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When her monthly blood had not arrived, Shmi hadn't worried.
On Tatooine, where even womb water was rare, even free women had difficulty keeping track of their moons accurately, and she had been demoted.
When the seed of yet another slave that Gardulla had imposed on her failed to take root, she decided to get her checked out by the doctor.
Her duties went from delicate, almost artistic work for the pleasure of her Depur to the hangars for sorting heavy scrap metal. Needless to say, learning that one of the slaves she had decided to breed was barren did not please her. She was angry enough to beat Shmi until she looked like a swollen, overripe fruit, but not so angry to forget how much she had paid for Shmi's skills. The first few months had been the most miserable of her life.
She had tried to waste as little water as possible, but the salty tears burned her bruised skin despite her best efforts. She cried for the pain of her broken bones, for the relief that nothing would be born of her, for her Depur's greed, for the knowledge that nothing would ever come from her womb.
Grandmother Ani was the one who forced Shmi to eat her rations, taught her how to work, which overseers would overlook a mistake and which would have her whipped, shared her stories and her tzai with her.
It was like having a mother again.
“And when Leia grew up again, she began to despair,” said the old woman as she combed Shmi’s tangled curls with a comb in her brown, worn hands. “<<Why am I growing so much, ena?>> she asked to Ekkreth. <<I want to fly by your side and free my brothers and sisters with you!>>”
“And her ena replied...,” Shmi interjected in her best Ekkreth voice. “<<You can't stop the change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting.>>”
It was something they did. They would gather in small groups so as not to alarm the guards, telling stories between meagre bites, sometimes reciting the story one sentence at a time, singing softly, offering a new version almost every night. It was more difficult to do this in the Palace, where the eyes of their Depur and the guards were closer and it was easier to be pitted against each other.
There, she almost felt free.
And then the sandstorm came.
It was a dark and menacing line on the horizon, down beyond Devil's Doorknot, looming over Hutt's Flats.
It was approaching, and quickly.
Shmi squinted against the wind that blew grains of sand into her face and ruffled her hair: “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Shut up and hurry up!” growled the guard Ukar, raising his macro binoculars to his eyes.
The tug hadn't stopped complaining since they left, cursing the sun, the sand, and the idiot who had put him in this situation. He had mistreated their team and prodded them with teser sticks to make them go faster. He was nervous, and for good reason. Gardulla wasn't happy with anything or anyone those days.
Two of her best pilots had crashed in the same pod-race against one of Jabba's, and as if her rival's smugness weren't enough, a load of high-quality spices and slaves destined for the Core had been intercepted by Republic forces. This had led their Depur to order a thorough scrutiny of his entire organisation, bringing to light several under-the-table deals that had resulted in the punishment of several of her enforcer and the killing of others who had spied on her. But the biggest disaster was the discovery of an entire freedom trail.
Chelik-ta that had been harbouring escaped slaves for generations had been destroyed, and those who had not been lucky enough to be killed immediately or sold had been hung alive on the walls of Gardulla Castle as a warning. They had lost a Grandmother and several overseers who had turned a blind eye on many occasions.
Those were terrifying days.
But everything had to return to normal, their dead would be remembered, their fragments of japor kept safe, they would keep their heads down and their mouths sealed until their Depur became complacent again. Even if that meant scavenging for scrap while a storm that had appeared out of nowhere drew ever closer.
Shmi was cutting a propeller into smaller pieces when she heard the desert scream.
It was a high-pitched, vibrating cry that echoed back to her, shaking her bones so hard that her hacksaw fell with a thud into the sand.
It was the hunting call of a Krayt dragon.
She was so shocked that she didn't realise Ukar and the other guard were running away until some of her companions shouted after them and the speeder's silhouette reduced to a cloud of dust and sand as it sped away.
Shmi felt her heart sink. ‘Oh Kriff.’
The wind enveloped her from all directions, sand scratched her skin, and light debris flew in all directions. She was too far away from both the others and the repulsor-train that had brought them there, and too close to the storm line. She wasted no time and ran towards the nearest rock spur, wrapping a cloth around her head to protect her nose and mouth from the sand, her hands trembling. That was all the time she had before the worst of the storm overwhelmed her.
It was clear to her from the very first moment that this was no ordinary storm, certainly not one of those that lasted a couple of hours, it echoed in her brain like the beat of a drum. She clung to the rock until her fingers bled, curling up in the ledge like a womp rat in its burrow.
And then she heard it.
At first just an echo far enough away to be lost in the roar of the sandstorm, and then closer and closer, three words repeated with desperate crying.
“Amu! Amu help me!”
It was a child, Shmi realised with growing horror. She didn't know who they were, but it was a miracle that the storm hadn't torn them apart yet. She leaned out as far as she could, stumbled and got back up, her vision blurred by sand and dust.
“I'm here!” she shouted into the wind, one arm stretched out towards the desert and the other clinging to a crack in the rock.
Two agonising moments of silence, then: ‘Amu!’ they sobbed desperately. ‘I can't see you, Amu!’
“I'm here!” she shouted again. “I'm here! Follow my voice!”
But the only thing that answered her was the storm and the distant roar of something with too many teeth. Despair took hold of her. She would die there, her brain numb with fear told her, she would die there and her mother and the others would not even have a body to burn and her only consolation would be to cause her Depur to lose profits.
It would have been simple, she could have abandoned her japor and gone out into the storm, she would have been free and would no longer have had to call anyone Master and-
“Amu!”
There it was, a dark, indistinguishable shape in the dust, but it was there and it was getting closer. A hysterical laugh that sounded almost like a sob came out of her chest.
“I’m here!” she leaned out with both arms. “Come here!”
Something crashed into her chest and she held them tight even though she couldn't see and—
And then everything went dark.
There were no children.
Rescuers found Shmi forty-nine hours later, huddled in the meagre shelter of the rocky outcrop, nearly dead from exposure and dehydration.
But there was no child. Not as if she had failed to hold on to them, not as if the storm had torn them from her arms.
It was simply not there.
All four children in the group—their small hands could reach the most precious parts of the cables with ease—were miraculously alive, and none of them had been anywhere near where Shmi was.
This did not bring her the relief it deserved. Even Grandmother Ani had pressed her lips into a line while the others dismissed her story as a hallucination caused by the desert.
“What do you think?” she asked the woman she now considered her mother. “I mean, really.”
“I think,” she began with a new hesitation in her voice, “that Ar-Amu answered my prayers and brought you back to me safe and sound.”
For a moment, the old woman seemed to want to say more, but one of the infirmary assistants was quick to usher her away.
She was almost tempted to resign just to follow her mother and return to their shack, but severe dizziness made her desist.
Perhaps if she had been pitiful enough, they would have given her something for her nausea.
When her monthly blood had not arrived, it had not even occurred to her to worry.
She had not told her mother or any of the other women.
Then a new guard tried to put his hands where he shouldn't, and Shmi ended up in the infirmary again.
The guard was punished for damaging their Lady's property, and Shmi received a full scan.
The doctor adjusted his cracked glasses to see better and simply said, ‘Congratulations.’