Aftermath: Star Wars by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online Page B

blaster of elegant, mirrored chrome.
    “Please,” he says, clutching his shoulder, favoring his leg.
    She takes three steps into the room. “I cannot have you complicating what’s about to happen. The future of the Empire—of the whole galaxy—is at stake.” And then, a flash of surprising empathy. “I’m sorry.”
    “Wait. Let’s talk this out.” He swallows hard, wincing. “It’s over. You know it’s over. We can negotiate a surrender, a
meaningful
surrender. Right here, right now, you and I can—”
    Behind her, a small squadron of stormtroopers catch up, their armored boots clattering in the hall behind her. They raise their blasters as she lowers hers. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she says. Then, to her backup: “Arrest him. Take him to detention level— No. Wait.” She snaps her fingers. “Have him shackled and taken to my shuttle. Have a medical droid in attendance.” With a stiff smile she says (as if for his approval): “We are not animals.”

For years, Norra did not weep.
Could
not weep. She joined the Rebel Alliance as a pilot and when the decision was made—a decision made less in her head and more in her gut—she cinched everything up. Put extra steel in her spine. All the fears and worries and emotions became extraneous things: anchors, she thought, mooring her to an old life, to an old way of thinking. If she was going to make it through this, then she had to cut those fetters with a cold, merciless knife. Leave them behind her.
    The Alliance deserved that much from her. This fight afforded them no time for weeping. They did not possess the luxury of looking back.
    Since she joined the fight, she has had two moments when she wept. The first was only months earlier, after the battle over Endor had concluded; after she and her Y-wing (and her laser-crisped astromech) emerged from the labyrinth of half-constructed passages inside the second Death Star—just escaping in a plume of flame as the whole thing began to implode and then explode behind her, the shock waves causing her little fighter to tumble end-over-end until she almost passed out. That night, she sat alone in a changing room on the star cruiser
Home One
, and sitting there half in and half out of her jumpsuit, she wept. Like a baby without its mother. Hard, racking sobs hit her like crashing waves until she was curled up on the floor, feeling gutted. A day later, she got her medal. She smiled, turned toward the applause of the crowd. She didn’t show them how stripped-down and scraped-clean she really felt.
    The second time is right here, right now. Holding her son and feeling his arms around her in turn. The tears that spill now are not the throttling sobs of that night months ago, but tears of happiness (and though she is hesitant to admit it, even in her own mind, of shame). It feels like a completed circuit: What she lost that night in the battle is returned right here, right now. Then she felt gutted. Now she feels filled up once more.
    And then, everything snaps forward. Time unfixes its feet from this slow, perfect moment (she has not seen her son in years, after all), and suddenly Temmin reveals himself less a child and more a man: He’s young, but starting to grow into himself. Lean, ropy, a muss of dark hair sprouting up off the top of his head. He’s snapping to the strange battle droid on the floor, clapping his hands: “Bones. Pull the speeder around back. We need to load these slime-guzzling Hutt-mothers up and you need to fly them out
far as you can
along the Trabzon Road, I’m talking all the way to the Kora Biedies—” Here he turns to her and says: “These eddies of water where the river meets the road. Rapids.” Then back to the droid: “You hear me, Bones?”
    The B1 battle droid stands up, all the bones dangling from its body rattling as it does. The mechanical man gives an awkward salute and in a garbled, distorted voice says: “ROGER-ROGER. BODIES BEGONE, MASTER.”
    Then the robot hums a