General Hux tells him some time later. Kylo doesn’t remember how many seconds have passed. “We’ll board his ship in two days and you are to explain yourself to him. No time estimate for that task was given. Understand?”

He says yes and looks away.

“And stay still for your examination, for Maker’s sake.” Hux adds. “Unless you really want to be infected and repulsive. If you stop fussing, you can be in a bacta tank in ten minutes and sleep the rest of the way.” He stops. Glares. “Bastard.”

“Don’t you have cadets to step on?” Kylo growls back.

“Phasma’s cadets could all step on you quite easily, if some starving slave bitch could do it alone. Or did that Stormtrooper do it? Did they gang up on you?” The general’s contempt slides somewhere near spiteful curiosity by the end, but Kylo Ren takes no notice of the change. He hears an ugly name falling through Hux’s mouth and he raises his hand towards it to kill it. General Hux slaps a hand onto his throat, trying to gasp.

“Don’t—insult her,” he says while the droid’s needles pull at his skin. “Do not.”

Hux’s eyes squint a little and he chokes out something that sounds like “what,” but Kylo does not notice this either. “Go away,” he tells Hux. The choke ends. Hux gasps and Kylo likes the sound of it.

As his head falls back a few inches onto the table, Kylo sees a bright bright bright field of dirt that’s golden-brown and empty except for one crooked comm tower with corroded metal plates on one side and a person sits at the base of it in its thin branch branch of shade the person has clothes that are pale and tan and their knees are up and their face is hidden and drawn into their knees but he knows they are only smearing one sweaty surface against another because it’s so so hot outside he’s gasping in th–

He and General Hux are both choking. Kylo’s head smacks back onto the table and he takes in a huge, shuddering breath. He can’t hear Hux’s gasps over his own. His eyes are huge, too, his gaze pinned directly onto the ship’s black, ribbed ceiling. He tries to think where this idea came from and why he thought about deserts, but there is no answer. He doesn’t know. He can’t remember. Already he’s kicking away from the thoughts that come to fill the void. He’s already scrabbling back to the picture of the scavenger instead, bounding away.

At last Hux comes into view again, right where he was when Kylo first choked him. He leans in with his face stony and solid. “You will be going into the bacta tank whenever I happen to remember to come check on you again.” Then he whirls around and exits Kylo’s field of vision.

Now he waits. He grits his teeth and picks out a medcart to stare at. After a few more blinks and needle pokes, a door at the other end of the room slides open and shut and the clapping steps of Hux’s boots are finally gone. Kylo exhales. He’s still when another droid whirs down the table or whatever he’s laying on and starts flashing scanners over every place where he’s bloody. But the scanners are silent and the room is silent and he feels alone. The droids don’t matter. Their memory will be wiped. So he lets himself start shaking again.

His mind was on the scavenger, was hiding from him but with the picture in his head of her running ahead of him, he’s accidentally bumped into thoughts of future punishment. He hasn’t thought about his master yet, doesn’t want to. But thought slips in that gap and squirms in anyway. He will have to face punishment for this. The Supreme Leader will break his bones. Break his thoughts open. It comes to him with easy familiarity that makes him grind his teeth. This scene of himself on a hard black floor and shaking and squirming. He gasps and cries like a little boy because his body is on fire without real flames and every ugly, weak, sinful thought is displayed for Master to touch. Master knows what he wants and is afraid of, and when he is tired and when he walks and sleeps and shits and obeys. He stops this picture. He knows what he sounds like while crying. He exhales loudly, listens to that instead. Looking around everywhere. Medcart over there. Droid scrap there. Oil spill? Definitely is. Inhale.

For the last time, Kylo exhales and tries to control the wriggling thoughts. Think clearly, smoothly. The scavenger. He had her. She’s gone. Her hand put this scar on his face and brought this blood in his eyes and caught him. Han Solo is gone. Dad. No no no he can’t go there yet no. Scavenger. He wanted to carry her. He’s still so muddled and he was muddled even before he landed on Takodana and saw the broken little castle and green trees where she was hiding, but he knows he’s seen her before.

He knows he’s seen her before. Kylo sees

he sees-

—

Someone grabbed her arm and yanked down, and she fell like a doll would. She’s halfway in the air, not standing or lying down but held in a crumpled, painful halfway point between them. She’s hot and she’s hurting.

It’s the first day. The glare of the sun is huge and painful. She’d never felt sun like this before and wanted to go inside but she was crying. In hindsight, far away from then and there, the heat of that day was nothing special or great. But Rey was five years old. She knew she was five. She knew she had to go home. She screams but the ship was infinitely louder than her tiny mouth and it was turning away from her.

They forgot her. Mama forgot her. That is worse than all the heat and the nasty dirt in her shoes. The heat on her skin is bad, but the nausea in her stomach is worse. Rey used all the breath she had to screech at her retreating silver ship and the engines dwarfed her little scream. The reality of the sight started to puncture her. Rey’s stomach turned in ugly somersaults she had never felt before. Kylo clamps his jaws shut against the heaving he then feels in his belly.

“So what’s it worth now?” somebody said. The ship was starting to get far enough away that conversation was audible again. Rey cried into that available void “come back come back come back” but the ship was not stopping. It soared, it shrank. It took in more sunlight and again forced her gaze away from the white glare. It hurts and she’s so, so scared because Mama left me Mama don’t go help me I’ll be good PLEASE wait

Rey screamed Nooo and was met with the same wall of all-encompassing sound that covered her own: a nearby engine was starting to spin. Its waves beat against her ears. Her stomach turned, the noise tunneling into her ears. Deep in. Jiggling her whole brain. Nothing would stay still. The motion and the fear were too strong for a child’s body. Rey released it all in screams while bile-tingled dribble sizzled in her throat and she had to stop to spit it out.

The hateful thing that held her wrist all this time came to life like a devil. It squeezed her wrist and turned her screams to wails. It yanked her forward and up so that she was finally almost standing. Prompted by the shade the thing cast over her, Rey finally looked at it: it was an enormous pink man, or a man-like sentient, and it blocked nearly her whole field of vision. His face looked like it had been melted and squished into a doughy mess in a cooking pan. His clothes were brown and he was so, so big. And fat. She absorbed most of these impressions in the space of one second and would register them later. After that one second he opened his mouth.

“I said to shut your squealing mouth!” Then the pink sentient yanked its arm downward thrashed her once against the ground like he was killing a fish.

The man spoke further of radiation cells, of which Rey knew and heard nothing. She knew and felt and heard only the hard pain of hitting the ground. It was too big, too strong, her senses overcome by it. Her left side was alive with pain like a living creature, eating her.

“For ninety credits. Yeah, he does radiation fixings too.”

A wind kicked up alongside the engine’s whooshing air and tossed sand directly into Rey’s mouth and eyes. For the very first time.

She spat out the sand-and-vomit mix that was sizzling around her teeth and tongue. This time she used her less-injured right hand to wipe the mess off her mouth. She cried for someone to help her please, or she thought she did, since she couldn’t hear her own words and no one else heard her. Eventually the pink man lifted her up again. Her toes left the ground. Rey was up high.

The big man said, “Great Maker, you’re still a fat little one. Are you listening to me?” She was not listening or looking. Her eyes were forced shut by the sun. “You’d better be listening. You keep on like that, I’ll give you something to cry about.” He paused and added more slowly, “Shut the hell up.”

As his arm came down and she mostly flopped to the ground again, She lay sideways on the sand and saw everything halfway turned, and her right arm held up high, for he still held her wrist. She breathed and breathed and breathed. A blaster went off somewhere, a sound that she knew from Mama and some holovids, but no one around her reacted.

“Maggo says nine hundred credits, flat.”

“He serious? He says that to my face and I might shoot him.”

“I think that whole radiation gem went to the guy’s head.”

Six minutes had passed. She would never know that time or how far her ship had traveled while she lay on the ground. The pink fish-man lifted her up again, made her stand again. Eyes shut, sun hot. Hot.

“You listenin’ now?” said the pink man, and Rey nodded several times as she thought was expected to do for teachers and grownups and big men. “You’re with me now. I got a scrap collecting business and you work for me. You fetch the scrap and I sell it. You understand?”

‘Work?’ she thought, but couldn’t muster any words or ideas past it. Work existed far away from her and she had only foreign words and dismissal to conceptualize it. It was for grownups, for really tall, sneaky people with briefcases and fancy holos. It should not have anything to do with her.

“You understand?”

Fear opened her mouth; without opening her eyes, the girl said, “I—can’t work.”

“You can’t huh? Too good for work? You got some inheritance money you can live off of, girl?” Rey did not understand him. “Guess you can’t get fed or housed, either. Maybe you’re such a tough little star you can do all that by yourself, then. Good luck. Out of my way.”

He dropped her. The wind slid and whooshed on every part of her as she fell. Rey hit the ground rear-first and curled her head in towards her stomach. She fought to take in air and then wailed, “Where’s my mama? I gotta g-go, go home! M-My ship went away!”

The sentient beside the pink man was a frowning Chagrian. “Broken holo, this one!”

“You don’t have a mum anymore, kid, may as well quit asking for her.” He scratched at a patch on his pant leg. “Sorgel, I might’ve wasted my credits on this one. One for the dust worms. Now get outta my sight.” He took a single step away from her. Two. Nonono no.

Her body opened up from its fetal position. The man cast no shade on her now but she tried to find his face through the sunlight. “No don’t! Don’t leave me here! Please! I can work. I can. I can do it.” Already she was sobbing. “Yo—You can’t leave me b-by myself. Mama and Dad aren’t here.”

Another hot wind came up and pushed sand towards her. Into her mouth again. She spat it out and covered her mouth.

The pink man stared down at her little arms and legs that were barely tanned. He guessed her age in standard years and knew how many oscillator gears would fit in her arms and the fractions of food that would fit in her mouth. A number he didn’t care about.

While tapping his fingers on his arm he asked, “So you have a name?”

Unkar Plutt’s mind is on moving numbers of scrap and portions as he asks; Rey’s is drowned in emotions too large for her. She has to separate the answer from everything else.

She thinks of a name and tells him what her name is.

“Rey,” said the fish man. “Your ship’s gone. Mama and Dad said you live here now. Get that straight. You do what I say now. You do the work I tell you to do. You don’t make no damn trouble. Do as you’re told and you get portions for your meals and you sleep in the shed with the other kids.” Rey heard kids and meals and work and processed nothing else. There would be other kids. Her eyes were shut against the sun once again and trying to hear for her ship’s engines drifting back down to her.

“Wh-wh-where’s my mom?”

“Sorgel, are we done or what?”

“Yessir.”

As the fish man said “Come on,” Rey started to get up off the sand. She’d lain there in some form of pain or another for what her mind insisted was almost the whole day. Seven minutes ago, her ship had taken off without her, though, and Rey was alone with the pink man.

She ran after him. There was sweat on her forehead, she noticed for the first time, and swept it away with the back of her hand. This was a desert, a real desert. It was hot and bad just like holos said but much worse, she was thinking. The heat was so strong that it had weight and pushed on the shoulders of every sentient below it.

“Where is this?” she asked. Her hand hovered above her eyes.

The man didn’t look back at her. “It’s Jakku, idiot. Worthless junkyard shit planet. You got anything else, ask it now. No more questions once I drop you off.”

Jakku was yet new and strange on that day; whatever life she had come from on her ship, whatever grownups there had been who threatened and said bad words, she had parents to keep their attention away from her. Not now. She shut up the rest of the way.

Three more ships went by as they walked, all of them smaller than Rey’s and most of them dull and mean colors that she didn’t like. She saw faded stripes and patches of dead silver showing through paint and she thought of her art markers that she could have used to fill in the patches with good colors. After they passed the third, Rey wiped some sweat away again. She was awfully sweaty. Ahead of them was a wide gateway with a horizontal, red top like an elongated mushroom. Rey stared at it as they walked under it and its spine-shaped shadow. Ahead of them was a little mess of a civilization.

The fishy man was walking towards a group of tents too big for her to see at once. She had to assemble the whole place out of impressions, looking left and then ahead and then way to the right to see it all. The settlement was constructed almost entirely out of tents in a careless assortment of sizes and states of wear. Sometimes there were small metal constructs that Rey didn’t know the word for. Some tents were a roof and no walls, some three walls with the fourth opened or gone. Strange objects visible through their gaps, like tables and helmets and boxes that looked like they’d been burned. Tan and brown and rotten-plant-green and black and other bad colors. The fishy man entered into a large gap between the tents, a street of sand.

A man stuck his head between two tent flaps and spat into the sand, and the fish-man stepped alarmingly near it, but Rey took several steps around it. Sentients that she’d never seen stepped around her too, or they stepped around the pink fish sentient. She passed a tent that was beige-colored instead of one of the nasty dark colors. It was almost a nice color, like milk. She thought of berry flavored milk and wanted some. It would help her feel less hot, but she didn’t have any here.  

She looked pointedly at the back of the sentient’s fat head. “Scuse me, what’s your name, please?”

“Scuse me?” he said back. His tone made Rey want to curl up again, but she didn’t dare stop walking. “You call me Mr. Plutt and don’t say ‘please’ anything anymore. You do what you’re told and don’t fuss with the other kids, or I’ll call Hesselo.”

“O-okay. Mr. Plutt. Thank—” She stopped herself by slapping a sweaty little hand over her mouth.

Plutt turned right at a vague intersection and came into a sort of street marked by endless footprints and tiny bumps of sand kicked up by nonstop footsteps. On either side tents were leaning in, offering scraps of shade on each edge of the lane and huge arrays of objects and bottles and metal pieces. Her eyes swept across grey-green engine halves, opaque tubes of vaccines and sunblock mixed together, shelves with four tiers of coiled wire cables and four armed guards in black robes watching them. Rey could not see that two of the guards were staring after her as she went past, at her and Mr. Plutt walking together. One of them looked away.

The pitted walkway in the sand branched off three different ways and Mr. Plutt took the right branch. Rey stopped once to trace her eyes up and down the other two and see where they went, but her curiosity wasn’t strong enough to keep her rooted for long. She was at Mr. Plutt’s heels again soon. Then she nearly walked into the flabby backside of him.

Metal pieces tinkled against each other in front of him. Rey stopped to listen to the soft little sounds and leaned around Mr. Plutt fat backside to get closer, but they stopped as soon as they started. They were a set of keys too small for Plutt’s hands and he had unlocked the front door of a big shed.

Rey looked to her left and to the right—view somewhat interrupted by Plutt’s butt—and tried to calculate the size of this new building. She decided it could probably fit nine or ten Mr. Plutts inside. It was ten Plutts big. It was an almost-square building with an uneven roof and two windows with blinds made of rusted steel slats.

The door swung open. It creEEEAAAKKed as it went. Mr. Plutt hobbled forward through the doorway, leaving Rey at the sudden mercy of the hot sun. She hobbled forward, too, and found the building was a little less hot than outside. Three children were in here.

One of them was a human like her, a little bigger, a little older. The other two were new species that made her stare. On little piles of red tarps in the far corner was a young Sluissi, the race of green humanoid torsos and serpentine bodies below the waist. Rey’s eyes traveled all up and down the Sluissi’s body to fully comprehend its body shape. She didn’t observe the human or the other alien and did not have time to do so. Unkar Plutt went to the final sentient she hadn’t looked at yet and kicked it out of her vision. It slid backward and hit the tarp pile with a coughing sound.

“Make room for one more,” said Mr. Plutt. “This here’s Rey, she’s new and she’ll be sleeping here, too. Move.” This last was for Rey, but she failed to catch the message. “MOVE!”

She moved and the Sluissi and the human moved aside as she came close. Rey stood in between them and felt her first twinge of almost-fear as their eyes started roving all over her. The child that had been kicked grumbled and twitched under the tarp, still unseen. “Gather up in two hours. And no more nonsense from you.” None of the children said anything back to him. Unkar Plutt turned round and walked out the door.

After another few moments, metallic tinkling let them know that Mr. Plutt was holding his keys again. He locked the door. Rey, holding her hands up near her face, lowered them at last. The rest of her lowered as well, or fell, till she sat down nearly against the wall. One of the tarps crinkled underneath her bottom. The rest of her body crinkled: eyes, lips, limbs pulling together. She needed the strength to cry. She did not know how to unlock doors that grownups locked.

While she hid her eyes, the other three sentients began to move around. To her right, something skidded on a bare patch of floor. Rey gasped and let out a long cry when something struck the side of her head like a slap.

“Hey, hey! Are you the Chiss? I bet you are.” The thing struck her again and it hurt. She cried out at the spreading pain there, on the side of her body where Mr. Plutt had thrown her onto the ground. He was the first grownup to pick her up and throw her and hurt her today and now he locked her away and she did not know what to do.

“Chiss are all blue. She’s a human color.” said one of the other two.

Rey dared to look through a gap in her fingers. The Sluissi was in front of her, leaning far, far forward and supporting itself with its hands slapped on the ground. It had dry reptile skin and long flaps growing out of the back of its head like heavy lizard spines. She stared at them helplessly. A nice green color that she liked. Something kicked her shoulder. Rey screeched and slapped her good hand over the hurt shoulder.

A Dug was grinning and glaring at her with its toes curling in mad delight. Dugs were more foreign to her than even Sluissi were; their long, muscly hands that they stood on and weasely little legs that they used for hands were a backwards manipulation of all the sentients she knew. The dug child looked like a rat with its limbs all stretched out and wrong. She watched dumbly as the right hand it stood on came up and “kicked” her in the shoulder a little softer.

“You have really soft skin. Squishy weirdo,” laughed the Dug. Its face was ratlike but furless, and tiny strips of what looked like dead skin dragged on its earlobes. “You’re gonna burn up and turn into a wrinkly old grandmother, I bet. Sun’s not good for softies.”

“Where are you from?” said the Sluissi. “Your name?”

Rey said her name was Rey. Then she coughed. “I’m thirsty.”

“Hm. Me, too.” said the Sluissi. “There’s not much water here, though, so that’s too bad.”

“D-do you guys know where the ships are? I, um. I gotta go back there. My ship left without me.”

“Oh,” said the other human child. His hands stuck out from thin, dragging sleeves and his eyes and nose showed through a head covering, and the rest of him was buried in the grey and inscrutable clothing. When he proved unwilling to give any more words, Rey ignored him.

“I, I got left here on accident. I gotta go home.”

“I bet it’s no accident if Unkar brought you in,” the Dug said with great confidence. He even added, “Unkar doesn’t do accidents when it comes to new kid scavengers. If he got you, you’re gonna be down in the dirt with us now! Sucks to be you.”

The Sluissi was laying down now. “Now our team has four cleaners. That’ll be better than three cleaners. And we can dig a lot. Can you dig?”

“I wanna go home.”

“You can’t. You’re gonna dig now. Or clean.”

Rey’s grip on her arm grew tighter and she told the Sluissi to shut up. Inside, she told herself the same thing, because believing the snaky sentient would be a dumb thing to do, because it was a kid like her and kids didn’t decide when ships traveled or came back. Grown-ups could make it come back. She couldn’t make any of this come out of her mouth. Parts of it came out in sobs. The Sluissi seemed to be waiting out her crying, but it didn’t stop, so it retreated.

The Dug slapped the floor with its left hand. “I just realized! Your stupid hair! Your hair looks like three poops on your head, ahaahaha!”

With her eyes dribbling tears, Rey reached up and covered one her buns with her hand. “Stop it. You better stop it.”

“You can’t tell a Dug to stop being mean.” said the Sluissi, unblinking. “Don’t you know anything?”

“She doesn’t know jack-oh!” screeched the Dug. “She’s dumb enough to think she can just leave if she wants! HA! My pop would slap you one if he was here.”

“Can you dig?” asked the Sluissi, blinking. “You better be good at it or Unkar won’t give you portions. It’s a fact.”

“Your hair does look like three poops,” said the boy in grey. He still crouched in the corner with his hands clasped over his knees, hardly moving. “If my hair was long, I sure wouldn’t do it up like that.”

“It’s not!” she screeched, and more sobs came unexpectedly, jaggedly out of her like a belch. “I-It’s not! My hair’s not poop! Shut u-up!”

There was a rock on the ground, or a clod of dirt or sand—Rey did not remember—but she grabbed it from between a few folds of tarp and threw it at the boy. He ducked his head farther into his knees and flinched dramatically when it hit. The dug laughed, the Sluissi quietly stared, and Rey continued crying.

She cried in spurts for an hour while the dug talked to himself and banged his hand-feet on the walls and yelled and pretended he was playing drums in a famous band. The hard metal echoes were louder than Rey’s crying. She remembered his drumming and awful not-music noise more than anything else.

She remembered the door tearing open and the Sluissi child was in the way. Quicker than lightning she moved from the floor to the wall and the slam of her green body’s impact was as loud as the dug’s drumming. Rey and the dug yelled together.

It was another grown-up, big and fat like Mr. Plutt, but none of the children knew a Barabel on sight. It was humanoid-shaped and reptilian-skinned and all but the Sluissi recoiled from it.

“Whichever one of you was making that stupid shit noise can quiet the fuck down!” it screamed, and all of Rey’s limbs curled in toward herself. “Out! Portion and work time. If you guys pull that again after lights out I’ll come back in here and step on all of you.”

“Portions and work, nice, nice, nice!” the dug screamed and clapped his little hanging feet together. “Outside! Let’s go, losers!”

He closed the short distance to Rey in the corner and pulled on her arm with his feet. “Move it or else, loser, let’s go!”

The Sluissi had already slithered out the door, under the Barabel’s giant shadow and out of sight. The boy in grey was getting up off the floor. Rey saw neither of these things with her head pushed into the crook of her elbow. She stood up this way and let the dug pull her out the door and back into the heat and the sun with its huge weight. When the dug child let go of her, she stumbled and fell into the sand. Something scraped her leg and tore through her pants. Something dropped a hard, pointy ball on her. Her breath and a high-pitched cry were slammed out of her throat.

“Get in the shade there and clean it till it looks new.” said the barabel. He produced a rag the color of old eggs and dropped it near where Rey’s face lay in the sand. “If you can’t do it, ask Mopsy.”

As he spoke, Rey spat sand out of her mouth and pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. Snot and sand had smeared her nostrils and upper lip. When her head was raised and she remembered to ask this new adult if he knew where the ships were, he was already laughing. His laugh was louder than her own voice.

“Clean your face and get in there.”

“Okay.”

Her fingers found the rag and clutched it. Her palms and fingertips felt the dampness in it, and it had a funny smell attached that was unlike cleaning supplies or soap. The shade the strange reptilian man had mentioned wasn’t far away, and all the other kids were sitting in it already, spread out under a flat cloth roof held up by six poles in the ground. Grey metallic things lay scattered around them and they all were rubbing at them with old-egg-colored cloths.

Ringing the children’s tent on all sides were the masses of tents and sheds in a short spectrum of metallic and dead-plant colors. All the structures rose higher than Rey’s head, and the borders of Niima were far beyond her line of sight. She would never find the shipyard by herself. A grownup would have to take her there. And it was so hot, she wanted to cry. Even as she stared around at the tents and the other kids not far in front of her, she was sweating and the back of her neck especially was burning already. Nowhere was ever supposed to be this awful hot. She walked ahead into the shade. Without the sun in her eyes, the shapes of them came into focus. They were all bent over metal things.

The boy in grey was closest to her. He picked up a fraction of a speeder battery and plopped it in front of Rey’s feet. “You can do that one,” he said. And then he ignored her.

“Are we ever gonna go to the ships?” Rey asked.

None of them answered her. Somewhere ahead, two more barabels were growling at each other, spinning heavy chain links in their hands. The ends of them were spiked and tipped with scars of rust and dark blood. The sight of sharp and big weapons made her want to be quiet and look away. Once she sat down, most of the view of them was obscured by the pile of metal things that needed cleaning. It was the scrap pile. Rey didn’t know enough of it at the time to shiver or shrivel away from it.

One last time: “Please, you guys. I’m s’posed to go home.”

The dug grabbed sand in his little left foot and threw it at her. “Shut up and help or I’m gonna eat your portions.”

Rey picked up the rag and felt the smelly cleaning fluid sweating through the cloth and onto her palm. The battery piece had come away in an explosion and it was more charred than not. No grace wires left, three of the four safety lights cracked or broken. The durasteel frame of it was too small to be repurposed for anything more than a container for tools or food. All of this would come to her, later. Rey picked a spot that was covered in char marks and rubbed the cloth on it. She worked.

-

End “snippet.”