Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  Jyn glanced at K-2 and found herself eyeing his Imperial markings. “Maybe we should leave target practice here behind.”

  “Are you talking about me?” the droid asked.

  Cassian straightened and tugged his jacket tighter as the wind picked up. “She’s right,” he said. “We need to blend in. Stay with the ship.”

  “I can blend in,” K-2SO returned. It wasn’t so much a protest as a declaration.

  Jyn snorted. “With Saw’s forces? Or the Imperials? Half the people here want to reprogram you. The other half want to put a hole in your head.”

  “I’m surprised you’re so concerned with my safety.”

  Jyn turned back to the city and the valley, trying to guess at the distance they’d need to cover. You overpacked, she decided, and tossed her satchel to K-2SO. “I’m not concerned,” she said. “I’m just worried our enemies might miss you and hit me.”

  Cassian had already started walking. Jyn followed. When the droid called, “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she pretended not to hear.

  —

  Bodhi Rook couldn’t see the creature in the cave. When he craned his neck, tried to squirm out of his bonds or pull himself away from the chair, the shadows of the cave seemed to crawl—wriggling, like the ocean creatures he’d seen in an aquarium as a child. The shadows writhed and played in long wisps and blunt stubs—but when he tried to focus on them, to bring a single tendril into view out of the dark, he saw nothing. No motion but the flicker of lanterns in his peripheral vision.

  “Bor Gullet can feel your thoughts,” said the ghost.

  Saw Gerrera was watching. He was outside the cave, the cell that contained Bodhi and the creature. Safe. But watching.

  “Don’t do this,” Bodhi said, barely loud enough to hear. “Don’t do this, please.” He mumbled things, incoherent things, pleading things, because it was all he knew how to do.

  The sores on his feet, the chill in his fingers, the dehydration and bruises—these were discomforts he could survive. They were discomforts he understood. He’d suffered before, gone through sleep deprivation during pilot training. He was afraid of pain, yes; but the thing in the shadows repelled him, offended him on a level too intimate for words.

  “No lie is safe,” Saw Gerrera said.

  The shadows were crawling toward Bodhi now, swirling around the base of his chair. They smelled cloying as blooming flowers. He held his breath, tried to shrink back into his seat.

  “What have you really brought me, cargo pilot? Bor Gullet will know the truth.”

  Bodhi felt a touch on his shoulders, on his neck, feather-light and almost gentle. When he trembled, however, the touch became painful, like his flesh was being pinched in a vise. He thought he was saying, I never lied to you. I never lied! But he couldn’t hear his voice.

  The tendrils found his forehead. He felt his hair press tight against his skull as something wrapped about him. He closed his eyes. His body felt cold and clammy with sweat he was too dehydrated to exude, and pinpricks of fire burned at his temples.

  These are a few of the things that Bodhi saw:

  His mother, her hands over his own, showing him how to cut a vegetable stalk with a knife in the family kitchen. His mother never let Bodhi handle knives, but this time was different because she felt sorry for him and he couldn’t recall why. He was certain the reason would break his heart. There was something he had lost. He would have wept if he had not begun to see—

  Misurno, his teacher, his copilot on the Fentersohn run, who would while away the journey talking about his years shooting pirates and rebels and Separatist holdouts in a starfighter; whose breath stank and who joked loudly about how badly he’d treated cadets, but who’d drunkenly called Bodhi his best friend, his only friend.

  Galen Erso, who looked not entirely unlike Misurno, telling Bodhi, “There is nothing brave about blind obedience. The simplest droid does what it’s told—never questioning or deciding. If you want to know what we’re building, Bodhi Rook, you could simply ask.” And he hadn’t asked, not then, not yet.

  His cargo shuttle in flames, his hands burning as he worked the controls, trying to gain altitude, to keep out of the streams of particle bolts from the ground as the rebels shot at him. Someone was screaming in the aft compartment but he couldn’t do anything, just fly, just hope the stormtroopers or the TIE fighters would intervene…

  Bodhi wasn’t sure if these things had happened at all.

  He could no longer remember how to breathe, and felt the strain in his lungs.

  “The unfortunate side effect,” the ghost voice of Saw Gerrera said, “is that one tends to lose one’s mind.”

  —

  From a distance, the city had seemed as silent as the desert—its desolation broken only by the rumble of starships like wind. But up close, the streets were awash with the sounds of daily life in Jedha: the shuffle of foot traffic and the shouts and clatter of merchants, the monotone chanting of pilgrims and the hum of machinery. Threaded among these noises were the sounds of occupation: distorted voices of stormtroopers demanding scandocs at checkpoints, the roar of uncontrolled fires in contested sectors, and the echo of distant, sporadic blaster volleys.

  Jyn knew the sounds of occupation well. They were the sounds of home.

  “We’ve got a good few hours of daylight left,” Cassian said. Jyn followed him through a curtain and into a pockmarked alley-turned-living room for a colony of Kubaz; the two ignored the long-snouted aliens and picked their way around blankets and sizzling cookpots as they walked. “We’ll probably need them. There’s a curfew at sunset, and I don’t fancy a walk back through the desert after dark.”

  “No sightseeing, then?”

  “No sightseeing.”

  As they turned a corner and exited a second curtain, they passed into a tightly packed crowd constrained by a narrow street. Jyn brushed against a passerby, then felt a jolt as someone shoved her to one side. Her hand went under her jacket, sought her truncheon, as her assailant snarled, “You better watch yourself!”

  Spoiling for a fight. Her gaze caught the man’s face—a barely human mien distorted from burns or scarring—and moved to a second individual—Aqualish, all tusks and bulbous black eyes—behind him.

  She could take them both. Her heart was suddenly racing. She smiled coldly.

  “No, no—” Cassian grasped her arm, tugged her back into the flow of the crowd. “We don’t want any trouble. Sorry.”

  The surge of adrenaline left her. Without a distraction at hand her mind returned, unprompted, to an image of her father’s face—a face nearly fifteen years out of date, but still the face of the man who’d abandoned her to serve the Empire. She kicked at the dust, shook her head when Cassian started to speak. “So what now?” she asked.

  If he noticed her discomfort, he didn’t show it. Good for him, she thought.

  “I had a contact,” he said. “One of Saw’s rebels, but he’s just gone missing. His sister will be looking for him.”

  “Sweet family.”

  “The temple’s been destroyed but she’ll be there waiting. There’re enough pilgrims around to make it a decent place to hide in plain sight, use as a dead drop. We’ll give her your name and hope that gets us a meeting with Saw.”

  “Hope?” She eyed Cassian dubiously. “Is that the best Rebel Intelligence can do?”

  Cassian might as well have shrugged. “Rebellions are built on hope,” he said.

  The crowd thinned out one street over. Jyn drew up her hood as they passed a squad of stormtroopers knocking on doors and manhandling residents. She didn’t reach for a weapon this time; she’d be too tempted to use it. She tuned out the pleas of the Jedha citizens instead and zeroed in on the words of an Imperial propaganda hologram shimmering nearby. Something about an armed fugitive in a stolen Imperial flight suit.

  She waited until they
were out of earshot of the troopers and then asked, “Is this all because of your pilot?”

  Cassian didn’t bother answering the question. “Wait for me,” he said, and disappeared into the crush of bodies.

  Jyn grunted an assent and began a slow orbit of a tight cluster of merchant stalls. She made a show of turning her head to study the contents of the shops—hand-knit fabrics, fruit so brown and spotted that it had to have been grown locally, shards of stone ostensibly from ruined shrines within the wastelands—and avoided eye contact with the hawkers. She could still hear the propaganda hologram in the distance (“goes by the name Bodhi Rook”), but a pilgrim’s chanting rose in volume until it drowned out almost everything else. Over and over, a simple refrain: “May the Force of others be with you.”

  She picked up a palm-sized heater that a merchant promptly slapped from her hand. Her mind began to drift and she feared she’d start thinking of Saw again, of Galen Erso, yet the chant resounded inside her skull. It followed her as she walked, until she was sure that the pilgrim responsible had fallen in behind her.

  She snapped a glance over her shoulder. The chant ended. At Jyn’s back was an ancient woman with withered hands, currently haggling over the heater Jyn had set down. Not her chanter.

  “Would you trade that necklace for a glimpse into your future?”

  The voice of the pilgrim. Jyn frowned and took another step forward, trying to locate the source.

  “Yes, I’m speaking to you.” Without the monotone sobriety of the chant, the voice seemed touched with gentle humor.

  She found the speaker at last, seated on the ground a few steps down the line of stalls. He was dressed simply, in a dark shirt and charcoal robe in the local style, and his smooth skin fought gamely against the years that infected his words. His eyes were milky and unfocused, and at his side lay a sturdy wooden staff in the dust. Are there trees left on Jedha? Jyn wondered.

  “Your necklace?” the man repeated.

  Jyn felt the crystal against her skin. Her necklace was still hidden, buried under layers of cloth.

  And the man was blind.

  “I am Chirrut Îmwe,” the man said.

  “How did you know I was wearing a necklace?” Jyn asked, and felt like a fool, like a mark, even as she spoke.

  Chirrut’s next words only confirmed her instinct. “For that answer you must pay.”

  It was the reply of a con artist. Jyn shook her attention from Chirrut to search for his partner (he must have had a partner, one who had spotted her necklace somehow) and immediately found her quarry: a hulk of a man with hair as wild as Chirrut’s was neat, in a filthy civilian flight suit and battered red plastoid armor half concealed under a wearable tarp. On his back was a generator unit connected to the blaster cannon he held casually in one hand. He stood with the stoic confidence of a bodyguard, unafraid of thieves or stormtroopers.

  “How did you know I was wearing a necklace?” Jyn asked the second man, who shook his head slowly and snorted. Under other circumstances, she might have admired his weapon. Now she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  “What do you know of kyber crystals?” Chirrut asked. His tone was patient, prompting.

  She should have turned away. Refused to be lured in. Yet Chirrut’s voice seemed to resonate like his chant and demand an answer.

  “My father,” she eventually said, and it tasted less bitter than she expected. “He said they powered the Jedi lightsabers.”

  Chirrut nodded approvingly. Jyn half parted her lips, tried to speak before the blind man’s voice could enter her skull again, but another sound broke the spell instead. “Jyn.” Cassian, sharp and low. “Come on.”

  She wrenched away from Chirrut, took three strides at Cassian’s side before the pilgrim’s next words found her: “The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.”

  Her necklace seemed to burn in the cold.

  “Let’s go,” Cassian urged.

  She couldn’t help glancing back once at the pilgrim (or the con man) and his partner. But she shrugged off Cassian’s guiding hand and trailed him willingly down the street. “We’re not here to make friends,” he muttered. “Not with those guys.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The Guardians of the Whills. Protectors of the Temple of the Kyber. But there’s nothing left to protect, so now they’re just causing trouble for everybody.”

  She frowned. “What kind of trouble?”

  Cassian turned his head in a slow arc as if checking for pursuit. “For the Guardians, anyone who’s not a pilgrim is intruding on holy ground. The Empire calls them strays…used to be domesticated, still beg for scraps, but they’ve really gone feral. Look at them wrong and they’ll bite your hand in a second.”

  “You’ll make me like them,” Jyn said. She tried to push their faces, Chirrut’s voice, out of her brain. They probably were con men, even if they’d been zealots once. Beyond that, she didn’t know enough about the local religions to speculate; pilgrims from a hundred faiths came to the moon from across the galaxy, and all of them blurred together into the same pathetic cult, chanting and moaning and squirming under the Empire’s boot.

  Cassian didn’t reply. His pace picked up.

  “You seem awfully tense all of a sudden,” she said. “What were you doing back there?”

  “Spotted an old associate. He didn’t have any better line on Saw Gerrera, but he’s been hearing rumors.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  They were drawing closer to the Holy Quarter, and the character of the streets was changing. The roads grew wider—just as ancient, but no longer touched by the centuries of expansion, of the layering of building onto building by residents and merchants. The vendors and their customers were fewer, replaced by pilgrims in bright-red kaftans and hoods and shawls.

  “This search for the pilot,” Cassian said. “The door-to-door inspections…there were shootings last night, an elderly couple dead in their home, others civilians rounded up. No one’s sure if they were innocent or if they knew something about the defector, but word is out that Saw Gerrera is planning reprisals.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Saw,” Jyn said. Cassian threw her a skeptical look, and she hastily explained, “Not that he wouldn’t arrange revenge attacks, but if he were that easily baited they’d have caught him long ago.”

  Cassian frowned in thought and seemed to process the words.

  “Could be my associate was wrong,” he said. “Could be it’s one of Saw’s people arranging the attack without oversight from Saw himself. Or it could be Saw thinks the Empire is vulnerable right now—distracted by the search or something else we don’t know about.

  “Regardless, we have to hurry. This town—it’s ready to blow.”

  They passed a mural, colors long since faded to muddy indecipherability. Jyn saw chips in the stone and a grenade fragment lodged into the wall. She laughed gutturally. “We’re a little late for that,” she said, though she didn’t slow her stride.

  —

  They arrived on an upper-level street overlooking a large plaza. The shadow of a descending Imperial cargo shuttle spread over the ground while a squad of stormtroopers rousted sleeping forms out of doorways and shoved them headlong into neighboring streets, waved blaster rifles at pilgrims, and barked orders. Jyn was surprised by the aggression—at close quarters, one squad couldn’t suppress a riot—until she saw the assault tank rumbling around a corner to join the Imperial forces. Its blaster cannons could have leveled a city block. Jyn didn’t doubt its pilots were eager for a challenge.

  Secured to the back of the tank were the same orange cargo crates she’d seen while spying on the city from afar. The kyber crystals, mined from the ground or stolen from holy sites.

  The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.

  She indicated the crates to Cassian with a nod. His attention was els
ewhere. He was scanning the rooftops, his gaze flickering back periodically to the civilians lined up along the edge of the plaza. To a person, the onlookers were garbed in thick, bulky cloaks and overcoats.

  When Jyn recognized what was happening, she was surprised the stormtroopers hadn’t already opened fire. But the Imperials appeared entirely—almost pitiably—oblivious.

  “How far is your contact? The sister of Saw’s man?” she asked, barely louder than a breath.

  “Half a dozen blocks over,” Cassian murmured. “But I don’t think she’s going to stick around.”

  A wrinkled Duros scampered up the stairs from the lower level and past Jyn and Cassian, red beetle eyes avoiding the now grounded shuttle, the tank, and every living creature nearby.

  “Tell me you have a backup plan,” Jyn said. “You want to tap one of these guys on the shoulder, ask if they can spare some advice before the shooting starts?”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” Cassian spoke the words like a curse.

  Jyn didn’t see who threw the first grenade. She heard it strike pavement despite the noise of the vehicles, recognized the sound despite the murmuring from the rooftops and the sharp commands of the stormtroopers. A glint of sunlight drew her eye to the metal sphere and she saw it bounce once, roll half a meter in the direction of the tank, then disappear in an eruption of street fragments and smoke and shrapnel. She felt the resonant boom in her teeth. She heard a dozen cloaks and overcoats being shucked in unison, then the dull clack of pistols and rifles being brought to bear.

  The air turned bright with the arterial glow of a hundred particle bolts.

  Sparks burst off ancient stone walls. The noxious smell of burning plastoid armor and the ozone of vaporized Jedha atmosphere stung Jyn’s nostrils. A volley of blasterfire coursed across the plaza’s upper level—originating from stormtrooper or insurgent, Jyn wasn’t sure—and Jyn reacted instinctively, dashing with Cassian into the flimsy shelter of a doorframe and squeezing tight against him.

  “Looks like we found Saw’s rebels,” she said. Her blaster was in her hand. Her finger was on the trigger.