Star Wars - Kenobi

terrible force.
    A spray of glass showered Orrin, his windshield smashed for the second time by someone he’d angered. But the landspeeder surged forward anyway, striking the Tusken warrior with full force and carrying her with it toward the southern exit.
    Annileen pursued the landspeeder. Orrin couldn’t see anything through the fractured windshield, she realized—but he was accelerating nonetheless. She skidded to a stop in time to watch the hovercraft miss the narrow bantha path that led down the side of the cliff. The vehicle sailed freely for seconds until, lacking anything for the antigrav units to repel against, it tumbled downward, end over end. It vanished in the bad country.
    Meters behind Annileen, Ben ran up. “A’Yark!” he yelled.
    Annileen looked down. Off the edge of the sheer drop from the bantha trail, A’Yark clung to a jutting rock. Annileen scrambled to the side and reached down for the raider’s hand. Dazed, the Tusken stared up at her, jeweled eye gleaming in the suns. Then the Tusken murmured something, and Annileen felt A’Yark’s grip loosening.
    Reaching Annileen’s side, Ben leaned over her shoulder and looked down at A’Yark. “You want to live,” he said. “Remember?”
    For a moment, A’Yark didn’t move, but then her hand tightened around Annileen’s. The settler and the stranger hauled the warlord up.
    Bowed but unbroken, A’Yark knelt and gazed at the smoke rising from the canyon hills below. The Jundland was unforgiving.
    “You have what you wanted,” Ben said.
    “Not all.” A’Yark turned back. Straightening, she pushed past Ben and Annileen and climbed back onto the plateau. “But deal is done. You go.”
    Annileen nodded. She could hear the sounds of pounding boots; the Tuskens would be returning at any minute. But with Ben there, she felt no fear at all.
    “I thank you,” he said to A’Yark, bowing.
    Standing before a passageway into the labyrinth, A’Yark looked back coolly. “You remembers, Ben,” she said. “You knows what you can be.”
    With that, she slipped back into the shadows.
    Annileen and Ben walked swiftly across the clearing, stopping only at Mullen’s corpse. Annileen blanched then—and turned to gaze back in the direction of Orrin’s departure.
    Ben looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “I’m not,” Annileen replied. Turning, she embraced him.
    It was not a passionate hug, but the exhausted collapse of someone who had had a very long day—and night, and day. This embrace, Ben did not refuse. She looked up at him and started to speak.
    He spoke first. “Not here,” he said. He smiled. “My place. Tonight.”
    Then he nudged her in the direction of the trail leading down.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
    BEN HAD FOUND HIS own way home. So had Annileen, and it began the hardest afternoon of her life.
    She’d emerged from the hills to find a muted victory celebration. The farmers who’d come to the Jundland after a would-be traitor had found instead a battle with a perennial enemy, the gangsters of Mos Eisley. And the country folk had absolutely routed the city folk. Mosep Binneed, mathematician enough to calculate odds on the fly, had decided to cut his losses in the Gault affair and withdraw with only the tail of his skiff on fire.
    Ulbreck and the others were relieved to see Annileen, but unhappy to hear that they’d been robbed of their chance to settle with Orrin. Nearby, Annileen found Veeka, under treatment from Doc Mell. In shock, the injured woman didn’t respond at all when Annileen told her of her father’s demise.
    Questions came at Annileen from all directions. Thankfully, Leelee’s husband saw her situation and offered to drive her back to the Claim alone. He dropped her off and departed without a word. Home, the famished Annileen ate as she packed, explaining to her puzzled children between bites what had happened. What she understood of it, anyway.
    In late afternoon, Leelee arrived at the back door of the residence, her face an ashen pink. She stayed outside as she recounted to Annileen what was being said at her home—and at others across the oasis.
    In a moment in which every hidden resentment against the Gaults suddenly found voice, most had been quick to find Ben faultless. It was so like Orrin, they said, to deflect blame to a hapless newcomer—and someone would have had to be terrified to seek shelter in a known Tusken nest. Or crazy. But while all appreciated Ben’s revelation, it rankled many that