Rose ran through the cell block after Finn, grateful that at least the wailing alarms were covering the sound of their footsteps. On either side of them, grimy humans and aliens pressed up against the bars of their cells, hollering to be let out, shouting encouragement, or simply reveling in a break in the monotony of captivity.
Over the din, Rose heard shouts behind her. Finn skidded to a stop and she almost plowed into his broad back. Before she could protest, she spotted glow rods bobbing in the gloom ahead of them.
They were trapped.
Rose looked around frantically—and spotted a grating in the floor. A foul smell wafted up from it.
“Finn! Help me!”
Finn heaved, teeth gritted. The metal groaned and the grate came free. Rose scrambled down a rickety-looking ladder into the darkness, Finn squeezing himself into the shaft above her.
“Put the grate back!” she called up to him.
“I can’t—not all the way,” Finn said, his voice strained by the effort. “It’s too heavy.”
“Then forget it,” Rose said, and the ladder shook as he hurried down after her.
They found themselves in a stone sewer, too low for Finn to stand without stooping slightly. Fortunately, there was only a trickle of fetid water flowing through the middle of the space.
“Which way?” Rose asked, looking left and right and trying not to gag. “Ugh, it smells even worse this way. Let’s go that way.”
Before she got more than a step, Finn grabbed her arm.
“It slopes down that way,” he pointed out.
“So?”
“So what if it comes out in the sea?”
“Then it comes out in the sea.”
“What if it comes out in the middle of the sea? How long can you hold your breath?”
“We’ll need to hold our breath going that way, too,” Rose objected. “Or we’ll suffocate.”
“That way at least there’s air.”
“Bad air.”
They glared at each other. Then a boot heel hit the grate above them.
“We go this way,” Finn said, pointing to the right.
“We go this way,” Rose said at the same time, pointing to the left.
“What do you want to do, a round of wonga winga?” Finn asked.
It was the stupidest idea Rose had ever heard. And she couldn’t think of anything better. She threw up her hands, scowling, as Finn held up a finger, pointing left.
“Wonga winga cingee wooze, which of these do I choose?” they recited together, Finn’s finger oscillating back and forth, like a pendulum. “Stars above and stars below, show me now which way to go.”
It pointed right, toward the bad air. Finn grinned. Rose scowled and hurried after him, into the foul air.
“Who knew they taught wonga winga in the Stormtrooper Corps?” Rose muttered.
Finn looked back over his shoulder, an annoyingly smug smile on his face. “Me. They also taught us you always win if you start with the choice you don’t want.”
“Cheater,” Rose grumbled. But she couldn’t help smiling back, just a little.
The tunnel ran on for about a kilometer, dimly lit by a strip of maintenance lighting. The smell grew steadily worse, until Rose’s eyes stung and she thought she would gag. Just as Rose was beginning to worry that the tunnel would never end, they encountered another ladder—one that emerged from a dark mound whose origins Rose could figure out all too readily.
“After you,” she said, turning away in disgust. It occurred to her that even Paige—who’d loved all animals from tookas to slime molds—would have opted to skip this particular experience.
Finn shrugged and scrambled up the ladder, paying considerably less attention to where he put his feet than Rose would have. She followed him up the ladder more carefully, grimacing, and emerged next to him in a dark, dimly lit space.
“That smelled great,” Finn said, scraping his boot against the top rung of the ladder. He looked around, puzzled. “What is this?”
They were in a long, pillared hall of brick and stone, with wooden gates on either side of them and a floor littered with straw. Rose wrinkled her nose—there was a strong smell up here, too.
A massive, milky-white head appeared over the wooden gate next to them, regarding them curiously. It had wide, winglike ears, deep, worried-looking eyes, and a short snout.
Startled, Finn slipped and fell, winding up on the stable floor. He moaned, but Rose ignored him. The animal was a fathier.
More heads appeared above the gates. Some of the fathiers’ hides were crisscrossed with pale scars.
Moving slowly so as not to startle it, she peeked over the first fathier’s gate, the animal snuffling at her and murmuring something. The beast itself didn’t smell bad—its odor reminded Rose of grass and sweat, but faintly spicy somehow. Its stall was barely larger than it was—it didn’t have enough room to lie down or turn around.
In the middle of all this wealth, too.
Startled, a small boy sat up behind the fathier, scooting back to where his rough cot met the wall. He stared at her, frightened, and fumbled for a red button on the wall.
“No no no!” Finn yelped.
“We’re with the Resistance!” Rose said at the same time.
The stableboy looked at her doubtfully from beneath a frayed cap. Rose fumbled with her ring—the one Fossil had given her in memory of her sister. She activated the hidden catch on its side, revealing the insignia of the old Rebel Alliance.
The fathier nickered plaintively. Rose held her breath as the boy studied the ring. Then a smile crept across his face.
When the police burst into the stable, blasters drawn, two things happened almost at once. First a massive door slid aside, opposite the row of fathier stalls. Then every gate on the stalls snapped open and the hapless officers were left spinning in the dust and straw as twenty fathiers leapt free of the confines of their pens, jostling to be first through the door leading to the empty racetrack beyond.
As the officers picked themselves up and stared after the departing fathiers, the stableboy grinned and crept away from the control panel he’d activated, looking down happily at the ring with the Alliance crest where it bobbled on his finger.
Rose clung to the lead fathier—the herd’s matriarch, the boy had explained in halting Basic—as her first steps exploded into a full gallop. In her ear, Finn let out an astonished yelp as the world began pitching violently up and down around them.
Rose knew a grin was plastered across her face. She’d been nervous when the stableboy had hastily buckled a saddle onto the matriarch’s back and indicated—with a wide grin—that they should climb aboard. But Finn had been little short of terrified.
Despite their nerves, the matriarch had accepted both Rose’s presence and the unaccustomed additional weight of Finn. Her sides quivered between Rose’s knees and her ears twitched, and somehow Rose knew: She wanted to run.
Around them, the racetrack was empty but lit up as if it were broad daylight instead of the middle of the night. Rose wanted to rear up in the saddle so her legs could better keep her in place atop the hurtling fathier, but she couldn’t with Finn plastered to her back, hands locked around her waist. There was nothing to do except hold on to the animal’s neck as best she could.
Rose could feel the matriarch’s enormous lungs working beneath her hide, and the muscles of her neck and legs working in synchronization. It was like being atop a living machine—one built with exquisite precision to maximize speed.
She was terrified and exhilarated—and aching for Paige to have been able to see this.
This isn’t a daydream or a story we’re making up in the ball turret so we can forget about the war for a moment. Pae-Pae, this is real—I’m riding a fathier!
The fathier’s head slammed up and down as she ran, her ears pushed back behind her by the wind. Rose could feel the blood pumping beneath her arms where they were pressed against the beast’s graceful neck.
“Stop enjoying this!” Finn yelled in her ear.
Police speeders rose into view above the track and Rose could see their weapons rotate, trying to get a fix on the matriarch and the herd sprinting behind her. But then the fathier matriarch snorted and lowered her head, as if she had a plan.
“Ohhh—hang on!” Rose yelled as she realized what that plan was.
She ducked, pressing her head against the fathier’s neck as the matriarch crossed the infield, churning up grass, and smashed through the window behind one of the casino’s bars. Glasses and chairs flew, and Rose could hear people screaming. Finn’s face was between her shoulder blades.
Rose looked up and saw the blur of the casino floor around them. Gamblers were diving over tables and piling up in panicked heaps, yelling in terror. Server droids stood stock-still, pivoting their trays rapidly this way and that to avoid the herd. Bouncers were screaming and trying to stay upright amid the tide of fleeing guests. Elderly women in glittering gowns managed to leap atop pazaak tables while smartly uniformed croupiers sought shelter below them. Chance cubes and cards and coins and purses and monocles and drinks and utensils and coasters and canapés wheeled in midair.
Oh, it was glorious. Every vacationing arms dealer doing an involuntary cartwheel made Rose want to cheer.
The fathiers stormed into the lobby. A valet stood, staring and paralyzed, in front of the matriarch. She shouldered him into a pond filled with ornamental fish—carnivorous ornamental fish, to judge from the sudden frenzy in the water. The automatic doors ahead of them obediently opened and the matriarch leapt into the air, mashing the outline of her hooves into the hood of a fancy speeder, then barreling up the boulevard.
Rose felt as if she were flying. She was pouring sweat, breathing hard with the effort of keeping herself upright in the saddle. Her legs ached and she didn’t care.
Behind them, the herd pursued the matriarch, drawn out like a string in her wake. She somehow picked up the pace, her speed creating a tunnel of air and noise around Rose. Tables and chairs flew as the herd obliterated an outdoor café, separating bleary-eyed night-shift workers from their cups of caf. Behind her, Rose could hear the jangle of police sirens, the wails of terrified onlookers, the crash of windows shattering, and the hollow clomp of fathier hooves denting speeders.
Rose was laughing out loud now. How many times had she and Paige imagined themselves the heroes of adventures in which they rescued fathiers from sleazy owners, guiding them to victory and watching their abusers laid low? But the Tico sisters had never dreamed of this much delightful destruction.
Rose patted the matriarch, who quirked an ear as one of Old City’s plazas rocketed by around them.
She loves wrecking this awful place as much as I do!
The matriarch lunged sideways, ducking into an alley, then leapt up onto a low rooftop. Rose yelped as the fathier hurtled the gaps between the buildings, scanning for a route across the city. Ahead of them, a rooftop skylight glowed in the night.
“No no no—” Rose yowled as the matriarch turned toward the light. Then she was pressing her head into the warm hide as the skylight exploded around the fathier, plunging downward with her legs braced for impact.
They landed, hard enough to knock the air out of Rose’s lungs. Finn was screaming in her ear and she wanted to tell him to cut it out but couldn’t. It was sweltering and the air was full of steam—they were in a sauna, she realized.
“Oh, sands,” exclaimed a long-armed masseur.
A diminutive pink alien clutched at his towel, single eye staring, as the matriarch sprang back into motion. A charcoal-colored, slablike alien yelped from atop a masseuse’s table as the herd turned the room to kindling before crashing back into the street in an explosion of flying glass.
“Yeahhhh!” Rose screamed, her joyous defiance turning into a moan of fear as police speeders swooped down in their path, spotlights turned on them. The matriarch rocketed into a narrow alley. Strings of decorative lights stretched and snapped, and Rose cringed at the stone walls blurring by on either side of her, convinced that her knees would be smashed at any second.
Ahead of them, the alley terminated in a dead end.
Rose could hear herself screaming—but she could also feel the matriarch’s muscles coiling beneath her. Rose’s stomach fluttered as she sprang into the air, the wall of Old City passing just below her belly, and landed in loose gravel and sand. The rest of the herd came down behind her, grunting and snorting, chasing the matriarch across the beach.
Moonlight glimmered on the surface of the sea.
She could see the pale shape of the shuttle, still sitting where Finn had plowed it into the beach. It wasn’t far away—they might even make it.
Then it exploded, ripped apart by a fusillade of full-intensity laserfire from the police speeders.
“Aw, come on!” Finn yelled.
Blasterfire whined around them and blue rings struck the edges of the herd and one fathier tumbled end over end, stunned and helpless. The matriarch snorted and froth flew from her muzzle.
Ahead of her, the beach rose, climbing a bluff. The matriarch took it at a sprint, her hooves scrambling for purchase in the loose sand, and raced along a rocky ledge above the water.
Police vehicles were alongside them now, firing into the herd. Fathiers tumbled off the ledge, falling toward the beach.
“This is a shooting gallery!” Finn screamed. “Get us out!”
Rose yanked on the matriarch’s neck, trying to alert her to the danger, but she knew there was only one way forward and sped up a crumbling path that struck Rose as terrifyingly narrow, her hooves slinging gouts of sand in her wake.
They emerged in a broad meadow, a green oasis in the middle of the Cantonican desert. The tall grass crackled and shooshed as the matriarch pounded through it, up to her flanks in greenery.
Rose leaned hard to the right, urging the matriarch that way. She raised her head and called to the rest of the herd before obeying, cutting across the field as Rose had asked. The rest of the herd remained on its earlier course.
“Is it working?” Finn yelled.
Rose watched the spotlights swing from the other fathiers to the matriarch.
“They’re letting the herd go!” she yelled. “Now if we can just—”
“Cliff!” Finn shouted.
The matriarch skidded to a halt, digging up skeins of grass and dirt. Rose and Finn were flung over her head, tumbling through the sweet-smelling grass. Rose wound up on her belly, just short of the cliff’s edge. She peeked over it, legs shaking, and saw it dropped at least a hundred meters to the water below.
“Can you swim?” Finn asked.
“Not when I’m dead,” she replied. “We’re trapped.”
The matriarch stood in the grass, sides heaving. Behind her, the police speeders were hurtling toward them, spotlights searching the meadow.
“Well, it was worth it to tear up that town,” Finn said, waiting for the speeders with his shoulders slumped. “Make ’em hurt.”
Rose shot a surprised look his way. Was this the same Finn who’d seemed happy to hang around the hazard-toss tables and cabarets?
The matriarch was still breathing hard. Rose’s fingers worked at the straps of her saddle, loosening it and then letting it slide off into the grass.
“Thank you,” she told the animal quietly, then reached into her jumpsuit to touch her medallion.
They’re even more beautiful than you said they were, Pae-Pae.
The matriarch looked at her, either reluctant to leave them or too tired to go. Rose slapped her flank and she trotted away, breaking into a canter that took her across the meadow, back toward the other members of her herd. Above, the police spotlights followed the fathier briefly, then snapped back to Rose and Finn.
Rose watched the matriarch go and smiled.
“Now it’s worth it,” she said, and waited for the police speeders to descend and take them back to jail.
A different sound reached her ears—the whining hum of well-tuned ion engines.
Rose turned and her mouth opened in shock as a luxury star yacht rose from the cleft in the bluffs, hovering in front of them.
A hatch opened on the side of the yacht and an orange-and-white astromech whistled at them.
“Beebee-Ate, are you flying that thing?” Finn yelled.
The answering beeps were accusatory.
“No, we were coming back for you!” Finn said. “Come on, pick us up!”
Then, behind BB-8, DJ stepped into view.
“Oh, you need a lift?” he asked. “Say the magic words.”
Finn considered. “Pretty please?”
But Rose knew all too well what DJ was waiting to hear.
“You’re hired,” she said grimly.