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Filled with danger, intrigue and more than just a dash of politics, the Republic capital of Coruscant is deadly for those who don’t know how to navigate its various demands. And in a CBR-exclusive excerpt, Star Wars The High Republic: Out of the Shadows protagonist Sylvestri Yarrow gets a taste of that darker side when she’s nearly assassinated.
Written by Justina Ireland, Out of the Shadows sees Syl in an upscale hotel on Coruscant. However, just when she seems to think the most frustrating part of the experience will be a droid that’s too helpful, she’s nearly killed by an assassin. Luckily, though, she’s able to use some quick thinking to turn the tables on her attacker and survive. Still, the experience leaves Syl visibly frustrated with the planet and her circumstances.
You can read CBR’s exclusive except from Star Wars: Out of the Shadows — which is the latest installment in the High Republic publishing initiative — in full below.
On her eleventh circuit across the carpet, Syl caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that occupied the wall across from the sleeping area. When she had awoken that morning, it had been a window, not a mirror. A knob turned the glass clear, revealing a dizzying view of Coruscant’s daytime traffic streaming by. Syl had watched the sky cars zipping past for exactly ten seconds before she had closed the glass once more. It was nauseating to consider how many beings flooded the planet. No wonder the Republic officials had completely ignored her pleas for help. How could they care about a handful of frontier lives when they had all this around them?
The Nihil must seem like a vague and distant threat to a people with their own busy lives.
Now, a wide-eyed Syl stared back from the glass. Her kinky-curly hair was snarled and flattened to one side of her head from her restless night. Her dark eyes seemed too large in her dark brown face, making her look like a frightened child. Was this why none of the officials had taken her seriously the day before? She was an absolute mess.
Syl took a deep breath and let it out in a growl as she half-heartedly tried to fluff her hair into some semblance of order. She wasn’t built for this! Give her a broken compressor, pirates, and a risky flight plan and she was fine. But dealing with government officials and fleecing the ultrarich apparently sent her to absolute pieces.
“Your heartbeat is elevated,” the server droid said, coming through on its quarter-hourly cycle. “I will dim the lights and play soothing music.”
“No, I’m fine,” Syl said. But the lights had already dimmed, and the discordant sounds of a Saleucami harp filtered through the room.
“Since you are from the frontier, I have selected music popular to the Outer Rim. If you would like something else, please specify.”
“I didn’t want any music at all,” Syl said, crossing her arms. Could a droid be too helpful? Because this one was.
A chime echoed throughout the room, and Syl looked around in surprise. The server droid was less startled.
“There is a visitor,” it said as it walked by. It was a gangly model, with an extra set of arms and a polished silver body. The middle spun around as it headed toward the door, one of the arms spraying some kind of floral scent into the air. “You are nervous. This scent has been designed to calm anxious humans.”
“Uh, thanks?” Syl said. She sort of missed the flop in the bad part of the city. There, no one had much cared how she felt, and the biggest annoyance had been the giant insects gnawing on the insides of the walls. Syl hadn’t seen any in her short time there; the sound of the chewing had changed to scattering feet when she’d entered the room in the run-down hotel to grab Beti and her small knapsack the night before, but at least pests were a thing she knew how to deal with.
The droid approached the door, which slid open soundlessly. “This room’s occupant did not yet order the midday meal,” the droid began. That was all it got out before two blaster shots felled the mechanical servant, a charred hole where its processing unit had once been.
Syl got a glimpse of a Mon Calamari male in a ragged hotel uniform before she threw herself behind a nearby chair. Two more blaster shots sizzled the air, leaving char marks on the carpet where she’d been standing just a moment before.
“Oy, now, be a dear and make this easy,” the man called. His Basic was heavily accented, like that of many on the frontier, and it made her think he wasn’t from Coruscant. Did the Mon Calamari leave Mon Cala? Not that she much cared where he was from. He was obviously trying to kill her.
It was strange the thoughts that ran through one’s head when trying not to get blasted.
Syl considered her options as she crouched behind the chair. It was her good luck the room was dimly lit and the man didn’t seem to know the layout or the fact that one whole wall was nothing but a mirror. He stalked into the room carefully, his blaster at the ready. Syl could track his progress in the reflective surface across from her. He was a dark shape against more recognizable shadows. Every couple of breaths the droid sparked, brightening the dim space and throwing everything into stark relief. Syl needed a plan and quickly, before the man discovered he could see her just as she could see him.
The lavatory was toward the back and the door could be locked, but she would be trapped. She could try to fight back, but she didn’t have her blaster; Beti was in a closet near the lavatory, and by the time she grabbed it she would be dusted. Still, Syl considered fighting back her best option. Only, what was she going to use as a weapon? A decorative sculpture?
That actually wasn’t a bad idea.
Syl very slowly reached for a nearby knickknack—a small, heavy vase that looked to be made from some kind of very fancy pink rock. She pulled her arm back and hefted the vase. Not as heavy as she wanted it to be, but better than just a fist.
“Emergency. Emergency,” the droid bleated, its voice processor severely damaged and the sound jarring. The sudden noise was enough to make the man turn around, and Syl did not waste the moment. She planted her foot in the seat of the chair she’d hidden behind and launched herself over its high back, landing behind the man with the blaster. As he turned toward her, she swung with all her might at his head, but he dodged at the last moment. Syl adjusted her swing slightly, and the vase hit the blaster he held. He yowled as his long fingers bent in all the wrong directions.
Syl did not give him time to recover. She aimed a kick at his midsection and he went flying backward, falling into the prone form of the droid. Syl grabbed the blaster—a heavy, outdated model—but before she could level it at the man, he had rolled out of the still open doorway, scrabbling to his feet and running away toward who knew where.
Syl let the hand holding the blaster fall to her side. A security droid, all black with arms disproportionately long compared with its body, burst into the room.
“There has been a distress call. Please state your emergency,” the droid said, a number of yellow lights on its torso flashing.
“Someone just tried to kill me! If you run you might be able to catch him,” Syl said in annoyance. Now that she was no longer in any immediate danger she was mostly just really, really angry. How dare someone try to kill her?
The droid hurried off in the same direction the Mon Calamari man had fled, but Syl had a feeling the assassin was long gone. As busy as Coruscant was, it would be a futile search.
Syl threw the blaster onto an end table and put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the damage to the room. The carpet was smoldering, and the droid was leaking various fluids all over the place. There were a couple of cracks in the fish tank, the see-through material melted and warped. Syl wondered who she should call about that. If the side of the fish tank went, she was going to have one giant mess on her hands.
“By the stars, what happened here?” came a voice from the doorway. Syl pulled her attention away from the damaged fish tank to find Xylan Graf standing there, the Gigoran Basha a looming white wall behind him. Xylan was dressed in red and white: deep red cape with an edge lined in beige, pale shirt and pants, each decorated with a pattern that swirled in shades from deep red to scarlet as Syl watched. Where in the galaxy had he found such an outfit?
Before Syl could explain the past couple of minutes, a cracking sound came from behind her. Instinctively she jumped onto a low-slung fainting couch. As she did, the wall of the tank gave way and a wave of water spilled across the room, lifting the murdered droid and surging toward the door. To Xylan’s credit he didn’t cry out or panic, merely raised a single perfectly edged dark eyebrow as water and dozens of flopping fish rushed toward him and over his shoes, soaking him up to his knees.
“This is unfortunate,” Basha said, her vocalizer making it less an exclamation of woe and more a statement of fact. She ducked her head to look at Syl directly, the doorframe not built to accommodate her height. “Is this the result of some kind of attack?”
“Yes! Someone tried to kill me,” Syl said, crossing her arms and remaining where she stood on the sofa. Xylan might have other shoes, but she was wearing her only pair of boots and she had no intention of getting them soaked. She’d had enough shenanigans for one day.
“We’re going to have to move you somewhere safer,” Xylan said, looking at his boots with an expression somewhere between woe and annoyance. “If an assassination attempt was made, it must be that someone thinks you have some critical piece of information.”
Basha nodded, her white hair shifting as she did so. “We should also alert the hotel. They are going to need a new fish tank.”
Syl didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But one thing was certain: she was definitely going to start carrying Beti with her everywhere she went.
Coruscant might glitter more than the frontier, but the flashy planet was every bit as deadly as the far reaches of the galaxy.
As to why Ireland chose Coruscant as a key setting for Out of the Shadows‘ action, she explained, “I think it can be hard to establish the various planets in Star Wars visually, and I think Coruscant is one of those places most fans have a good mental image of. It’s sort of a time saver when you can sketch out broad strokes of a place and readers can fill in the rest. Plus, Coruscant is sort of like Washington DC and New York combined, and who wouldn’t want to write about places that seem to be chaotic and vibrant?”
Talking about Syl and her place in the Star Wars universe as well as the High Republic era, Ireland explained, “Syl is just a simple hauler. That’s all. She’s not Force sensitive, she’s not a Jedi, she’s just a human girl trying to make her way in a galaxy full of danger and excitement. Her mother has been killed by the Nihil and when the Nihil attack for a second time and she has to abandon her ship she figures she might as well go to Coruscant to let the government know that their efforts to rein in the Nihil have been shoddy at best. As one does when they have nothing left to lose.”
Yarrow isn’t Out of the Shadows only protagonist, as Jedi Knight Vernestra Rwoh will also play a key role in the book. However, don’t expect any secret hidden connection between the her and Syl. “That’s the great thing about the High Republic books,” Ireland explained, “it gives us a chance to introduce new characters and new relationships. Syl and Vern end up in the same orbit because of a couple of feuding families and territorial rights to an empty bit of space. They’re perfect foils for one another: two pretty independent teenagers trying to navigate the complicated politics of the time. It’s a quintessential Young Adult set up: the Odd Couple pairing and a larger than life problem that they have to face down.”
After adding that Out of the Shadows is giving her the opportunity to kill characters on-screen for the first time in her work with the franchise, Ireland noted, “I mean, people die in a Test of Courage, but that’s a book for younger readers so it is all off screen. But this time you get to witness the body count. And that’s fun.” She then teased that those who have “read my other YA books, especially Dread Nation or Deathless Divide,” will know what to expect in terms of a scene she can’t wait for people to see.
According to the official synopsis for Star Wars The High Republic: Out of the Shadows,
Long before the Clone Wars, the Empire, or the First Order, the Jedi lit the way for the galaxy in a golden age known as the High Republic!
Sylvestri Yarrow is on a streak of bad luck with no end of sight. She’s been doing her best to keep the family cargo business going after her mom’s death, but between mounting debt and increasing attacks by the Nihil on unsuspecting ships, Syl is in danger of losing all she has left of her mother. She heads to the galactic capital of Coruscant for help, but gets sidetracked when she’s drawn into a squabble between two powerful families over a patch of space on the frontier. Knee-deep in familial politics is the last place Syl wants to be, but the promise of a big payoff is enough to keep her interested… Meanwhile, Jedi Knight Vernestra Rwoh has been summoned to Coruscant, but with no idea of why or by whom. She and her Padawan Imri hitch a ride to the capital with Jedi Master Cohmac and his Padawan, Reath—and are asked to assist with the property dispute on the frontier. But why? What is so important about an empty patch of space? The answer will lead Vernestra to a new understanding of her abilities, and will take Syl back to the past…and to truths that will finally come out of the shadows.
Star Wars The High Republic: Out of the Shadows by Justina Ireland goes on sale from Disney Books on July 27.
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