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stood in the darkness of her home, catching her breath, listening to R’iia’s rage outside. The noise was diminished but still sunk through the walker’s armored hull. She reached out, fumbled for a second, then found one of her lamps and triggered the key. The light flickered weakly at first, then stabilized into a warmerglow.
    Rey sighed, took off her boots, and emptied sand from them. She shook off her clothes. She shook out her hair. When she was finished, there was a substantial pile of Jakku’s desert at her feet, and she felt easily ten kilos lighter.
    Thunder detonated overhead again, vibrating through the metal shell of the walker. Bits and pieces of various salvage jumped. One of the old helmets fell fromwhere it hung on a makeshift hook. She lived in what had once been the main troop compartment of the walking tank, but that had been when the thing was upright. The interior had long before been stripped of anything salvageable and now resembled a cluttered workshop more than anything else. Rey had traded for a generator a couple of years before, so she had power when she needed it, mostly forthe workbench where she would take apart and reassemble and, more often than not, rebuild from scratch those pieces of usable junk she recovered.
    Unkar always paid more for things that still worked.
    Through a hairline crack in the hull, Rey saw a sudden flare of light, more dry lightning. She picked up one of the blankets on the floor and used it to cover the crack. She secured it using threeof the rare magnets she’d recovered from a shattered gyro-stabilizer. She went to her stash, hidden beneath one of the side panels, unscrewed the plate, and removed one of the three bottles of water she’d left there. She took a drink to wash the desert out of her mouth, swallowed with a grimace, carefully recapped the bottle, and just as carefully restored it to its hiding place before securingthe panel.
    She sat on the pile of remaining blankets and rested her head against the back of the hull, listening to the storm beat furiously against her home.
    She closed her eyes, feeling, for the first time in a very long time, very much alone.

    The
X’us’R’iia
lasted three and a half days.
    Rey finished one bottle of water and half of another, guarding her thirst, because she didn’t knowhow long it would be until she’d be able to get into Niima for more. She was out of food by the second day, and by the time the storm was over her headache was so intense she was lightheaded and had to go slowly when she moved around her little home.
    She’d jury-rigged a computer using pieces scavenged from several crashed fighters over the years, including a cracked but still-usable display froman old BTL-A4 Y-wing. There were no radio communications to speak of—no way to transmit or receive and, frankly, nobody she wanted to talk to anyway. On the wreckage of a Zephra-series hauler, though, she’d once found a stash of data chips, and after painstakingly going through each and every one of them, she’d discovered three with their programs intact; one of them, to her delight, had beena flight simulator.
    So when she wasn’t sleeping or just sitting and listening to the storm or tinkering at her workbench, she flew. It was a good program, or at least she imagined it was. She could select any number of ships to fly, from small repulsor-driven atmospheric craft to a wide variety of fighters, all the way up to an array of stock freighters. She could set destinations, worlds she’dnever visited and never imagined she would, and scenarios, from speed runs to obstacle courses to system failures.
    At first, she’d been truly horrible at it, quite literally crashing a few seconds after takeoff every time. With nothing else to do, and with a perverse sense of determination that she would
not
allow herself to be beaten by a machine that she herself had put together with her ownhands, she learned. She learned so much that there was little the