Queen''s Shadow

by E. K. Johnston

  “I will,” Padmé said. “I’m not always comfortable with who I am here, but I’ll stay.”

  “You’ll be Amidala,” Sabé said. “And you’ll be Padmé, too.”

  “And you’ll be Tsabin and Sabé?” Padmé asked, even though she already knew the answer.

  “For as long as you need me,” Sabé said.

  She and Tonra took the lift down to the public pedestrian level, where they would catch a transport back to their apartment. They were wearing Republic uniforms, but that was hardly a strange sight on Coruscant. They would fit right in.

  Padmé, R2-D2, and Typho took the private speeder to the Senate building, because Padmé wanted to write up her report before she went home. She was tired, and she knew that once she stopped moving, it would be a long time before she wanted to start again.

  The Senate building was emptying as she arrived, the session over and the committee meetings concluded for the day. Typho had no trouble finding a landing pad, and they walked up to Padmé’s office through quiet corridors. She downloaded the files from R2-D2’s memory and spent a few minutes looking at the pirate ships before passing the specs over to Typho.

  “Do you recognize any of it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I’m not an expert on this sort of thing. You might ask Captain Panaka, though. He knows ship design better than I do, and he has more contacts.”

  “I’ll have Mariek add it to one of her communiqués to him,” Padmé said. She intended to ask around, as well. “Do you mind if I go down and see if Senator Bonteri is still here? I know she hasn’t been involved lately, but she did help us get started with the Bromlarch situation, and I would like to update her in person, if she wants to know.”

  “Artoo and I will be fine,” Typho said. “Just don’t take too long. We both need to get home.”

  Padmé agreed, so she wasted no time getting to Bonteri’s office. It wasn’t far, given the size of the building, and Padmé was familiar with the route. The lack of other senators and aides sped her journey along. She didn’t even see any cleaning or maintenance droids. It was almost too quiet. Padmé came around the final corner to find Senator Bonteri standing at a communications console in the corridor, speaking with someone Padmé couldn’t see. The image was concealed by the screen around the holoemitter, which, combined with the anonymity of the console, made the conversation totally private. Padmé stopped walking as Bonteri looked up and saw her. She thought a flash of fear might have gone through the other senator’s eyes but couldn’t imagine what her friend would be afraid of.

  “I will let you know,” Senator Bonteri said. Her words were rushed, as though she had said the first thing that crossed her mind.

  “See that you do, Senator,” the figure said.

  The voice was unmistakable. This was the man that Bonteri had been conversing with the day Padmé had accidentally overheard them, and now here he was again. He made her feel cold, though not in the usual way. She couldn’t explain it. It was not in her nature to dislike people with no context, but Padmé found she didn’t care for him one bit. The blue glow disappeared from the console, and Padmé was glad of it.

  “You have been successful, then,” Bonteri said. For the first time, she didn’t invite Padmé into her office, leaving them standing in the hall.

  “Yes,” Padmé said. “Bromlarch is saved.”

  “Congratulations, Senator Amidala,” Bonteri said. “You have done what few other senators before you have accomplished.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you,” Padmé said.

  “No,” said Bonteri. “I don’t suppose you could have. But your patience with the Republic is commendable, and I applaud you for it.”

  “Thank you,” Padmé said. “I can give you more details if you like.”

  “I’m sorry, Senator,” Bonteri said. “I have a call scheduled with my son. I will have to hear about it in the session report.”

  “Of course,” Padmé said. “Please feel free to ask me any questions.”

  “I will,” Bonteri said. She turned, went into her office, and closed the door.

  Padmé drifted back up to her office, lost in thought. She had gained the full confidence of Mon Mothma only to lose Mina Bonteri. The two women were not dissimilar, and Padmé had been hoping to work with both of them, because she admired them for similar reasons. But it seemed that it was not to be. Bonteri’s primary alliance was a mystery, and it was a puzzle Padmé was strangely afraid to solve.

  She arrived back at her office just as Chancellor Palpatine did, accompanied by two guards instead of his advisors.

  “Senator Amidala,” he said, “I’m pleased to see you have returned safely.”

  “Thank you, Chancellor,” she said. He had come to her office, but his tone indicated he was not merely a friend checking on her welfare. “We did come under attack, but with the help of the Republic ships and Jedi Master Billaba, we suffered no losses.”

  “Good, good,” Palpatine said. It was clear he was light-years away, his relief at her safety the same as he might feel if he had made a particularly risky holochess gambit only to have the pawn survive it.

  “I will have a full report for the Senate soon,” she said, nearly lapsing into the queen’s voice.

  “I’m glad you have found a more suitable arena to utilize your talents,” Palpatine said. He gestured sharply to his guards, and they moved off down the corridor.

  Padmé stood alone in the hallway for several moments, parsing what he’d said. More suitable. He was glad she had moved away from the antislavery—“jurisdictional”—politics. She set her teeth. She hadn’t come all this way to be a line in the programming. She could do more than one thing, even if it meant going against the Chancellor’s implied wishes. She had, after all, only just begun.

  “I’m ready to go home, Sergeant,” she called to Typho from the hallway. If she went back into her office, she would find a hundred more things to do.

  Typho came out, R2-D2 at his heels, and they went back down to their airspeeder.

  “It’s so good to be home,” Padmé said, sinking into the sofa in her sitting room. Dormé, Cordé, and Versé were all with her, and the guards were pretending not to be there, which was always appreciated. Everything seemed soft and warm and solid, a welcome respite after the past few weeks of hard desks, desperate plans, and interplanetary cooperation.

  “Home?” said Mariek, who was always worse at pretending she wasn’t in the room.

  “Well,” Padmé said, “not home, I suppose. But I am glad for this cushion in particular.”

  She told them all the details of the excursion, including the firefight, though she left out her conversations with her fellow senators. She didn’t like shutting the handmaidens out, but the boundaries were different now, and they would all have to adjust to them. There would still be times like this, when it was all of them together, but they wouldn’t inhabit each other’s skin anymore, and that was probably for the best. She wouldn’t even have to tell them. They were all professional enough to spot the shift and accept it.

  Movement caught her eye, and Padmé saw an airspeeder rise from the dedicated traffic lanes to level off outside her balcony. It was Sabé, and she was waving for them to let down the screen that kept out intruders and high winds. Typho came running into the room as the proximity alarm sounded.

  “It’s all right,” Padmé said. “It’s just Sabé.”

  “If she’s doing this,” Typho said. “It’s not all right.”

  He deactivated the shield, and Sabé jumped onto the balcony. Padmé tried not to think about the distance between the balcony and the ground. The airspeeder drove off, and the alarm ceased once the screen was back in place. Sabé came in at a run.

  “There’s news,” she said. “It’s not public yet, but my source is a holojournalist, and she was in the courtroom when it happened.”

  A courtroom could mean only one thing. The Occupation of Naboo had ended, but it was going to follow h
er forever. She couldn’t regret it. She had done what she needed to do. But she was just so tired.

  Sabé knelt in front of her and took her hands. Padmé knew that her dearest friend would see her weariness no matter how she tried to hide it, so she didn’t. Sabé looked her straight in the face, as she had always done, and the message in her eyes was clear as crystal.

  We are brave, Your Highness.

  “Nute Gunray was found not guilty,” Sabé said. “He retains his assets and titles until we file another appeal.”

  We are brave, Your Highness.

  “Padmé, the rumor is that he has put a price on your head,” she said. “Big enough to attract the attention of some unpleasant people.”

  We are brave, Your Highness.

  “All right,” Padmé said.

  Naboo. Tatooine. Bromlarch. Trade. Slavery. Piracy. There would always be another planet that needed help, and she’d be damned if she would let anyone stop her. A light flashed on her personal console, the alert she’d set for any development on Chancellor Palpatine’s jurisdictional bill. She’d make time for all of it. She looked up, and her people were ready for her.

  “What do we do next?”

  Padmé Amidala was completely still. The brown halo of her hair spread out around her, softened here and there by white blossoms that had blown through the air to find their rest amongst her curls. Her skin was pale and perfect. Her face was peaceful. Her eyes were closed and her hands were clasped across her stomach as she floated. Naboo carried on without her.

  Even now, at the end, she was watched.

  Theed was subdued as its citizens remembered. Even the Gungans in the procession walked slowly, no trace of the usual bounce in their steps. Throughout Naboo, the people mourned a queen, a senator. She had served well. She had grown in wisdom and experience, and had done both rapidly. She had faced the trials of her position unflinching and unafraid. And now, her time was ended.

  After the funeral, Sabé went home. She had nowhere else to go.

  It was a cramped little place on one of Theed’s smallest streets. There weren’t slums on Naboo, but if there were, that’s where Sabé would be living. She didn’t stay there very often, only when she was onworld and her parents started asking too many questions. It was the only place she could go now where no one would ask her if she was all right.

  A knock made her jump. She was halfway through the list of disreputable types who might have tracked her down before she realized that it was Tonra, one of the few who knew where this place was. She let him in without saying anything and went back to where she had been sitting.

  As usual, Tonra was content to wait her out, and her patience frayed long before his did.

  “It doesn’t make any sense!” Sabé’s rage and bewilderment—held at bay by sheer force of will throughout the public response to tragedy—finally crept into her tone. “She wouldn’t just die. And an empire? Headed by Sheev Palpatine? Nothing about this makes sense!”

  Sio Bibble had finally retired, and instead of holding an election—in which Saché was heavily favored—the role of governor had been replaced with a new position. By Imperial appointment Quarsh Panaka, of all people, now oversaw the daily operations of Naboo. Neither Mariek nor Typho had appeared with him when he made his first formal address to the planet. The changes were coming almost too fast for her to cope with in her grief. At least they still had a queen, though Sabé didn’t know how she could help the girl, even if she were in a position to do so. She needed a moment to think, and Tonra was giving it to her.

  “What will you do?” Tonra asked.

  From her parents, that question would mean, “What will you do without her?” It was a question they had been asking Sabé for years, and she never had an answer for them, because she never considered life without Padmé’s direction. From Tonra, there was more nuance. He knew what she had done in Padmé’s service, after all. He wasn’t asking what she would do without. He was asking what she would do because. He knew her too well to imagine she would do nothing.

  She had walked with the surviving handmaidens in the funeral procession. They had barely spoken. Their grief was deep and profound but difficult to explain to those outside their select circle. Naboo had lost a senator, a hero, a queen. They had lost the friend they had all—every one of them over the years—risked their lives for. They hadn’t taken those risks for politics or for Naboo or for the now-defunct Republic. They had taken them for Padmé, because they loved her. And now she was gone.

  “I’m going to find out what happened to my friend,” Sabé said. She got up and began to pace the small room. She couldn’t sit still anymore. She couldn’t stay on this paradise of a world while there were dreadful secrets for her to uncover. Cordé was dead. Versé was dead. Obi-Wan was dead. Master Billaba was dead. Anakin Skywalker was dead.

  Padmé Amidala Naberrie was dead, her dreams with her.

  “I’ll go back to Coruscant,” she said. “I’ll be Tsabin a little bit longer. One or two of our old contacts might still be there. They might know something, and that would be a place to start.”

  “I’ll come with you, if you’ll have me,” Tonra offered.

  She knew the offer was genuine. They had spent more time apart than together since Bromlarch, and Sabé knew Tonra hadn’t spent all that time alone. She hadn’t, either. But they had always been on good terms, even if they had rarely been on the same planet. She knew they worked well together. And she didn’t really have anyone left. She stopped pacing and stood in front of him.

  “I would like that,” she said.

  He heard the small crack in her voice and ignored it, placing a kiss on her forehead instead.

  “We’ll need entirely new identities,” she said. “Even if we go back to Coruscant. Sabé, Tsabin, Tonra—they’ll all have to go. We have to be people we’ve never been before. And we have to scrub off anything that indicates we’re from Naboo.”

  Her hand went to her necklace. She could leave that behind, if she had to. For Naboo, and for her friend. There were plenty of places to hide something that small, and keep it safe until she could return for it.

  “Tell me what you need me to do,” Tonra said. “I can get us a ship, I think. Or at least I can get us offworld, and then we can get a ship somewhere else.”

  “We’ll have to make the credits we have left last for a long time,” Sabé pointed out. “So any favors you can call in would be a good idea, as long as they can’t be traced.”

  “Go and plot out the IDs,” he said. “I can pack for you.”

  It was true. She didn’t have that much anymore, and her essentials were almost the same as his, when it came right down to it, except her boots were smaller.

  She went to her workstation and closed the files she’d been looking at. They were Padmé’s writings, the work she had hoped would be her senatorial legacy. A call to reinstate term limits on the chancellorship. Multiple bills advocating Clone personhood, both during the war and hypothetically for when the war was done. A motion to bring all hyperspace lanes under the purview of the Republic, to avoid territorial taxation and squabbling. Years and years’ worth of drafts of antislavery bills. A legacy that would go largely unrealized, and Sabé burned with the need to know why.

  She called up two blank idents. They would use basic ones to get off Naboo and then switch to a higher-quality cover when they were someplace else. It was safer that way, even though it meant a lot of work.

  She heard her comm chime and ignored it. She really didn’t want to talk to her mother right now, and the handmaidens would know to leave her alone. They didn’t have to speak to communicate. They knew she’d tell them when they needed to know. They knew it might be dangerous to know before that. The comm chimed again.

  She heard a soft murmur from the main room as Tonra answered it and spoke to whoever dared interrupt her peace. A moment later, he appeared in the doorway.

  “Have them leave a message,” Sabé said. “I don’t want to take the
call right now.”

  “I think you should, love,” he said. He passed her a holoemitter. Whoever had called wanted to talk face to face.

  Sabé held the device in her palm and activated it, calling up a familiar figure. When she spoke, it was in Amidala’s voice. She had no intention of giving anything away.

  “Senator Organa, now is not a good time,” she said. “What do you want?”

  I have been waiting for this book for twenty years, and I am endlessly thrilled I got to write it. It would not have happened without the generous help of several people:

  Josh Adams, who phoned me in Iceland to see if I was interested, and who always takes me seriously when I say I’m good to go on a project.

  Jen Heddle, who guided me from idea to book. Emily Meehan, who always has my back. Patrice Caldwell, who helped me make the world bigger.

  The Lucasfilm Story Group and design team, who made sure everything worked out.

  Everyone who did art or story for Naboo in Shattered Empire, Forces of Destiny, and Battlefront II, and Tara Phillips, who made this beautiful cover.

  Natalie Portman, Keira Knightley, and Trisha Biggar, who gave me the best fifteenth birthday present ever, and Cat Taber, who kept it going.

  Several people who answered questions without knowing what we were talking about, including Emma Higinbotham, Rachel Williams, Bria LaVorgna, and Angel Cruz. Keeping secrets is rough.

  MaryAnn Zissimos, who is somehow the most simultaneously excited AND levelheaded person I know.

  And every girl who ever asked for more from Star Wars. You’re my spark.

  E. K. Johnston is the author of Star Wars: Ahsoka; The Afterward; That Inevitable Victorian Thing; and Exit, Pursued by a Bear. She had several jobs and one vocation before she became a published writer. If she’s learned anything, it’s that things turn out weird sometimes, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. Well, that and how to muscle through awkward fanfic because it’s about a pairing she likes.