by Chuck Wendig
“I confess that I’m not.”
“Oh, it’s a truly charming role. I was trained to sniff out weakness in my cohorts. I learned how to read body language, how to detect lies, how to use people against one another, all in order to discover where my own people had committed trespasses against the Empire. Anything from small breaches of conduct to outright treachery against the throne. I was the shadow they couldn’t shake. You put me in a base or battle station or office and they knew they were on notice. I’d scare up what they’d done like a hunter flushing prey from the brush. And I’d hurt them to earn a confession and correct the errors. Oh, it wasn’t just physical pain I caused, though that was certainly a part of it. It was emotional pain. Can I tell you a story?”
“Temmin’s not yet returned, so—have at it.”
He leans back against a table. As he tells the story, his long nimble fingers gesture along with it. “Most of the people I hurt were people I didn’t much care for. Some were brutes, others were cowards, and all of them were people I was happy to hobble on behalf of the Emperor. But that wasn’t always the case. Take, for example, young Gunnery Officer Rilo Tang. Rilo: an eager officer. Eyes bright like polished credits. A beautiful man. Pretty like a sunrise. Sweet like a jifcake. And sneaky like a monkey-lizard.”
“I don’t follow.”
“He was a thief, you see.”
“What did he steal?”
Sinjir laughs and cocks his head. “Well, that’s the thing. Nothing particularly important. It was a compulsion of his, I suspect. Grabby hands picking up anything that wasn’t nailed down. Mostly he stole the personal effects of others. Silly things. Holopics and ID tags and—by the stars, one time I remember he stole a private’s pair of shoes. Why do that?”
Norra narrows her eyes. “I’d ask the same. Why?”
“Best guess given his psych profile? Parents often sent their troubled children to the Imperial academies. An act meant to be corrective, as they assumed we could shape their sloppy, insubordinate progeny into something resembling a proper galactic citizen. The reality was often that those types washed out. Forcibly so. The Empire wanted its own heroes, not its own freak show. I suspect Rilo was like that.”
“What happened to him?”
“We warned him. I warned him. Again and again. And then one day he stole something from a moff—a ring. A ring the moff said was personal to him, meaningful, but I realized had encoded information in its scrollwork, though that’s a story for another day. So I was forced to…deal with Rilo in order to solicit his confession.”
There. That look on Norra’s face. Up until now she’d been following along with curiosity, but suddenly: That look falls away like bark off a dead tree. What’s left is a cold, empty stare. One of horror.
“You killed him,” she says.
“No. Oh, no, no. You misread me. I wasn’t the executioner. I was the confessor. The secret police. I found the evidence, and then someone else signed the warrant and someone else beyond that pushed you out of the air lock. Or hanged you or put you in front of a firing squad, or, or, or. But to elicit that confession, I had to break many bones on this beautiful boy’s body. I don’t know if they killed him. I heard rumors he ended up working the trash compactors. What matters is that his face would never look the same. His beauty, his vigor? Gone. And that was my fault.”
“You were a bad man.”
“Still am, maybe, though I’m trying to do better. But that’s not why I’m telling you this story. The reason I’m telling you this is that you think you’re my enemy, and that’s not true, not at all. The Empire is my enemy. The Empire has always been my enemy. I hunted my own kind. I hurt them. I was made to doubt them, to see the weakness in them. And I saw so much weakness and ruination. In them.” And in myself. “They were my enemy then and remain my enemy now. I’ve just scrapped the uniform.”
“So, you’re with us now? You’re a rebel?”
That thought twists inside of him. He is, isn’t he? A rebel. He’s turned like milk past its time. Gone to the other side. And why? Because he almost died there on Endor? Because looking at all that wreckage jarred him? Changed him? What a curious reason to desert your post. It can’t be that simple. It can’t be that complete. He tells himself that it’s temporary. That this crisis of conscience will one day resolve itself.
He lifts his chin and stares down his nose at her. He says: “I’m not with them, but not with you, either. I’m with me.”
“I don’t trust people who are only in it for themselves.”
He shrugs and offers a sad smile. “Then you shouldn’t trust me.”
—
Everything’s gone supernova. Jom Barell can see that. TIE fighters blowing each other up overhead. The city surging all around him. He hides in the sliver-sized alleyway between two buildings—an old kaffa shop and a rotten-walled tenement—and watches it all unfold. The anger. The chanting. Rage at the Empire. Fury for the satrapy. An Akivan resurrection: rebirth blooming bright in the fires of revolution.
Up until now, he had a goal: Get to a comm station, find a way to report in. He could hack it, or force the Imperials to give it up.
But all these people around him? This small rebellion unfolding before his very eyes? Well, that puts him in the fighting spirit.
He thinks back to that turbolaser turret, blasting apart whoever was in that rogue TIE fighter. That thing’s a danger.
So, Jom changes his orders. Time for a new target.
Forget the comm station.
He plans on taking the turret. Single-handedly. Or the likelier result: He’ll die trying. But if he wasn’t willing to die for what he believes in, he wouldn’t have joined the Rebel Alliance in the first fragging place.
—
Temmin’s back now. All of them gather downstairs in the shop’s cellar, and he has the maps of the city’s subterranean passages spread out across a couple of weapons crates.
“A flimsiplast map,” Sinjir says. “How quaint.”
Norra shushes him. She admits it sounds a bit sharp, a bit too…motherly. (And her feelings about him ricochet around the room of her mind like a stray blaster bolt. She wants to trust him. But something about him rubs her wrong. Could he betray them? Would he?) Still, it works. Sinjir quiets down and Norra leans in.
“Look, this is our way into the palace. The tunnels connect all parts of the city. The access points have long been walled off—”
Temmin interrupts: “Yeah, which also means they’ve walled off the way into the palace.”
“Maybe not,” she says. “Everybody here has heard the rumors of how the satraps sneak in and out of the palace. This might be how. And even if it is walled off—that’s why we bring the detonators.”
The bounty hunter nods. “I like it.” Norra feels an odd surge of pride, there. Jas seems a hard one to please. “It gets us off the streets and out of the way of the rebellion. Plus away from the prying eyes of both the Empire and any of Surat’s men. This works. And that’s our doorway in?” Jas points to the secret door behind the valachord.
“Yeah,” Temmin says. “But I gotta say, I don’t like this plan. It sucks. It sucks the fumes from a broken speeder bike. It sucks the vapor from the hindquarters of a gassy eopie. It sucks—”
“Evocative,” Sinjir interrupts. “You should’ve been a poet.”
“I’m just saying, look. This map? It’s not gonna be totally accurate. This is hundreds of years old.”
Norra says, “But you’ve explored the area. You’ll be our guide. I trust you, Temmin.” She offers a warm smile. To her surprise, he gives one back.
“Okay, yeah, I have, and the map has been wrong a lot of the times. Plus, I didn’t go that far. If we’re going all the way to the palace, we have to pass by the old droid factory.”
“Which is where you got a lot of your droid parts to sell. Right?”
“…not exactly. I picked scrap from the garbage pits down there. Holes full of junk from the factory. I never went t
o the factory itself.”
Jas asks: “Why not?”
He hesitates, but then says:
“Because it’s haunted.”
A moment where they all share looks.
Sinjir cannot contain himself and finally bursts out laughing. “Haunted? By what? Droid ghosts?”
Norra elbows him hard in the ribs. He oofs.
“I don’t know,” Temmin says. “I don’t know! That’s just the story. That’s the story of why they sealed it all up. It was haunted, so they sealed it all up. You know how many people have gone missing down there?”
“They went missing because they didn’t have a map,” Norra says. “They probably got lost, Temmin. Or never went missing at all and are just part of the stories. Spooky stories from some jungle scout camping trip do not reality make. This is our best, fastest way there.”
Jas turns to Temmin. “Do you have a better way?” she asks.
“I do.”
“And?”
“We don’t go at all! Listen. I get it. We all wanna do right by the galaxy. But this isn’t our job. Well—” He points to Jas. “Fine, it’s your job. But the rest of us? This is going to shake out with or without our help. And…maybe the New Republic are the good guys, maybe they’re not. Maybe nothing changes here. Maybe it even gets worse. We are the Outer Rim. We’re the part of the toilet bowl nobody wants to clean, okay?”
Sinjir whistles. “And I thought I was cynical.”
Norra kneels before her son and takes his hands in hers. Her heart breaks to see him like this. He is cynical. She understands it. She knows it. And she’s pretty sure it’s her fault. Which means it’s her job to fix it.
“Tem,” she says. “This is the kind of thing your father and I have fought for. We want to make a better galaxy. For you. For your kids.” He winces at that—and she remembers that no teenager wants to talk about getting married and having a litter of puppies. “Please. Trust me on this one. We’re doing the right thing. And we can make a difference. Even a small group of people can change the galaxy. It only takes one man to spit in the eye of a giant and blind him. So let’s do it. Let’s spit in the giant’s eye.”
Jas speaks up and says, “Your mother is right. If we don’t act now, it’s likely that the Imperials at that palace will squirm out of our grip. If that happens, we don’t get paid. You want to get paid, don’t you?”
Temmin nods. “I do.”
Norra almost regrets that. That what moved the needle with him wasn’t her earnest plea but rather, the practical, greed-driven entreaty put forth by the bounty hunter. But it works.
He’s in.
—
The call goes out, and they find Wedge Antilles in the servile quarters in the bottom floor of the palace. Already here they’re bringing steel shutters down over any of the stained-glass windows and fortifying the doors. Down at this level, the roar of the crowd is a living thing—still muted, muffled, but with a rise and fall that Rae can feel in her breastbone.
She steps into the bunkroom, with a trio of stormtroopers behind her. Adea is not present—she’s already under the care of the palace doctors.
Antilles is facedown at the back of the room, dead. His arm is splayed out, his hand curled into an arthritic claw. A few centimeters away, the holoscreen he stole from her assistant after he shot her.
Rae eases forward and then she sees—his back gently rising and falling. He’s not dead, after all. Merely unconscious. The pain and injury, too great for him. Good. That means this particular breach began and ended before the others of the summit could find out.
She signals the stormtroopers to gather Antilles up.
“Take the captive back upstairs. Use actual chains this time. Surely the satrap can conjure up some in this archaic palace.” Then she snaps her fingers. “Hand me that holoscreen. I should return it to Adea.” Just because she’s injured doesn’t mean she can’t work. Rae needs her.
The stormtrooper hands over the holoscreen.
And her blood goes cold.
On it, a communications screen. He hacked their channel and secured a line. And it’s open to a rebel frequency.
Antilles sent out a summons to war.
The red-headed boy with the cleft lip stands there with the other kids. Kids of all shapes and sizes, all ages and alien races. Most of them are younger than him, and the younger the kid, the more attention that kid gets from the wannabes who gather around, looking to adopt. All of them, shipped here from various parts of the galaxy.
The boy leans over to the tail-head girl next to him, and he says: “We’re never gonna go home with any of these people.”
“Shut up, Iggs,” she says. “You’re being a huge bummer.”
He shrugs. “I know it and you know it, Streaks. They want the kidlings. The young ones. We’re too old.”
“We’re not that old,” she whispers. “And besides, we’re heroes.”
“Heroes?” He rolls his eyes. “C’mon. They don’t know that and if they did they wouldn’t see it that way.”
“We were the Anklebiter Brigade from Coco-Town. That means something.”
“It means two things: zip and squat. People don’t even know what we did. You think people care about a buncha orphans who hid in the sewers and messed with the bucketheads and other Imperials? I dunno if you noticed, but we aren’t on Coruscant anymore. And even if we were—so what?” They got scooped up and brought here. Taken out of harm’s way, so they were told. But Iggs and Streaks—they were the harm’s way. They and the other orphans were doing rebel work. Striking from the shadows. Hiding in alleyways and shipping containers. They brought down a whole Imperial frigate—one resupplying the Empire’s front lines.
“They care. We did more than that. We passed messages. Told them about troop movements. We gave them intel, Iggs. How do you think the rebels retook Coco-Town? That was us.”
He waves her off. “I know that. You know that. But these people will never know. Or never care.”
Her face sinks. “You think?”
Suddenly he feels bad. He squeezes her arm. “We always got each other. And the others.”
Now the lady with the green skin and the other older woman—the “maven,” the one who has been talking to orphans and the wannabe parents about this or that—come closer. Iggs hears the green lady talking to a pair of well-to-do humans, pink-skins in fancy clothes. They’re talking about how important it is to try to get the galaxy “back to normal,” about how a lot of poor kids have been displaced because their parents went to war or were casualties in this conflict or that battle and it’s time to put families front and center again. And mostly Iggs, he just stands there making faces, rolling his eyes. All while Streaks stands there, vibrating visibly.
“Maybe they’ll come and interview us,” she says. “Maybe we’ll go home with someone today.” He hears the hope in her voice. Like she wants to say: Maybe we can have parents again.
“They won’t come to talk to us. We look like dirty urchins.”
“They might!”
“They won’t.”
But sure enough, here they come. The green lady and the maven. The adults hunker down and green lady says to the both of them:
“What are your names?”
They tell her. He’s Iggs, she’s Streaks.
The woman can’t quite contain her amusement. A little smirk on her face. Laugh it up, Iggs thinks. She makes small talk with the kids. Just dumb stuff. Their favorite flavor of milk shake, if they hope the Grav-Ball Pennant will start up again this year, stuff like that. A small crowd of wannabe parents gather now—wealthy Naboo types in their finery and fanciness. Iggs only feels more like a stain on a nice tablecloth.
“What happened to your parents?” the woman asks.
Iggs freezes. He doesn’t want to think about it or even say it. He tries to block out the memories of seeing his two fathers lying there like that…
Streaks, though, she jumps right in: “My parents were rebels. Their transp
ort was attacked just past Tanis and I’m a rebel, too, me and Iggs here were part of a crew of kids called the Anklebiter Brig…”
Ugh. No. He feels out of place. A piece of trash left on a nice shelf. So while they’re talking to Streaks, he ducks away behind a tent—he starts looking for ways outta here. Already he starts forming a plan in his head. Find the sewers—they gotta go somewhere. Work their way back to the center of Theed. Find a spaceport. Catch a ride back to the action. Back to the hot war of Coruscant. Home to Coco-Town, where the Anklebiter Brigade can ride again and help the rebels.
There. A grate. That’ll do. Doesn’t look bolted down. It’s all gilded and pretty—like everything in this city of museums.
Iggs ducks back around the side of the tent. He’s about to yell to Streaks that it’s time to go, time to bust out of here and forget all this getting adopted nonsense, but he turns around and she’s gone. No. Not gone. There, a few meters away. Talking to a nice-looking couple, a clean pair of pink-skins with good hair and shiny teeth. She looks happy. They look happy.
Iggs thinks, good for her, good for her.
Then, because nobody’s paying attention, he slinks off alone. He finds that drain grate, pops it, and ducks down into the darkness. It’s time to go home. It’s time to go back to the fight.
The case is light. Though he’s moved it before, it surprises him again: the crate with the black carbon locks looks like it should weigh a ton. And one might expect a weapon like this (er, whatever “this” is) would be heavy. But it isn’t. It’s light as air. Hollow as a balloon.
As the others move into the passageway leading into the catacombs beneath the city, Temmin lifts his end and Bones lifts the other (the droid helps not because the crate is heavy, but rather because it’s cumbersome).
They get it inside the door.