Star Wars Rebels: Rise of the Rebels (7 page)

Ezra had made it
halfway up the hill when he felt that tingle again. Actually, it was more than a tingle. It was like his spine was being rattled. He had to move or he would die.

Ezra followed his instinct and flipped to the left. A cannon blast pounded the hillside where he’d just stood. Unfortunately, he’d dropped the helmet. It tumbled down the hill, skipping over rocks.

Ezra couldn’t go back for it now. Incessant blasts came from the TIE fighter. Ezra rolled, making himself a difficult target to hit. He could almost hear the pilot’s voice:
Lucky kid
.

The man was wrong. This wasn’t luck. And while Ezra was technically a kid, he played harder than any other kid he knew.

When he came up to a knee, Ezra was holding his most valuable possession—the
other
thing that had saved his life countless times.

His slingshot.

Ezra pulled back on his slingshot’s energy stream. A bright, sizzling stunball formed in the pocket field. The TIE laser cannons fired again.

Nudged by his special instinct, Ezra leapt high over those blasts. And still in the air, he quickly slung two stunballs in rapid-fire fashion.

The stunballs were perfectly aimed. They hit the TIE’s viewport—then fizzled out. Shocked, Ezra lost focus. His landing didn’t go as planned. He fell back onto his rump.

Ezra knew he probably lay in the dead center of the TIE’s targeting scope. A sitting hawk-bat if there ever was one. He could see the pilot looking out at him through the broken canopy. Fingers on the cannon trigger, the pilot allowed himself a cocky grin.

Ezra used that moment to shoot a stunball.

The energy globe arced high—too high to do any damage to the cockpit. Instead, it nicked the edge of the canopy, causing the globe to ricochet—into the back of the pilot’s head.

The man crumpled in the seat, dazed. His fingers fell from the trigger, and his face slammed the cockpit dash. He never knew what had stunned him.

Ezra rose, dusting his clothes off. “Well, that was fun.” He took a breath and looked around. “Now, where…”

He found the TIE fighter pilot’s helmet leaning against a rock. He picked it up and examined it. Then he put the helmet on his fist and shook it back and forth like a puppet’s head. “This helmet is the property of Ezra Bridger,” he said, mimicking the Imperial’s stern voice.

Ezra stared into the dark lenses that were supposed to shade the pilot’s eyes. “Or it is now, anyway,” he said, and put the helmet on.

The helmet bounced on Ezra’s head, many sizes too big. He could hardly see out of those dark lenses. He could hardly breathe.

Discomforts like that had never stopped him before. Ezra came out there to have fun—to be a kid—and that was what he’d do.

He held the helmet in place with a hand and turned toward the outline of the TIE fighter. With his other hand, he saluted. “Sir! Thank you, sir!”

Then he walked away, skipping over blast craters and weaving around smoldering wreckage. Only when he had reached the summit of the hill did he pause and look back. Smoke plumed up from the crash site like phantom snakes.

Ezra tightened the straps of his backpack and turned around to descend the hill, whistling merrily. The distant communications tower might be a lonely, rusted hulk, but it was his home away from the streets. There he would have fun. There he would enjoy the last rays of the sun and look up at the dawning stars.

There he would find peace.

Michael Kogge
has written in the
Star Wars
galaxy for a long, long time. His other recent work includes
Empire of the Wolf
, an epic comic series featuring werewolves in ancient Rome, published by Alterna Comics. He lives online at
www.michaelkogge.com
, while his real home is located in Los Angeles.