A Crash of Fate Read online

  “Well, clearly you can fly if you made it all the way out here in that thing,” Salju said with a chuckle. “I take it you need repairs on the fuel drive pressure stabilizer and the left laser cannon?”

  Among other things, yes. Izzy glanced back at her ship, her indignation catching in her throat. Salju was already walking past her to the Meridian. Izzy followed and said, “You can tell from just looking at it?”

  “It’s one of the many languages I’m fluent in,” Salju said, cracking her knuckles. “I’ll take half now and half when you pick up. Should be ready by midday if I get started now.”

  Izzy sighed. She didn’t want to be there long, but no matter where she went next she’d need repairs. She began to pull some credits out of the inside of her jacket when Salju put her hand up. “Sorry, my dear. I can only take Batuuan spira, I’m afraid. You can get Dok-Ondar to exchange them for you, I’d wager.”

  Izzy could hardly contain her smile when she recognized the name. That was precisely whom she needed to see. She knew Black Spire Outpost was small, but was she so lucky? Her father had never believed in luck. For a man who’d once been a scholar, he spent a lot of time reminding her of the way the universe worked, moved and shaped by the Force itself. For the moment, she’d call it luck and count her riches when the job was done. Perhaps Dok-Ondar would see how quickly she’d brought his parcel and keep her in mind for future work.

  “I’ll head on over there, thanks.”

  “Oh, and if you’re looking for work,” Salju continued, “Dok’s been short on couriers the last few weeks. Both of his apprentices up and left, too.”

  Izzy arched her brow. “Is that normal?”

  Salju glanced around, pressing her hand to the side of the ship like she was waiting for the metal beast to literally speak to her. “There’s nothing like normal in BSO, but you’d know that, since you were from here and all. Work has slowed, what with—the new arrivals.”

  The last bit she said in a careful, hushed tone. She shook her head, and Izzy knew not to pry.

  “Right,” Izzy said. “Do you mind pointing me in Dok’s direction?”

  “Course,” Salju said, and pointed down a well-trekked road that led away from the station. “Take this road to the left and it’ll lead you straight to Merchant Row. Once you see the big statue of a Jedi priestess, you’ll know you’re there.”

  Salju’s energy was contagious. Izzy gripped the straps of her backpack and set off with a new smile on her face.

  “May your deals go well, Izzy!”

  Izzy hurried down the path. Fresh footprints marked the way. Already the vendors were setting up stalls, beating dust and errant dried leaves from canvas tarps with large sticks. The whirring and beeping of droids fought for her attention with the howling chirps coming from a tent. Dozens of cages in the tent were covered up tightly, though at least some of the critters inside were clearly awake. For a moment, Izzy considered lifting an edge of the fabric to get a look at what kind of creature might be beneath it, but a crash behind her made her jump. It seemed two vendors had collided. One of them was a heavily robed, white-bearded human who’d been wheeling a cart full of bright green fruit. A hooded Gran, with floppy ears and three eyes, had interrupted by laying out a rug in the very middle of the road to unload some wares. Both were waving their hands animatedly, snapping back and forth in Basic and guttural Huttese.

  Not wanting to stick around in case they got violent, Izzy kept walking. The previous night’s fight had been enough for her.

  When they’d lived on Batuu, her parents had rarely ventured into the Outpost. They were never recluses, but her mother wasn’t the kind of neighbor who was going to trade ronto stew recipes, either. She could count on one hand the number of times her father had taken her to the market with him—usually to buy spices and repair his beat-up datapad.

  Izzy touched the ring beneath her shirt and struggled to find more memories of the cobblestone streets and cylindrical structures built right into the ancient spires and stones. She wondered what it would be like to live inside one of those apartments. Somehow the metal domes and the petrified trees made sense together, marrying the world’s ancient past and present. Izzy drank in the colorful banners that hung overhead to shield market-goers from the suns. As she neared an obelisk in a courtyard, she stopped to listen to the chirping sounds of languages she’d never be well-versed in. Standing in the middle of the market just before it filled with bodies made her feel like the road was open just for her.

  Perhaps that was why she took a wrong turn at one of the courtyard archways. She kept an eye out for the big statue Salju had mentioned, but she second-guessed herself and doubled back. She took a right at a dark alley that smelled of puddle water and char. It looked like there had been a fire in one of the bins.

  That’s when a figure stepped out of the shadows. Izzy had seen First Order stormtroopers on the holonet feeds after what had happened to the Hosnian system. But she’d never seen one in person. The armor glistened white, with black seams marking joints, like a skeleton made of plastic. There was a high-powered blaster rifle strapped to his back. Why would he need that on a planet where there was no military presence?

  “What’s your business here?” he asked in a voice that sounded wrong, like it had come through a faulty holomessage.

  Izzy’s body betrayed her and froze. Why would the First Order be there of all places? There were busier ports that moved valuable exports elsewhere. Why Batuu? Her mouth dried up at the thought of the parcel in her pack—a parcel the contents of which she wasn’t supposed to ask about. Could there be something inside that might get her in trouble? When she took too long to answer, the trooper leaned forward.

  “Well?” His voice was hard and impatient.

  “It’s my first day at Dok-Ondar’s and I got a bit lost,” Izzy said, softening the edges of her voice.

  “What’s in the pack?”

  She was stupid for thinking that a display of innocence would have any effect on this kind of soldier. Staring at her own warped reflection in his helmet made her queasy and she felt even worse when she realized she might get sick on his boots. She hadn’t hesitated to pull the trigger on the gang member in the cantina the night before, but there was something purposely faceless about these particular helmets that unnerved her enough that it made her want to prove she’d done nothing wrong.

  Then the stormtrooper straightened, raising his hand to both silence her and let her know not to move.

  “On my way. Copy,” the trooper answered, then lowered his helmet toward Izzy. “Isn’t it your lucky day?”

  Then he turned and left her alone in the alley with a pounding heart. She ran back out onto the main road. There were more people crowding around stalls, and the sound of shuttles zooming overhead gave her small comfort. As if the stars had aligned for her, there was the statue Salju had mentioned. The Jedi looked severe, reverent in ways Izzy had never learned to be. Cargo crates were stacked against the cylindrical structure. She darted around the perimeter until she reached the domed entrance of Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities. She pressed the doorbell a couple of times, but nothing happened. She tugged on the straps of her backpack, shoulder blades aching, and tried to calm her frantic pulse. Why had that trooper bothered her so much?

  Perhaps it was a deep-seated memory; perhaps it was that she hadn’t recovered from the night before.

  She realized the doorbell was either broken or simply decorative. She raised her fist and banged. Behind her a silver-and-black protocol droid ambled along, herding what looked to be mud-covered piglets. At least she wouldn’t be bored on Batuu, she thought, then raised her fist to bang again.

  Only instead of hitting the door, her fist collided with a person.

  “Ow!” Jules exclaimed as his head snapped back. He cradled his nose with his hand, blood flowing down his lips and filling his mouth with a metallic tang. Despite the sharp pain blooming across his eyes, he reached blindly for a rag. His hand closed around
the nearest piece of cloth on a counter and used it to stop the gushing. He was vaguely aware of Tap laughing in the background and a voice repeating an apology.

  Jules was positive he’d used the same rag to clean the baby sarlacc terrarium a couple of nights before, but there was nothing else within reach.

  “I am so, so sorry,” said the girl who’d sucker punched him. She followed him inside the parlor.

  At once, Jules registered something: he knew this girl. His mind raced through memories, trying to place her high cheekbones and pointed chin. The delicate arch of her full upper lip. Her dark brows knit together over green eyes that stared at him as if he’d grown three heads. Looking at her made the pain around his tender, most likely broken septum hurt just a bit less. The door slid shut behind her, and the morning breeze rustled her black hair, which reminded Jules of the silk ribbons Dok imported from the tropical moon of Linasals.

  Where had she come from with her hit-first-apologize-later attitude? Jules was convinced he knew her. Not from Kat Saka’s farm, that was certain. The dark-green leather jacket, black leggings, and scuffed boots marked her as an off-worlder. There were hundreds, thousands of people who came and went in the Outpost—refueling, hawking wares from the back of clunky freighters, hiding from deals gone wrong, or going on sabacc benders at Oga’s Cantina. Those faces blurred together after a time, but the sight of this girl slammed into him with the strangest familiarity.

  “Are you okay?”

  Jules realized that she was asking him a question and had been attempting to talk to him the entire time he’d been trying to place her in his memory.

  “He’ll be fine,” Tap said in his high-pitched, know-it-all voice. “He gets hit on the head a lot.”

  The kid wasn’t wrong. Jules had taken quite a few hits over his lifetime, mostly from roughhousing with local friends, rock climbing in the Surabat River Valley, or tangling with off-worlders looking for an easy mark. But he thought he’d grown out of the latter.

  “Neither of you look okay,” Tap said, standing between them, bewildered eyes darting back and forth.

  The girl tilted her head to the side and narrowed her stare. He was sure she was trying to remember him, too—or assessing the damage. When she brushed her hair back, her jacket sleeve slid up and he noted the scars above her wrist. They stood out quartz white on her golden skin.

  Jules could see her then, a faded memory from so long before, he’d nearly buried it: a girl with fearless eyes, in a dirty dress at the top of a cliff. He vacillated between convincing himself that it couldn’t be her and being certain that it was. As a little boy, he’d stared at the sky in hopes of seeing the arc of her family’s ship, but it had never come back.

  He worked his lips and mind into forming words, and settled for a single one. “Izzy?”

  She gasped and took a step back. Her hand flew to the collar of her simple black shirt. He could practically hear the gears in her mind turning.

  Fortunately, blood had stopped spewing out of his face, so he lowered the rag. He bunched it in his hands because a part of him wanted to throw his arms around her and—say what? He’d been a farmer for so long, he almost reflexively wanted to ask how her crop yield was doing. What exactly did one say in that situation? How’s the weather in whatever world you came from? So, why are you back? Are you thirsty? Because I’m thirsty. He was practically short-circuiting. There was once a time when his days began and ended with the company of his best friend. Until they didn’t. Now she was standing there dressed in leather that looked like armor, with a blaster strapped to her thigh.

  She went rigid, straightening her shoulders against the heavy weight she carried, and the silence wound between them. Perhaps he’d imagined it. He could blame it on Volt’s Gut Rot—his mind playing tricks on him, dredging up memories from the past. It had been twelve years. No, thirteen. The Garseas had left before the fires.

  He had begun to talk himself out of the certainty that the girl before him was Izal Garsea when she said his name in a swift exhale. “Julen Rakab.”

  Then she lunged at him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He was too aware of his clumsy limbs as he embraced her, of his heart struggling to beat at a normal rate. The bridge of his nose throbbed, but when they stepped back and stared at each other, he didn’t care anymore.

  “I can’t—” they started to say at the same time.

  “You go first,” they said, once more in sync.

  Jules motioned for her to speak.

  “You’re—taller—than I remember,” she said, and he warmed at the surprise in her voice.

  Jules held out his arms and presented himself to her the way he’d seen some of Dok’s assistants greet wealthy potential buyers. Not that he was selling himself. Not that he was trying to sell her anything. He was overcome with a knot of frayed nerves like never before and was nearly thankful when Tap inserted himself directly between them.

  “Those deliveries aren’t going to carry themselves,” Tap muttered, turning to Izzy with small fists squared on his hips. He’d finally managed to free himself from the finger trap. “What do you want, then?”

  “I got this, Tap,” Jules said, and pulled the kid’s hat over his eyes, then gave him a shove back to his corner of the dimly lit shop.

  “My parents never let me come here when I was little,” Izzy said, eyes roaming the display cases. She wove around stacks of open crates, an Ewok headdress covered in feathers and teeth overflowing out of one of them.

  “All things considered, this is one of the safest places in the Outpost.” Jules shrugged. Then his eyes darted to the reinforced tank that housed a juvenile dianoga near the metal railing. He wasn’t sure if it was growing too big for its confinement or if it just liked to press its ferocious fanged underside against the glass. “But now I understand why some might object.”

  Izzy peered up at the taxidermic body of the wampa on the raised mezzanine, the creature’s last growl frozen for all eternity.

  “Is that real?” she asked.

  Jules felt his body answer before the rest of him. He went to her side in two long strides, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t curse his too-long legs. “As real as you or me. Dok prides himself on rare and authentic.”

  She flicked her gaze to him, then back to the beast. “You work here?”

  He didn’t want to get into the circumstances that had brought him to Dok’s that day. “For today. Usual staff seems to have taken off. Almost feel sorry for the ones who cross Dok-Ondar.”

  Izzy quirked her brows skeptically. “What happens when someone gets on his bad side? Slow torture by droids?”

  “You get fed to Toothy!” Tap piped up.

  “Ignore him,” Jules said. “The dianoga is only fed ronto meat. But if you plan to stick around the Outpost, you don’t want to get on the Doklist.”

  “The Doklist?” she asked, weighing a crystal ball in her hands. “Is that like being blacklisted?”

  “Around these parts you’re better off packing up and finding work on a distant moon and never coming back. My parents made that clear practically at the time we could walk.”

  “Mine failed to mention it.” She made a thoughtful sound and picked up one of the many glass jars filled with shimmering golden lichen. Despite her abrupt greeting, he got the feeling she was doing everything in her power to look at anything but him.

  “What are you doing here, Izzy?” he asked, voice lower than he’d intended.

  What did he want her to say? That she’d come back to the edge of the galaxy for him? Belen always reminded him he was a foolish dreamer, but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Izzy Garsea had returned just to see him after thirteen years.

  She took a deep breath and scanned the metal chandelier above. The Ithorian wind chimes had gone perfectly still. It was difficult for him to read her. How could he? She was practically as unknown to him as anyone who passed through the Outpost. Contrary to his current inability to think straight, usually
he was quite good at striking up conversations with strangers. It was the closest he’d get to knowing about the greater galaxy. For now.

  Izzy adjusted the strap of her pack and said, “I’m here to see Dok. I have a parcel he requested.”

  Tap lifted his head and joined the conversation again. “Dok’s not here, but you can leave it with us.”

  Izzy’s hand went to the bottom of her rucksack, much like the one Jules was wearing.

  “My instructions were to deliver to Dok and Dok only.”

  “Suit yourself.” Tap shrugged. “He stepped out, but he doesn’t stay gone for long.”

  Right then, Jules was overcome with the need to do anything to make her happy. For a fraction of a second, he even wanted to turn into a two-centuries-old Ithorian to make her day better and take away the lightning-bolt frown that marred her otherwise smooth brow.

  She muttered a curse under her breath, but then gave him a small smile. “I don’t suppose you could help me with changing credits to Batuuan spikes?”

  Tap snorted behind his hand.

  “Spira,” Jules gently corrected.

  “That, I can do.” Tap slid off the stool he’d been using and sauntered over. He hopped over the metal railing that encased the raised platform where Dok was usually stationed. Jules could hardly remember another time when the Ithorian hadn’t been there mulling over his illegible ledgers.

  “Thanks, kid,” Izzy said.

  Jules had his own work to get done, but he was grounded to the stone floor. He couldn’t rationalize his need to be seen by Izzy, truly seen. He wasn’t entitled to her attention, or time, or anything she didn’t want to give. They were virtually strangers. But the part of him that had searched the skies hoping to see her again longed for the friendship they’d once had. No one, not even Belen, had understood him the way Izzy had.

  That was long ago, he reminded himself.

  Julen Rakab believed in fate. It was a notion he’d learned from his mother. Between his parents, she was the dreamer, the one who found a bit of hope and goodness in any situation. She believed that there were things brewing in the wide galaxy that couldn’t always be explained. Whether it was the movement of the planets, ancient deities, or the Force—something was at work. Haal, his brother-in-law, liked to make fun of Jules for trying to string together mundane events and call them “fate.”