Chapter 72 · Before the Sky Falls

Eli spotted an old loading cart wedged beneath a collapsed support strut, half-buried under a spill of insulation foam and rust-flaked plating. For one irrational second, he thought it looked too fragile to be useful; then the first distant tremor passed through the ground, faint enough that no one outside the wreckyard would have noticed, but clear enough through the soles of his boots.

He grabbed the cart’s handle and pulled.

It did not move.

“Of course,” he muttered, bracing one foot against the strut and yanking harder. “Of course the one thing we need right now has decided to become part of the landscape.”

The wheels protested with a dry metallic screech as the cart came loose all at once, nearly sending him backward into a stack of coolant housings. He caught himself against the frame, hissed through his teeth, and dragged it upright. One wheel spun freely. Another wobbled in a slow, ugly circle. The third looked like it had survived a small war and resented being asked to participate in another.

“It will not move efficiently,” Stent observed.

Eli gave the cart a test shove. It lurched forward half a meter, screamed, and stopped.

“No,” he said. “But it’ll move.”

Tee sat slumped beside the remains of Rinna’s auxiliary console, dome angled slightly forward, optics dim beneath layers of soot and scoring. Every few seconds, something inside him clicked, a weak little mechanical sound that made Eli’s stomach tighten despite himself. The droid had caused most of this. The droid had nearly broadcasted their existence into every Imperial shadow still listening. The droid was a walking liability, assuming he ever walked again.

And still, when Eli looked at him, he did not see a liability.

He saw a burned-out astromech who had spent the last of his strength trying to keep them alive.

“Help me with him,” Eli said.

Stent did not argue, which was its own measure of urgency. He stepped around a hanging cable, bent, and lifted the droid with practiced efficiency, one arm sliding under the chassis, the other steadying the dome before it could loll to one side. Tee’s servos gave a faint, distressed grind as the movement shifted something damaged inside him.

Eli winced. “Careful.”

“I am being careful.”

“That sound did not sound careful.”

“That sound is the result of prior damage, not current handling.”

“Comforting.”

Stent set the droid onto the cart’s platform, adjusting his weight so the damaged side rested against a bent rail. Eli crouched and looped a loose cable across Tee’s base, then another, fastening them through the cart’s cracked side hooks. The knots were ugly but secure enough. His hands moved faster than his thoughts, tightening, testing, tightening again.

Tee’s dome twitched once.

Eli leaned closer. “Still with us?”

A faint chirp tried to form, broke into static, and died.

“Yeah,” Eli murmured. “That’s what I thought.”

“Still functional?” Stent asked.

“Barely.” Eli stood and wiped his hands on his trousers, leaving dark streaks across the fabric. “But he’s coming with us.”

Stent’s eyes moved from the droid to Eli. There was no visible judgment in his expression, which meant the judgment had gone deep enough to become structural.

“Dragging a compromised droid through an exposed settlement will slow us.”

“So would stopping to have this argument.”

“That depends on the length of the argument.”

“It’s already too long.”

Eli pushed the cart. The wheels shrieked again, loud enough to make him glance toward the nearest broken hulls. No one shouted. No one came running. The wreckyard remained a maze of stacked metal, hanging shadows, and heat-stained dust, all of it vibrating faintly with the aftershock of the systems Tee had burned through.

Behind them, Rinna’s workshop looked dead from the outside. No lights. No movement. The shutters had sealed over the windows, and the external comm mast had folded into its armored housing like an animal pulling in its limbs. If Eli had not known better, he would have thought she had abandoned it.

He did know better.

Rinna was still inside, somewhere below the surface, scrubbing data, cutting connections, erasing every digital footprint she could before the Empire came sniffing through the ashes. She had not asked for help. She had not asked for reassurance. She had simply looked at Eli once, with that flat, exhausted certainty of someone who had survived one purge too many, and told him to leave.

People like Rinna did not say goodbye.

They gave orders and hoped someone was smart enough to obey.

The cart caught on a strip of twisted plating.

Eli swore under his breath and kicked it free.

“Try to look like this is routine,” he muttered.

“I am always routine,” Stent replied.

“You look like you’re escorting a stolen military asset through a scrapyard.”

“That is a largely accurate assessment.”

“Then look less accurate.”

Stent adjusted nothing about his posture, expression, or pace. Somehow, through sheer obstinacy, he managed to look even more like himself.

Eli huffed and pushed harder.

They made their way through the narrow path between stacked hulls, the outpost looming ahead through breaks in the scrap — a crooked grid of prefab structures, hanging cables, old thermal shields, patched roofs, and antennae leaning at slightly different angles as if the whole place had been assembled by people who believed permanence was a superstition. Heat shimmered above the dust. A row of laundry hung between two cargo containers, pale cloth snapping lazily in the dry wind. Somewhere a generator coughed and settled into a rough idle.

It looked ordinary.

That was the worst part.

Tila’s Reach should have looked frightened. It should have already been moving, scattering, grabbing children and credits and emergency packs. It should have felt the way Eli felt: skin too tight, breath too shallow, every second collapsing toward something bright and violent overhead.

Instead, a pair of mechanics were arguing beside a dismantled skiff, one of them waving a spanner for emphasis. A woman in a grease-stained apron leaned out of a food stall and shouted at someone to bring back her change. Two Rodian traders unloaded crates from a speeder with the slow irritation of people more concerned about margins than mortality. A child chased a maintenance drone across the dust, laughing whenever it dipped out of reach.

The quiet normalcy felt wrong.

Obscene, almost.

Eli slowed without meaning to.

The cart’s front wheel rolled into a rut and stopped. Tee shifted against the cables with a faint metallic clank.

Stent noticed immediately. “We cannot delay.”

“They don’t know.”

“They are not required to know.”

Eli turned his head sharply. “You heard Rinna. Last time, the Empire leveled this place.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll do it again.”

“Likely.”

The flatness of the word made something hot flare under Eli’s ribs. Not anger exactly, or not only anger. Panic, compressed until it looked like anger because there was no space for anything else.

“And you’re fine with that?”

Stent’s gaze flicked across the street, measuring exits, sightlines, traffic density, the angle of the comm tower at the edge of the settlement. “I am not fine with anything. I am prioritizing.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the only answer that affects whether we survive.”

A fuel-cell vendor laughed at something across the street. The child chasing the drone tripped, got up, and kept running.

Eli looked at him. At the dust on his knees. At the way no one even glanced toward the sky.

“They’re not soldiers,” he said.

“No.”

“They’re not part of this.”

“Few people are part of what kills them.”

That landed colder than Eli expected. He stared at Stent for a second, searching for cruelty and finding none, which somehow made it worse. Stent was not being callous. He was being accurate. In his mind, accuracy and mercy had never been required to agree.

Eli’s jaw tightened. “Maybe their survival isn’t our responsibility.”

“Correct.”

“But if I were them,” Eli said, voice low, “I’d want someone to yell run before the sky started falling.”

Stent did not respond.

That silence was not agreement. It was not permission either. It was calculation rearranging itself around Eli’s refusal to move.

Eli knew the shape of it by now. Stent was checking the time they had, the distance to the Faded Glory, the condition of the droid, the likelihood that an alarm would accelerate chaos enough to block their path, the possibility that drawing attention to themselves would make everything worse. He knew Stent would be right about at least half of it.

He also knew he was going to do it anyway.

Another faint glimmer appeared high in the pale sky, gone almost as soon as Eli spotted it.

Not a star.

Not at this hour.

Stent saw it too. His eyes narrowed slightly.

“Reconnaissance?” Eli asked.

“Possibly. Or debris from atmospheric insertion.”

“Imperial?”

“Assume so.”

“Hours?”

“At best.”

Eli inhaled sharply, then turned the cart toward a half-collapsed control shed near the central utility post.

Stent’s voice sharpened. “Eli.”

He hated how much warning could fit into one word.

“Just keep moving.”

“That direction is not toward the landing pad.”

“It is if we take the stupid route.”

“The stupid route appears to enter a shed.”

“Then you’re reading it correctly.”

The control shed leaned between two larger prefab units, its roof patched with hull plating from at least three different ships. One wall had bowed inward. A faded emergency symbol had been painted beside the door years ago and scratched nearly illegible by weather and neglect. The door itself refused to open until Stent hit the release panel with the heel of his hand, after which it slid aside ten centimeters and stuck.

Eli shoved his shoulder through the gap and forced it wider.

Inside, the air smelled of dust, hot wiring, and old plastic. The light strips flickered uncertainly when they entered, revealing a cramped room filled with dead monitors, dangling cable bundles, and an ancient comm console patched together from a dozen mismatched systems. Someone had bolted a civilian relay panel over what had once been Imperial hardware, then wired a local emergency override into the side with more optimism than engineering discipline.

Eli stared at it.

“All right,” he muttered. “Please be as badly secured as you look.”

Stent positioned himself at the door, one hand near his weapon, the other resting briefly on the cart to stop Tee from rolling backward. “What are you doing?”

“Reminding people how to survive.”

“An alarm may cause panic.”

“Good.”

“Panic is rarely efficient.”

“Neither is getting vaporized in your own kitchen.”

He swept dust from the console with one hand and activated the input screen. It flashed orange, then blue, then filled with static and a prompt requesting municipal authorization.

Eli almost laughed.

“Oh, that is adorable.”

He pulled a connector from his belt and jammed it into the access port. The screen sputtered. Lines of outdated code crawled across the display with the weary reluctance of a system that had not expected to be relevant again.

Behind him, Tee emitted a weak chirp.

Eli glanced back. “No. You stay out of this. You’ve done enough heroic self-destruction for one day.”

The droid’s dome twitched faintly, offended even in near-unconsciousness.

Stent looked from Tee to Eli. “He appears to disapprove.”

“He can file a complaint when he has a functioning processor.”

The console demanded a second authorization code. Eli bypassed it with a maintenance loop. Then a third. Then a fourth, because apparently even dying frontier settlements believed in bureaucracy when it came to warning their own people.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, come on…”

Outside, someone shouted for a missing loader. A speeder engine coughed. The settlement continued breathing, unaware.

Eli found the emergency override buried under three layers of local system decay and an old Imperial public-safety protocol that had never been fully removed. Fire. Chemical spill. Raider incursion. Atmospheric breach.

Orbital threat.

His finger paused over the option.

For half a second, he saw a different world: one where he left it alone, where they reached the ship faster, where Stent was right, where Rinna did what she could and everyone else simply discovered the danger when the first shot fell. It would be cleaner. Easier to explain. Easier to survive.

The child’s laughter drifted faintly through the cracked wall.

Eli selected orbital threat and slammed the activation switch.

Nothing happened.

He stared. “No.”

The console blinked.

Then, from somewhere high above the settlement, the first siren coughed.

Once.

A horrible, strangled sound, like a machine waking from a nightmare.

Then it caught.

The outpost’s sirens came alive in sequence, one tower after another, low and metallic, rising into a long droning wail that rolled across the settlement and through every wall, every street, every piece of rusted metal. The sound went through Eli’s chest as if his ribs were part of the alarm system. It was not loud at first, not compared to engines or blaster fire, but it had a shape designed to be understood by the body before the mind could argue.

Danger.

Move.

Now.

Outside, the settlement froze.

Eli saw it through the cracked shed window: the mechanics stopping mid-argument; the vendor turning with a ladle still in her hand; the Rodians abandoning their crates; the child standing suddenly still as the drone bumped uselessly against a wall.

Then motion broke open.

A woman shouted a name. Someone else yelled for the lower shelters. Doors slammed. Shutters began to drop over stalls. Speeders powered up badly and too fast. The child’s laughter vanished beneath the rising noise as an older man grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him toward an alley.

The quiet was gone.

Eli stood there a moment longer, hand still on the switch, listening to the alarm echo through the scrapyard, and wondered if this was what it had sounded like the last time. If Rinna had heard this exact note before the fire came down. If the people who had survived had learned to move at the first breath of it, or if some of them still hesitated because alarms belonged to other people’s disasters until the sky proved otherwise.

Behind him, Stent said nothing.

That silence had changed too.

Not softer. Not approving.

But altered.

Eli turned away from the console. “Satisfied?” Stent asked quietly.

The question should have sounded like criticism. It didn’t. Not entirely.

Eli swallowed, suddenly aware of how dry his throat felt. “Not even close.”

They forced the cart back through the narrow door and into the street.

The settlement had become motion and noise. People ran past carrying bags, toolkits, children, weapons, pets, one man with a portable caf brewer clutched to his chest as if it were a sacred relic. A woman nearly collided with Stent, looked up, saw his face, and recoiled just enough for Eli to notice before the sirens dragged her onward. Someone shouted that the west shelters were sealed. Someone else shouted that the east access was clear. A loader droid rolled in frantic circles until a mechanic kicked it toward a cargo bay.

The cart’s wheel jammed again in the dust.

“Move,” Eli snapped at it, as if the cart were capable of shame.

Stent took the front handle without comment and lifted slightly, reducing the weight enough for Eli to push. Together they forced it over the rut and into the side lane leading toward the landing pads.

Overhead, the sky had brightened in three thin lines.

Engines.

Distant still, but descending.

Eli did not look long. Looking made them real.

They passed the fuel-cell vendors, now overturning their own stall to reach the hatch beneath it. The woman with the apron was shoving two younger workers down into the shelter ahead of her. One of the Rodians had dropped an entire crate of parts; another cursed at him, then abandoned the argument and ran. Everywhere, the alarm kept wailing, long and metallic and merciless.

“Faster,” Stent said.

“I know.”

“Eli.”

“I know.”

The Faded Glory came into view beyond the last row of prefab buildings, sitting on the outer pad like the battered old miracle she was: patched hull, ugly lines, landing struts sunk slightly into the dust. Her ramp was still down. Her exterior lights blinked amber through the haze.

For one brief, irrational instant, Eli loved that ship with his whole exhausted soul.

Then the horizon flashed.

A white-orange pulse bloomed far beyond the treeline, followed several seconds later by a low concussion that rolled across the ground and rattled every loose panel in the settlement. People screamed. Not many. Just enough.

Stent’s head turned toward the blast. “Warning shot.”

“Was that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It means they have not begun full bombardment.”

“Your talent for comfort remains unmatched.”

They reached the base of the ramp. Eli dragged the cart up backward while Stent steadied Tee from below, and the wheels clanged hard against the metal plating with every step. Tee’s dome sparked once.

“No, no, no,” Eli muttered. “Do not pick now to die dramatically.”

The droid answered with a weak, furious crackle.

“That’s the spirit.”

They hauled him into the cargo bay. Stent hit the ramp controls before Eli had fully cleared the threshold. The ramp began to rise, slow enough to feel insulting.

Eli turned and looked back.

The outpost was chaos now — lights flickering, figures scattering into shelters, speeders tearing up dust as they launched half-prepared from side lots. The alarm still wailed, its long metallic note stretching over everything. Above the settlement, the sky had taken on that strange, terrible clarity that came before violence: too bright, too open, waiting.

Somewhere out there, Rinna would still be at her console, wiping the net clean.

“She’ll make it,” Eli said under his breath.

Stent keyed the hatch seal. “She will if she was efficient.”

The words should have been cold. Maybe they were. But Eli had learned to hear the thin layer beneath Stent’s precision, the narrow place where concern hid because it had no authorized vocabulary.

The hatch sealed.

Sound dropped away.

For one second, there was only the interior hum of the ship, the harsh pull of Eli’s own breathing, and the faint unstable clicking from Tee’s damaged chassis.

Then the Faded Glory’s engines roared to life.

Eli ran for the cockpit, one hand catching the bulkhead as the ship shuddered beneath him. Stent was half a step behind, already issuing start-up confirmations before he reached the pilot’s chair. By the time Eli dropped into his seat, the systems were waking in uneven layers, old lights flickering, nav board stuttering, repulsors whining hard enough to shake dust from the overhead panels.

“Engines?”

“Responsive,” Stent said. “Barely.”

“Barely is our brand.”

“Lift.”

The ship rose from the pad in a swirl of dust and smoke.

Below them, Tila’s Reach shrank into a tangle of flashing lights and running figures, the sirens still visible in the pulse of emergency beacons even after the sound disappeared behind the hull. Another flash burned at the horizon, closer this time. The ship rocked as the shockwave caught them low and hard.

Eli gripped the armrest.

Stent did not flinch.

The atmosphere ahead opened in a bruised haze of heat and smoke. Behind them, the settlement scattered into shelters and shadows, not safe, not saved, but warned.

That would have to be enough.

Eli stared at the rising sky and tried to make himself believe it.

The Faded Glory climbed.