Star Wars - Kenobi

but nothing like a krayt.
    A’Yark thought the choice was cowardly and had said so. It described a clan so weakened that it could no longer keep to its principles. If A’Deen fell to a krayt, fine. The child would have been adjudged a weakling and would have deserved death. It didn’t matter that the boy was the last of A’Yark’s children. The warrior would have taken a blade to A’Deen personally rather than see him live as a failure. But no one would know A’Deen’s worthiness now.
    They would be killing womp rats next and pretending it was bravery.
    More movement at the garages. The Smiling One was out there again, babbling to the freakish thing that tended the vehicles. A’Yark kept watching the place. This was it, the center of all the Tuskens’ problems. The Airshaper had shown A’Yark the way.
    And soon, A’Yark would lead the rest of the Sand People to her.
    “Keep going, I’m listening.”
    Annileen wasn’t listening, but it hardly mattered. Wyle Ulbreck spent far more money at the store than any other visitor to the Pika Oasis—and far more time, too. Ulbreck had a platoon of farmhands to run his spread; he knew in his heart that droids were thieves, programmed by Jawas to steal from their masters. The old moisture farmer had first pontificated on that subject when Annileen was running the counter at seventeen. Twenty years later, he was still talking about it—among countless other topics.
    At the moment, Ulbreck was on another classic: the four times he had seen rain.
    “ … and the second drop was right in my eye, let me tell you. I felt it, and I was lookin’ up, too. You’d think rain would be like the mists some see on the ground, steaming up. But no, it comes right down at you just like it fell out of a freighter …”
    “Unh-huh. Right.”
    Annileen nodded as she dusted the merchandise on the shelves behind the counter. Ulbreck’s ramblings were like recordings of familiar songs, arranged in a different medley each day—because while the old farmer remembered a lot, he often forgot his place. An engineer who visited the Dune Sea years earlier once described Ulbreck’s stories as transcendental loops, defying the laws of physics—and storytelling.
    She didn’t know about that. But she did suspect the cause of her pain: Ulbreck’s wife, Magda. Annileen had never seen the woman. But it was clear she dispatched her husband to the store at the crack of dawn every morning, to torment someone else for a change. This made Magda both a wise woman in Annileen’s ledger—and deserving of a smack in the face, should they ever meet.
    “ … but you know, I swear I seen a freighter take off once and go right through a flock of neebray. And the things just hit the ground like sacks of spanners. Which is why I don’t go near that Mos Eisley no more, ’cause they’re always tryin’ to kill people and take their money …”
    “Unh-huh. Right.”
    Annileen looked around, plaintively, for different company. It was futile. The breakfast rush was over; the workers would be in the vaporator fields for hours. The Bezzards had left her guest quarters early that morning to return home, anxious to pick up the pieces of their lives. The settlers around the oasis were resilient, as they had to be. Annileen didn’t miss the extra burden, but she did miss the baby.
    Her babies were at work. Jabe had taken the store’s LiteVan speeder truck to the dry goods distribution center in Bestine; Kallie was out back with the animals. That left her alone with Bohmer, the slow-motion Rodian, sitting at the luncheonette table, considering his caf. She wondered what he saw there, sometimes.
    She slouched against the cabinets and sighed. FIND WHAT YOU NEED AT DANNAR ’ S CLAIM , the sign outside read. What she needed was a month away on a lush green forest planet.
    “ … but then back the first time I was workin’ for real money, on a vaporator, I just started crossin’ circuits. Beginner’s luck, they called it. That was the second time I seen rain—or maybe it was the first. I’ve spent the rest of my days tryin’ to figger out just what I did …”
    Annileen looked up. Orrin entered through the back of the store, whistling and wearing the natty dress browns she’d picked out for him from the high-end catalog. Clicking his leather boots together, he smiled broadly at her. “How do I look?”
    “Like you just landed from Coruscant,” she said, smiling wanly back.
    “Thanks to my fashion