Like a native guide, Zekk led the four friends down connecting elevators, slide tubes, and rusty metal stairs, and across the catwalks from one building to another. Jacen followed, exhilarated. He wasn’t sure he knew exactly where they were anymore, but he loved to explore new places, never knowing what sort of interesting plants or creatures he might find.
The skyscraper walls rose like glass-and-metal cliff faces, with only a narrow wedge of daylight shining from above. As Zekk took the companions farther down, the buildings seemed broader, the walls rougher. Mushy blobs of fungus grew from cracks in the massive construction blocks; fringed lichens, some glowing with phosphorescent light, caked the walls. Lowbacca looked decidedly uneasy, and Jacen remembered that the lanky Wookiee had grown up on Kashyyyk, where the deep forest underworld was an extremely dangerous place.
High overhead Jacen could hear the cries of sleek winged creatures—predatory hawk-bats that lived in the city on Coruscant. The breeze picked up, carrying with it heavy, warm scents of rotting garbage from far below. His stomach grew queasy, but he pressed on. Zekk didn’t seem to notice. Tenel Ka, Lowie, and Jaina hurried behind them.
They proceeded across a roofed-in walkway where many of the transparisteel ceiling panels had been smashed out, leaving only a wire reinforcement mesh that whistled in the breezes. Jacen noted etched symbols along the walls, all of them vaguely threatening. Some reminded Jacen of curved knives and fanged mouths, but the most common design showed a sharp triangle surrounding a targeting cross. It looked to Jacen like the tip of an arrow heading straight between his eyes.
“Hey, Zekk, what’s that design?” He pointed to the triangular symbol.
Frowning, Zekk glanced around them in all directions and then whispered, “It means we have to be very quiet down here and move as fast as we can. We don’t want to go into any of these buildings.”
“But why not?” Jacen asked.
“The Lost Ones,” Zekk said. “It’s a gang. They live down here—kids who ran away from home or were abandoned by their parents because they were so much trouble. Nasty types, mostly.”
“Let’s hope they stay lost,” Jaina said.
Zekk glanced up, his forehead creased with troubled thoughts. “The Lost Ones might even be looking at us right now, but they’ve never managed to catch me yet,” he said. “It’s like a game between us.”
“How have you managed to get away from them all the time?” Jaina whispered.
“I’m just good at it. Like I’m a good scavenger,” Zekk answered, sounding cocky. “I may not be in training as a Jedi Knight, but I make do with what skills I’ve got. Just streetwise, I guess. But,” he continued, “even though I have kind of an … understanding with them, I’d rather not push it. Especially not while I’m with the twin children of the Chief of State.”
“This is a fact,” Tenel Ka said grimly. She kept her hands close to her utility belt in case she needed to draw a weapon.
Zekk quickly ushered them through dilapidated corridors that were heavily decorated with the gang symbols. Jacen saw signs of recent habitation, wrappers from prepackaged food, bright metallic spots where salvaged equipment had been torn away from its housings.
At last they moved on to deeper levels. They all breathed more easily, although Zekk confessed even he had not fully explored this far down. “I think it’s a shortcut,” he said. “I need your help so I can recover something very valuable.” He raised his dark eyebrows. “I think you’ll like it—particularly you, Jacen.”
Zekk made his living by scavenging: salvaging lost equipment, removing scraps of precious metal from abandoned dwellings. He found lost treasures to sell to inventors, spare parts to repair obsolete machines, trinkets that could be turned into souvenirs. He seemed to have a real skill for finding items that other scavengers had missed over the centuries, somehow knowing where to look, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places.
They descended an outer staircase, slick with damp moss from moisture trickling down the walls. Jacen had to squint just to see the steps. As they turned the corner of the building, Zekk stopped in surprise. In the dim light reflected from far above, Jacen could see a strange jumble protruding from the side of the building—smashed construction bricks, naked durasteel girders … and a crashed transport shuttle. From the drooping algae and fungus growing on its outer hull, the damaged shuttle appeared to have been there a long time.
“Wow!” Zekk said. “I didn’t even know this was here.” He hurried forward, edging his way along the damaged walkway. “I don’t believe it. The salvage hasn’t even been picked over. See—I’m lucky again!”
“That’s an Old Republic craft,” Jaina said. “At least seventy years old. They haven’t used those in … I can’t even remember. What a find!”
Tenel Ka and Lowie held the creaking ship steady as Zekk scrambled inside to look around. He poked into storage compartments, looking for valuables. “Plenty of components are still intact. Engine still looks good,” he called. “Whoa, and here’s the driver. I guess his parking permit ran out.”
Jacen came up behind him to see a tattered skeleton strapped into the cockpit.
“Oh, do be careful,” Em Teedee said from Lowbacca’s waist. “Abandoned vehicles can be terribly dangerous—and you might get dirty as well.”
“Was this what you wished to show us, Zekk?” Tenel Ka said.
The older boy stood, bumping his head on a bent girder that ran along the shuttle’s ceiling. “No, no, this is a new discovery. I’ll have to spend a lot more time down here.” He grinned. Engine grease smudged his face, and his hands were grimy from digging through compartments. “I can get this stuff later. I need your help for something different. Let’s go.”
Zekk scrambled out of the shuttle wreckage and grasped the rusted handrail on the rickety walkway. He looked around to get his bearings, making certain he wouldn’t forget the location of this prize. The skull of the unlucky pilot stared out at them through empty eye sockets.
“Looks like you really do know this place like the back of your hand,” Jacen commented as Zekk led them elsewhere.
“I’ve had plenty of practice,” Zekk said. “Some of us don’t take regular trips off planet and go to diplomatic functions all the time. I have to amuse myself with what I can find.”
It was midmorning by the time they reached Zekk’s destination. The dark-haired boy rubbed his hands together in anticipation, and pointed far below. “Down there—can you see it?”
Jacen looked down, down over a ledge to see a rusted construction crawler latched to a wall about ten meters away … completely out of reach. The construction crawler was a crane-like mechanical apparatus that had once ridden tracks along the side of the building, scouring the walls clean, effecting repairs, applying duracrete sealant—but this contraption had frozen up and begun to decay at least a century ago. Its interlinked rusted braces were clogged with fuzzy growths of moss and fungus.
Jacen squinted again, wondering why the other boy meant to salvage parts from such an old machine—but then he saw the bushy mass, a tangle of uprooted wires and cables woven together, bristling with insulation material, torn strips of cloth, and plastic. It looked almost like a …
“It’s a hawk-bat’s nest,” Zekk said. “Four eggs inside. I can see them from here, but I can’t get down there by myself. If I can snatch even one of those eggs, I could sell it for enough credits to live on for a month.”