The shrill shrieks stabbed into Dameron's already-pounding head, muted though they were by distance and metal walls. He winced, pushing himself painfully up onto his elbow as he followed the sound along the unseen horizon.

"They're going to find us, Beebee," he commented grimly. "We have to get off this planet..."

BB-8 beeped and spun around in a circle, investigating the interior of the AT-AT the young scavenger called home. It was impressive, in a way, how much junk he had been able to fit into the torn-out insides of a war machine, but Dameron still felt skittish inside the belly of the beast.

The dulled sound of a speeder warned him of company. He slid his hand to the shelf next to the bed, to his blaster resting there, but even that movement made his teeth grit together. The desert sun had done a real number on him – if there was a fight ahead, he didn't like his chances.

"Coming in."

The muffled call did little to alleviate Dameron's concerns, but he did appreciate the warning. The hatch of a front-door squeaked open, and the scavenger ducked inside.

Raey...

Dameron's rescuer didn't look like much. He was probably nineteen, maybe twenty years old, but his scavenging lifestyle had worn additional years into his sun-darkened face. Dirty brown hair (in both senses of the word) had been tied up in rough knots, and in the dimness of the AT-AT, his dark eyes looked completely black. Had Dameron seen the young scavenger on some dusty port-town street, he would have avoided getting too close for fear of pickpocketing or a shanking, but circumstances had taken that decision out of his hands.

And... BB-8 liked the kid.

Dameron let his hand slide off the blaster.

Raey rolled a barrel, audibly sloshing with water, into the room with barely a glance at either of his guests, then hauled it upright with a grunt. He turned, perching uneasily on the edge, and then fixed Dameron with an intense gaze.

"Heard some news at the trading post. Seems the First Order is pretty eager to get their hands on you."

Dameron frowned, feigning confusion. "What? Me? Why would they be after me?"

Raey rolled his eyes. "Don't play ignorance," he insisted. "My friend said they were after someone and a droid, and there are rumors of a big bounty. If you don't want an ally, that's fine – you can leave whenever you like and I can pretend I never saw you – but don't try to lie to me." He leaned forward. "Why are they after you?"

The rest of the argument was silent, communicated in expression alone, but Dameron got the message. If he was housing someone the First Order was after, he'd want to know why he was risking his safety, too. He glanced at BB-8 and the droid eagerly piped up, insisting they could trust their mutual rescuer.

Sigh. "I'm a Resistance pilot," he said reluctantly, wincing as his lingering headache surged in intensity. "The First Order has been on my tail for a while, but I'd been able to avoid them until now. They got men on the ground faster then I expected and I had to abandon my ship, and..." Dameron smiled humorlessly. "You know what happened after that. Pilot training didn't include desert survival."

Raey didn't seem surprised, but while Dameron spoke the young man's expression did shift. He leaned forward a little more, and when he spoke there was a subtle eagerness in his tone. "So you're on some secret mission for the Resistance, right? Running messages... sabotage... spying?"

"Don't get excited," Dameron warned. "Not only couldn't I tell you anything if I was on a secret mission, but most of the time we Resistance fighters don't have nearly as exciting lives as rumor would suggest. The First Order chases us around the galaxy whenever they get a name, just looking for someone they can torture information out of. Which, by the way, could be you if they thought you knew anything."

"So... you just need to lay low until they give up and find someone else to stalk?"

If only.

Dameron hesitated. Doubtless it was just the lingering effects of the sun, but he seemed to feel the heat of burning huts against his face. The First Order was not going to walk away from this one. Somehow, they knew who Dameron had gone to meet. They knew whose secrets he carried.

"For now," he said finally, and it was as much of the truth as the kid needed to know. He could barely move without feeling sick; the heat had gotten into his brain, his gut... even now, his heart pounded just a little too fast for lying still. Going out now, trying to dodge Order goons in this state, would be tantamount to walking into town and surrendering to the first bounty hunter he could find.

Raey didn't pry any further. He nodded, a look of determination replacing the childish excitement he had unconsciously let slip, and rose.

"In that case, let's get everything straight. I have water enough for two for now and my vaporators work well, but food is going to be tight. You can stay as long as you need to, but in exchange I need some help." He crossed his arms, but Dameron suspected it was mostly for show. Raey held himself just a little too stiffly - he wasn't confident, he was pretending he was. "I need your droid."

"No."

"Not for good," Raey added, a little defensively. "I work in parts, mechanics, and computers. I could use his help finding the best salvage, figuring out where the operational comms are... getting into places you can't get into without a droid to open the doors." He paused, then added, "If you're going to eat my food, you have to help me get the food."

Dameron narrowed his eyes, trying to find a hint of deceit in the kid's claims. BB-8 looked to him for a response – in this, it seemed, the little droid had no opinion.

"You're not taking him to a scavenger hotspot," Dameron said finally. "If he can help with anything else, then fine, but keep him away from other people. I don't trust any of them not to rip my droid apart the moment your back is turned."

"That's fine," agreed Raey, just a little too quickly. Dameron's suspicions deepened, but he said nothing. If the scavenger had dark intentions, then there was very little Dameron could do about it. "For now, though," Raey continued, grabbing Dameron's empty cup, "you should try to drink. Keeping out of the sun, staying hydrated, are the most basic cures for heat-sickness, but that's all I've got." He handed it back to Dameron, now half full of tepid water. "Don't mess with my trophy shelf, but other then that... my At-At is yours."

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Dameron swallowed hard to avoid laughing water up his nose. "At-at?" he said incredulously, setting the battered tin back down to avoid spilling anything. "It's A-T A-T, not at-at."

A defensive scowl slid into Raey's expression. "On Jakku, they're At-Ats. Come on, droid, I have some junk I need you to look at."

.

Raey kept to his workshop for the rest of the evening, making rough computer spikes. It was familiar, guaranteed-worthwhile work he could do while distracted, and BB-8 was good, but definitely distracting, company. It rolled around cheerfully on the plastic sheeting that made up the floor, beeping as it found things to do. The translator – set on a corner of the workbench where Raey could see it, but where it wasn't in the way – did its best to turn those beeps and beebles into Basic, but it was really having trouble with the droid's dialect. When Raey asked BB-8 to weld a part for him, the translator tried to turn the response into,

~Metal rust make rust make rust~

"Tomorrow, we're going on a bit of a journey," Raey announced after a while. "I've got something I need you to take a look at... maybe do some work on. Do you have any experience working with Imperial computers?"

Beep beep bweebweeoo.

~Old talk Imperial talk.~

Raey reached over and gave the translator a jiggle. Something clattered around inside the dusty casing. "Gotta look at that later. Sounds like it's got a wire looped somewhere. There are a lot of old Imperial computers around here, running most of our tech, so I hope you can get a better handle on it then this thing has on your language, BB-8."

Wooooo...

~Oh dear.~

"Don't say that," groaned Raey. "Just give it your best shot, alright? That's all I ask."

Bwoo beebeep.

~Untranslatable – please repeat that.~

"I'm going to trust that was an agreement. Here, can you light up this casing for me? I can't see if there is any more rust in there or not."

.

.

FL-2218 stood at attention, his eyes fixed on a distant light socket on the other side of the hanger. The voice of his captain rose in furious tones, orders dripping with implied threat if any member of the assembled squadron should fail their assigned task.

Find the rebel. Bring him in alive. Destroy any who tried to protect him.

Familiar orders. They had heard these same orders time and time again – different voices, sometimes, and different words, but at the heart of it they were always exactly the same.

FL-2218 was tired of it. The passion of the officers, the strength of their convictions... it made his shoulders want to slump and his chest feel empty and hollow. It was exhausting to listen to, utterly exhausting.

But his shoulders did not slump. He stayed in his place unmoving, side by side with unmoving soldiers he knew only as numbers. FL-1976 (the only one of his class still assigned to the same company as him), LN-2737, MK-4414... his squadmates, barely even friends, whose lives were constantly in his hands, and his life in theirs. Lists of numbers ran through his mind for hours, strictly separated by letters so they did not blur together into a nonsensical whole...

His heavy, almost shuddering breath of weariness steamed the inside of his helmet. The officer finished his tirade, and FL-2218 saluted in perfect synchronicity with the rest of them. "For the First Order!" he shouted, a fake sincerity mirrored by every other voice in the room coloring the now-meaningless words. Noises, nothing more.

He felt so empty.

The officer stalked away, all self-righteous anger and arrogance, and the troopers' strict lines fell apart with a silent sigh. They did not talk – it would end up being reported – but they didn't need to talk. As she passed, LN-2737 put her armored hand on his shoulder. She didn't even turn her head towards him and a moment later she was gone, lost in the movement of identical white-armored figures... but the heaviness in his bones lessened at that momentary touch. Armor on armor, but person to person.

It was enough to remind him that there were people behind the helmets. There was a hard, almost unbreakable line between work and rest, the hours in armor and the hours without. Only those momentary slips by his squadmates reminded him that they really were the same people he bunked with each night, and not faceless, characterless drones living only to execute their masters' brutal commands.

He felt so tired.

Orders were orders. He acted on them almost without thinking, because if he thought about every meaningless action he had been trained to take for the First Order, his mind would break under the sheer weight of them. He went through the motions, he collected his gear, he reported in with his flight-partner, he ran through the tie-fighter systems check. Through it all, beneath his helmet, his expression barely wavered. His voice never changed. His eyes, even when glancing over control panels, might as well have still been focused on that light on the ceiling.

FL-2218 barely felt. And what he did feel, he wished he didn't.

It could get him reported.

.

.

The ravine appeared before the shuddering engine of the dust-runner almost without warning, a rift in the desert disguised by the shape of the land and the equalizing color of sand. No visible rocks, soft dune shadows - nothing to betray the slash in the crust of the world unless seen from the right angle, or at the right time of day.

It was far from the beaten paths between downed ships and the scavenger towns that grew up around them, but to Raey it was a well-known and precious safe haven. He let gravity slide his dust-runner down the gradual slope, slowly picking up speed as the angle steepened and the sunlight grew more distant. An abrupt shelf caught the slope of sand on either side, transitioning to the rough, jagged rocks left over from whatever earth-shattering event had torn the desert apart. Anyone riding down the sides of the ravine would have hit a sudden and unexpected stop – Raey approached from the end, and the sandy slope did not betray him. Thin curtains of sand fell from above whenever the wind blew across the surface, constantly threatening a massive desert avalanche that never seemed to happen.

And yet, Raey loved this dangerous ravine. Beneath the shelves of rock lay dozens of dark caves and hollows, hiding places for anything and everything he could possibly want to keep out of sight. And here, in Raey's Canyon, his biggest and most valuable secret sat waiting, years in the works and so, so close to completion. Raey had done everything he could think of, but some things required a more specialized touch. The cold, analytical touch of a droid.

For a few days, his sun-scorched guest asked no questions and made no comments about what Raey needed his droid for. They barely talked at all once Raey realized Dameron had no intention of discussing his work with the Resistance. He mostly slept, or pretended to sleep, when Raey checked in on him, but that was just as well.

Food began to run low in those few days, so Raey made a quick, distracted salvage-run, then traded for rations while his water barrel filled. The two subsequent days away from home to make that run were stressful, fraught with the paranoia (so easily nurtured on Jakku) that he had let a thief into his sanctuary. The paranoia turned out to be just that; when Raey finally got back, his home was just as he had left it, and BB-8 rolled over to the door with a cheery greeting the moment Raey opened it.

Dameron was sitting, back to the wall, on Raey's bed. He still looked half-cooked, but his regular wincing from constant headaches seemed to have vanished over the last few days. He set aside his blaster (the weapon had probably been cleaned more times now then anything in Raey's workshop) and watched as Raey put away his supplies.

"BB-8 told me what you're working on," he said finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence. "It's... ambitious."

Raey brushed some dust off the nearest metal shelf, a suitable response failing him in the moment. After a beat, Dameron continued.

"Beebee isn't the only one who can help you, you know. And you're not the only one who wants to get off this planet."

Tiny flakes of rust mixed with the dust on Raey's fingertip. He stared at them blankly, his heart beginning to beat faster as he went back and forth, pros and cons, with Dameron's suggestion.

Trust.

It all centered around trust. Raey knew that, and he didn't like it.

Dameron didn't give him an easy out. Even BB-8 was quiet, his big round eye fixed on Raey. Waiting.

The moment became minutes.

Then, finally, Raey let out a pent-up breath and turned.

"Alright, ace pilot. You'd better get your jacket; this will be a long ride."