SURPRISED BY HIS sister’s sudden cry, Milo’s shot went wide, and the net wrapped uselessly around a tree.

“Lina! It got away!” he moaned as the ash-rabbit leapt back into the undergrowth.

“Like I care!” came Lina’s voice from above.

Milo looked up to see Lina hanging upside down, wrapped in barbed vines.

“What are you doing up there?”

“Getting up close and personal with nature!”

CR-8R crashed through the trees. “Mistress Lina, you appear to have been snared by creepervines!”

“I had noticed, thanks.”

“They’re fascinating,” CR-8R added. “Why, just three years ago, your father recorded an incident where they skeletonized a bantha in only—”

“Not helpful,” snapped Lina, looking up into the canopy. The creepers stretched down from a fleshy body with a wide, snarling mouth. She had to get free, but the vines were too strong.

“Where’s my fusioncutter?” she said, feeling for her tool belt.

“You mean this?” Milo shouted up from the ground. He was holding a long tubelike device in his hand. It must have fallen out of her belt when the creepers grabbed her.

“Throw it up to me.”

Her brother tried, but it dropped uselessly back down. She was too high, and getting higher by the second.

“Crater, you try!”

“Gladly,” CR-8R said, snatching up the tool. “Of course, the interesting thing about creepervines is that they largely hunt by sound. Stay quiet and they may lose interest.”

Lina looked up at the open mouth that was getting closer with every passing moment.

“Not going to happen, Crater. Just throw it!”

Spinning a manipulator arm like a propeller, CR-8R sent the fusioncutter soaring up to Lina. She stretched out, but the tool flew straight past her.

“Oops,” said CR-8R, “I may have miscalculated the required distance.”

Lina watched as the cutter arced up into the canopy, only to be plucked from the air by a small bony hand.

“Morq!” Lina shouted in joy, as the rust-colored monkey-lizard jumped down and landed on her legs. Nimbly avoiding a grabbing vine, Morq scampered down her body to press the fusioncutter into her hand.

Lina pulled herself up, fighting the pressure of her ever-tightening restraints, and fired the tool. She sliced through the creepers at her feet and felt the vines loosen, but there was no time to celebrate. With a cry, Lina and Morq plunged into a huge puddle.

“You okay?” Milo asked.

“No thanks to you,” Lina shot back, wincing as she tried to push herself up.

CR-8R whirred over to examine her throbbing shoulder. “Mild bruising, that’s all.”

“Doesn’t feel mild,” Lina complained.

Pulling her tunic’s collar aside, the droid gave the offending shoulder a quick blast with his bacta-spray. “That should reduce the swelling until we get back to your parents.”

Lina looked down at herself. Her clothes were in tatters and she was drenched from head to foot. “Mom’s going to lose it!”

“Not if she doesn’t know,” Milo said. “We can get changed before she even notices.”

Lina gave her brother a withering look. “And what about Crater? You gonna wipe his memory?”

The droid looked appalled. “He most certainly is not!”

“Which is exactly why you should have left him behind!” Milo said, storming through the trees with Morq perched on his shoulder. “No, in fact—you should have stayed there yourself. At least then you wouldn’t have made me lose the rabbit.”

Lina splashed after him. “I made you miss it? Lo-Bro, you couldn’t hit a sleeping rancor with a net gun!”

“Don’t call me that!” Milo hated when she used the nickname she’d given him when he was little.

“Now, that’s enough,” cut in CR-8R. “Arguing isn’t going to fix Master Milo’s speeder bike or—”

The droid froze, both midair and midsentence.

“Crater?” Lina said, concerned. “You okay?”

“Receiving data,” the droid reported, his voice more stilted than usual. “Processing.”

“Data? Where from?”

“Mistress Rhyssa.”

“From Mom?” Milo groaned. “She’s mad, isn’t she?”

CR-8R didn’t respond but shook his head as if trying to wake himself up.

“Crater, do you need to reboot?”

“No,” the droid replied. “All my systems are working perfectly, thank you very much.”

“So, what’s the data?” asked Lina.

“I’m not sure. It’s heavily encrypted.”

“Decode it then!”

“What do you think I’m doing? The binary language your mother has used is positively archaic. No one has spoken it in centuries.”

“Well, if you’re not up to the job,” teased Milo.

“I am more than capable, thank you. It will just take time.”

“Time that we don’t have,” said Lina, glancing up at the sky. “We better take a look at your speeder.”

Milo’s shoulders dropped when he saw his bike lying in the water. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I may have flooded the intake a little.”

“And the rest,” said Lina, pushing past him to flip open the bike’s access hatch. “Look at it. There’s marshweed all around the steering vanes, and as for the calibrators—”

“I get it, Sis,” Milo said, his cheeks blazing red. “I messed up. Again. Let’s just get it onto the back of the landspeeder. Mom will be able to fix it.”

“I’ll fix it for you,” she said. “That way Mom might not find out exactly how much trouble you got into. Dad’s bound to have a spare repulsor array back at camp. Just help me get it onto the landspeeder.”

Milo gave his sister a hand with lifting the malfunctioning bike onto the larger vehicle. The landspeeder dipped worryingly and Lina hoped that its stabilizers would hold up to the extra weight. She had been pestering her dad to replace the flying junk heap for months now, but, as always, he’d ruffled her hair and said that she could keep it in the air. “My little chief engineer.”

Of course she could—Lina had played in the Whisper Bird’s workshop ever since she could hold a hydrospanner—but that wasn’t the point. Why did all of the Grafs’ stuff have to fall apart before they finally replaced it? It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford new equipment, with all the credits they’d made over the past year or so. Since the end of the Clone Wars, people had started to travel farther into Wild Space again, and travelers needed maps.

After making sure that the speeder bike was safely secured, Lina jumped behind the controls. Her brother was already hunkered down low in the passenger seat, still sulking that his expedition had gone so wrong. Morq was perched on Milo’s shoulder, happily chewing a fleshy pink fruit, much to the disgust of CR-8R, who was getting sprayed with pulp. Morq was a notoriously messy eater.

Just another day in the life of the Grafs, Lina thought as she gunned the landspeeder’s engine. Wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of the time.

The landspeeder skimmed onto the plain where the Grafs had made camp. It was getting dark, but Lina could make out the dome-like tents that CR-8R had constructed earlier. She peered over the speeder’s windscreen.

“That’s odd.”

“What is?”

“There’s no lights.”

Morq immediately let out a concerned whine.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Milo said. “The generator’s probably packed up. I bet Mom’s fixing it right now.”

The monkey-lizard nuzzled into him, not convinced.

“But I installed a backup generator myself,” CR-8R fussed behind them. “Surely they couldn’t both have blown?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” said Lina as they made their final approach. “After Dad yells at us, of course.”

“What do you think he’ll make us do this time?” Milo asked. “Clean out the Whisper Bird’s exhaust?”

“Worse than that,” Lina said, making a face. “He’ll probably force us to listen to one of Crater’s lectures!”

Milo let out a comic groan. “Please no, not the one about atmosphere-filtration turbines again. Anything but that!”

“Of all the nerve,” complained CR-8R. “I’ll have you know that AFT units are fascinating. Why, only the other day—”

“Crater, shut up!” Lina snapped.

“I beg your pardon!”

“I mean it. Listen.”

They fell silent, all straining to hear over the whine of the landspeeder.

“I can’t hear anything,” said Milo.

“Exactly. Even if the generators are down, we should be able to hear Dad crashing around.”

She brought the landspeeder to a halt by the two domes and jumped out.

“Mom? Dad?”

There was no response.

“Where are they?” Milo asked, running up beside her.

Lina scooted around the main dome but stopped short when she got to the entrance, slipping slightly in the mud. “I don’t understand,” she said, her stomach clenching as panic started to set in. “Where is everything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look. All our stuff. It’s gone.”

The domes were completely empty. No tools. No equipment. Not even their camp beds.

“Have Mom and Dad gone back to the Bird?” Milo asked.

“Without telling us?” Lina snapped, a little too forcefully. She saw Milo shrink back and forced her voice to be calm. “It’s not like them, that’s all.”

Milo shrugged. “Dad did say a storm was coming.”

Lina scanned the horizon, her fists clenched so hard that her nails dug into her palms. She wasn’t sure about any of this. The Whisper Bird was sheltering in a nearby cave system, but if their parents had headed back early, why hadn’t they taken the domes with them? Nothing about this made sense.

Nearby, CR-8R swept his flashlight attachment over the muddy ground around the camp. “Wherever they’ve gone, it looks like they had company.”

“What are you talking about?” Milo asked, running over to the droid. “No one else is on this planet, are they?”

CR-8R shook his head. “No. Dil Pexton said your parents have exclusive rights.”

Dil Pexton was the Grafs’ agent out in the Rim worlds, setting up deals for the maps and data charts the family made while exploring. He was the one who’d put them onto this swamp world in the first place, a planetoid so remote that it didn’t even have an official name. Dad joked that they could christen it Graf-World.

“Could it be Dil?” Lina asked, desperately trying to stay positive.

“Not unless he brought friends,” replied Milo. “Crater, shine your light over here.”

The droid pointed his light in the direction Milo was indicating. It revealed a host of large footprints in the mud.

“So many of them,” said Milo, his voice wavering. “And Dil’s feet aren’t that big!”

“What’s that?” Lina asked as something shone in the mud. She bent down and pulled out a long gold chain with an emerald star pendant.

“It’s Mom’s,” Milo said. “Dad gave it to her on Morellia.”

“She wouldn’t leave it behind,” Lina insisted. “She loves it.”

“Unless she doesn’t know she lost it,” CR-8R said.

“Wait, there’s something else.” Milo dropped down on his knees, scrabbling around in the dirt. “It’s totally buried.”

“Let me see.” Lina helped him pull the small device from the ground.

“It’s the holo-recorder your parents use to create three-dimensional surveys of the landscape,” CR-8R said.

“Yes, I know what it is,” snapped Lina, “but it’s caked in mud.”

“There’s a light flashing,” Milo said.

“It recorded something,” Lina replied. “If I can just clean the projector grooves…”

Using her sleeve, she rubbed mud from the recorder. All of a sudden, it buzzed, light blazing from the indentations notched into its sides. Lina cried out in alarm and dropped the device as ghostly glowing figures appeared around them.

“It’s Mom and Dad,” Milo said as an image of Rhyssa and Auric Graf flickered into being in the mouth of the dome—but that wasn’t all. Their parents were surrounded by a circle of armor-clad figures, each wearing a featureless helmet.

“Lina,” gasped Milo. “They’re stormtroopers! It’s the Empire!”