[Galaxy Of Fear] - 04(20)

There was no sign of Deevee.

He can’t drown, Zak thought to himself. Maybe he got pulled along by the current.

Tash would soon sink if she didn’t snap out of it. Using one hand to keep her afloat, Zak started to swim toward the shore.

Zak had done plenty of swimming on Alderaan. He swam steadily but slowly, to save his strength, and after fifteen minutes they were near enough to see the shoreline clearly. There was no sign of the rancor.

Exhausted and soaking wet, Zak crawled onto the wet sand, hauling his sister behind him. “I’ve never swum so far in my whole life,” he panted.

Beside him Tash let out a huge gasp. Still only half-conscious, she muttered, “One of us must die. One of us must die…”

Zak grabbed her shoulders. “Tash? What are you saying?”

Tash let out a sudden, violent cough, clearing more water from her lungs. Her eyes flew open. “Zak!” She looked around. “We’re-we’re on dry land!”

“Yeah,” he sighed wearily. “What were you saying just now? You were muttering again. Are you sick?”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed her temples. “I don’t remember saying anything. But my head is killing me. What did I say?”

Zak decided not to tell her. “Forget it. You were just delirious.”

Tash shivered in her wet clothes.

“We’ve got to find help,” Zak said. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on here. How could that rancor have eaten Lando? Wasn’t it a hologram?”

Tash didn’t answer. She still seemed lost in her own world.

Zak answered his own question. “I don’t know. I told you something’s wrong here. It’s like the Hall of Reflection. I really felt like I had been transformed, not just tricked by an illusion.” He pointed to the nearest building, a long, low structure at the edge of the lagoon. “Whatever that rancor is, I don’t want it to find us. Let’s stay out of the open. We should head for that building over there.”

Slowly Tash and Zak made their way toward a building surrounded by small kiosks. The kiosks contained arts and crafts from across the galaxy-woven baskets spun from the grass fields of Worru’du, magnificent

animated storytelling puppets from the planet Zhann, and delicate figurines made from seashells on the many-tiered world of K’ath.

The objects in the kiosks were beautiful, but all Zak and Tash noticed was that all the people were gone.

“Maybe they were all holograms,” Tash offered hopefully. “Maybe they were just accidentally erased, like the other day.”

“Or maybe,” Zak returned darkly, “they were real. Maybe everything is real now. Otherwise how could that rancor have eaten Lando?” He swallowed. “Everything in Fun World has come to life.”

The building beyond the kiosks was topped by a sign that read, THE MAKER’S WORKSHOP.

“Do you think this place is safe?” Tash asked.

“I don’t know,” her brother answered. “But it can’t be worse than anyplace else in Fun World. Besides, maybe we’ll find Deevee here. It sounds like the kind of place a droid would like.”

Inside The Maker’s Workshop, they found a long hall. On each side of the hall was a workbench, and another long table ran down the middle of the room.

“Prime!” Zak exclaimed when he saw the tables.

The tables, shelves, and even parts of the floor were covered with mechanical parts and tools. Servos, circuits, hydrospanners, the arms and legs and heads of disassembled droids, even engine parts, lay scattered everywhere. It was a tinkerer’s paradise.

“Imagine what I could do with all this stuff,” he murmured to himself. He walked down one row of parts. “There’s enough spare equipment in this room to build a dozen droids, a T-71 skyhopper-maybe even a small starship!”

“Don’t get any ideas, Zak,” Tash warned. “This isn’t the time to-“

She stopped. In the middle of the central table, resting on a small pedestal of polished stone, was a gleaming cylinder that Tash recognized instantly. It was the weapon of a Jedi Knight.

It was a lightsaber.

Tash had only seen one lightsaber before with her own eyes. It had been worn on the hip of a young man named Luke Skywalker who, along with his friends, had saved them from the flesh-eating planet D’vouran.

Tash exhaled slowly. A lightsaber. Only the Jedi knew how to build them. Only the Jedi knew how to use them properly. Where had it come from? How had it gotten here?

It’s probably just a hologram, she thought. But then, the rancor was supposed to be a hologram, wasn’t it? Maybe the lightsaber would prove to be just as real.