by Claudia Gray
Leia put out her hand. If they flew away, they might be shot down. These people had to be convinced she was a friend, not only for her own safety but to protect her pilot, too. She didn’t intend to get anybody hurt ever again. “I’ll go with them.”
Batten shook her head once more. “Your mother will skin me alive. I mean this in a literal sense. My hide will be tanned and turned into some kind of belt or purse or other accessory.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Leia said firmly. “You’d just spend some time in the brig.”
“Oh, that’s where we are,” Batten muttered. “Spending time in the brig counts as the bright side.”
The lead soldier said, “She’ll be safe.” Leia wanted to believe him.
Either way, she’d go where he led.
The shelters weren’t that far away—but trudging through the shifting salt made the hike feel as though it went on forever. Or maybe that was the distinct knowledge of the guns in the soldiers’ hands. Either way, by the time they reached a low-roofed, gray structure jutting from the salt drifts near the mountains, Leia’s breaths came fast and she was sweating. The soldiers led her through the door and down a few steps; echoing sounds in the distance revealed most of this base or station was located underground. However, Leia was steered through a narrow, featureless corridor that revealed nothing of this place’s layout or capacities.
By that point, it was fine with her. She wanted to simply drop to the floor in gratitude for a place to rest, but she couldn’t betray any weakness. These people needed to understand she’d come to them as an equal and a potential ally.
If they didn’t believe her…
Is this the most danger I’ve ever been in? Probably. Almost certainly.
“Stay here,” the lead soldier said as they ushered her into a small room half-filled with pale equipment crates. The activity within came from a tiny MSE-series droid, rolling through to scan content codes. As Leia took the one chair, the soldier continued, “We’ll bring our leader to you soon, or we’ll let you go.” He didn’t say which option was more likely, or what would make the difference. When he shut the door behind him, it locked with a solid metal chunk, which sounded very final.
“Why tell me to stay here if you’re going to lock me in?” Leia grumbled. But she didn’t think much about it. She was too busy unfastening her jacket to provide easier access to her blaster. They hadn’t even thought to check her for weapons. There were advantages to being a teenage girl in the middle of a situation like this; her opponents underestimated her, which made so many things possible.
Leia took the blaster in hand. She wasn’t a practiced shot, but in a room this small, surely it would be hard to miss.
Could she really fire at a person? Maim or kill them, even to save her own life?
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that…but Leia knew it could.
All right, I sit in this chair right in front of the door. I point the blaster at the leader right away—no, that might look like an attack, and they’ll fire immediately—but if I don’t have it in my hands, they might search me after the fact and find it, which will leave me both a prisoner and unarmed—I can’t do that.
She didn’t make the decision with her conscious mind. When the door clicked again and swung open, Leia obeyed her instincts and swung the blaster up into position, ready to fire.
Then she saw the man stepping forward into the light, pulling back the hood of his jacket to reveal the shock on his face—a face she knew by heart.
Leia whispered, “Daddy?”
Bail Organa took another step forward and stared at Leia as though he’d never seen her before. The shock weakened every muscle in her body, and she let her arm drop to her side, the blaster now dangling from slack fingers.
“They told me you were here,” her father said, “but I didn’t believe it. How did you find us?”
“I traced some strange traffic through Calderos Station.” But why were they even talking about that? “Dad, what’s going on?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Well, I do know.” Shaking off her stupor, Leia reholstered her blaster at her side. “Are you really going to try to keep hiding this from me? Here and now?”
Bail put one hand to his forehead like a man with a headache. Probably she’d given him one. “Tell me what you’ve learned, Leia. And tell me how you learned it.”
Shock was quickly morphing into anger. “I find you in the middle of some kind of…insurgent camp, and I’m the one who has to answer questions?”
“It matters,” he said, a note of urgency in his voice she’d never heard before. “If you could find us, so could the Empire. We thought we’d erased all data about Calderos Station, but if we missed something—lives are at stake.”
A jolt of fear straightened her spine. Her vivid imagination showed her visions of Star Destroyers overhead, TIE fighters swooping down like rye-crows to destroy them all. “The data about shipping traffic between here and Calderos was stored in some older records I’d put together for the Apprentice Legislature. And some of the hostages I rescued from Wobani mentioned Itapi Prime, that they had cousins there who did a lot of business through the station. Something about that link seemed odd, so I followed the trail. It brought me here.”
“I’ll need you to destroy that data as soon as you return to Coruscant,” Bail said. His stance relaxed slightly as he nodded, answering a question within his own mind. “Thank the Force it came from your private records.”
“All right, I’ll destroy it,” Leia promised. “But what is this? Whatever it is—you attacked Calderos Station, right? You attacked the Empire!”
Her father held up one hand to forestall any more questions, but at least he’d accepted he couldn’t get out of this without telling her something. “Not personally. But our…one of our groups was responsible, yes. We’re carrying out a few tactical strikes meant to weaken Imperial control.”
“You always said we had to exercise influence through the Senate, to change the system from within.”
“I still believe there’s valuable work to be done there. But Palpatine’s rule only grows more despotic as time goes on. A few of us have come to accept that operating within the law won’t be enough.” He sighed heavily as he sat on the edge of one of the crates, the tiny MSE droid whirring near his feet. “I realize this must be upsetting for you. That you’re disappointed in me. I don’t blame you for feeling that way, Leia. I only ask that you try to understand.”
“Disappointed? Dad—this is amazing.” Her doubts about violent action had faded the instant she realized her father played a part in all this, that he even seemed to be the one in charge. Despite the recent distance between them, her trust in his goodness remained absolute. For Leia, it was this simple: if Bail Organa led this movement of rebels, then they were doing the right thing.
And she wanted to be a part of it.
“Does Mom know?” she asked.
Bail gave her a look. “As if I could hide anything from your mother. The truth is, she had the idea even before I did. She remains on Alderaan, but she has a role to play. Let’s leave it at that.”
Not likely. “What about me? What can I do?”
“Leia, no. You’re not to have any part in this.”
“I already do,” she pointed out. “I let you know how people might find this base!”
“That doesn’t count,” he said, in her opinion unfairly. “How did you get here?”
“Commandeered the Polestar—”
“With what crewmembers?” Her father’s voice sharpened, and his gaze intensified. This was the stage that came immediately before You’re In Serious Trouble, Young Lady.
“Just one,” she said quickly. “Lieutenant Ress Batten. She stayed with the Polestar.”
Relief gentled Bail’s expression. “I know Batten. She can be trusted. I’ll still need to talk to her in person when we’re back on Alderaan.”
“When will that be? How long do we stay here? What
is there to do?” Questions bubbled up inside Leia, dozens and dozens of them, but mostly she wanted to be put to work. Constructing shelters? Cleaning up? Any task, no matter how mundane, seemed like an exciting chance to help her father stand against the Empire.
“You? You can go home,” Bail said. “You don’t mention this to anyone, ever, do you understand?”
“But—Mom—”
“Yes, obviously we’ll talk about this with your mother. But that’s it. After that conversation, you pretend your trip here never happened. Do you understand?”
“No! That doesn’t make any sense!” Leia stamped one foot on the floor. “Not the part where I don’t tell anyone—obviously I’m not going to tell—but how am I supposed to pretend I don’t know what’s happening?”
Bail held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness, or exasperation, maybe both. “If you want to be a part of a rebellion, you have to learn how to lie.”
Brightening, she said. “So when I know how to lie, I can be a part of this.”
“I didn’t mean—that was only a general—” Breathing out in frustration, he paused before he continued, “Do you realize the risk you took, coming here? If we hadn’t identified your ship as civilian in time, we might’ve shot you out of the sky. Batten’s a good pilot, but we have even better gunners. I would have been the one to give the order. I could’ve killed you, Leia.” His voice shook. That idea scared him even more than it did her. “What if you’d been followed by an Imperial scout? Every single person on Crait could’ve been killed. Everyone. That includes my soldiers, your crewmembers, me and you. All those lives could’ve been lost, only because you couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
The memory of Wobani made her waver, but she couldn’t back down, not now. Instead she crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I wouldn’t have to investigate things on my own if you’d just tell me the truth!”
“That’s it,” Bail said. “I’m taking you home.”
Leia flew home on the Polestar, with her father’s ship, the Tantive III, off their wing and flying as close as any military convoy sent out for an arrest. Ress Batten did her job without so much as a sideways glance; obviously she understood the value of discretion.
Still, as they finally reentered the Alderaan system, Batten ventured, “Are we in trouble or aren’t we?”
“You’re not in trouble,” Leia replied. Me, on the other hand…
“So we never went to Crait, never even heard of any such planet as Crait, and so definitely didn’t find your father there, because how would we find the viceroy on a planet he never visited and we’re not even sure exists?” Batten shrugged and raised her eyebrows. “It’s a mystery.”
“We went on a…survey run,” Leia tried. “Turned up absolutely nothing.”
Batten nodded firmly. “‘Nothing’ would include planets that probably don’t exist. Got it!”
If only all Leia’s questions could be resolved so easily. It felt as if nothing made sense anymore, and maybe it never would, unless her mother could explain.
After landing in the middle of Aldera’s night, she hurried from the spaceport without waiting for her father’s ship to land. Bail Organa would no doubt have sent word ahead to the palace, so Leia harbored no illusions about getting to tell her mother her version of events first. She only wanted a few moments to speak freely, one on one.
As she’d anticipated, as soon as she walked into the inner chambers of the palace, she saw Breha standing in the great hall, waiting. No doubt she’d been awakened by the message, because her hair hung long and free down her back, and she wore a simple velvet robe instead of the usual royal finery. Faint golden light glowed at the neckline of the robe, hinting at the pulmonodes underneath. None of that mattered as much as the haunting, unfamiliar expression on Breha’s face. It took Leia a moment to recognize what she saw there as uncertainty—an emotion she’d never believed her mother felt.
“Leia.” Breha held out a hand to her. “My child, you should never have had to know this.”
“I wanted to know,” Leia insisted. Her mother’s hand was strangely cold, as though she were ill or in shock. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because the knowledge is dangerous—to you, to me, to your father, and to every single being who has allied with us in this fight.” Shaking her head sadly, Breha added, “You have to go on as though you had never learned of this.”
“How am I supposed to do that? Mom, you’ve raised me to know how evil the Empire is, to want to do something about it—”
“This is different,” Breha said. “Don’t ask me how, thinking you can score a point. You know how.”
Leia did.
The wide doors to the hall swung open again, this time admitting her father. Bail Organa had changed from his gray-and-white Crait gear into the long coat of the viceroy, although he didn’t need that to look intimidating. “You couldn’t wait at the spaceport?” he said to Leia.
“I wanted to talk to Mom,” Leia insisted. She caught herself pushing out her lower lip and stopped it; she was too old to pout. If she wanted to make a point, she’d have to argue it. “Who started this? Where did it begin?”
Her parents turned to each other, silently weighing between them what could and couldn’t be said. They had a way of speaking to each other without words, such a perfect understanding that sometimes Leia thought they didn’t need to talk at all. It had taken her a long time to realize not all spouses were like this, that not everyone found the kind of love that was like sharing souls.
At last Breha answered, “No one person started it. Many of us around the galaxy have seen the need for greater action, and began taking the first steps on our own. We found each other. We’re still learning to trust each other. The work ahead requires extraordinary trust.”
“The work ahead,” Leia whispered. “What does that mean?”
“We don’t know yet.” Bail took his wife’s other hand and held it to his chest. “We have to be ready for anything.”
They were determined. They were steadfast. And they were afraid. Seeing their fear made Leia believe more firmly in their courage than anything else could’ve done. If they could be this brave, she could as well. “I can be ready too. Let me help.”
“Absolutely not.” Breha snapped back into mother mode, the version of it closest to queen mode. “The danger we’re facing is too great.”
“Do you think not telling me anything is going to protect me?” Her parents might be courageous, but to Leia, they seemed shortsighted, too. “If the two of you are found out, do you really think the Empire won’t come for me?”
Her mother made a low, anguished sound in the back of her throat, not quite a moan. Bail gripped his wife’s hand more tightly for a few long, silent moments before he said, “They would. We know that. We carry the burden of that knowledge every day. And if they do come for you, you have to be completely innocent. Do you understand, Leia? If they question you—if they torture you—” His voice cracked, and he couldn’t go on.
Breha picked up where he left off. “If you truly know nothing, eventually they’ll realize that. There’s a chance—a good chance, I think—that they’d let you go. Probably they’d feel the need to leave someone from the royal house of Alderaan alive, and if you’re blameless, they could install you as queen to try to make it seem like a normal transfer of power. It’s the only shield we have for you, Leia. Don’t ask us to destroy it. Otherwise we couldn’t endure another day of this fight, and we must endure it. The fate of the entire galaxy is at stake. I don’t think we could risk you for anything less.” Tears welled in her mother’s dark eyes, and Leia felt powerless to comfort her. Instead she watched as Bail brought Breha into his embrace and brushed his lips against her black hair.
“I thought—” The words trembled more than Leia had thought they would. “I thought you two had forgotten about me. I thought you were ignoring me for no reason.”
Her parents instantly turned back to her, eyes wide
with dismay. Bail shook his head as he said, “Sweetheart, no. We would never do that. Never.”
Breha pulled Leia into the embrace, turning it into a family hug. “Nothing less important than this work could ever take us from you,” she whispered as she stroked Leia’s braided hair. “Not even this changes how much we love you. It’s your future we fight for. Do you understand?”
Leia couldn’t answer out loud. She just nodded, burrowing deep into her parents’ arms, wishing they never had to be farther apart than this.
By the time she reached her bedroom, it was very nearly dawn. Her window faced away from the sunrise, so the only proof she saw was the graying of the night sky. Dully she wondered whether the household staff would remember to override 2V’s standing orders to wake Leia up early in the morning. Probably not.
If she fell asleep this instant, she might get two hours of rest. That was laughable. Leia felt as if she would never be able to sleep again. Her mind raced wildly in a dozen directions at once, full of new knowledge and countless new questions her parents would refuse to answer.
However, she had realized something even the formidable Bail and Breha Organa didn’t know: They were fooling themselves about shielding her.
If her parents were revealed to be in rebellion against Emperor Palpatine, the entire House of Organa would be destroyed. Leia would die alongside her parents. Maybe the stormtroopers would even burn the palace to the ground. No mercy would be shown, and no innocence could protect her from the fate that would follow.
Really, her parents were too intelligent to believe otherwise. Only the desperation of their love had convinced them that part of their plan had any chance of success. Leia knew better. She hadn’t had enough time to deceive herself.
The danger terrified her, but it excited her, too. Instead of grappling with mystery and uncertainty, she saw a fight on the horizon, one with a clear enemy. Leia was sick of living in confusion or fear. She wanted to take action.
But how could she do that? Bail and Breha wouldn’t easily surrender their illusion of her safety. They would never willingly bring her into the fold of whatever organization this was they were forging. (She still didn’t understand exactly what that was, which was maddening, but her parents hadn’t betrayed one whisper of information beyond what Leia had already discovered for herself.) More than that, her mother and father were deceiving themselves about her safety because it was the only way for them to go on. She didn’t want to hurt them or make them more frightened than they already were. What if they pulled out of the fight entirely just to keep her from it?