Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 01_ Outcast - Aaron Allston [68]
She wanted to glare at them, but that would be showing her true feelings, and her mother—her real mother—had always said that only loved ones deserved or needed to see your true emotions. And not even them, if you needed to convince them of something.
“I'm tired of waiting,” she told the droids. “I want to do something.”
C-3PO looked down at her where she sat on the carpeted floor. “Why, you are doing something. You're reading on your datapad.”
She closed the electronic device with a definitive snap. “No, I want to do something good. Something nobody's ever done before.”
“I have done things that no one has ever done before, and I can assure you, it is usually a dangerous and alarming sort of activity. Not suited to little girls.”
“What have you done?”
“Well, I have been mistaken for a golden god, and in so doing helped strike down the Galactic Empire. Let me tell you that story—”
“No.” She grapped her backpack, tossed in her datapad, and dragged out her breath mask. “Let's go outside.”
“Not advisable, young miss. Every new world is a place of new, un-cataloged dangers—”
R2-D2 interrupted him with a series of notes.
“What did he say?” Allana asked.
“He asserted that we could protect you in the unlikely event of danger. In short, he undermined my already precarious authority. Oh, very well. The outside offers no comfort, you know.”
“Maybe, but I like to bounce.” Kessel's gravity, lower than that of most worlds where humans settled, had given her the opportunity to make some extraordinarily high leaps on the short walk from the Falcon to this building.
Not that bounding had anything to do with her desire to go outside.
Quietly, so as not to alert the Calrissians, Nien Nunb, or any of the occasionally glimpsed members of the skeleton crew Lando had on duty in the building, Allana led the droids down corridors that were so echoingly empty and dimly lit that they all but had signs pointing out that they were off-limits to little girls. Eventually, she found a hatch exit to the exterior, and moments later she stepped out into the bracing chill of Kessel's atmosphere. “Time to bounce,” she announced.
“As we are rather ill suited to bouncing, and even more poorly engineered to land in a nondamaging fashion, I believe that Artoo and I will simply watch from a safe distance.”
Allana shrugged. She began moving in a straight line away from the main building, sometimes running with long steps, sometimes jumping for the fun of it, always heading away from the perceptions of adults. Soon her shoes and the lower parts of her pant legs were covered in the white powder that seemed to be everywhere.
Now it was time to do as Leia had begun to teach her, to open her mind and feelings. It was hard for her, because she had always had reason and usually encouragement to stay bottled up. Sometimes her life had depended on it. Scary people were less likely to sense weakness or fear if you remained bottled up.
The ground ahead and to the left was darker. She changed direction to head that way, and soon found herself at the edge of what looked like a series of stone outcroppings, jagged brown rocks protruding from the white dust. The ground was jumbled, rising and falling.
This area wasn't pretty, but it was better than more white sand. Cautiously, she moved out among the broken stones.
“Miss Ameeeeeelia …” she heard C-3PO cry plaintively. She turned and saw the golden droid, R2-D2 beside him, a couple of hundred meters back. She waved to them, as though she welcomed their presence and had absolutely no intention of keeping clear of them, then headed farther into the outcroppings, picking up her pace.
Deeper in, the rocks were taller, some as tall as she was. She gracefully moved among them and soon was completely out of sight of the droids. Occasionally she would hear C-3PO calling or R2-D2 tweet-ling, and she would extend a hand above the level of the rocks, wave,