“Can’t Kal sell it? Kyrimorut needs the creds.”
“You could keep one…”
They were magnificent stones, but it was Ordo’s anxious expression that forced her hand. She was as damned now as she would ever be; she’d thrown in her lot with Skirata, and his rules were now her rules. Did it matter if she added one more crime to the list? She’d placate Ordo now, and work out how to square it with her conscience later. “Thank you.”
“If I got paid, I’d buy you something wonderful.” Ordo sometimes had an anxious, apologetic tone when he felt he’d fallen short of perfection, a rare lapse in his apparently unassailable confidence. That was what happened, Besany thought, when a child was told it had to die for failing to meet standards. It ripped her apart every time; not even Skirata’s influence—constantly telling them they were perfect, wonderful, brilliant—could totally erase that trauma. “This is the best I can do right now. Do you want to marry me?”
Ordo was a slave by any other name, an object manufactured for a task, minus rights and a vote. Besany understood now why Etain had also had a moment of apparent insanity and had Darman’s baby. The clones had a right to be men. Their future was all the more precious because it would be so brief.
“Well… yes.”
“Oh, good.” Ordo seemed to have very fixed ideas about what a man should be and what he should do, no doubt swallowed whole from Skirata’s philosophy. He placed his elbow on the table as if he was challenging her to arm wrestle. “Take my hand, then.”
She did, palm-to-palm, because Ordo had that way with him. She trusted him. She didn’t know if he was going to squeeze her fingers fondly or slam her hand to the table and declare victory.
“Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde,” he said, eyes fixed on hers. “Now you say it.”
“What’s that?”
“A Mando marriage contract. If you agree, repeat it. It means we’re one whether we’re together or apart, that we share everything we have, and that we’ll raise our children as warriors.”
It wasn’t exactly the way Besany had imagined her wedding. But then she had never imagined a day like this one at all, ever. Her normality barrier had been smashed down twice in an hour, and the hammer was coming down for a third time.
“Okay,” she said. She couldn’t refuse; she didn’t want to, even if this was brutally pragmatic in that conflicting Mandalorian way, strictly business one moment and tearfully sentimental the next. It was as if he’d made up his mind, and so had she, and he didn’t see any point in messing around any longer. “Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde.”
Ordo smiled. “I’m glad we’ve got that sorted,” he said, letting go of her hand. “You look like you need some more caf.”
I’m still in shock. That must be it. People do rash things like this in wartime.
Besany now lived a life at the extremes, with the extremes, with the most marginal in society, an existence few beings around her would ever know.
“Good idea,” she said, voice shaking.
She tried to blot out all thoughts of Lemmeloth’s wife, if he had one, being told he was never coming home again. She couldn’t. It would always plague her in the quiet moments.
That, she reminded herself, was war.
Chapter Three
Enceri, Mandalore, market day,
approximately six months later—937 days ABG
If we were given just one word of information in our entire history, how we’d treasure it! How we’d pore over every syllable, divining its meaning, arguing its importance; how we’d examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information, and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet… we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day, we’ll die of voluntary ignorance.
—Hirib Bassot, current affairs pundit, speaking on HNE’s Facing Facts—a low-audience politics show, axed shortly after this broadcast for poor ratings
Mandalore was paradise.
It was desolate, backward, and lacked most of the limited comforts Fi had been used to even as a clone commando, but here he was no longer a soldier among civilians. Mandalorians understood military life. They were all soldiers, one way or another, and that made this an easy place to be. He stood in the unrelenting drizzle that had reduced Enceri’s marketplace to a quagmire and tried to remember why he’d agreed to meet Parja here.
She’d told him. But these days, he forgot so much. The war was over for him now. He wondered if he would ever be fit to fight again.
I don’t know how to do anything else, do I? What use am I now?
“You okay, ner vod?” A stranger—a man in full Mandalorian armor, like everyone else here—put his hand on Fi’s shoulder as if to get his attention. Fi must have looked lost. It was a voice that Fi felt he should have recognized, but he couldn’t. “Can I help?”
Fi could follow the map Parja had given him. Some days he knew he’d forgotten something important, and some days he didn’t realize it until someone told him. But just knowing there was something he’d missed was progress. Just over a year ago, he’d been on life support and declared brain-dead. His recollection of his recovery was a patchwork of memories that could easily have been dreams.
“I’m waiting for my girl,” Fi said, steadying himself on the bevii’ragir that Parja had given him. It was a hunting spear with a removable counterbalance weight on the other end, and although he was in no fit state to hunt, it looked more respectable than crutches or a walking stick. He had his pride. He still struggled to find the right words, and he knew he sounded confused, but… yes, he was making progress. Parja told him so. “She told me to meet her here. I forget things lately. I was blown up.”
The man, in that mid-green armor so many Mandalorians wore, stared at the sigil on Fi’s helmet that marked him as a wounded veteran, and paused for a few moments, but didn’t ask for an explanation.
“You’re younger than I thought,” he said. Fi’s voice must have surprised him; maybe he expected an older man inside the armor. “I’ll wait with you until she shows up, then.”
It was a kind thing to do, as if Fi needed protecting here. He’d been used to being the one who provided protection. It rankled to be needy.
You’ve got Parja and you’re alive. Be grateful.
But Fi wasn’t grateful. Since he’d arrived on Mandalore, he’d come to understand how free men lived. Now he resented every moment he’d spent serving a society in which he had fewer rights than a droid.
“Who were you fighting for?” the man asked after a long, awkward pause. Mandalore had supplied the galaxy with mercenary troops for generations, and the topic of commercial soldiering counted as social small talk. “Did they pay well?”
“Grand Army of the Republic. What pay?”
Another pause. Mandalore wasn’t Republic territory, not by a long chalk. And now the Mandalorian knew Fi was a clone, too, not even accorded the respect of being paid for his fighting prowess. But that didn’t seem to be a stigma here.
“Deserter,” the man said, no hint of disapproval.
“Discharged dead.” Fi groped for the words. He knew what he wanted to say, but getting his mouth to obey him was another matter. He could feel sweat beading on his top lip. “Like a regular medical discharge, only a bit more serious.”
“It’s okay, ner vod, you’re among friends here,” said the man. “Fett was a disgrace for letting the Kaminoans make clones for the Jedi out of him. It’s not your fault.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Fi said defensively. He didn’t want pity. The Kaminoans didn’t care any more than Fett did if the clone army was happy and well treated, just as long as it won wars, but he’d had Kal Skirata looking out for him. “Our sergeant took good care of us. He adopted me as his son. We did fine.”
“So I heard.”
/>
“You’ve heard a lot.”
“It’s a small planet. A fair few Cuy’val Dar came back here when they’d finished training you.”
So the guy did know. The Mandalorian training sergeants handpicked by Fett hadn’t all been fond of him, but they respected his prowess. And they’d been griping about life in Tipoca City. Well, there were no more secrets left to keep. Everyone knew about the Grand Army of the Republic now.
It was dawning slowly on Fi that Fett, Mand’alor and bounty hunter, had been a good advert for Mandalorian grit, but his heroic status wasn’t respected by some of his own people. The Alpha ARC clone troopers, hard men literally made in Fett’s mold, were scared of him, utterly loyal to his orders even after his death. But Fi realized that some Mando’ade here thought he was a selfish chakaar.
Mandalore didn’t have any leader at all now, and life still went on regardless. Fi could imagine the chaos on Coruscant if the Chancellor was killed and nobody was around to succeed him. Mandos just got on with life. It had happened before, they said, and it would happen again, but no nation worth its salt fell apart just because there was nobody on the throne.
“You got any kids?” asked the man.
Fi shrugged. “I’m working on it.”
Sometimes Fi’s old self surfaced unexpectedly. He’d been superbly fit, an elite commando, and—most painful of all—he’d had what Skirata called paklalat, the gift of gab. He’d had a way with words. But the explosion on Gaftikar had put an end to that, and now he was an invalid, dependent on the care of a nice woman called Parja Bralor who didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t quite the prize he’d once been.
The man looked past Fi as if he’d recognized someone approaching in the bustle of armored figures lugging flexiwrap bags of preserved vegetables, machine parts, and an occasional five-liter container of tihaar, the local triple-distilled alcohol that could actually be used to degrease engine parts.
“Is that your missus?” he asked. “Heading this way, on your six.”
Fi turned. Parja’s dark chestnut braids swung beneath the chin level of her helmet, secured with red copper beads. With her deep scarlet armor, the overall effect in the gray drizzle was one of vivid autumn fruit. “Yeah. That’s her.”
“I’ll leave you, then. You’re in safe hands again.”
Again. What did he mean?
By the time Fi turned around, the man had melted back into the market-day crowd. Parja shouldered her way through the press of armored bodies with the focus of a laser cannon and caught Fi’s arm, pulling him to her to tap the forehead of her helmet against his. It was the only way to give someone a kiss in full armor. That was probably why some aruetiise believed Mandalorians head-butted one another as a greeting. Aruetiise—foreigners, enemies, traitors, or anything in between—would believe any old tosh, Fi thought.
“You made it,” Parja said, all approval. “Well done, cyar’ika. Making new friends, are you?”
“Don’t know.” Fi couldn’t see the man now. He’d vanished. “He was worried about me.”
Parja reached up and patted his helmet. She’d painted it with the Mandalorian letters M and S for mir’shupur—brain injury—just like a battlefield medic might do for triage purposes. On Mandalore, the symbol functioned as a blend of a general warning to give the wearer a break, and a medal for combat service. “He saw the sigil on your buy’ce. It told him you were disabled and why. Saves a lot of daft questions, you see, and folks know how to treat you.”
Fi had never thought of himself as disabled. Injured, maybe, but not disabled. He told himself it was still early days, and that Bardan Jusik was putting him back together a cell at a time with his Jedi healing techniques.
“What are we doing now?” he asked.
“You’ve got to find your way to the cantina,” Parja showed no trace of impatience even though he realized she’d probably told him a dozen times. “I’m not going to prompt you, either. Use the map. And what else have you got to do? Come on, tell me.”
“Notes. Make notes as I go.”
“Good. Make notes. Then all you have to remember to do is to keep looking at your datapad.”
Enceri was a small pimple on the map compared with just one of Coruscant’s teeming termite-hill neighborhoods, and the nearest settlement to Kyrimorut, Skirata’s refuge for clone deserters deep in the northern forests. It was more a trading post than a town. But from Fi’s perspective, it was as complex and confusing as a labyrinth. He took the stylus from his forearm plate and checked his datapad. Events a couple of years ago—even his artificially brief childhood—were vivid, but he couldn’t retain the day-to-day memories that everyone else took for granted. He oriented himself the way he’d once been trained, getting his bearings from landmarks like the grain silo on the edge of town and the basic magnetic compass on his forearm, and then trudged off. Once he learned to cope with that, he’d learn to use his helmet’s head-up display again.
One step at a time, Parja had said.
She trailed after him. “You’re doing okay. Really, cyar’ika, you’re getting better every day. I’m proud of you.”
How could Parja love him in this state? He felt crushed. But they’d met when he was already injured, and she never knew the Fi he’d been. She loved him for what he was now. Things could only get better.
“I miss my brothers,” he said. “I miss Ordo, too.”
There were messages, occasional comlink conversations with Omega Squad and the Null ARCs who were his only family in any sense of the word, but Fi had lived his whole short life among other men like him. He’d never really been this alone. He felt suddenly guilty that Parja wasn’t his entire world; she’d nursed him in those awful days after he was rescued from Coruscant, fed and cleaned him like an infant, and her constant encouragement had made him walk again every bit as much as Jusik’s Force healing skills. Once, Fi could imagine nothing he wanted more than a nice girl who cared about him. He never thought that she might end up caring for him.
“Ordo’s bound to drop by soon,” Parja said. “You know the Nulls don’t exactly run to a timetable. Anyway, Bard’ika’s due back in a few days for your next healing session.”
Fi thought it was worth asking. “Can I go home?”
Parja blinked. “This is home, Fi. You don’t mean Coruscant, do you?”
“Yeah.”
“No, you’re not going back there. They were going to kill you, remember? They wanted to switch off your life support because they didn’t think you were worth keeping alive. They’ll probably confiscate you at Customs as stolen Republic property. You don’t need to go back to that stinking dar’yaim.”
Parja was angry about it, but it was a very distant brutality for Fi, something that he knew was terrible but hadn’t felt because he’d been mercifully unaware in a coma. As he paced the route to the cantina with mechanical care, checking the map at every alley and crossroad, he tried to imagine Besany and Captain Obrim desperately trying to save him from a callous system that put down permanently disabled clones like animals. Ordo said Besany had pulled a weapon on the medcenter staff and kidnapped him at blasterpoint. He seemed fiercely proud of her. Sheer guts like that had the same effect on a Mandalorian male that a pair of long legs did on aruetiise; female courage was irresistible.
“I can get past Customs,” Fi said. “I’m a commando.”
“Besany went to a lot of trouble to get you out.”
“I know.” Fi couldn’t square Besany’s daunting blond glamour with the rather lonely, methodical woman inside, let alone one who could start an armed siege. “Never said thanks.”
“You want to thank her? Wait till she visits.”
“But I could say hi to everyone,” Fi persisted. He rounded a corner, and the cantina was exactly where the map said it was. It was a small triumph. He took off his helmet and let the rain wash over his face, hating himself for talking like a simple kid. “It’s easier for me to go to them.”
“Your brothers are deployed
all over the galaxy.”
“And I could see Etain’s baby…”
“That’s a dangerous secret, Fi.”
“It’s not fair that Dar doesn’t know he’s a dad.”
“The galaxy’s an unfair place. It’s safer that he doesn’t know yet.”
Fi finally blurted it out without thinking. “I don’t belong here, Parj’ika. I should be fighting. It’s all I know how to do. I thought I wanted out, but—I don’t know what to do.”
The cantina doors were beaded with rain as if they had just been painted, the only part of the building that seemed to have been maintained in years. Concentrating on their glossy blackness kept the frustration and anger at his own helplessness from overwhelming him. But part of his mind never stopped whispering that he was nothing now, that he had no purpose or pride. It was his indoctrination surfacing. Sergeant Kal said so. Kal’buir reminded Fi a couple of times a week by comm that he was a free man and he didn’t have to have any purpose beyond living his life to the full.
It didn’t feel that way right then. Fi couldn’t shake the guilt that everyone was fighting the war except him, and that he was a burden on Parja. She slipped her helmet off and clipped it to her belt.
“You’ve had quite a battle to get where you are now,” she said quietly, and nodded toward the doors. “And you can be a soldier again, if you want, but not yet. I know it’s hard. Try to be patient.”
“I don’t have time.”
Parja seemed to flinch every time he reminded her that time was running out twice as fast for him as it was for a normal man. They didn’t talk about Kal’buir’s plan to stop the accelerated aging now. The genetic engineering secrets needed to stop it seemed as far away as ever; he was still searching for the right geneticists to make sense of Ko Sai’s research.
“You’ll get time.” Parja had a way of dropping her voice that got Fi’s attention—and compliance—a lot better than yelling at him. Quiet menace summed her up. “Even the way things are now, time’s still on your side.”
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