Star Wars, page 4
“I wouldn’t!” his Rodian friend whined.
The human did not look away from me as he said, “I agree with my friend.”
I waited.
Finally, the human added, “The last time I saw Evereni, it was a pair of them. On a station off Pantora.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Year, more or less.”
“What were they doing there?”
“You’d know that better than us.” The human tipped the nose of his blaster up in a clear signal he was finished talking.
I left the public house. It was old information but still a direction. And stations kept logs. Perhaps the right bribe, the right approach, could get me the name of a ship.
But that was not the end, that day.
The Twi’lek woman followed me out. In addition to a necessary blaster in a pocket of the flight suit, I carry staves in my belt, wrapped with mynock leather just as white as my suit. Without drawing them, I turned into an alley and stopped, faced the entrance.
She careened around and skidded to a halt, pink lekku slapping her back loudly.
Slowly I drew one of my staves. I stared at her.
The Twi’lek touched the butt of a blaster at her hip. She was dressed like any trader or smuggler: jumpsuit, plentiful pockets, straps for weapons and tools and bags. Her lekku were wrapped at the base with dark lace. A scar bisected her forehead. Her lips were painted black.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She stepped closer. “I’ve heard stories about you. Your people.”
I studied the lines at her eyes, the thoughts in them. She was at least a decade older than me. Most people are older than me. Sometimes I can hardly believe how young I am still, for all I’ve done and witnessed—the ghosts I carry with me.
To the Twi’lek I repeated, “What do you want?”
She answered, “I want to touch you.”
Surprise made me consider it. I—
I miss touch. I did not realize how much until it was gone. I used to be held; I used to hold. Hold hands, comb hair, paint thin lines of brikal-shell blue across foreheads and cheeks of Elders. Of babies. I was there when the Kessarine eggs—
—I was there when Yana—
—and the rough crumble of flesh into sand—
I used to listen to the Force. Now I listen to my gut. To the Twi’lek I said, “Do you have your own ship?”
“Yes.”
“Come with me.”
“Why?”
“I am looking for people who like my kind of work.”
“What kind is that?” she asked. But she stepped closer to me. In the nighttime alley, her black lips gleamed.
“Hunting,” I said.
“Oh,” the Twi’lek said, and smiled. She had sharp teeth, too—not for slicing, like mine, but sharp little cones. “And if I do, I get to touch?”
Her voice was slightly too breathless to offend.
In answer, I put a hand on her chest and leaned onto my toes. I kissed her. She tasted like the thin beer inside smelled, and I stepped away. “You have touched. Now,” I said, “you get to be rich.”
The Twi’lek was not what I landed on Dantooine to hunt, but she was the first person I brought to the Gaze who had never heard of the Path of the Open Hand.
The Gaze Electric is yours. I took it. You’ll take it from me. And it will be taken from you in turn.
When I took it, I did not know what to do with it, but I learned. I dug into the records. I checked the supplies. There was so much. The Mother—
I should call her by her name. She was no mother. She did not care for us—for me. But she did leave us rich.
Some of it was confiscated by the Republic, some by enemies she made among the Grafs and the Hutts. But there were enough avenues hidden from them for me to find. I am not too proud or too foolish to use what she left, and rebuild.Not a community of believers. Not a religion. Not a family.
The opposite of community, of faith, of religion and family. The bond between me and the people following me is simply—
Nothing.
Isn’t that funny? No? I’ll tell you why.
Nothing in this galaxy is freely given.
Every gift is a trade, a relationship. Every gift comes with expectations—whether they are sharp as a blade or pure as love.
And if there is no gift freely given, then what is freedom?
Taking.
I am building this for you.
I did not know you then. When I hunted on Dantooine. When I brought the Twi’lek Fori Nagor into my halls, I did not know my mission yet.
I have made the Gaze into a good home. No. Well. It is not a good home for most. It is a good Evereni home. Evereni. Not a name given to us, but our name for ourselves, I have learned. It means caretakers. Not caregivers.
Yes, I find that painfully funny, too.
I live in the throne hall of this sanctuary ship. Old blue banners hang above, and the buttresses are sleek black. They glitter like starlight but take paint well. I have streaked over the old Path lines with handprints, and do you know, under the floor I found a hold with so many weapons. Blasters, cannons, knives, and even a sword. I left most of it beneath my feet, except for a couple of blasters. One I holster when I leave the ship; the other I keep behind a small panel in the arm of the throne.
Another bit of lore I have learned about us: we don’t need as much sleep as some other sentients. When I do sleep it is here, on this throne. Sometimes I curl up on the floor over the weapons cache, when I feel weak.
You will feel weak sometimes, but you are not. Curl around yourself. Hold yourself. That is all we can do—we at the center.
I like this cavernous hall, and I like being alone in it. When I am alone I know any voices I hear are those of the dead. Perhaps you see the dead of the past, as I do. Some of us see the dead of the future. I learned that from—
But no, first:
I have collected some scattered members of the Path of the Open Hand, those who never knew the Closed Fist. They ventured out into the frontier to preach harmony, clarity, and freedom in the Force, and records of them were among those I discovered in the guts of this ship. They were few and far between, but I knew where to find them. I gathered them, because I have always been at the center of something. I don’t know how to be alone, or how to want such a thing. I hunt Evereni, but until I find them, I need someone to surround me. I told the Path missionaries a story about Dalna. It is a lie, a lie that put me at the center of their faith. The center of their desires.
I gave them a choice: stay with me and evolve, or give up the Path as it was, the Path the Mother destroyed with her lies and greed. Maybe, I tell them, the Path never truly existed. If they do not stay with me, they must go elsewhere, be something new by themselves, away from me and all this. If I hear about the Path in other places, I will come for them.
A few listened and chose me: Alirya, a human girl who believes in me and wants nothing more than to care for me. Esstrop and Kortanio, a Kessurian couple who cannot bear to be fixed in place. They are good seekers, if they do not yet have a hunter’s instinct. Rox, a huge Ozrelanso who cooks for us. Another human called Milan Stor, who is a better pilot than me, but not for long. It is important to say their names to you. They will be dead, but they came before you. It matters to know who spins around, who is buffeted against the edges of our—our—
I took the ones who stayed into the bowels of the Gaze and introduced them to the Great Leveler.
It is a void that balances the storm of the Force, I told them. We hold it safe for the future, and someday we will find a place for it to wait. Someday it will rise again and consume the abusers of the Force, I said. That is a mission they are primed to accept. There is no religion for us to share, no story to pass to the wider galaxy. What matters now is that we survive. We are caretakers of the Great Leveler, and we will feed it.
I want to feed it because I know a secret: the Leveler is a monster like me. Like us.
Sometimes I touch my palm to the face of the Leveler. My hand, like yours, is long-fingered and gray. My nails are black and sharp. My skin is delicate. The Leveler does nothing to me. It is not hungry for me.
It was not hungry for the Mother, not really. But still in the end she turned slowly to bone and salt. She was too close to it. Or it was too far from where it longed to be. Our Leveler can never go home, and you should never get too near. If you must wake it someday, beware. There is one difference between the monsters we are and the monster that is the Great Leveler: we do not have a home, but it does. We should never have taken them from their home.
The Jedi.
I do not like to think of them.
You must know them.
This Jedi walked through an eclectic marketplace on—no, I won’t say. I was there to hunt. His robes layered brown-gold-white like fresh-turned fields and sunlight, and I—
I—
I walked up to him. There was nobody else around.
Do you know Jedi? They are Force users. They are strong, and sure of themselves. Their lightsabers are bright and sing with power. They are killers.
I walked up to him.
“Jedi,” I said.
He blinked. He was human, with a sunburn down his white nose and a thin yellow beard. Taller than me, broader. His eyes were the same brown of his cloak. I think he probably had a nice smile.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
I laughed.
The Jedi made a small confused frown.
I said, “Jedi, do you have a Padawan?”
“No,” he said, very obviously surprised I knew to ask.
Then, I—
I was covered in blood. Blood in the creases of my palms, perhaps flesh caught in my claws.
It smeared on the controls of the small shuttle as I returned to the Gaze. I shut everything off and opened the boarding doors. Alirya, Milan Stor, and Rox entered, as I’d instructed on approach. They stared at the bloodied Jedi sprawled on the cold floor of the hold. Alirya covered her mouth in shock when she saw me.
“Is it dead?” Rox asked, grimacing with his sharp teeth.
“No, but soon he’ll wish I’d killed him planetside.”
“Marda!” Alirya gasped, hands fluttering as she tried to find a place to touch me. “Are you well?”
“I am,” I said, striding past. “Bring him with us.”
“You—but you’re covered in—”
I ignored her. She was only fifteen, but so was I when I had begged for more responsibility. Alirya had asked, and I—unlike the—unlike the Mother—I gave her what she wanted.
I led the three of them, the Jedi slung between Milan Stor and Rox, to the Leveler. It lived behind a large containment shield in a room built of transparisteel that must have been meant for medical observation. The moment we arrived, its sharp blue eyes found the Jedi. The Leveler looked awful: rangy, its white skin hanging off its bones, spines long and cracking.
Rox dropped the Jedi beside the containment shield, and I turned it off.
The Leveler slunk forward, and as one huge knuckle reached out, the Jedi woke.
He screamed and scrambled away, slipping on his own blood.
There was nowhere for him to go.
Have you seen what it does? How the Leveler eats the Force?
Have you seen the flesh turn to stone? Turn to chalk and crumble? Have you seen the hardened eyeball? The disintegrating hair? The husk?
I always watch every second. But Alirya turned away immediately. Milan Stor and Rox, too, eventually.
I ushered the Great Leveler back into its chamber with a bloody hand and strode away. Once I reached the throne hall and my station, I removed the Jedi’s lightsaber from where I’d tucked it into my suit. I hid it with my blaster in the compartment inside the throne. My fingers left smears of blood. Turning, I touched the controls to project an image of myself, a mirror self. My white suit and shawl were splattered with bright red blood. The Jedi’s flesh had been so soft. Easy to tear, easy to control. My blood is not this vivid red. It is gray. Thick, hard to spill, hot.
This blood—
“Marda—” someone said.
“Get out!” I screamed. My holo-mirror screamed it silently with me.
I put a hand to my chest.
It left a splotch of red blood. I touched it again. I dragged my fingers away. The blood streaked. There on my chest, a spot of blood, and red rays pulling away. A red sun. A red storm. A red eye. It is so many things, this—
“Marda.”
I ignored Alirya.
“Mother?”
Whirling, I reached out to scratch her face off.
But Alirya was too far away. She knelt halfway across the gaping hall.
“That is not who I am,” I hissed.
“Marda,” she said.
I wanted to wail. She said something else, that Milan had routed a course somewhere. I said it was fine. I didn’t care where we went. I didn’t want anything. The blood on my chest, the red, the red.
Someone touched my sleeve. My hand.
“Marda,” they said. My name, again and again.
I squeezed my eyes shut. So many people were saying my name. So many of them ghosts.
Alirya screamed it.
Marda echoed throughout the throne hall. Echoed back. Hissed and whispered.
I looked at her.
Her big eyes watered. She carefully got to her feet and stepped nearer to me.
Slowly, I raised my hand. I felt sick. I felt outside my body.
I offered my hand to her, palm up.
Alirya scrambled to take it. Her touch was cool.
Her touch was—
I do miss it.
“Marda,” she whispered. “Can I help you wash?”
“This is the blood of Jedi,” I said. “Why should I want it gone?”
I imagined the Leveler licking it from my cheek.
The girl squeezed my hand. “You should be clean,” she said, as if that meant anything. She was human, too, like that soft Jedi. So breakable. My gaze lowered to her throat. My fingers twitched. But she wanted to help me.
“Are you thirsty?” she asked. “Hungry?”
“No. Sit with me,” I said, and drew her with me to the throne. She crouched at my knee, leaned her cheek there. I petted her hair and thought of myself, when I was fifteen. Barely three years ago. A lifetime. I opened my mouth to ask what she wanted.
But in the end I didn’t. If I knew what she wanted, I could take it away.
When I was alone again, I tore down the blue banners and painted the wall with a massive red sun.
I was sweating on Ryloth when I met him—the old uncle who introduced me to you.
I’d heard twice in a month that someone had seen Evereni haunting the caves at the edges of the planet’s equatorial forests, there to hunt lyleks. Lyleks, I learned, were vicious insect-like monsters with tentacles and strong mandibles that could—and did—happily eat the native Twi’leks. Their carapaces could deflect blaster bolts, and they often tore each other apart in displays of strength.
Awful, yes? But hunting Evereni myself, I understood.
The lyleks preferred the deep, lush forests near Ryloth’s equator, and there were several hubs that game hunters could use as a base. I picked one with nothing but my gut and booked a room in one of the tourist multiplexes. I began to wander as I inquired with expedition groups, particularly looking into the cracks where less established—and less legitimate—safari guides could be found. Everyone told me the same thing: Evereni do not join groups. Better luck walking into a nest of lyleks than to hope a single Evereni would drop from the sky to save me.
I’m not foolish enough to hunt monsters like that on my own. I found a dark bar and sat in the corner, as usual, nursing a fermented milk tea. I could be patient: that is a lesson I learned long, long ago. Another lesson: how to fail, how to be rejected. I have done those things again and again, and as I held myself stiff-backed and strong in the corner of that bar, I thought of the things I have tried and failed to do. They sat beside me, whispering in my ear, bumping a shoulder against mine.
The crowded bar let me look at the ghosts without seeming strange. The blurring, faded faces of the dead. I do not know if their fading means they are only in my memory or if that is what happens to ghosts.
Then I saw him.
After more than a year of chasing rumors and missing contacts, clinging only to legends, I saw him.
He leaned back against the dingy plaster wall, in his hand a small bowl of liquor so hot it steamed. His hair was streaked red, and I knew without knowing it is how we age. His dark gray skin wrinkled around his blacker-than-black eyes. His black-and-red hair was pulled back to display his scalloped ears. Bones pierced the lobes, their tips gilded. He wore forest fatigues and at least three weapons I could easily count. More hidden, certainly.
A thrill shot me to my feet. I moved to him and leaned over his table, hands pressed flat to the sticky pocked wood. “Evereni,” I whispered.
He slowly lifted his eyes to mine. His body fell still. He stared back at me.
I have no memories of my family other than Yana. Not really. I had never seen one of us before who was not the cousin who raised me and loved me, whose hand I cut off in rage.
It was easy to stare.
“Sit, girl,” he said.
I obeyed immediately, and the moment I realized it, I cringed. Obedience was part of the old me, grilled into who I had been, who I made myself. I have been trying to strip it out: only give orders, never take them unflinching—make myself the center.
The Evereni smirked.
I reached over and took the bowl of hot liquor. I knocked it back. My eyes watered at the heat and bite of it. The liquor numbed my throat, and I kept my tongue pressed hard to the roof of my mouth.
He spoke in a language I didn’t even recognize. It danced slippery around his mouth.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
His lips peeled back over his sharp teeth, and he took the bowl back from me. He poured more from the tiny carafe at his elbow. “Isren,” he said. “You can call me that.”
