Chapter Text
“Karabast!”
The cries of the dark-haired boy rang over the vast stretch of sand, as he brought his fist down on the searing panels of his starship for the twentieth time since he’d crashed that morning.
Rey watched him from the entrance of her walker, half in fascination, half in fear, and filed that curse away in her memory as she took another enthusiastic bite of insta-bread.
The boy had crashed nearly an hour ago, lodging half his ship in the crest of a sand dune in what she’d assumed was an attempt to soften his landing. Since then, she’d watched him try nearly everything to get it up and running again, but to no avail.
At any other time of day, she speculated, chewing thoughtfully, he might have been successful. But his attempts had been thwarted by the midday sun, which had heated the steel ship so that it was impossible to touch. The heat was coming off it in visible waves, and the boy, standing beside it in thick brown robes, looked on the point of collapse. He’d already burned pretty badly; the pale ones always did.
When she’d finished eating, he was still there, sitting with his arms around his knees in the shade of one of the wings. She wondered how long she’d have to wait for him to abandon it. He seemed persistent, and she guessed she might be waiting there past nightfall, unless he fainted or froze before then.
But when she came back from setting away her dish he was gone. Eagerly, she pulled on her gloves and darted out of the walker; she’d have to work quickly, a new crash always brought a swarm. The sand grew warmer beneath her feet the further out she got, and as she drew nearer she could feel the heat coming off the metal like a second sun.
She double checked her gloves for any exposed skin and examined the ship carefully. She didn’t know much about what ships were called, she’d only ever been taught the names of their parts, but she could tell just by looking at this one that it was special. In all the six years of her short life, she’d never seen anything like it.
Double engines and a curved front, all separate from the spacious inner cabin, had hardly been dented in the fall, any damage must have been to the interior technical system, but that could be easily fixed. She wondered, as she began to pry of a bit of the polished chrome paneling, how he could have abandoned such a wonderful thing so easily.
“Gotcha!”
Suddenly a pair of arms were around her, and she was entrapped by hands almost as big as her head
“Let me go!” she screamed, kicking instinctively; but the more she struggled the stronger the stranger’s grip became.
Rey felt herself gripped by a wave of terror, larger and more suffocating than the last. The stranger must have been crushing her ribs so that she couldn’t breathe.
As a last desperate attempt at escape, she threw her head backward, unsure of what she might achieve in doing so.
“Dank Farrick you little—”
Apparently it worked. The stranger’s grip loosened, and she took that moment to bolt.
She scurried down the dune as fast as her legs would take her, ignoring the throbbing pain in the back of her head, and tumbled the last meter or so. She could feel the hot sand seeping into her shoes and clothes, and it hurt to run, but she couldn’t stop. She ran for the only place with some semblance of shelter. She ran until she could run no more.
Her legs gave out and she felt herself tumble again, the sun flashing in her eyes as she rolled.
The last thing she felt was the throbbing ache of her head and the pulsing heat of the sandy ground.