Zoraida Cordova - A Crash of Fate

“You can wait here if you’d like,” he said, and when she looked at him, she saw just how young he was. What had she been doing at ten? Learning how to clean a blaster in the cargo bay of her mother’s ship, she realized.

She fished inside the pack for her caf beans and the holocomm Pall Gopal had given her to contact him. Perhaps if the Rodian told her she could give the parcel to Tap, she could be on her way off this world.

“No,” she muttered as she pulled out a dented silver briefcase. It was roughly the same size as hers, but there was no keypad on it. “Nononono.”

“No, what?” Tap asked, the beeping of rapid explosions from his game matching the speed of her heart.

Even as she examined the pack, brown and worn, she knew where she’d gone wrong. If she closed her eyes she could see herself reach into the cockpit, her mind so full of emotion she couldn’t think straight. She’d grabbed Jules’s pack.

That meant Jules was about to hand hers to someone else.

“Where’s Jules?” she shouted at the kid.

“You were just with him.”

“Please, Tap,” she said, shoving the contents back where they belonged. “I need to find him, or all of us are getting on Dok’s blacklist.”

“The Doklist ?” Tap set his game down long enough to see her panic. “He’d go to Hondo’s and then work his way back to Oga’s.”

“Where is Hondo’s?”

With Tap’s quick directions, Izzy took off as fast as she could manage. She wove through the throng of bodies clogging the arteries of the market’s heart. Her rapid feet moved to the pharynx flute music coming from one of the stalls. Why hadn’t she borrowed a speeder from Salju so she’d never need to accept a ride from Jules? Why hadn’t she stayed with him in the first place? She wanted to blame it all on seeing Damar and Ana Tolla, on their presence on Batuu rattling her nerves, but she knew it was more than that. Being around Jules had made her start to feel things she wasn’t used to feeling, and she wanted to put as much distance as she could between herself and that planet. Her own carelessness was why she’d switched their backpacks. She couldn’t let something like that happen again. She stopped in front of the stall with the pharynx flute and realized she’d been going in circles.

“Stop, think,” she said, but her own panic was getting the best of her. She picked a direction and went with it. She was practically born there for sky’s sake. It shouldn’t feel so strange .

“Izzy!” A hooded figure a few meters ahead shouted her name. Her first reaction was to turn back around. Only Jules and Ana Tolla’s crew knew her there. But when the figure called her name again and waved, she could see the blue and white of the Togruta’s montrals under the hood of his tunic. It was Neelo and Fawn, and they were in a speeder.

“Hey!” She caught up to the stalled speeder. She didn’t think she could be so happy to see people she’d only met in passing. Their speeder was weighted down with encased instruments strapped down by ropes.

“Where are you off to so quickly?” Neelo asked.

“I need to find Jules. Can you give me a lift to Hondo’s?”

“We’re on our way to practice over there,” Fawn said, sliding to the middle of the speeder’s seat, next to Neelo.

“Where do you practice?” Izzy asked, hopping in.

Fawn, the human boy, ran a hand over the tight curls in the center of his head, the sides buzzed short. Two black earrings had stretched out his earlobes. “Since tourism is down the last few weeks, Oga rents us docking bay four to practice.”

“Oga hates that, but she’ll take the spira where she can.”

“Besides, my mom hates it when we play in the house.”

Izzy white-knuckled the side of the seat, her hair whipping behind her as they flew. The dry air felt good on her sweaty skin, and the faint smell of smoke and exhaust let her know they were near their destination. “I appreciate it.”

“No doubt,” Neelo said. “Any friend of Jules is a friend of ours.”

She grinned despite the rest of her body flashing with panic. “Jules has a lot of friends here.”

Fawn turned to Izzy, a twinkle in his brown eyes. “No girlfriend, though, in case you were wondering.”

“I was not wondering,” Izzy said, but she had definitely been wondering. “I’m only here for a few more hours.”

Neelo tapped the dash like it was his drums. She’d known enough musicians to know that they always had a rhythm waiting to be tapped out by their fingers, their toes, and whatever other limbs were free. Even the Rodian musician/spy/whatever he was, Pall, hadn’t been able to stop fiddling with the rim of his glass, trying to coax sound out of it, while they talked.

“What’s so urgent that you can’t stick around for a little longer? You’re young! Live a little or a lot but you’ve got to live.”

Musicians , she thought.

“The last time I checked I had a pulse, so by all definitions I’m living.”

“You know what I mean!” Neelo said, and Fawn laughed. “What’s the point of racing around the galaxy if you aren’t going to have fun?”

“I know how to have fun!” she said defensively.

Was that why Damar had left her? Because she’d stopped being fun? He’d mesmerized her at first with his strange gray eyes and pretty words. They’d taken on jobs, many of which had failed. For a time, it didn’t feel like failure. It felt like adventure. But she’d grown tired of always being responsible for getting them out of trouble with officials. The less work they could find, the angrier she’d become. And yet, she had been afraid to ask him to leave.

She shook her head. No, that was not the reason he’d left. He had left her because he had chosen someone else, someone who could give him things Izzy couldn’t—a crew, adventure, danger. Izzy did not want to be Ana Tolla, not even remotely. But hadn’t she said she’d prove Pall Gopal and her old crew wrong? If they could see her, hitching a ride with two musicians to chase after a boy she hated saying good-bye to, they’d laugh at her.

“Remember what I said about living.” Neelo flashed his white teeth. He stopped and powered down the speeder on a busy pad where a shiny hexagonal Avent100-series light freighter was parked.

She kissed both of her drivers on the cheek. If not for them, she’d still be running over there and most likely turning down another wrong alley. If only cities were as easy for her to maneuver as infinite space. “Thank you, both. Have a good practice!”

Izzy was overwhelmed by the number of people on the maintenance pad. There were hundreds of crates, packages of all sizes, and barrels and buckets of shipments waiting to be loaded into different ships. The hangars appeared to have been built into a curved wall of connected spires. She searched for Jules on the main level. He was so tall he should have stuck out among everyone else, but she was once again going in circles.

A Karkarodon was shouting orders. Izzy froze for a moment at the sight of the jagged teeth lining the arch of its mouth. Its long webbed feet slapped the landing pad. Waving pointy webbed fingers, the Karkarodon was a musical conductor, if the symphony was all mismatched instruments playing in different keys. It clutched a datapad against its broad chest, though it did slap the datapad on the rough blue skin of its head twice in so many seconds. Izzy watched as the Karkarodon pressed a button on what looked like a habitat-regulating bodysuit. It released vapor that the sharklike alien inhaled through the slits of its nose. Though Izzy found Batuu humid, she couldn’t imagine what an aquatic being felt like on land. The shark-headed being pulled a silver key card from a hip pocket, and the large metal door slid open.