Ellaita- discovers her seat is jammed. "Fuck fuck fuck." She grabs for her blaster, shoots out the canopy, feels along the back of the seat for the chute- which is integrated, damn.

Okay, explosive bolts should be... here and here, oh fuck this is going to suck-

Two rapid shots later, she's spinning through the air, away from the crashing ship.

It's two heart-pounding moments before the parachute deploys.

Elsewhere, Anathema hits sand.

It's mid-morning. The region's already scorching hot, and it's only going to get worse over the next few hours. Enough to overwhelm even the armor's climate control.

Her mind jars loose. She stumbles away from her eject seat, falls to her hands and knees, and tries not to vomit.

She'd been -

Leading a revolution.

She can't grab anyone now. Her head's pounding. It feels turned inside out. Scraped raw.

She was -

With Ellaita Dameron. Pretty, possibly Anathema's ticket into the Dawn Resistance - into punching Lord Asshat in the face, she doubts he had enough courtesy to go down with his ship. Important, Anathema had known that as soon as Lord Dickwad brought her on board. A key to her plans, maybe - Anathema's always getting gut feelings like that -

She didn't eject with Anathema. She's not in sight.

It's Anathema's fault they got shot down.

Anathema stumbles to her feet, head spinning, and tries to orient enough to say -

Where is she.

She always finds her way. Her head's killing her, every attempt to ask, to focus, sends her mind spinning dizzily -

No matter. She'll have to look the old fashioned way.

She pulls a map with her projected location off the eject seat's tiny computer. Orients herself to north, marks distance to the nearest village, nearest lookout point, nearest survivable shelter... Mentally reorients where they'd been when she ejected, where the ship had been going -

And she starts walking. Away from the village. She doesn't think Ellaita went that way.

The armor can keep her alive a hell of a lot longer than a human body can last alone out here, and Anathema's breathing steady - she's always been good at working through discomfort, pain, thirst -

She has to force herself to go curl up in a sand-croc's hole when the worst heat sweeps in shortly after noon, making her armor's monitoring systems start screaming at her about heat stroke. She keeps her blaster ready in case the beast comes back. Her head's fuzzy, her mouth's dry.

She waits just long enough her suit stops beeping at her, that the temperature drops to 'technically survivable' -

She keeps looking -

She doesn't find Ellaita Dameron. She does find a village near where several of her girls' TIEs landed - safely, thank fuck - and they're so glad to see her, they want to know what to do now.

Anathema's exhausted. Her mind feels turned inside out.

"We go to the Dawn Resistance," she says, voice distant from herself. "We have important information for them."

She leaves Jakku before the next morning.

Ellaita wakes up somewhere cool and not even particularly dry. It's kinda dark, but there's a soft breeze, and the fan responsible isn't obnoxiously loud. There's a goop of some kind on her shoulder, what feels like bandages wrapped around it.

There's also a soft sound of things rustling. Metal against metal. Something sliding against cloth.

And then a girl's voice, a bit soft: "You awake?"

"Mrm. Think so."

"Your shoulder's fucked," she says, "And I'm not allowed to try Force-healing people anymore. But I think it'll heal on its own if you keep it still. Got some stuff on it, though it's not as good as bacta. So you probably shouldn't thrash around a bunch or anything."

"Yeah, well, if you don't try to torture me I won't thrash around, how about that? Had enough of that for a while..."

"I won't."

"You'll be safe here, whatever you're running from. No one finds us who I don't lead over."

"Great." She groans. Shoulder does ache.

"You didn't see anyone else in the area?"

"Some ships flying overhead. No one landed near us, though."

She slumps a little.

"All right."

"Looking for someone?"

"There was another person in the ship. Hope she got out."

"Huh."

"My Master's really good at finding people. We can ask her to check around."

"That'd be good. But if she survived and didn't find the wreck, she's probably gone."

"Oh. She wouldn't have kept looking?"

"We only met about an hour before the crash. She had other things going on too."

She nods. "Well, my Master can probably at least figure out if she's alive."

Frown.

"...Didn't think there were slaves on Jakku."

"...Oh. I'm not a slave. She's my Master like - master of the craft, or headmaster of a school. But it's just us here, not a full school."

"Studying out here? What, desertcraft?"

"The Force! She's really good at it, even if she's a weird hermit. She says spaces without a lot of sapients around are a good place to learn to listen to yourself."

"I'd say there was something in the water if there wasn't such a distinct lack of it around here..." she mutters.

"What's so weird about it?"

"Of the last five people I've met on or around this planet, four have had some kind of tale to tell me about what the rest of the galaxy considers a mystical superstition."

She giggles.

...And several packages start floating in front of Ellaita's face.