“Thank you.”
Siv bowed her head slightly. “Body to body, dust to dust.”
She stayed standing, though, hoping Phasma would say something or take off her helmet or do anything that would provide comfort or understanding. Back in the Scyre, Keldo had been the voice and heart of their leadership, the one who always knew what to say, whether it involved offering kindness, support, company, or admonishment. Back then, Phasma’s quiet had seemed like one half of a whole, as if her part of their sibling bond was the realm of the physical, of protection and defense and valor. Now, without Keldo’s tenderness and empathy to ground her, Phasma seemed cold and inhuman. The helmet only served to heighten her resemblance to a droid like the ones back in Terpsichore Station, which had never changed their expression even as they did horrible things.
And yet the way Phasma focused on the sand—it was clear she felt something.
“You can take extra,” Siv said, almost without thinking, as she weighed the tin in her hand. It was Gosta’s portion for the day, and years of carefully monitoring her people’s needs had trained Siv to mete out exactly what was required and hold back enough for all. Now it only served to remind her that Gosta had been little more than a child, for all that she’d sought to belong among the warriors and acquitted herself well in battle.
“Save it. Perhaps it will keep us going tomorrow.” Phasma’s voice was flat and clipped, and Siv could tell, even with the helmet, that Phasma wasn’t watching her.
“The sickness that Churkk mentioned. Do you feel it?”
Phasma’s helmet shook once. “No.”
“I wonder if we’ll even know. If it will come on like the fever, hot and itching, or if it will sneak up in the night like the old barking cough once did. Or perhaps he was merely mad.”
“Perhaps.”
Siv waited several long minutes, hoping Phasma would say something, anything, to reassure her that her leader had not, in fact, begun to head in the direction of madness herself. The longer Phasma sat there, scanning the horizon, holding her portion of salve while not removing her helmet to apply it, doing and saying nothing, her hand on her blaster, the further she felt from the girl Siv had grown up with and learned to trust with her life.
Siv tried one last gambit. “Do you think we’ll make it?”
At that, finally, the helmet turned toward her and canted up. She felt Phasma’s keen gaze crawling over her and wondered what her leader saw in her lieutenant.
“Perhaps.”
Siv turned to leave, but she couldn’t go until she’d had her say. Even if it was like prying sea creatures from their shells, she would know something of Phasma’s mind as they entered a place that truly terrified her.
“Brendol Hux says we can make it. He says his ship will be there, and his people will come. He says they’ll take us into the stars and give us medicine. That they can fix whatever is harmed here. Do you think it’s true?”
Phasma’s helmet clicked as her gaze left Siv and returned to the gray horizon, the setting sun casting long, black shadows from the metal bones of long-dead civilizations.
“We can only act as if it’s true,” Phasma said. “We can only keep going.”
Siv nodded and walked away, considering. Phasma was right. At this point, there was nothing else to be done. They could only press forward, believing that Brendol Hux would be their savior.
If he was lying, they would be dead soon enough, anyway.
—
Siv woke covered by Torben’s huge arm and a dusting of sand. Every crevice of her body itched, tortured by the feathery gray stuff, and she flung it off and stood, trying to find her balance. The grit stung her eyes, and she brushed it from her eyelashes as she faced the direction from which they were being pursued. She didn’t see Keldo and his band, but she had no doubt there was little time to waste. Phasma was already awake, in conversation with Brendol. Siv’s brow wrinkled, and she put on her own mask again. It irked her that she had to work so hard to get a few meaningless words out of her leader, while Phasma seemed more than happy to converse with Brendol in secret. In her opinion, Phasma should’ve been loyal to her people first, and her allies second. Phasma apparently did not see it the same way anymore.
“Get up, you big brute.” Siv rubbed Torben’s shoulder, smiling as he twitched awake and frowned at the sand covering him as if he were a great mountain.
“I’m buried,” he said in surprise. “Another hour, and you’d have lost me.”
“Hardly. You’re the biggest lump in view.”
It made her feel good, tending to Torben, giving him bits of food and his morning share of water and spreading him with extra salve. With Gosta gone, she ached to take care of someone, to make some kind of nurturing connection. As for Torben, he put up with her clucking and pulled her into a hug, and it felt so good to be held that she felt her eyes prick with tears as she slipped off her mask and buried her face in his chest, a stolen moment of comfort that felt all the more precious in such a precarious situation.
If the Gand had told the truth, they were headed toward the deadliest place on Parnassos, and that was saying a lot. Every other enemy Siv had faced was something that could be fought head-on—opposing groups, sea beasts, even a monster like Wranderous. But whatever creeping death awaited them was some sort of disease with unknown symptoms that could already be taking over her body, somewhere deep inside. When the child wiggled within her, barely a burble of bubbles, she put a hand to her belly and offered up thanks. At least what she held most precious was still untouched. So far.
They set out before the sun had truly breached the sky, and Brendol grumbled that they should be walking at night, when the air was cool and clear, rather than saving their work for the heat of the day. Siv expected Phasma to share her own thoughts on the matter, but she remained silent. In the Scyre, Phasma would’ve had a sharp reprimand for any warrior in her company who complained or questioned her judgment, and there would’ve been punishment for anyone who slowed the entire party down with their lack of vigor and energy. Yet Phasma matched their pace to Brendol’s without a word, subtly resetting their path every time they started to veer off. Siv was too well trained by now to question this strange and silent battle of wills. Her sole task was to get to Brendol’s ship alive, preserving her child and Torben as well as she could. Even if she had her doubts, Phasma was her leader, and Siv was duty-bound to follow her orders, even when she felt conflicted by Brendol’s interference.
They left the long-empty buildings, and new shapes rose up against the morning sky. These weren’t small homes like those filling the last area. They were huge stations, as big as Terpsichore or Arratu but…ravaged. The first one was missing part of its metal roof, with black shadows ghosting up its white walls. The farther they walked, the more damaged the buildings appeared. Their roofs were gone, their walls burned and cracked and missing great chunks. Siv felt woozy as she looked around and tried to imagine what could do so much damage to such a large area. Even the mighty ocean took years to chip away at the stone cliffs of the Scyre. After they stopped to take care of personal needs behind a particularly mangled structure, Siv noticed several black shadows shaped like people painted on the wall.
“What is that? More art?” she asked Brendol, who was waiting nearby in the shade of a wall, his goggles and wraps undone as he scratched at his eyes.
He turned to follow her glance.
“Residue from a nuclear blast,” he said, brow furrowed and mouth pursed. “We must be near the epicenter.”
“Residue?”
“Oh, look. People were standing in front of the wall when the bomb hit. Everything exploded, and the power of the blast disintegrated them where they stood. Their remains were sort of pressed into the wall by the power of the explosion. Do you see?”
“No. I don’t know what an explosion is.”
Everyone except Torben had gathered around now to listen, and Brendol put his hands on his hips and considered them. He’d put his
black outfit back on sometime after Arratu, and the color was being leached out by the sun, the careful pleats and folds and puffs dusted with gray sand and wrinkled. The once shiny black boots were dull and cracked. His beard had grown out to a patchy red-and-white scruff, and his face was flushed an unhealthy red with a few developing spots like the ones Siv had suffered during her teen years.
“Look, it’s very complicated,” Brendol said. “But you know what lightning is?”
Siv nodded. “Of course.”
“Imagine a huge bolt of lightning. So big and with so much power that it destroys everything as far as the eye can see. Every person, every animal, every plant, every building. Only the very strongest surfaces made of the most resilient minerals might survive it. Organic matter is disintegrated, utterly destroyed and leaving nothing behind. The entire sky goes black with smoke, blocking the sun and turning the rain to poison. Literally nothing survives.”
“I can’t imagine that,” Siv said, but her voice was hollow.
She couldn’t imagine it, but she could understand it. Brendol’s description explained so much about Parnassos, about why there was nothing left. She’d always been told that the planet itself had been the cause of her people’s destruction, but this made more sense. Of course it was people. People had destroyed this place. And people had left behind the few survivors to piece together a violent life filled with pain and toil. Torben had rejoined them and heard the last bit, his face flushed red with fury as if he would gladly drag the person responsible out of whatever hole they were hiding in and beat them to death. He put his arm around Siv as if wishing he could protect her and the child from all the sorrows Parnassos had inflicted.
“Who did this?” Phasma asked.
Brendol chuckled. “Isn’t it obvious? The Con Star Mining Corporation. Whether they were responsible for the bombing, whether a rival corporation accomplished it, or whether their faulty technology triggered a nuclear meltdown, it was clearly them. And instead of fixing their mess, they abandoned the entire planet.”
“Do they still do business in your world?” Phasma asked.
“They are a large and profitable business in the galaxy, yes.”
“Something should be done.”
Brendol nodded, looking crafty. “Perhaps that can be arranged. They own many valuable assets, and the First Order always needs more assets.”
Siv felt that Phasma and Brendol had just reached an unspoken arrangement, that they had some prior understanding of how their paths would…well, not intersect. Probably not intertwine, either, as Phasma didn’t seem to particularly like him. Align was probably the better word. Brendol had something in mind for Phasma to do, some special place among his people that would benefit him.
Brendol was the first to walk on, turning from the imprinted shadows as if he’d finished looking at a particularly boring rock. The troopers followed him, as did Phasma, who quickly outpaced him to lead. Siv and Torben lingered a moment, and he pulled her more tightly to his side. The black shadows appeared to be two different sizes, and Siv imagined she saw adults and children there, an entire family group reduced to nothing but a hazy image on a wall.
“The faster we walk, the faster we’ll find safety,” Torben reminded her.
She turned in his arms to look up into his unmasked face and immediately put the back of her hand to his forehead. “Do you feel feverish?” she asked.
For though his anger had fled, his color remained high. A few tiny spots lurked under his scruffy brown beard, and his eyes were bright green against pink whites. His skin was cool against hers, though, and when she put her fingertips to his pulse, his heart was beating steady and strong.
“I feel fine,” he said, eyebrows drawing down in confusion. “And you?”
She put her hand to her own cheek. Her skin, too, felt cool, but her fingers danced over a few bumps at her temples, where her hair pulled back from her scalp.
“Churkk said there would be a sickness,” she said. “I wonder if this is how it starts.”
Torben gently pulled her mask into place and urged her to walk as the others disappeared around the next building.
“We’ll ask Brendol later,” he said, giving her a squeeze. “Nothing to be done for it now. I feel strong as ever.”
He thumped his chest and grinned at her, and she returned the smile, for all that it felt false. She’d learned much of bodies, tending the detraxors and, before that, caring for the elderly and infected in the Nautilus. When several people all showed similar signs of some new malady, it was never a good omen.
But Torben was right. There was nothing to be done but keep walking. Whatever this illness was, she’d never heard of it and had no curatives in her pack or in her memory. All she could do was make sure everyone took extra salve and liniment, and that it would continue to provide some sort of protection. Siv and Torben jogged to catch up with the others, climbing up the slight hill of a dune. Every time they clambered up out of a low spot, she grew excited for the sight of whatever lay over the ridge. Even if what she saw generally brought only trouble, from the skinwolves to Arratu to the fence and the dead lands beyond, she still felt a swell of optimism. This time, finally, her hopes were answered.
They topped the dune when the sun was high and looked down on two things: utter devastation…and the remains of a ship.
“THERE IT IS,” BRENDOL SAID, SOUNDING cheerful for the first time in Siv’s memory.
“It appears untouched,” Phasma added, looking through her quadnocs. “If someone else had reached it first, it would be stripped to nothing.”
From what Siv could see of the ship, it was the size of a building and covered in the shiniest metal she’d ever seen, bright enough to rival the beetles that had covered Churkk. But the ship was silver rather than gold, and the sun gleamed off it so fiercely that she had to shield her eyes with her hands. Hope swelled in her heart, and she could barely contain her excitement. For all that she’d let herself believe in Brendol’s promised future, she had never fully trusted the man, or his story of the First Order’s might and generosity.
The wrecked ship was just in front of a structure she recognized all too well: another Con Star Mining Corporation station. It had been utterly destroyed, as had all the outbuildings around it. Twisted chunks of metal and broken poles poked up through the sand, and two great cylinders the size of the station itself towered behind it, dead gray against the flat blue sky.
“That’s what happened,” Brendol said, almost to himself. Then, louder, “It was a nuclear accident. Someone must’ve cut corners on building materials or made another stupid error. The galaxy should be beyond this sort of tragedy. Under the First Order, a company could not simply devastate a planet and abandon it. Who knows how many lives were lost here.” He shook his head and spit into the sand, and for once Siv didn’t blame him. If wasting a tiny glob of moisture was blasphemy, then killing millions of people was even more so.
“So the sickness…” Siv began.
Brendol looked at her, his earlier cheer gone. “Yes. We’ll feel it soon. Radiation poisoning. The redness, the boils. Then weakness. It will get worse. The faster we get to my ship and call the First Order, the faster they’ll get us off this dead rock and pumped full of the antidote.”
“Which is?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Chelation, antioxidants, drugs. Not my field. This is why we have med droids. The point is that the more time we spend standing here talking about it, the lower our chances of surviving long enough to be cured.”
Phasma took off running, and even Brendol found his speed in her wake. They surged down the other side of the dune and into the crater below, slipping and sliding in the sand, falling and getting back up to run again. A throbbing ache began behind Siv’s eyes, and for just a moment she saw double and almost swooned. But then Torben had her arm, and she was up and running again. Even the Scyre warriors were winded by the time they reached the ship, close enough to see the angles of the smooth cr
aft and the cracked plates of metal strewn around it and damaged by the impact.
Brendol was breathing so hard that he couldn’t speak. He waved his arm at his troopers, and they attempted to climb up onto the metal, their boots sliding on the chrome. Siv didn’t know that word—chrome—but I do. I’m sure you recall that craft, having ridden in it yourself a few times in your day. It was once Palpatine’s favorite yacht on Naboo, and I don’t know how Brendol got his hands on it, but he loved it. And then it disappeared from the records. Perhaps you remember when you stopped seeing it. Maybe Brendol told you he’d sold it, or that it had been retired. He probably didn’t want to admit that he’d crashed it and abandoned it.
It was no easy task breaking into a damaged ship of that size without the right equipment, and the troopers were making a poor job of it.
“Leave this to us,” Phasma said, and she nodded at Siv and Torben.
Pleased to have real work to do, they pulled their Scyre gear out of their bags, claw boots and gloves and rappelling lines and grappling hooks crafted from detritus and rusty mining equipment. In the Scyre, such things were necessary every day, but the climbing rigs had been useless ever since they’d rappelled down the mountain and landed in endless sand. For just a moment, having ascended her line to stand high on the silver wing of the ship, Siv was flooded with pure joy and accomplishment, forgetting all that had befallen her family in the last week. When she looked through the broken transparisteel of the cockpit, however, her happiness fled. Two dead humans sat within, strapped into their chairs in black helmets, beetles fighting to lap up the dried blood discoloring their black clothes.
As Phasma turned to drop a rappelling line to the troopers to help haul Brendol up into the cockpit, she froze. Siv followed her gaze and felt her heart stutter. It was Keldo. And all the Scyre and all the Claws, already over the dune and rushing forward, weapons ready.
—
“Pull me up!” Brendol shouted. “Hurry!”
Whatever he said next was lost in a volley of blaster bolts from the troopers and the mad cacophony of war cries.