by Greg Rucka
He had no intention of giving it back.
“Yes?” Chirrut said. “And who are you, please?”
“He’s blind,” Baze explained to the armored soldiers in front of them. He said this patiently, as if he often had to excuse Chirrut’s clumsiness and awkwardness to new people. “They’re stormtroopers, my friend.”
“Oh!” Chirrut straightened slightly, but his smile remained as it was. He had his walking stick planted in front of him, his left hand on the cap, right hand on the upper part of the staff, and now he raised it high and lifted his voice with it. “Imperial stormtroopers! You bring order to the disordered! Long live the Emperor!”
Baze kept half an eye on the walking stick as Chirrut brought it back to the ground, or more specifically, on his friend’s grip on the stick. Chirrut could do a lot of damage with that staff if and when he so chose, and oftentimes the only warning Baze had that Chirrut was about to launch an attack with it was some subtle change in how he was holding it from one moment to the next. Judging by Chirrut’s current grip on it, Baze figured things could go either way.
“What were you doing in there?” This was the lead, again. The pauldron on her right shoulder indicated that she was a sergeant.
“Where?” Chirrut asked. He sounded convincingly innocent.
“There. In there.” She used an armored hand to indicate the broken door of the orphanage, then realized she was gesturing at a blind man and looked at Baze.
“Where?” Chirrut repeated.
“Several people saw you forcing your way into the building.” The sergeant’s voice crackled slightly through the speaker on her helmet. “We were standing right here when you came out. In there, the building, there.”
“This building?” Chirrut reached back with his left hand, fingertips touching the stonework. He managed to look surprised.
“He gets confused,” Baze told the sergeant.
“Fine,” she said. “But you don’t. What were you doing in there?”
Baze shrugged.
“Do you want us to take you in for questioning? Is that what you want?”
“No,” Baze said. It was possibly the most sincere thing he’d said in weeks.
“Why’s he dressed like that?”
“He’s religious.”
The sergeant muttered something that sounded to Baze like “another one of those.” She sighed, her helmet speaker making her growing frustration all the more evident.
“The orphanage has been closed,” the sergeant said.
“Ah,” Chirrut said. “Where did they go?”
“Who?”
“The residents. The orphans. Those who cared for them. Where are they now?” He leaned forward on his stick slightly, tilting his head, as if hoping that by moving closer he might better hear her answer. His hands hadn’t moved on the walking stick. “Did you arrest them? Are they guests of the Empire?”
“How should I know?”
“So that would mean you did not?”
“I said I don’t know. Why would we arrest orphans? We’re not monsters.”
The sergeant’s frustration was growing. Baze understood this. In his experience, Chirrut could be a tremendously frustrating person when he chose to be, and often enough, even when he didn’t.
“The building was cleared out this morning after the raid,” she continued. “Possession of stolen Imperial property. You know anything about that?”
The blaster cannon on Baze’s back felt distinctly and suddenly heavier. Chirrut’s left palm turned slightly, cupping the cap of his walking stick. His right hand dropped perhaps a centimeter lower down the shaft, an almost imperceptible adjustment that Baze was sure the stormtroopers had missed entirely.
“Is the street empty?” Chirrut asked.
“What?” said the sergeant.
“Empty enough,” Baze told Chirrut.
“I thought so, but I wanted to be certain,” Chirrut said, and the smile vanished, and the walking stick came up and connected with the chin of the sergeant’s helmet with a crack like a board splitting in two. Her helmet snapped back and she dropped at once, as if her legs had suddenly turned to air. The stormtroopers behind her were so stunned that Baze had pulled the cannon from its rig on his back and up to his shoulder before they’d even begun to move in response.
“Left,” Baze said, and Chirrut swept his walking stick left, following in its arc and clearing the field of fire for Baze. Baze pulled the trigger, and two of the stormtroopers fell where they stood, but the remaining two caught the shots high in their torso, and the blasts sent both of them tumbling back, helmets over heels, until they cracked into the wall on the opposite side of the street before slumping, motionless, to the ground. Smoke wafted from where they’d been shot.
Chirrut straightened, smoothing the front of his robes as if nothing had happened.
Baze looked at the weapon in his hands.
“Yeah,” he said. “This’ll work.”
It was evening and turning cold before they found Killi and Kaya and the children. The Holy City was a maze of streets, of neighborhoods, some of them hundreds, some of them thousands, and some of them—if you believed all the myths—hundreds of thousands of years old. It was a city made for hiding as much as it was a city built upon self-discovery. Once Baze and Chirrut had been assured that neither of the Gimms nor any of the orphans had been taken into custody, it was simply a matter of checking, in turn, the possible places they could have gone. But there were a lot of places, and the Holy City sprawled across the top of its mesa, and there were the stormtroopers to contend with.
They found them, finally, in the northwest part of the city, three and a half blocks from the Second Spire, a towering arrowhead of stonework that stabbed up at the sky like a needle. It was one of the tallest structures in the Holy City, and still it was only a third of the height of the Temple of the Kyber. The Second Spire—and the First, for that matter—had also been closed and sealed off by the Empire, but unlike the Temple of the Kyber, far fewer pilgrims made any attempt to visit it; the particular faith associated with the two towers was all but forgotten in the galaxy. The neighborhood, though still populated, was about as close to deserted as one could get in the Holy City, and traffic was far lighter.
The house had been abandoned some years earlier, shortly after the Imperial occupation had begun. Baze had been the one to discover it and pass it along to Chirrut to, in turn, pass along to Killi and Kaya as a potential site for a second orphanage should the need ever arise. It appeared as abandoned now as it had upon his initial discovery, and Baze keyed the old comm panel alongside the door expecting no answer and wondering where they would have to look next.
But the door opened, and Kaya stood there, in the old dark-blue mechanic’s jumpsuit that she seemed always to wear, the tool belt slung low on her hips. Her hair fell in two long braids, draped over her shoulders and bound together just above her breastbone. Her eyes were blue, and red-rimmed from tears, and the skin beneath them had the sallow gray of fatigue and worry. Baze had always thought she was pretty—insofar as he thought such things about anyone at all anymore—but the relief he felt at seeing her was enough to make her seem positively radiant. He hadn’t allowed himself to recognize just how worried he had been—for her, and her sister, and the children—until this moment.
“Baze,” she started to say, but he stepped in and wrapped his arms around her and lifted her in a hug that took her off her feet. She stiffened for an instant, reflexively, surprised, and then all at once relaxed, and shuddered, her face against his chest. He felt her breath through his tunic as she let out a sob.
“I am sorry,” Baze said. “We should have been there.”
It was warmer inside the house, but not by much. In the time since it had been abandoned, others had come through the place and stripped it of almost everything of value, and that meant heating coils and faucet fixtures, everything that could be removed and sold. The bathroom was the only thing left marginally intact, t
hough the door panel had been removed for whatever parts it could provide, which meant that it had to be opened and closed manually if anyone wanted privacy. There was almost no furniture. There was still power, and still running water, but the water was cold, and the power was pretty much useless as everything it might’ve powered had been stolen away.
Kaya had recomposed herself quickly. Baze knew she hated to worry or frighten the children, and that distress on her part would have precisely that effect, so she was hiding it. But he had seen her fear and her pain, and it nudged the simmering anger inside of him that much closer to a boil.
Kaya brought them to Killi, who was watching over the children with the help of the CZ droid. The children were still clearly upset, though quietly so, and Baze saw them tense, even flinch, at every loud noise from the street. A couple of the oldest orphans were still trying to console and soothe several of the youngest.
Killi was wearing her filtering mask around her neck, and her voice was hoarse when she spoke. She would use one hand to put the mask to her face to take a breath or two every couple of minutes. She left the CZ droid with the children, and the four of them moved to the kitchen, where they sat on the floor. Baze removed the harness and tank for the cannon and leaned back against the wall, Kaya beside him, while Killi and Chirrut sat in almost identical postures, their backs straight, cross-legged, facing one another.
“This is our fault,” Baze said. “We brought this on you.”
Killi shook her head. The mask was down, and her face was lined with worry, and like her sister, her eyes had the same sunken, almost hollow appearance. Her hood was down, as well, and her hair, cut short, was shot through with gray.
“We do not blame ourselves for the choices of others,” Killi said. “The stormtroopers did what stormtroopers must do. We did what we must do. And you did what you must do.”
Baze shook his head.
“Your heart demanded you help us.”
“There was always a risk this would happen,” Kaya said. “It could have been much worse.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Chirrut asked.
“They pushed Killi to the floor.” Kaya spoke before her sister could. “That frightened the children. B’asia hid under her bed, and one of the troopers was…unkind in getting her out, would not let Killi or me help. He grabbed her. She’s Togruta, and he took hold of her by her montrals, and she screamed and tried to escape him and…he struck her.”
“The stormtrooper struck a child?” Baze almost growled.
“She will be fine. At least the injury is not permanent.”
Baze looked to Chirrut, and he knew that Chirrut was aware of his gaze, and he knew that Chirrut also knew what he was thinking. But Chirrut only said, “They took everything, yes?”
“All of it,” Kaya said. “They accused us of stealing it ourselves, but I think even they knew that was absurd, which is why they didn’t arrest anyone. We took only what we could grab before they kicked us out.”
“I am worried it will get cold tonight,” Chirrut said. “You will need blankets, heating coils, never mind food and water.”
“I have contacted Gavra Ubrento at her shop. She has promised what she can spare, but it is not much.”
Baze continued looking at Chirrut. It was petulant, he supposed, but he knew Chirrut could tell he was doing it. Gavra Ubrento worked as a roving mechanic, and had done business—and thus forged a loose friendship—with Kaya. But whatever Gavra could supply would hardly be enough.
There was a silence. From the other rooms, they could hear the CZ and the children; low voices, soft voices, even the droid’s modulated vocoder. It was dark outside, and the darkness inside heavier as a result, and the few remaining working light fixtures cast small pockets of illumination that failed to lift the growing gloom.
“If you will excuse us for a moment?” Chirrut said. “Baze has something he wants to say to me alone.”
Baze continued to stare at Chirrut. Killi and Kaya left the room without a word. The door slid back into place, and still Baze didn’t speak, and neither did Chirrut. They sat in the growing darkness, listening to the faint sounds of the orphans and the two women who had taken it upon themselves to care for them, and to the sound of the old, battered droid that Kaya Gimm kept operational to help them. They sat, and the silence grew, and Baze imagined he could feel the movement of the Holy City settling into yet another uneasy, frightened night. He could almost feel the very weight of the Imperial Star Destroyer parked in orbit above Jedha, and through that giant ship, the incredible pressure of the Galactic Empire behind it. For a moment, he felt a spasm of pure dread, and then it broke, and gave way to his anger.
But Baze didn’t say anything. There was nothing he needed to say. Chirrut knew what he was thinking, and Chirrut knew why he was thinking it.
He realized that Chirrut’s lips were moving, that his friend was repeating the first phrase of the mantra, over and over.
The Force is with me and I am one with the Force. The Force is with me and I am one with the Force. The Force is with me….
The Force was with Chirrut. Baze knew that, believed it. Had seen it. There had been a time, once, when Baze had felt the Force with him, as well.
Not anymore.
Chirrut’s lips stopped moving. He sighed. With his left hand, he reached into his robe and removed the slim metal cylinder that Beezer Fortuna had given him. He ran his fingertips over it, tracing the shape, feeling the edges, the activator switch. He sighed a second time and then held out the device for Baze.
“Food, water, and medicine for the orphans,” Chirrut said. “Blankets, heating units, beds if they can find them. Tell them that if they will provide these things, we will fight alongside Saw Gerrera.”
Baze made the call.
Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.
Through Passion I gain Strength.
Through Strength I gain Power.
Through Power I gain Victory.
Through Victory my chains are Broken.
The Force shall free me.
—The Code of the Sith, translated from Qotsisajak
From Collected Poems, Prayers, and Meditations on the Force,
Edited by Kozem Pel, Disciple of the Whills
CHIRRUT COULD FEEL the AT-ST stomping down the Blessing Way.
He counted the steps. Seventeen to reach the intersection with the Square of Stars.
Sixteen. Fifteen.
He moved his walking stick, settled it so it stood between his knees where he sat. He rested his forehead against the cap of the staff, the cold metal of the crystal containment lamp doing little to soothe his headache. He was tired, and he was frustrated, and he thought that either or both would bother him less if Baze’s reassuring presence were somewhere over his shoulder. But Baze was not there, and now that they had allied with Saw Gerrera, it was an absence that Chirrut had come to feel more and more frequently in the last two months.
Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.
Two months since allying with Saw Gerrera’s partisans. Two months since Saw Gerrera had agreed, without the slightest hesitation, to provide Killi and Kaya and the children with anything they needed, anything he could spare.
Eleven. Ten. Nine. Eight.
Two months since the start of Saw Gerrera’s campaign against the Empire. Two months since Chirrut and Baze—and it had mostly been Baze thus far—had taught Gerrera’s partisans the back-alley paths of the Holy City. Two months since the Empire had learned that Jedha, while occupied, would not submit willingly, nor quietly, and had responded in kind.
The AT-DPs were gone. They had been lighter, quicker, used by the garrison for patrols and quick response. Now there were AT-STs, a purer manifestation of the Empire’s military might. The AT-ST was a battlefield weapon, and its presence in the Holy City meant that, at least in one thing, Saw Gerrera and the Empire agreed.
The fight for Jedha was on.
Seven. Six.
The first attack had been planne
d by Gerrera himself, passed along by Fortuna, and executed by a handful of his partisans, plus Baze and Chirrut. But since then it had been Baze more than Chirrut who had found himself in the fight, and whether it was due to a perceived liability in Chirrut’s blindness or something more, Chirrut did not know. He suspected it had less to do with his lack of eyesight than what it was he could perceive. He suspected that he made Saw Gerrera uncomfortable.
Five. Four.
Gerrera had many secrets. Even now, after two months of helping the partisans, neither Baze nor Chirrut had the first idea where outside of the city Gerrera was making his base. When they met with him in person—and that occurred less and less frequently now—it was invariably where they had encountered him the first time, in the shadow of the Three Faces. Whether this was because Gerrera still didn’t entirely trust them with the location of his hideout or for another reason entirely, Chirrut did not know. If Saw Gerrera was paranoid, Chirrut could hardly blame him. The Empire had every reason to want the man dead. Soon it would have yet another.
Three.
Every act, every action, had its effect, unintended and intended alike, Chirrut reflected. Fighting the Empire for what was needed to keep the orphans in Killi and Kaya’s care safe and warm and fed had resulted in the loss of the orphanage, the loss of everything that Chirrut and Baze had acquired to that very end. For every insurgent who had struck at a stormtrooper, another stormtrooper arrived to strike back.
Two.
Whether Saw Gerrera’s war against the Empire had changed this, or whether it had simply accelerated the inevitable escalation, was yet another thing Chirrut did not know. The weapon Baze now employed against the Empire with frightening accuracy and to devastating result had been intended for use on the inhabitants of the Holy City. That had been before Gerrera had arrived. Chirrut was certain that if the Imperials could get away with keeping only those residents required for working the kyber mines on Jedha and somehow get rid of everyone else on the moon, they would do so. They’d had no respect for the lives here to begin with. Gerrera’s war had not changed that.