Star Wars: I Am a Slave ✓

Chapter 25 - I Am No One

Rey awoke the next day with a blinding headache. She rolled out of her hammock and crawled up to the deck with the refreshers. She took a rag and soaked it in cool water, placing it on her forehead before crawling back into her hammock. Her brain was very foggy. She knew her name. She knew where she was. She knew not much else—her brain could not even tell her how to stop the pain.

Ani watched as Rey suffered the effects of the mindwipe, helpless to do anything for her. As soon as she was asleep again, he prepped some bread from a ration packet for her and left it by her hammock with her canteen of water. And he waited.

Rey awoke as the sun reached its zenith, raising the temperature inside the walker to unbearable heights. Her headache seemed to have dissipated, but her rag on her forehead was dry. She reached for her canteen to quench her thirst and found a piece of bread next to it.

I must have been out of my mind. I don't remember making bread or leaving it there. She took a bite of it, letting the carbohydrates sink into her body. After a few minutes, her sugar level increased, and she was able to roll out of the hammock.

She grabbed her bag and her staff, climbed onto her speeder, and headed out to one of the old TIE fighters a few kilometers away from the Ravager. The Ravager had a few pieces left on it, but none that were accessible right now.

The wind was blowing yet again, moving swaths of sand across the desert. The grains got into her eyes, her mouth, her ears—everywhere. She took her scarf and covered her mouth, nose, and ears. 

The heat was almost unbearable, but she had to scavenge some more. She did not have a lot of rations left, and she needed some other supplies as well.

After flying across the desert floor for almost an hour, Rey came up on a snub fighter and two TIEs in the sand. She jumped down from the speeder and raced to the first TIE, her scanner in hand. Fortunately, no radiation. She checked over the other two ships carefully, which also came back as clean.

The TIEs seemed to have been picked over thoroughly already, which was not surprising, since they were both almost out of the sand. The A-Wing on the other hand was still in good condition, with only the cockpit showing above the sand. The pilot was still in the cockpit, even.

Rey cleared the sand from the grooves of the canopy and worked the latch open. The springs had frozen with dust contamination, so Rey had to thrust the canopy up with all of her strength.

The corpse was all bones now, with a little flesh baked on in hard strings. Rey hauled at it and thrust it from the cockpit.

Something went flying from the pilot's neck. Rey scuttled down the sand dune and grabbed it. It was a pair of macroquadnoculars. She adjusted the controls and found that one of the nocs still worked, but was blurry. She shoved it in her bag to fiddle with it back at her workbench on the walker.

The sun beat down on her all afternoon as she pulled out the electronics from the A-Wing. She finished two canteens of water before the sun started to set.

Using her knife, she scratched "Rey" into the top of the hull near the canopy, claiming the vehicle as her own. Unlike the Ravager, there was an unwritten rule among the scavengers of Jakku that once a small ship was claimed everyone kept their hands off it—well, usually. Sometimes, if it was too good a find to ignore, scavengers would turn into thieves.

Rey returned to her walker that evening and fiddled with the macroquadnoculars. She was able to get one of the lenses working adequately—if she squeezed the fitting hard with two fingers and pressed down on the filter. Since Unkar would not pay anything for this piece of scrap, Rey decided to hold onto it for her own use.

What she really needed, though, were some goggles to block the glare of the sun and keep the sand out of her face during the windstorms.

She scraped another day mark in the side of the walker as she prepared her food. In her portion stack she noticed one portion was missing the bread but still had the green meat. She cooked up the extra meat, figuring she must have cooked the bread the night before while she was blinded by that headache.

While eating her dinner outside on the sand shaded by one of the walker's feet, she looked above to see a ship take off from Tuanul Village, about fifty kilometers away. She watched as its booster streaked a long white cloud across the sky behind it as it winked out of sight into space. Rey licked her metal dish clean, and returned to the walker.

She grabbed her helmet and climbed to the other side of the dune, where her X-wing fighter was camouflaged. After removing the netting, she reconnected the hoses to the engine and began the start-up cycle. While performing her pre-flight check, the engine hummed and whistled properly. Rey hopped in the cockpit and lifted off.

She zoomed across the desert, down the Crackle, up the Spike, through the Goazan Badlands, across Kelvin Ridge. The X-wing performed flawlessly, thanks to all the minor modifications she had made on it the last few years. There was nothing like soaring into the clouds to clear your head.

But when did I learn how to fly? What happened yesterday?

I must have hit my head or something. I know my name. I know what I do. But I don't know much else.

I am no one.