cased in clean bark

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are—cased in clean bark you drift
Through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
Shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
All fear gives way: the light
Looks after you, you feel the waves’ goodwill
As arms widen over the water; Love,

The key is turned. Extend yourself.
It is the Nile, the sun is shining,
Everywhere you turn is luck.
— Louise Glück, The Undertaking

Mon Mothma and the Rebellion’s military leaders stood around the circular, recessed holoprojector in which they invested so much of their lives. The sickly green light of the command center cast a harsh, vile glow on each of their faces. It was almost demonic, strange shadows falling across and altering their features. How they could look at one another from across it all the time. Because they had to, a small part of his mind suggested, just like all of the distasteful things Cassian had to do for them. ‘Because they had to’ was all any of them had.

He waited at parade rest for General Draven to call him forward. The man was taking his time laying out some scheme or other with General Merrick and hadn’t noticed his arrival despite his aide having only just sent for Cassian. It was another mission that would end in a slew of dead soldiers and pilots. X-wings, U-wings and Y-wing bombers were likely to be lost at an extraordinary rate, too. Their bacta supplies dwindled and their medbays were understaffed; even old-fashioned bandages were getting hard to come by. And yet the two of them—Draven and Merrick—fought. Bickered, really. They fought—or bickered—as hard as they had the first day he’d met them. First Merrick then Draven batting the verbal equivalent of a ball between them, like this was all a game, like arguing their way to a perfect plan would somehow make things better.

But even the most perfect plan got people killed. It still wasted resources. A perfect plan hadn’t defeated the Empire. And wouldn’t, most likely. Some days, Cassian wondered if a plan ever would.

He turned his head and coughed into his shoulder, clearing his throat and pretending it had been involuntary rather than targeted. Mon Mothma caught his eye, darkly amused, and said, “Gentlemen, I believe we have another concern at the moment.”

He considered telling them all to shove it, that he was done, that that was their biggest concern right now. He could do good for the galaxy in any corner of the Empire’s blasted realm even without the Rebellion’s resources guiding him. Instead he inclined his head and took a step forward. That’s dangerously close to Gerrera’s reasoning, he told himself. “Senator,” he said, polite, placid, bland. “Generals.”

“Captain Andor, it’s good of you to join us,” Mothma replied, equally cordial, though perhaps a little distanced from the others and from him. Then again, she always held herself apart from the people around her. And perhaps she was smart for doing so. She could never be seen shedding tears over fallen troops despite her pretty speeches and eulogies after all, and that was easier if you remained reserved. He should take a page from her book.

He always had had a hard time separating himself from the very worst parts of what he did.

“I wasn’t aware I could avoid the meeting,” he said, light, trying for quippy and probably hitting somewhere in the realm of disrespectful. Not disrespectful enough that Draven or Merrick noticed—he was never that disrespectful—but Mothma cut a sly look his way. He fought the urge to flush at the scrutiny, well aware that doing so would only confirm his guilt to her.

“You can’t,” Draven said, unaware of the joke and uncaring of the fact. Cassian knew there was a sense of humor buried beneath that beige, quilted vest of his—there usually was with types like Draven, with most people in the Rebellion if he was being truthful—but Cassian would be damned if he ever saw it. “We have a new assignment for you.”

Every inch of him considered sighing and every inch of him rejected it as a useless endeavor. It was always a new assignment. Go here, go there. Shoot this man. Destroy that family. No big deal. It was all for the greater good.

The greater good had started looking pretty grim to Cassian. “Yes, sir.” His body tightened, going ramrod straight. If he couldn’t feel like a good soldier, he could look it. “What is it?”

Draven passed a datapad over to him. Reaching for it, Cassian tapped through on instinct, rote memorization of protocols and encryption keys and passwords doing the heavy lifting of generating the necessary briefing for him. His eyes scanned the dossier quickly.

“Quick and clean, Andor,” Draven said, “just like always.”

“I am beginning to hate those words, General.”

Draven shrugged, his mind already half a galaxy away. “Don’t we all?”

Cassian felt the weight of Mothma’s heavy, smothering gaze against his face, but he refused to lift his eyes to meet hers. He didn’t want her to see just how dubious he found Draven’s comment. From the cavalier way he spoke, quick and clean was high on the list of things he did like.

Too bad he was never the one who was forced to commit ‘quick and clean’ acts.

Maybe it was easier on his side of the table. Maybe it wasn’t. Cassian’s various brushes with a leadership role had always burdened him, but perhaps it was different for Dravan. Perhaps it would one day be different for him, too. Issuing orders was one thing. Being the one to carry them out…

It must be done, Cassian. If not you, someone else. Someone who isn’t as good. Someone who might not make the kind of difference you can.

A childish thought for a more childish version of him. It was the kind of thought that had gotten him through his early years in the Rebellion, the kind of thought that had gotten him to the rank he holds now. But instead of inspiring him, the words rang hollow in his mind, cheap and worn. There were plenty of rebels as good as he was. And they were just as dedicated. And they were out there doing their jobs just like he was. Some of them less encumbered than he was. Some, more.

“Go to the Ring of Kafrene. Find out where this pilot has gone.”

“Yes, General.”

“Whatever you have to do, you’ll do it.” Draven spoke as though the warning—the threat—was necessary, but Cassian already knew. He didn’t need to be told. Anymore, they didn’t send him on a mission unless there was some kind of complication where anything went, where he would do ‘whatever he had to do’ and more. And he’d never given them cause to doubt. Not once. Not ever.

There was a saying from back home—and a story. A yurala cannot be a rexal. There was a time when he’d taken comfort in that idea. It made what he had to do easier, the inevitability of it. He was like the stalking, predatory yurala, so he didn’t have to worry about being like the peaceful rexal. You couldn’t change what you were.

Cassian no longer felt like the yurala and the yurala no longer soothed the ache in his chest where his resolve once sat. But he wasn’t the rexal either and he didn’t think he’d ever be and he wasn’t as okay with that as he used to be. He never thought much about the future, not his own future anyway. He thought about the galaxy’s future, what it would be like out from under the Imperial yoke, but what room was there for a man like him in that galaxy?

He supposed there would always be smaller injustices to fight. Maybe he could be useful there.

Nerves fluttering in tandem with the resentment already coursing through his blood, hot and cold in turn, he nodded once. Sharp. No, he wanted to shout. I won’t do it, he wanted to tell them I won’t do whatever I have to.

He didn’t shout no. And he didn’t tell them he wouldn’t do it.

Instead, he answered as he always did. Because he had no better answer and because someone had to go and because he knew nothing else the way he knew this.

“As you say, General.”

One day that might well be his mistake, but today, today it was just a normal day’s work.

“Captain,” Mon Mothma said. “May the Force be with you.”

Cassian nodded, polite, appreciative of the sentiment behind Mothma’s language if not of the specific words that sentiment was contained within. They didn’t speak often, but she was always a kind presence, always showed how much she cared even to the rawest recruits, fresh in from whichever hellish experience finally tipped them over the edge and into open rebellion.

But even after all these years, even if she was the one saying it—and he trusted her to only mean it in the kindest way—it still sat uneasy in his heart to hear that particular phrase.

And so he didn’t otherwise acknowledge them.

Someone, Cassian didn’t know who because it was before his time, had started a library. Housed near the quartermaster’s office, it was less a library than a small closet, barely large enough to count even as that much, so cramped that Cassian’s shoulders nearly brushed the walls when he stepped inside. The automatic lights brightened, slow and reluctant, overhead, wired in haste and forgotten immediately. But for what it lacked in artistry, it made up in functionality. Row upon row of small, thin shelves, carefully divided to hold dozens of chits each, filled every spare inch of space on the back wall and along each side.

It was crude, constructed of plastic sheets melted together strategically and glued to the walls, but it did the job.

When Cassian first joined the Massassi unit, there was maybe one row filled up, mostly holonovels about intrepid adventurers working for the glory of the Empire—he’d stayed away from it then, uninterested in those tales, though others either allowed themselves a respite by reading them and genuinely enjoying the contents or by reading and mocking them.

But over the years, it had filled with other things. Poetry from occupied worlds. Manifestos. Unpublished novels, stories of a lone Jedi surviving—that was a popular subgenre and ran the gamut from cynical examination of the realities of what such a bleak existence would be like to pure escapist fantasy. A single Jedi delivering the galaxy from the Empire? Preposterous—and there were even tales written about the rebels, some of them inspiring, some of them less so. Cassian read the ones about rebels sometimes; they made him feel a little less alone in his cynicism.

Cassian dug out a chit from his jacket pocket. He didn’t often have a contribution of his own to make, his missions far too dangerous to indulge in something as silly as hunting out a book to bring back. But sometimes events converged and he found himself with something to leave here, a quiet testimony to the galaxy outside this base and what they all fought for.

“Rest well, Angara,” he said, slotting the chit into an empty space. Affixing a hololabel to the spot underneath it with the title, the authors, and the source, he stepped back, admiration and remorse churning inside of him.

He hadn’t meant to bring this back alone.

But it was all he could manage.

“What are you doing?” K-2 asked. If he was a person, he would’ve been breathing down Cassian’s neck, his face practically cheek-to-cheek with Cassian’s, his body against Cassian’s back. If it had been anyone else, Cassian would’ve rolled his shoulders in the hopes of getting the person to step back, but K-2 was hundreds of pounds of metal-plated stubbornness. Even if he’d wanted to get K-2 to move, it wouldn’t have happened if K-2 didn’t want it, too.

And K-2 obviously wasn’t in the mood, far too curious for his own good. “None of your business, Kay,” Cassian answered, flapping his hand in K-2’s direction. “Go away.”

“For a friend,” K-2 said, “you say that a lot.”

“And for a friend, you spend a lot of your time not listening to me when I ask you to beat it. Funny how that works.”

K-2 hummed in agreement, but didn’t take the hint and he didn’t get distracted. “Are you writing?” he asked, gripping Cassian’s shoulder as he leaned even further. Cassian groaned under the weight, his shoulder aching as he tried to hold up against it.

“Kay,” he said, his lungs aching at the strain his upper body now bore thanks to K-2, “you don’t need to press your face against the computer to see.”

“Oh, yes,” K-2 answered, not moving. “My ocular sensors are superior to human eyesight.”

“Kay!” Finding a well of strength he didn’t realize he had, he wrenched his shoulder free of K-2’s grip. Rubbing at his arm, he glanced down at his jacket, brushing at the indentations K-2’s fingers had left in it.

“What are you writing? Is it a report? It looks like a report.” Though he didn’t retake Cassian’s shoulder, which was good, because it throbbed and would probably end up with bruises shaped like K-2’s spindly fingers anyway, he did something much worse: he stepped around Cassian’s chair and pushed him out of it. If Cassian’s instincts and reactions were any slower, he’d have ended up on his ass, yet another K-2-instigated bruise to account for. Instead, he caught himself on his hand and only faced a momentarily-numb palm for his trouble as he twisted to his feet. Then K-2 sat, taking his ill-gotten reward for all that it was worth. The chair, meanwhile, creaked ominously under K-2’s weight; he looked more like an adult sitting on a child-sized stool—his knees high and back hunched—than a dignified, former security droid. He clearly didn’t give a shit about any of that though, leaning in and squinting as much as a being with no eyelids could. “But you’ve already filed all your reports. Who’s Angara?”

“I swear to every Force-born deity…” Cassian wedged himself between K-2 and the screen, adopted the most intimidating look he knew how to give. This wasn’t funny. And though Cassian suffered most of K-2’s more annoying habits with more equanimity than K-2 deserved most days, he would not suffer this. Not today. “Do not interrogate me.”

K-2’s head tilted back and his eyes did that searching thing, the white lights of the sensors shimmering as they flickered to take in his whole face. “Okay, Cassian,” he said, dubious. And Cassian knew he’d done himself no good by being so adamant, but if it got K-2 off his back, even if only for as long as it took him to get this finished, then it was worth it. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yes! Yes, that’s what I want!” His fingers brushed through his bangs, mussing the strands to an even greater degree than they were already. Drawing a deep breath, he pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned with exasperation. He so hated it when K-2 capitulated. It never felt like the win it was meant to be. “Angara was the mission.” He scratched at the back of his head. “I was meant to get him off Siol. I didn’t.”

“Oh,” K-2 said, turning his eyes away finally.

“He gave me a datacard with a collection of Siolan prayers, a few novels, speeches. Protests they could never speak while under Imperial occupation. He was dying and this was the thing he most cared about.” The back of Cassian’s hand slapped against the computer screen. “I thought anyone who might read it should know his name at least and a little of who he was.” And how much it cost him for it to be here. “Not that I knew much about him. I didn’t know anything about him, not really.” Not any of the important stuff anyway.

“Cassian.”

Crossing his arms, Cassian glared down at K-2. It was something of a novelty, he admitted in the back of his mind. He rarely had height on the droid in any capacity. “What?”

“Can I help?”

His eyes narrowed and he lost the train of his anger. “What?” he asked again, this time less belligerent than confused.

“Can I help?” K-2 repeated, enunciating his words even more precisely than usual as though that would make their meaning any clearer. He always did that when he thought people weren’t keeping up with him. It was a… thing. Made him kind of unpopular around the base. Because it made him ‘sound like a kriffing asshole’ according to more than one person who’d seen fit to inform Cassian of the fact.

“What?” Cassian asked, not a little suspicious. “No. Why?”

“You’re right,” K-2 said, though Cassian hadn’t said anything one way or the other, but K-2 pushed himself to his feet anyway. The chair clattered backward, which was good. There wasn’t a whole lot of room between Cassian and K-2 anyway and there would’ve been even less if the chair hadn’t moved. He didn’t need to be squished against the computer. “It was a stupid idea.”

Cassian’s brows furrowed and he thought he was probably gaping like a fish, but he didn’t know what to say and there really wasn’t anything K-2 could do, so he let the droid go even if he did huff, aggrieved, maybe waiting for Cassian to call him back. But other than apologize, Cassian had nothing and he didn’t much feel like apologizing right now anyway. He was already twitchy and he just wanted to be left alone.

K-2… he could talk to him later. The best thing about the droid was how quickly he let go of grudges in the short term. It might just bite him in the ass a few months or a year down the road—“Remember that time I tried to help you and you snapped at me and I never asked to help you again? Yes, so do I.”—but a few months down the road wasn’t now and that was what mattered.

Grabbing the chair from where it had been knocked over and righting it, he sat back town, tapped with painful, earnest slowness at the keyboard as he fought to convey everything he intended to say for and about Angara.

It wasn’t much and it probably wasn’t enough, but it was the only thing he could think to do.

It had to be enough.

The sound of a blaster. A choked-off yell. A stumble and a thud and a fall.

“No, no, no,” Cassian said, catching the man in one arm at the last moment, his other swinging around, blaster raised, shot fired. It hit true and dropped the single threat that Angara had not yet beaten. All his life, he’d protected himself. But he was frail and tired and Cassian had taken the burden of that protection upon himself. He’d offered it. He’d guaranteed it.

For all the good it did Angara in the end.

He lowered the man the rest of the way, his weight practically nothing, easily handled. His breathing was labored and thready and they were not yet within range of anyone who was able to help. They could have been surrounded by a million people and none of them could have. Not on this world, where no one had anything and bacta was such a rare commodity that some communities—this community—had no access to it.

“Cassian,” Angara said, his name strange in the man’s mouth. It was so, so rare that anyone except base personnel used his true name. His fingers shook as he tried to free a clasp on his shirt. Cassian’s hand caught those fingers in his own, gripped tight, stopped him from wasting his energy trying to retrieve what Cassian absolutely didn’t want him to retrieve. Because if he retrieved it, it was over. And if it was over, then Cassian had failed.

Again.

“It’s all right.” Angara’s skin and bones and flesh were brittle and dry and fragile beneath Cassian’s touch and he half-feared harming the man further. “I’m with you, Angara. We’re almost to safety.” Cassian had told many lies in his life and this was maybe the one he hated the least—or maybe it was the one he hated most. He couldn’t be sure. Not with his thoughts running away from him, recriminations and justifications tearing through every corner of his mind and ripping them to shreds.

Cassian felt the strength leeching from Angara’s body, his body relaxing in his arms, against his chest. His breathing evened out and it was only when he said please in an unbearably small voice that Cassian broke, slipping his fingers into the pocket that held the datacard.

The man deserved what little peace Cassian could give to him.

Cassian thought he heard a thank you, but he couldn’t be sure; between one breath and the next, Angara was gone. There was no way now to confirm Angara’s last words.

“Thank you, Angara.”

“When I put out a request to the Alliance, I didn’t think they’d send such a handsome young rebel to extract me,” Angara said, his first words to Cassian, dry and full of good humor. From the dossier Cassian had received, he knew that Angara was a notorious flirt, but cared little for the handsomeness of men—or of anyone of any gender. The man was ninety if he was a day, his pale skin rough and wrinkled. And though his words were amused, his eyes were shadowed. Even when you got out of the game, the game haunted you. “Should I be flattered?”

“Yes, well,” Cassian said, coughing into his fist. “I don’t know about that, but I do know the Alliance wants the best for everyone who seeks our aid. And that, in situations like this, is me. If that is flattering to you, who am I to say otherwise?”

Angara arched one gray, well-kempt eyebrow. “Handsome and confident. And it has nothing at all to do with me being one of Gerrera’s Partisans that they would send ‘the best’ for me?”

“A former Partisan from my understanding, sir,” Cassian said, scanning the spare quarters Angara kept. So normal compared to the living spaces where rebels and former rebels tended to end up. It almost made Cassian want to ask why he wanted out. This seemed comfortable for all that he had nothing most people would consider comforting. It was more than what could be offered on one of the Alliance bases anyway. And he’d more than earned his rest. Maybe not here exactly. Here, he was liable to be found and carted off to prison now that Siol’s occupation was complete and regular Imperial patrols were seeking out traitors and rogues all over the place. But somewhere. “I expect you know more about fighting tyranny than a lot of the rest of us combined. Your knowledge and expertise is something we desperately need.”

Cassian squinted thoughtfully at the ceiling and hoped his words rang true; they were, at the very least, honest.

“And he knows how to charm,” Angara said, his attention following the line of Cassian’s own. Wherever Cassian’s eyes went, so did Angara’s, until finally he broke the pattern and turned away. “Take a seat if you’d like.”

Cassian did not take a seat as the only seat available put his back to the door. He did lean against the back of the long lounge chair that Angara offered to him though, a compromise of sorts. Angara puttered about the room as Cassian kept half an ear out for him. What he was doing, Cassian couldn’t guess. Most of his extractees over the years had been… nervous. In dire need of Cassian’s guidance. Afraid, even, and rightfully so.

Angara was none of those things.

“How do you do it?” he asked, eyes still on the door. “How do you keep coming back?”

Stalling in his search, Angara hummed and sucked on his teeth. “I think the fight just doesn’t ever leave some people. No matter how much they might want it to.”

A shiver rattled through Cassian, all the way up his spine to settle at the base of his skull. “Whenever you’re ready to go, Angara,” he said, gruff, on edge now, like there really were Imperials waiting just outside that door for them.

A definite risk.

Siol City wasn’t the easiest extraction point, too exposed, too easy to get lost in, too unfamiliar to Cassian, who’d never stepped foot upon it nor had anyone else within the Alliance in recent memory. Even the alleys and side streets had a distinctly open quality about them, like the whole city wanted to air your secrets to the world. It made the Imperials’ jobs here easier, but it infinitely complicated Cassian’s.

“It will be all right,” Angara said soberly.

“Are you ready?” Cassian wasn’t sure he himself was.

Angara’s features grew somber as he patted his chest, just over his heart, hand covering his breast pocket. “I have everything I need right here.”

“Good.” Cassian pushed himself away from the chair. “Let’s get you out of here, yes?”

He’d had the A280-CFE for years at this point, its metal skin weathered and scratched—it was constantly being scratched, especially along the barrel, from the addition and removal of attachments that turned it from a normal pistol into the weapon that had made him infamous among the more impressionable and pointlessly romantic young recruits the Rebellion seemed to scoop up more and more often these days, eager kids who believed and wanted to be heroes and took inspiration from Cassian of all people.

Force save them from the recruits who considered Cassian worthy of emulation.

Heroes died for the Rebellion every day. It was people like Cassian who survived. And though Cassian wanted desperately for people to survive, he didn’t want them surviving the way Cassian had.

Practiced, easy, he snapped the scope into place, finishing the process of transforming his close-range pistol into the long-range rifle with which he did most of his work. His fingers skimmed, certain and steady, over the various parts as he did his final check. They were so accustomed to the feel of each piece that he could do this with a blindfold on.

He had done it with a blindfold on once upon a time, more than once, in fact—much to the amusement and disbelief of his fellow rebels.

Flipping the rifle into position and making minute adjustments to its placement, he settled himself, too. The spot he’d chosen—the only spot he could choose given his mark’s habits and the layout of the street—wouldn’t ever be his favorite. But despite the cold, scum-coated puddle doing its damnedest to soak into every inch of fabric from the knee of his trousers down to the hem, it was far from the worst.

Peering through the sight, he found the subject of a week’s investigation. Sitting outside of a café, she drank a cup of tea, unaware of the chances she took with her own life. He wondered what she was reading, whether it was reports from the labor camps she’d built here or if it was one of the old-fashioned novels she enjoyed reading, text-only tales about adventurers and pirates and free spirits, the kind of people her organization has fought to crush out of existence for years and years.

If he could, he’d have liked to ask her if she recognized the irony of this.

Instead, he settled on imagining she didn’t. Imperials weren’t any more self-aware than your average person and many of them were even less than that. It was a rare individual who saw through it all and kept going anyway.

Now that she was in his crosshairs, the furious, frustrated pounding of his heart receded to the background. His mind went blank. It was just him. And it was her. He refused to think of her name even though it had been in the dossier and it blinked in flashing red in the back of his thoughts.

His body ached from holding so still.

His hands did not shake.

And it was over within seconds, almost before he realized it. He’d never cured himself of the daze that accompanied him in the immediate aftermath of a kill like this. Sometimes, he didn’t remember putting his weapon away. Sometimes, all he could think about was the simple way the blaster fell apart in his hands as he took it apart piece by piece.

And sometimes, he saw only the spattering of blood and brain matter against a transparisteel window, red and thick pink and glinting in the sun.

Cassian fished his comlink from the inside of his coat and thumbed it on, holstering the blaster in the meanwhile. “Extraction requested,” he said. His tone was dead calm, harsh and implacable as stone. “Twenty minutes at rendezvous coordinates.”

“Acknowledged,” the bright, shining voice at the other end of the line answered. “Well done, Fable. See you soon.”

Fable. Fable the joke. Fable the call sign. Fable the nickname he wouldn’t have saddled himself with if he’d had the choice. But the pilots of his acquaintance had terrible senses of humor and drove everything into the ground, even old jests, and Cassian had never quite shaken it even though its originator was long dead and there were people on the base who didn’t know why he was called it at all because the turnover in the Alliance could be so high.

“Thank you,” he answered though his voice was practically a snarl and his gratitude was limited to the fact that everything this time had gone so smoothly, that no one on his side had died, that there was one less Imperial to harm the people he worked with and people he didn’t know alike. That was worth remembering. Far more so than those things that annoyed him personally.

“Come on, Cassian,” he said, slipping into the building, rifle attachments now safely stowed in a boring, harmless briefcase.

As he stepped onto the street, he could pretend he was a faceless nobody. He turned away from the chaos down the way, the carnage. People were still yelling, some calling for help, though most had already run and this wasn’t a world predisposed to Imperial sympathies. Help would be a long-time coming and even the local garrison wouldn’t be scrambled in time to do much good.

He hoped the inhabitants here wouldn’t be harassed too much by the authorities. And if they were, that they’d come to the Alliance for help. That was, Cassian suspected, at least half of the reason he was here. An agent provocateur, that was what this place needed to push it into rebellion. And so Cassian had been sent.

He certainly knew how to provoke.

“This has Operations written all over it,” Cassian said, fingers aching where he held onto the datapad, the tips of his fingers pale and bloodless. “In case you forgot, I don’t do this anymore.” This. The vagueness of that word hid a multitude of sins.

“All of our other operatives are otherwise occupied, Andor,” Draven answered, half of his attention on the next bit of business and the next and the next. There was always something that needed Draven’s attention and he wasn’t afraid to say as much—in words or in actions. “Or would you rather we sent out someone without your skills in your stead?”

“No.” Cassian blew out a breath. “No, sir.”

“Good.” Draven glanced up finally, a hint of confusion in his eyes. Perhaps because Cassian was still standing there. “May the Force be with you.”

A clearer dismissal, Cassian had never heard.

“Cassian,” a voice said, far too familiar for Cassian’s liking, the chugging metallic gait instantaneously recognizable. The fact that he was here at all was a dead giveaway.

“Go away, Kay,” he answered. He’d long ago given up wondering how K-2SO always managed to get into his quarters. It didn’t matter how tight the security was on the thing. Cassian had even reprogrammed it himself a time or two—at least until the people in security complained that his encryption protocols were far in excess of safety parameters and what if there was an emergency? How would we get in? And how would you get out?

Since they didn’t do more than momentarily hamper the expression of K-2’s lack of boundaries, he’d agreed to remove them.

“You’re not drinking,” K-2 pointed out, gesturing vaguely in Cassian’s direction. Not that Cassian could see as much. His head was leaned back against the hard, flat cushions that sat against the back of his couch and his eyes were closed. But K-2 got a squeak in his elbow joint when he hadn’t had an oil bath in a while and Cassian had sure as hell heard that.

“No.”

“Usually you do when…” K-2 squeaked again and this time it was the shoulder joint, too, the socket scraping against something though Cassian couldn’t tell what. So he needed more than an oil bath. K-2 was going to love that.

“When what? Don’t stop yourself from speaking on my account, KayToo. What is it you want to say?” Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been worse than what Cassian himself was thinking. Cassian’s hand clapped over his eyes and he groaned, scrubbing at the grit on his face. He still needed to clean up even though it’d been hours since he got back. If a gesture could wipe away the kind of day he’d had though, this one would have done it. Instead, because this was the real world, it only ground the dirt and dust of a world lightyears away even further into his skin.

“Maybe I’ll come back later.” The floor creaked as K-2 shifted his weight. “You’re not very good company when you’re cranky.”

Cassian choked on a bitter, darkly amused laugh. “I’m not very good company when I’m not cranky.”

“Well, I didn’t want to say it.”

“What do you want, Kay?” Cassian asked. “I’m not really in the mood.”

Taking a lumbering handful of steps, K-2’s shadow fell across Cassian’s body, the inside of his eyelids suddenly far darker as the droid loomed above him. If Cassian opened his eyes, he knew what he’d see. Body creaking, K-2 leaned forward, the scent of metal and blaster cleaner accosting Cassian’s senses, harsh enough to exacerbate the headache already gathering behind his eyes.

Cassian finally cracked, squinting up at K-2. K-2’s optical sensors swiveled as they scanned his face, the lights seeming to flicker with the speed of his analysis. Whatever he saw, he didn’t find reason to speak it. Cassian tried to feel encouraged by that, but he only found an even deeper well of annoyance to drag up to the surface, a full bucket’s worth of it.

“I’ve investigated the mission’s recordings and debriefings,” K-2 said.

“Oh, did you? And now I’m going to have to apologize to Mon Mothma for you, aren’t I?” Shifting, he pushed himself forward, face inches from K-2’s. It did little to intimidate the droid, of course, but it made Cassian feel marginally better. “Kay, just—”

“No. She allowed me to access the files.”

That stopped Cassian short, disgust twisting his stomach. K-2 shouldn’t have seen them. Cassian’s mistakes weren’t something he wanted investigated. Not even by his best friend.

“Then by all means.” He settled back against the cushions, crossing his arms. He wished K-2 would take a step back, but he didn’t, keeping Cassian cornered. As he probably intended. “Please bestow your wisdom upon me. I’m sure I’m going to love what you have to say.”

K-2 nodded, a jerky, unnatural motion he’d picked up from somewhere. “There’s only a five percent chance you’re responsible for the mission’s failure. I completed the calculations myself.”

“Only five percent? How comforting that will be when I write condolence letters to the families. Thank you, Kay.”

“It’s more like six-point-three percent,” K-2 answered, perhaps missing the point, perhaps not. His ocular sensors dimmed slightly. “I rounded down.”

Cassian snorted. This wasn’t funny. K-2 definitely wasn’t funny. And yet, he had two options here and one of them was to laugh. It was better than the alternative. He had had enough of the alternative.

“Are you feeling well?” K-2 asked, crowding Cassian even further. Most people thought K-2’s bulk was intimidating. Most of the time Cassian found it comforting. “Do you need medical intervention?”

“I need a lot of things. I don’t need that.”

“Oh.” His fingertip tapped a hollow note against his jaw, a strange gesture for a stranger droid. He wondered where K-2 had picked that up, too. Maybe the same place he’d gotten the nod from. “Well, good.”

“Mmm.” Scratching at the stubble on his chin, he added, “So is that all?”

“I—yes?”

“Will you go now?” He tried to keep the sharpness out of his voice, but it was hard and he wasn’t very successful even to his own ears. Luckily, K-2 rarely concerned himself with the courtesies and kindnesses of normal social interaction and so didn’t always notice when they were breached.

K-2 tilted his head. “Have I made you feel better?”

“If I say yes, will you leave?”

“If it is true.”

And if it’s not, he thought. What then? “I do appreciate what you’re trying to do, Kay.” He scratched at the back of his neck. That much was… accurate. More or less. “And it helps.” This was less accurate, but he’d learned to become a consummate liar in his work for the Alliance. And this was an easier lie to tell than most.

“I’m gratified to hear that,” K-2 said with an unusual stiffness. As far as attempts at courtesy went, it was better than his usual. By anyone else’s standard, it might have been lacking. But Cassian understood and so it didn’t bother him the way K-2 sometimes grated on others. “Enjoy your evening, Cassian.”

Fighting to keep the exasperation out of his voice, Cassian nodded, tight. Pointless. This whole thing had been pointless. Cassian could have been zero percent responsible and he’d still be responsible. It was his job to be responsible. He owned that fact. He honored it. He respected nothing in himself more than that. K-2 would probably never understand, but that was okay.

K-2 meant well, he reminded himself. He should acknowledge that. Warmer, trying to be a decent friend, he said, “You, too.”

K-2 retreated in slow, measured thuds, his gait methodical as he headed for the door, his back hunched. Cassian watched and tried not to think that if only he’d rush out it would be better. He didn’t have to be that impatient.

“I wish I had gone with you, Cassian,” he said, faint, the sound of the door opening almost drowning out his voice. Cassian said nothing in response.

Once K-2 was gone, truly gone, Cassian let out a shaky, staggered breath and threw his arm over his face.

One day… one day he wouldn’t make it through. And he wondered whether it would be as much of a relief to meet that moment head-on as it seemed like it would be from this time and place.

Some days it just didn’t seem worth it.

Blaster fire pinned him in an alley, his informant-turned-ally-turned-enemy shooting at him with something top of the line, something fierce and mean and quick. The man got shots off twice as fast as Cassian could and every time Cassian looked back to remind himself that, in fact, this particular alley happened to be bricked off with duracrete blocks stacked high enough that he’d never be able to climb it and avoid making himself a bigger target.

It looked temporary.

It looked new.

In retrospect, it looked a hell of a lot like a trap.

Why Cassian had let himself get caught like this, why he hadn’t somehow figured it out, he couldn’t say. All he knew was he was better than this. And now he was probably overdue and was looking at having to get himself rescued by a couple of new recruits about to perform their first sortie.

They weren’t ready. They were only supposed to stay with the ship, figure out what it was like to go out on assignment, get those first mission nerves out of their systems. It was what he liked to do with his people, though some of the other commanders disagreed with his philosophy. Throw them in headfirst, that was their thought on the matter. But Cassian would be hard on them for the rest of their damned careers and who knew how long that would be? So he preferred to ease them into it. Not least because it seemed to end with fewer of his people dead at the end of it.

Ducked behind a crate—if this was a trap and not just bad timing, they really shouldn’t have left anything Cassian could hide behind, but he was grateful anyway—he read the meter on his blaster, annoyed at how low the gas ampule already was.

How could this guy still be going? How could Cassian have missed him so many times?

He should’ve brought K-2. They wouldn’t be in this mess if he was here.

No, Cassian thought, there would be a different sort of trouble in that case. Not every planet was friendly to Imperial droids, even if they had gone rogue. And a new paint job wouldn’t have done much even if K-2 had let them cover over the signs of his origins. He probably would have gotten shot to pieces before anyone stopped to find out the truth about him. And Cassian along with him.

No, it was better this way. If only he could—he pushed himself up, squeezed the trigger of the blaster, got off three bolts in quick succession. No dice.

Someone shouted. There was a scuffle on the duracrete near his former informant’s position. Two blaster shots. Two thuds. Cassian popped up. More on instinct than anything else, he aimed, took his shot and hoped he got the guy. A third thud. Without looking, he dropped back down, breathing hard, and replaced the cartridge before daring to look again. His hands were steadier than the rest of him, sliding the new cartridge into place without the rest of him noticing.

The usual crowd had dispersed at the first sign of danger, so the only thing Cassian heard was a deathly, creeping silence even as he strained for something more useful. It seemed to coat everything, though, that silence and Cassian almost considered sitting here a while longer, his back to what he didn’t want to find. If the silence was going to be kind enough to allow him the chance to pretend…

He could take advantage: pretend, just for a little while, that everything was all right.

That was what convinced him to push himself to his feet; pretending had never been his strong suit, not even when he tried very, very hard to do just that. “It took you guys long—” He inhaled sharply and was less surprised by the three bodies that lay in a crumple at the entrance of the alley than he wanted to be. “—enough.”

Force damn every Imperial in this fucking galaxy.

He stepped toward the mess though every inch of him protested it. Holstering his blaster took two tries and a steady breath to accomplish and getting his comlink out of his vest pocket was almost impossible, fingers and fabric fighting him every inch of the way. “Sparrow One,” he said, hoping the catch in his voice wouldn’t get caught in the transmission. “I need clean-up at my coordinates.”

The response was quick and crisp and perfectly clear. “Yes, sir. Right away.”

Flicking the off-switch of the comlink with his thumb, he considered throwing it against the side of the building closest to him. Just—let it smash against the ugly, pocked façade of whichever store stood next door. If there wasn’t a chance the Imperials could learn something from it, he probably would have. Through gritted teeth, he let out a frustrated groan and stowed the stubby cylinder.

One day, they’d make a comlink in a useful size and shape and on that day, Cassian would probably buy twenty of them.

It only took five minutes for assistance to arrive, Privates Loiilin and Hafes and a hover cart loaded with discreet bags, but it felt like the longest five minutes of his life. The quiescence of the place. The chill in the air that had nothing to do with the environmental controls. The Alliance certainly wasn’t inexperienced with having to bring bodies home, but Cassian never grew accustomed to it.

He hoped, perversely, that he never did.

Cassian had to admit it: he regretted not bringing K-2 along. Another friendly on his side wouldn’t have gone amiss right now. And as he touched his fingertips to the charred edges of the wound in his shoulder, hissing at the sharp, bright agony that doing so brought, he wasn’t sure he’d survive the mistake.

Shooting out the comms panel and security array had probably helped a little bit, mitigated entirely by the savviness of the Imperial on duty who’d so conveniently replaced the individual he’d sweet-talked his way past coming in. No alarms had been raised whatever the case might have been. He had to class that as a win.

Well, he hadn’t much liked impersonating an Imperial officer anyway. Someone shouted. It was hard to hear over the ping and whizz of so many bursts of blaster fire, but it sounded a lot like, “Rebel scum.”

Rolling his eyes, Cassian pointed at his nearest comrade in arms against the Empire, a young woman who looked all of fifteen and carefree and if you didn’t pay much attention to the pain in her eyes, the heavy burden of new understanding, you might have actually thought her to be that young and naïve. She must’ve been a believer once. All the truest defectors were. And Cassian wanted to sympathize more than he did at the shock she must’ve been facing, but she hadn’t absolved herself yet of the sins she’d fed the Empire with.

But she would, he was sure. And he would forgive her for them in turn. He always did. But first he had to get her out of here. Between them, they’d already gotten the other two out. That, at least, was something. They knew where the rendezvous was and they’d get there or they wouldn’t.

He pointed again, surreptitious, and received a nod of understanding for his troubles.

“Can we really do this?” she asked, too low to properly hear, but the shapes her lips made gave meaning to the words she’d spoken anyway.

“I’ll get you out of here,” he replied, hoping to soothe her so that she wouldn’t make a mistake out of fear. “I promise you that.”

He could promise her no such thing, of course, but if the relieved smile she gave him was any indication, she didn’t care about such a minor detail when her life was in his hands. Determination drove the shadows from her eyes and, more clear, her aim steadier, she helped him take out the Imperials that remained between them and freedom. Down they went with heavy thuds.

The silence that followed could have deafened him.

“Go, go!” he said, shooing her forward, shoving her between the shoulder blades even though it hurt to touch her, pain lancing down his arm. He brushed his hand over his belt, tapped the pouch that held the information he’d been sent to retrieve, and sprinted along behind her, turning every few seconds to assure himself no stormtroopers were coming through the door on the opposite side of the base’s entryway.

He threw his hand out to stop her from rushing out onto the tarmac outside. “Calm,” he said. “They don’t know anything’s wrong, yeah?”

The woman’s eyes widened and she nodded.

“Good,” he said. “We’ve got permission to go off-base. We’ve got what we came for. We’re good to go. Are you ready?”

“Y-yeah.”

“Excellent. Here, we’re almost home free, right? It’s just a few more steps.” He let himself smile though it felt awkward, corroded by rust and how little reason he has had to use it of late. Clapping her on the shoulder, he nudged her forward and guided her past more than a dozen Imperial troops and officers, none of them the wiser, every one of them confident in the system they’d helped built. False identchips. False overnight releases. None of this crossed their mind.

Not a single person looked at Cassian’s face, a stranger’s face at the very least, and thought to question him.

They didn’t even realize who they’d let go. Not until they’d hit atmosphere and a priority alert lit up the holoprojector in the shuttle, overriding everything else. But by then it was too late.

The wool of the uniform sat heavy on his shoulders, so different from the lightweight tunics and loose-fitting jackets he’d adopted as part of the Rebellion, barely a uniform at all though everyone around him wore similar outfits and could identify one another easily enough by them. They wouldn’t stand out in a crowd on the ground, but they still symbolized something to Cassian, the things he wore, about what he cared about and who he was. Everything a uniform should do in fact if not in name.

“You don’t look very Imperial to me,” K-2SO said, breezy, arms hanging motionless at his side, “no offense intended, of course.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, brushing his hands down his chest to adjust his belt, thumbs hooking in the leather. Glancing in the mirror, he leaned over the sink in his ’fresher and squinted. “And what are you even doing here?”

“I want to help you,” K-2 said, like it was really that simple. “No one is better equipped.”

“The last time you helped me I ended up with a broken arm and almost lost half of my molars.” He tilted his head back and inspected his chin. He looked at K-2, sidelong, a dry smile playing around his mouth. Teasing mostly, yet a warning, too. “Pardon me if I’m wary of your help now.”

“You kept the molars,” K-2 pointed out, ocular sensors tilting down, quizzical. “And your arm’s healed. You’re fine now.”

Yes, it had healed. And yes, he was fine now. What K-2 didn’t know was that it still ached when the barometric pressure changed; he could tell when it was going to rain by the throb in his elbow. There were pins inside of him that would forever mark that particular mission for the disaster it was. But, being fair, he hadn’t died. And he would have if not for K-2.

Probably.

Someday, he might give K-2 credit for that. When he was sure it wouldn’t go to his head anyway. “So,” he said instead, planting his hands on his hips, “how do you intend to assist me, Kay-Tuesso?”

“Stand up straighter,” he said, gesturing vaguely in Cassian’s direction. A flinch caught Cassian by surprise, though he wasn’t sure why. Cassian had tangled with an Imperial security droid or two in his time. They were nasty pieces of work. And K-2, whatever he was now, still looked like one of them. K-2 adjusted his stance slightly, his mechanical spinal column squealing as he demonstrated. His normally hunched seven foot frame suddenly became just that little bit more looming. He tried to adjust his shoulders, at least that was what it looked like to Cassian, but that didn’t work quite as well. “You have this—forward hunch. They’d have beaten that out of you in the Academy.”

“Charming.” Pushing back his shoulders, he tilted his head up. “How’s that?”

“Too much. Now you just look like a kid from some backwater who’s playing at being an Imperial officer. No one will take you seriously. They’ll think you’re trying too hard. The important ones hate that. The ones who want to be important hate it even more.”

I am just a kid from some backwater. Gritting his teeth, he tried again, unsure how he wasn’t trying any harder by doing this. Breathing deeply, he relaxed as best he could, keeping his awareness on his posture. It was, he had to admit, awkward as all hell. And he wasn’t sure how this could be any different from what he was doing the first time.

“There,” K-2 said, pleased, like it was his accomplishment and not Cassian’s. “Just the right amount of hard-ass—”

“Kay!” The illusion shattered into pieces as he stalked out of the ’fresher unit, waving his finger in K-2’s face. His boots stomped so loudly against the floor, he was sure someone would come looking to find out what all the noise was about. “This is serious.” His chest rose and fell with every sharp inhale he took. “I have to—” Oh, hell. It wasn’t K-2’s fault. He reached up and slapped his hand against the long, upper length of K-2’s arm. Were it an organic being’s arm, he would have squeezed. There was no point in doing that here. “I’m sorry. I’m just on edge.”

K-2 nodded. “Your respirations are abnormally high. That often happens with mea—organics.” K-2 looked away, either guilty or affecting its approximate so well Cassian couldn’t tell the difference. “You’re afraid.”

“We are all afraid all of the time,” he answered instead of telling a lie. K-2 could probably sense it anyway. “It makes no difference to what we have to do.”

“You don’t have to do this though.”

Cassian frowned. Now where did you hear that, I wonder. “It will help the Alliance. Of course I have to do it. This is our only chance—”

“Forgive me, but you say that every time,” K-2 said. He tilted his head. “At least thirty percent of the time. And yet another opportunity always arises. Why risk this one?”

Because we have an Imperial uniform, a perfectly forged identchip, and a slicer who could get me into the Imperial computers as a transfer. And they have troop deployment schedules for the entirety of the Albarrio sector, defectors, and an underdefended outpost. One person can save a lot of lives with those things. “Senator Mon Mothma sent clearance all the way from Yavin, that’s why. And we need the intelligence inside that building.”

“It’s a suicide mission.”

“You’re more dramatic for a droid than I expected you to be. This is what Fulcrum does.” Never mind that he’d abandoned the title and had been with the Massassi unit for over a year now and was only back here investigating because of his familiarity with the area. He tried to cross his arms and found it difficult, the fit of the uniform suddenly tight across his shoulders. Whomever this thing belonged to before, they were smaller than he was. And he wasn’t that big to begin with. “What happened to you? I thought security droids were…”

“You happened to me.” K-2’s arms swung at his sides in an approximation of a shrug. “I should come with you.”

“No.”

“I can help.”

“You’re a terrible liar, KayToo.” He shook his head. He wasn’t a liar at all in point of fact. He’d never once said an untruthful thing since arriving. It had caused more than one incident around the base, much to K-2’s omnipresent confusion and anger of whomever he’d insulted. “You’ll never blend in.”

“Sure I can. I’m a security droid. An Imperial security droid. Imperial. As in… Imperial.” He didn’t shuffle his feet, thank the Force, but if ever there was a time for him to pick up the habit, it was now. He certainly sounded abashed.

“How? Security droids don’t attend Imperial officers.”

“They could. Theoretically.”

“Do they?” K-2 could go like this for hours, far longer than Cassian’s patience would hold. Cassian glared and hoped it would be enough to cow the droid.

“…no,” he admitted with exaggerated care. Sighing, he added, “Not that I ever saw.”

“That settles it then. You’ll stay here.”

“You could be an especially paranoid Imperial officer,” K-2 said.

“I could also be a normal Imperial officer and do everything in my power to avoid unnecessary scrutiny while I try to steal an important Imperial document. That’s a thing I could do, too.”

K-2 hummed, mechanical, the noise odd to Cassian’s ears. He didn’t think he’d ever heard a droid hum before. Not like that anyway. “But it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?”

“When have I ever given you the impression that I do this for fun?”

“There was that one—”

Getting into the face of a seven foot tall droid was a nearly impossible task, but Cassian was willing to give it a shot. “We don’t talk about that. And this discussion is over.” Cassian gestured around him toward the door. “Now please go. I won’t ask again and I’m not above temporarily deactivating you to get my way.”

K-2’s head drew back, eyes flashing with alarm. “You wouldn’t dare.”

‘You couldn’t’ was probably more what K-2 meant given how little advantage Cassian had against him in this room at this moment, but he bought the seriousness with which Cassian made the threat and that was what mattered. “Try me,” Cassian said, to drive the point home.

“You’ll regret this,” K-2 said, though the uncertainty of his tone undermined the threat? Promise? Cassian wasn’t sure what it meant. Just that it didn’t quite convey the punch necessary to give him pause.

“I’ve survived regret,” he answered. “And I’ll survive this grave, grave disappointment, too. Now get out of my quarters, huh? It’ll be fine.”

Cassian clasped his hands behind his back, waiting for Mon Mothma and General Draven to appear. Meetings weren’t usually conducted behind closed doors like this, nor at this particular time of night, nor even without the usual scheduling mess involved in getting both of them free of their other obligations while pulling Cassian away from his own.

But given the report he’d filed, he supposed it wasn’t so unusual that they’d do this this way. They probably wanted to make sure Cassian wasn’t ready to throw them all over for what had transpired on Katral Prime.

When the door slid open, he jumped at the sound, his heart set to racing, but neither Mon Mothma nor Draven were looking at him. For all they knew, when they looked up at him, he was the same steady Cassian Andor he’d always been. And he would be that again, he was sure, he just needed some distance from what he’d helped do.

“Thank you for seeing us at such an unusual time,” Mon Mothma said peaceably. If she was concerned, she didn’t seem like it. “I hope you understand our desire for discretion.”

“I do, Senator.”

“Your suggestion is surprising, I must say.”

“It is.” He’d known it when he made his recommendation. Whether they accepted it was another thing entirely. He tried to gauge their conclusions, but Draven was stony-faced as always and Mon Mothma’s features were equally devoid of obvious signs of distress or anger.

“Are you certain about this, Andor?” Draven asked, pacing around the table that stood between them. He planted his hand on the edge once he’d staked out his place. “As distasteful as working with the Partisans can be, they are useful.”

“If you wish to keep a relationship with them, General, that’s your business, but I would ask that you don’t send me next time.” He wondered if perhaps they’d known Gerrera’s true plan and promptly discarded it. Mon Mothma would never have approved it, he was reasonably sure, but a person could never really know these things about another person, could they? “Not unless I’m fully aware of what I’m walking into.”

“You’re a soldier. You go where you’re told to go with whatever information we choose to give to you.”

“General,” Mon Mothma said, disapproving.

“I’m an intelligence officer, too, General,” Cassian replied, keeping his voice cool and crisp despite the fire raging inside of him. It was one thing to allow himself to be used for the cause; it was another for Draven to expect it without being willing to give up anything in return. “If I’m to be an effective soldier, should I not be fully aware of the consequences of my actions before I take them?” And have I not already shown myself willing to do what I have to? Are you worried I won’t do it?

It was already far too late to argue otherwise.

“I’m not asking us to stop them,” Cassian continued. They needed the kind of warriors Gerrera brought to the table whether they wanted them or not. “I’m just saying we should not work directly with them any longer.”

“You’d let them twist in the wind on their own?” Draven asked.

Cassian sighed. Perhaps that was a component of it, sure. “If they can take some of the heat off our backs,” he said, appealing to Draven’s more mercenary sensibilities, “isn’t that for the best? What would the Imperial hammer do if they thought the Alliance at large condoned Gerrera’s actions?”

“I don’t think they would care to make the distinction,” Draven replied. “And would implicate us anyway.”

“Then it’s up to us to make that distinction.”

Mon Mothma nodded and glanced sidelong at Draven. “Well said, Captain.” She breathed in deeply. “And with that in mind, we’ve decided, Draven and I and the rest of the Council, to accede to your recommendation immediately. If we are to be an alliance, we must all be working toward a common goal and from Gerrera’s actions on Katral Prime, we can’t trust that his goals and ours align.”

The tension that had sat in Cassian’s chest since coming back from Katral Prime relaxed just enough that he felt like he could breathe normally. Not easily, but normally.

“As for your other request,” Mon Mothma said, turning a pointed look at Draven, who scowled in response, “consider it granted. You’ll be moved to Retrievals in the morning.”

“Thank you, Senator.”

And if he felt dizzy with relief, he didn’t show it until Mon Mothma and Draven left the room, pressing his hands against the table and hanging his head, breathing deeply for a long, long time before he, too, abandoned the room.

“How many people?” Cassian asked, tearing his blaster from the holster. It might not have been smart to pull it now in the middle of Saw’s compound while his people surrounded him, but Cassian had had it and he didn’t actually intend to kill Gerrera and somewhere in the back of his mind, the part of him still calculating away at the problem before him, he was sure he wouldn’t die here. Not today anyway. “How many?”

Gerrera raised his arms and had the audacity to laugh, his eyes wide and bright with his perceived victory. “Over a hundred Imperials.” Subtly, he motioned for his followers to lower their blasters, and then they, too, shouted in celebration at Gerrera’s pronouncement. “And we couldn’t have done it without you.”

“That’s bantha shit. How many civilians?” He refused to consider the idea that they’d needed him to accomplish this. The only purpose he served here that he could see was implicating the greater Alliance in Gerrera’s scheme. His intelligence expertise had been wasted in his opinion. And while he was a perfectly good shot, he wasn’t necessarily better than any of the more experienced people Gerrera kept in his own cadre.

Gerrera shrugged as though it didn’t matter and when he spoke again, his voice was shattered, shaky as though he was fighting off a hoarse cough. “In this fight, there are no civilians.”

Cassian closed his eyes, breathed deeply, his head and his heart at war with one another. Did it matter if he knew? Would it change anything? What was done was done. And knowing the particulars would make no different. Yes. Yes, it still mattered, he decided. The truth always mattered. “How many?”

Nearly choking himself with yet more bitter laughter, Gerrera said, “Fifty.”

When Cassian lifted his eyes, he saw nothing but fragility and vulnerability in Gerrera’s face, the shredded remnants of his humanity on display for all to see—or maybe just for Cassian to see.

“We’re done.” He holstered his blaster. “For good as far as I’m concerned. This is not how the Alliance should operate.”

He didn’t remind himself that sometimes that was exactly how the Alliance had to operate—Cassian was proof of that.

The minute the rest of them started believing this was the way things had to be, they were lost.

Cassian had never before traveled the narrow, throttled streets of Katral Prime, but they weren’t so different from the roads of other worlds he had visited. Old, cracked duracrete lined the ground, vegetation and dirt pushing through where it could, making walking and driving hovering landspeeders down the lanes more dangerous than necessary. What was it about the Empire and letting the infrastructure of Outer Rim systems rot and crumble before their eyes?

They’d have an easier time controlling people if they allowed them a world where they could be content. Sometimes Cassian was selfishly grateful for that fact. Who would fight if they were comfortable?

People like Saw certainly and his followers. People like Cassian. But most people? No. Probably not.

“Is everyone in place?” Cassian asked Edrio in a bare whisper. They were meant to sabotage an Imperial shipment working its way through Katral City and Cassian was starting to get antsy. K-2 hovered at his back, a shield the wrong way around, a heavy weight despite the fact that they weren’t even touching.

The tubes of the breathing apparatus that covered the lower half of Edrio’s face glinted as he turned to look at Cassian. Cassian heard a few words spoken in Tognath and then an answer in harsh, distorted Basic. “Benthic says soon.”

Soon. Great. Cassian sighed and scrubbed at the back of his head, trying to recall just who Benthic was. Edrio’s eggmate, maybe? Did anyone else in Saw’s group speak Tognath? Did it matter? No, he decided, it didn’t. It was just Cassian trying to distract himself from the nerves alit throughout his body. He hadn’t been part of an operation this big in a long time; this kind of cooperative action had never been his strength anyway.

He’d already done his part when he got hold of the Imperial transport schedule, but Saw had wanted more from him. He’d wanted another body there. And Cassian hadn’t been able to bring himself to say no. Admittedly, Saw probably wouldn’t have let him say no when it came down to it, but Cassian couldn’t blame him for that.

You’re almost done.

“Cassian,” K-2 said in a voice he probably thought was a whisper.

“Not now.” Besides, he didn’t hear what K-2 wanted to say to know he had a bad feeling about it. Cassian felt the same way. Luckily, K-2 was wise enough to keep his mouth shut without Cassian telling him specifically to do so.

The people crowding the thoroughfare began to break up, their numbers thinning, and Cassian wasn’t sure if it was Saw’s crew that was encouraging the migration out of the area or the Imperials or just the general sense people got that something was wrong. Whichever reason explained it, Cassian was grateful. The fewer civilians around for this, the better, for selfish and unselfish reasons alike.

The terror inducing screech of a TIE fighter tore through the atmosphere above them, a sound Cassian had hated for so long it didn’t even faze him anymore. He watched it with disinterest and knew that was the signal he’d been waiting for.

When Edrio nodded, Cassian was relieved to have confirmation. And if that hadn’t done it, the oncoming noise of an Imperial cargo hauler would have given it away. Cassian turned and glanced up at K-2, who looked back at him with something approaching equanimity.

Thumbing the safety off his blaster, he raised the weapon. Edrio hissed something at him, but he didn’t quite catch it, his voice too low for Cassian to parse with everything else happening around them. He pressed against the wall of the street they were hidden behind and peered down the main street perpendicular to the one he was on. Five stormtroopers, a couple of scouts, and the heavily armored hauler.

Nothing they couldn’t have handled on their own.

Cassian tried not to allow his nerves to get the better of him for noticing that.

Edrio raised his fist and made a gesture—the gesture. “Now, Rebel.”

Partisans stationed elsewhere along the street spilled out onto the street and Edrio followed suit, Cassian and K-2 following behind. Blaster fire pinged above Cassian’s head, raining debris down onto him and the ground around him.

K-2 grabbed him hard by the shoulder and tore him back into the side street they’d hidden in moments ago. “Cassian,” he said again. “Something’s wrong here.”

“What?” Cassian’s voice pitched high with anger. A blast, too close for comfort, made him instinctively cover his head and duck, one arm thrown out to grab K-2—for all the good that did. Which was: none at all as K-2 remained fully upright. “Yes, something is wrong. Imperials are shooting at us!”

“Not that,” K-2 said, slow and ponderous and very much not what Cassian wanted to hear right now and certainly not how he wanted to hear it.

“Kay, there’s no time for this.” Cassian tried to turn, but K-2 wrenched him back.

A loud, earthshaking boom issued from somewhere to the south, so loud it left Cassian lightheaded, his ears ringing. Disoriented, he looked up in the direction the sound had come from. Flinching, Cassian twisted, K-2 releasing him from his grip.

“Shit,” Cassian said, watching as a giant plume of dust filled the air. Anger choked him, understanding coming on him swift and certain, everything falling into place in his mind to come up with betrayal. Someone yelled nearby and color flashed in Cassian’s peripheral vision. He wasn’t surprised when next he heard the thud of a body falling to the ground. “That son of a—”

“We should get out of here, Cassian.”

Groaning, Cassian pulled his comlink from his vest. Hand shaking, he lifted it to his mouth and, almost without thinking, he threw the device at the wall of the building next to him. Pieces shattered off it and splintered in every direction, the majority of the unit bouncing off and toward the opposite side of the street. “No,” he said, shaking his head, the rest of him running on fury. “We finish this.”

And even though that fury was for Saw Gerrera, he directed it toward the Imperials who were their mutual enemy. Later, later he would square himself with the Saw Gerrera.

He wasn’t afraid of the Partisans and he wasn’t afraid of their leader either.

Saw Gerrera was as charismatic a man as Cassian had ever seen. He would have had to be given the accoutrements that kept him alive. The Vader of the Alliance some called him—and those who knew anything about Vader could see why. Those who were lucky enough to have avoided any contact or true understanding of the creature held on the Emperor’s leash maybe didn’t understand.

The only thing Cassian didn’t get was why. Cassian wasn’t given much to images, but he knew the strength that could be found in appearance, the fear, the weaknesses. He’d worn plenty in his time and each had conveyed something. As much as Gerrera needed the equipment to stay alive, Cassian couldn’t help but wonder if there was a purpose at work here that only Gerrera understood.

Needless to say, if his intent was to disrupt the more mainline Alliance’s troops, to unsettle them, he accomplished it perfectly. If his intent was not to do so, he’d accomplished it anyway. Fairly or unfairly.

“Saw, you know how the Alliance operates,” Mon Mothma stated, clear and reasonable—always so clear and reasonable. “We need each other, but we cannot—we cannot do it this way.” Her finger drove her point home by driving itself into the lip of the holoprojector that stood between them. “There are civilians.”

“These supposed civilians will face no risk,” Gerrera answered, his hand fluttering through the air to wave off such a ridiculous suggestion. If Cassian agreed with Gerrera’s implication regarding civilians—and he wasn’t saying he did, technically, this wasn’t his meeting, he was just observing, whether he agreed or not was unimportant—he kept it to himself.

“You may have Captain Andor as backup,” Mon Mothma said finally, “if this is how you wish to proceed. I won’t authorize more troops unless you can prove to me no civilians will be at risk.”

“You would damn the mission before it’s even started?” Saw’s eyes widened with disbelief and carefully checked fury. Cassian was impressed with his restraint. If Cassian had lost as many people while fighting the most desperate battles the Empire could throw at him as Saw did on a regular basis, Cassian wasn’t sure he would do the same.

“What is it you like to say about men with sharp sticks?” Mon Mothma asked, pointed. “Captain Andor is equipped with much more than that.”

Disgust and sick amusement wormed their way through Cassian’s gut. Either Mon Mothma had forgotten the rest of his statement on the matter or her intuition was a great deal more honed than Cassian had ever given her credit for.

“Yes, I have heard a great deal about Captain Andor,” Gerrera said, his eyes cutting Cassian’s way, dark with interest. Cassian didn’t have to be a spy to know that Gerrera would love to flip him. What they both knew was Cassian would be a perfect fit, which was precisely why Cassian wouldn’t go anywhere near them unless he was ordered to. “Let’s hope you don’t kill him before his time has come with your unwillingness to do what must be done.”

Cassian bit back a smirk. He had nothing against Mon Mothma, but it wasn’t often you heard someone speak to her this way. And she knew it, too, her face growing just that faintest hint of red as she looked away.

“Someone must keep an ideal alive if we are to succeed,” she replied.

“If only we were all lucky enough to believe that,” Gerrera countered, measuring Cassian up against the mission they were about to undertake. Cassian allowed the scrutiny and knew that whether or not Cassian fit the bill, Gerrera would take him.

“Be careful, Senator. You might find yourself lacking in support the next time you need it,” Gerrera added.

A crack formed in Mon Mothma’s composure, a crack so small, Cassian was sure Gerrera didn’t see it. But Cassian did. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “Is that all?”

“I believe it is.”

“One moment, Senator,” Cassian said.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I’d like permission to take Kay-Tuesso with me.”

Mon Mothma waved him off, barely refraining from rolling her eyes. “Permission granted,” she said, voice heavy with regret.

Indeed, she looked very much like she wanted this meeting to be over with and Cassian was more than happy to comply, stepping back as Mon Mothma exchanged a few words with Draven and Merrick. Saw remained where he was and Cassian would have liked to speak with him, but he knew enough about politics to stay out of it for now.

All he could do was his best for the people out there fighting a dirtier war than some in the Alliance cared to admit.

At least his best was quite a bit better than most people’s.

The ceremony took place in a small room, only General Draven and K-2 present, just the way Cassian wanted it, no fanfare to accompany a moment that didn’t deserve celebration.

“Congratulations,” Draven said, a hard edge hidden beneath the brusqueness of his tone. Cassian didn’t take it personally though. Draven was always like that. Probably always would be. It scared a lot of people, Draven’s intensity, but it hardly phased Cassian, who appreciated at the very least always knowing where he stood with the man.

“Thank you, sir,” Cassian replied, the word still strange in his mouth. Before, they’d been something of a loose confederation of groups, no real military strictness in sight. There was a chain of command, of course, but it never felt official. It was comfortable. Familiar. Being given a rank… that was new.

Then, the leadership started handing out medals and rank squares and titles. And instead of the Rebellion, they were the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Sometimes people split the difference and called them the Rebel Alliance, but it wasn’t… it had changed somehow. What they were doing. And Cassian wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

For all that he’d spent his life fighting, he wasn’t a military man.

Draven clapped him on the shoulder and smiled just a little, nostalgic maybe, like he was remembering his own youth. He’d been in the Republic military, hadn’t he, he asked himself, a familiar bile rising in the back of his throat at the thought. “You’ve been a good soldier, Andor,” he said, vaguely proud in a way that made Cassian shift uncomfortably. “Now you’ve got the rank you’ve earned for it.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate it in theory, but he hadn’t done anything worthy of the attention. He’d done his job. That was all. He didn’t want to think of it as anything else and he certainly didn’t want to think of himself as above anyone else in the Rebe—Alliance; he was no different than the other men and women he commanded. But whether Cassian liked it or not—and some days, he did not like it—he was different.

He just now had the rank to prove it.

“So tell me something about you,” Cassian said, the pleasant buzz of Antilles’s alcohol working its way through his body, warming him all the way down to his fingertips. He wasn’t drunk. He never let himself get drunk, but it was as close as he allowed himself to be.

“Are you certain you’re well,” K-2 said instead of answering, hovering at his side as he strolled the halls leading back toward his quarters. The question of how K-2 had found him—and why—tickled at the back of his mind, but not enough to lose his focus on the more important point right now, which was:

“I’m okay. Now tell me about you.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” K-2 said, point blank, serious, like it was true and he believed it utterly. But Cassian knew better. He knew droids could keep secrets the same as any organic. He knew they developed lives and personalities outside of their programming. It would’ve been more surprising if there was nothing new or interesting to discover about K-2.

“Why do you stick around?”

“You’ll deactivate me if I don’t.”

“I suppose so,” Cassian conceded, turning a corner, feeling a little bit guilty about the truth of that statement. He would have to deactivate K-2, but he’d reached the point where he wasn’t sure he’d want to. “Then why do you help?” He’d known a droid or two in his time who’d made things… difficult for the people around them. Work was completed just that little bit slower than usual. It was just that little bit more unpleasant to be around them. K-2 could’ve made everyone’s lives hell. Instead, he stuck with Cassian and mostly only annoyed him in the same way anyone might.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a straightforward question, Kay-Tuesso. You might have to stay, but you don’t have to be useful.”

K-2 sniffed. “I’m not useful.”

That was debatable. And Cassian was willing to debate it, but he had bigger interests at the moment. “Come on. There must be something about you I don’t know.”

“Isn’t it your job to know everything?”

“About the enemy, sure.” He shrugged, his fingertips skimming along the corridor’s mostly smooth walls. “About allies, maybe. But not colleagues.”

“We’re… colleagues now.” The way he said it, Cassian couldn’t be sure if it was a question or a statement. “Huh. Well, you’ve certainly told me something I wasn’t aware of.”

Cassian glared and knew it was ineffectual from the way K-2 seemed not at all perturbed by it, walking alongside Cassian no differently than usual. But Cassian didn’t have the heart to push harder and anyway, he’d reached his quarters and had no reason to keep pushing. Keep your secrets, Kay, he thought.

As the door slide open, Cassian glanced one last time at K-2. “Do you want to come in or something?” he asked, unsure quite how to handle this situation now. What do you do when you’re trying to befriend a droid?

Is that what you’re doing, Cassian?

No, that was ridiculous. He didn’t need a friend and K-2 probably didn’t care one way or the other about having one either.

However, a dependable colleague, that was worth something.

That was good enough.

Cassian stepped into the doorway, hand gripping the wall to keep the door from sliding shut again. When K-2 didn’t answer or even acknowledge the question Cassian had asked, he said, “Good night, Kay,” and wondered whether simply deciding not to answer might be useful the next time he got himself cornered with a question he didn’t want to answer.

“Good night, Cassian.”

“Okay,” Cassian said with a laugh, hands raised, to the raucous joy of the twenty or so rebels arrayed around the ready room with him. A few of them were already pink-cheeked and glassy-eyed with drink, the end result of a job well done. Cassian hadn’t started yet, had only just come in himself, his hands barely clean of the muck and dirt and blood crusted under his fingernails. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

These weren’t his people. He didn’t have people. Nobody in Intelligence did, not really. Not like the pilots, who clumped and clung and congregated together, attached at the hip, every last one of them. Cassian didn’t understand how they did that—they got so attached to one another in such a short timeframe—when their losses were so great. Still, he admired that bravery, the daring of it.

Everyone’s losses were great. But that stopped a lot of other people.

It stopped Cassian. Mostly. But there was only so much you could do against the full force of a bunch of fighter pilots who had it in their minds to want something from you, whether it was your attention, your time, or merely your presence during their celebration.

“That’s the spirit,” Antilles said, clapping his hand on Cassian’s shoulder and squeezing. Yanking a thin handkerchief from a loop on his flight suit, he twisted it a few times between his fingers and flattened it against Cassian’s face, the metallic tang of Antilles’s ship all over the cloth. The dark didn’t scare him, not exactly, but the vulnerability of being blindfolded cut through him like a knife, smothered the pure joy of the moment. He almost shoved the fabric up and onto his forehead.

You’re among friends, Cassian, he said to himself and that eased the tension some. They weren’t friends in any traditional sense, but for all that he knew only a handful of their names, he trusted that they would have his back if necessary. And they were more than that because they were in this together. He might never sit with them in the mess hall. They might never invite him to sabacc night. But they were all part of the Rebellion.

So maybe he could show off for their enjoyment this one time for them.

Reaching out at random, opening and closing his hand in the near universal gesture of gimme, he waited for his rifle case to be brought over. It didn’t take long, the familiar shape falling into his grasp like it was an extension of him, something not to be parted with ever. He flicked open the case, pulled his blaster from his holster, a little awkward and well aware of the scrutiny that clung to him. Why anyone thought this was impressive was beyond him, but if it amused them, he was willing to be amusing.

There weren’t very many situations where either of those things were true. Cassian was many things, but he wasn’t a gregarious man and sometimes people took that to mean he didn’t enjoy the company of others. And in a lot of cases, they wouldn’t have been wrong. But sometimes, sometimes Cassian enjoyed the siren’s call of camaraderie.

Each piece attached as easily as the last, hardly a false move as he built the blaster into a rifle. He lost himself in those moments, the satisfying click click click of the weapon as it become more than what it had been before. A few people clapped and murmured and as soon as he jammed the stock into place, someone shouted out, “Fifteen seconds,” in a voice he didn’t recognize, awed, an edge of disbelieving laughter in her tone.

“Can you take it apart?”

“That’s two drinks you’ll owe me,” Cassian answered, deadpan, but he shrugged and got to work dismantling the thing, just as practiced. Someone whistled, sharp and high, startling Cassian enough that he almost fumbled as he pushed the silencer back into the barrel. He even placed each piece back into the foamcore inside the case. “Pretty soon you starjocks are going to be out of beer.”

“What do you take us for?” Antilles said, untying the blindfold and whipping it away from his eyes. With his other hand, he brandished a bottle of Whyren’s. It sloshed inside the thick, even glass, the label shiny and embossed under the lights, as Antilles tilted it back and forth. “We couldn’t have gotten Sam out without you. We do right by our heroes, mister.”

Someone took the case from his lap and he got to his feet, waving his hands in front of his body. “That is not…”

“If you’re saying it’s not necessary, we don’t care,” Antilles said, pushing the bottle into Cassian’s grasp.

Cassian, turning the bottle by the neck, nodded. He knew a futile fight when he saw it. “In that case,” he said, “I guess we’ll just have to share, won’t we?” He looked down again. “Maybe we’ll save some for when Sam gets out of the medbay?”

Antilles smiled, soft, and nodded back. “I’ve never heard a better idea in my life, Andor.”

Cheeks warm, he cleared his throat and turned his attention to safer topics. “Where did you even get this anyway?”

Antilles smiled again, even wider this time if that was possible. “We’ve got our ways.” He glanced around at his fellow pilots, shuffling a little awkwardly, and cleared his throat. “And, uh, if there’s anything we can do for the droid, let us know, will you?”

Cassian smiled slightly, a little touched that they would bother to think of that. K-2 probably wouldn’t appreciate it or care, but Cassian could do it for him. Insofar as Cassian allowed himself to care, which… he and K-2 weren’t friends. But generally speaking, Cassian was glad Antilles and the others were willing to concede even that much credit to K-2 simply on principle.

“I can’t believe it’s true,” one of the newer recruits said, coming over to Cassian to slap him on the shoulder. She was pink-cheeked and so young, her braided hair gleaming down her back, a sharp contrast to her orange flight suit. “I thought the rest of the guys were telling tales about you.”

Cassian huffed, almost laughing, and ducked his head, brushing his hand through his hair. “It’s just a trick.” And not one you should be proud of, Andor.

“It’s amazing is what it is!” She grinned so brightly that Cassian had to look away. “If you were one of us, I’d be calling you Fable right now. Do you get nicknames in Intel?”

“Not really.”

“Too bad. It suits you.” She clapped her hand on his arm and squeezed it once. “Guess it’ll just have to be an honorary nickname from us to you then.”

Cassian glanced at Antilles. Antilles’s eyebrows lifted and lowered and he raised his arms as though to say: what can you do? “You heard the lady.”

“I guess I did,” Cassian said, conflicted, unable to decide whether to be pleased or not. “Fable, huh?”

She nodded and sealed his fate. “Fable.”

Fable. It was quite a nickname. Maybe he’d even come to like it.

The cold threatened to take his breath away, seize up his lungs, and as he pushed his way out of the warmth of the ship, he wondered if maybe this had been a fool’s errand. Even just walking across the ice-crusted ground, each step reverberating with a crunch underfoot, K-2’s steps behind him even louder, made him realize just how harsh it was here.

And he said that as a man from Fest, one of the more inhospitably cold places in the universe.

Most pilots kept extreme weather gear in their equipment, Cassian thought. He hoped anyway. It seemed foolish for them not to have something with them just in case. And if it was the case that they didn’t, Cassian would see that that policy was changed immediately.

He reached the ship first and noted that the cockpit hadn’t been popped. “Give me a hand,” he said, his voice swallowed up by the wind, but K-2 heard him anyway and nodded and strode forward a little quicker than before. K-2 easily reached where Cassian couldn’t and opened the cockpit. “Can you boost me onto the wing? I can pull her out from there.”

K-2’s fingers clicked as they laced together and his joints creaked as he squatted awkwardly for Cassian. Grabbing the wing and thankful Sam had thought to retract them before landing, Cassian pulled himself up. The surface was a little slick with ice, but not so much of it that he couldn’t tromp his way toward the cockpit.

She was in there. And she looked unharmed—relatively speaking. There was an emergency blanket thrown across her body at least, so she couldn’t have died on impact. He would’ve risked checking for a pulse, but he saw little puffs of air as she exhaled, eyes closed, head tilted back against the seat.

“Captain Sam,” he said.

No response.

His eyes scanned the cockpit quickly. All of the monitors were down completely and even when he tried to turn them on, they failed. Well, that was one thing done. If he couldn’t turn it on, then neither could the Imperials who would probably find it. Still, he slipped a datacard into the slot on the dash, one that, if the Imperials somehow did start the ship up, would wipe the memory banks completely.

“Captain Sam,” he said again. He didn’t want to move her without knowing what was wrong with her, but they needed to go. And they needed to go now.

Without needing to be asked, K-2 came closer to the fuselage. “If you can get her out,” he said, “I can carry her back to the ship.”

“Good. Okay.” He struggled to get his arms under hers, his coat and gloves and everything about this situation more cumbersome than he’d have liked it to be. Sam was dead weight in his arms and though he knew she wasn’t really dead, not yet anyway, the realization that she was very close to it spiked hard in his chest.

And that blanket suggested she believed there was some hope left for her. Even in a disabled ship surrounded by Imperials, she’d believed.

He didn’t want to risk hurting her now.

K-2 did what he could from the ground, reaching for her legs as Cassian pulled her free, the whole time hoping he didn’t slip and fall. Finally, they got her out—Cassian stopped long enough to ensure she was still breathing—and he handed her off to K-2.

Cassian’s eyes scanned the pale, delicately uniform grayness of the sky.

“Cassian,” K-2 said and Cassian knew almost before he knew that something was wrong. Then the screech of TIE fighters overhead conformed it, ear-piercingly loud, along with imprecise bolts of laser fire that struck and shook the ground around them. A slurried mix of warming water and ice pelted them.

“Go,” Cassian yelled, hopping down from the X-wing and hoping he didn’t break an ankle in the process. “Go, go.”

K-2 hesitated, but finally turned and sprinted off with a loping, not quite elegant gait. Cassian sprinted along behind, turning to get an accurate count on the number of ships in the sky. One. Two. Two, he thought. Definitely two.

Slipping on the ice, Cassian caught himself on his palm, pain, dulled by adrenaline, shooting up his wrist. He scrambled and heard the low moan as another TIE fighter—or maybe the first—swept a wide arc through the sky and turned, blasting at the ground behind him. The force of the closest strike, and too close it was, pushed Cassian forward and finally, desperately, into the back of the ship.

K-2 was still tending Sam, so Cassian raced past him to the cockpit. “Take care of her,” he said, throwing the first-aid kit back at him, its plastic casing skittering against the metal floor. “Prepare for take-off.”

Cassian didn’t wait for acknowledgment. He had to trust K-2 to do what needed to be done.

Anyone else would have said the Force was with them, but Cassian preferred to think of it as luck, pure and simple. In a galaxy where anything could go wrong, sometimes… sometimes it didn’t. It was a thing to celebrate, but not a thing to revere. You could look for those moments and you could do everything possible to optimize them, but that was no reason to bless such moments. There was no mysticism in luck.

It was even easy to spot the wreck once they were within visual range. A dark ship against stark white, smoke pale and black in turns billowing from the nose. Not hard to spot at all. And yet the Imperials hadn’t spotted it yet either even though it had to have been down for hours now, likely more.

Whether the pilot was alive or not was another matter, but they were likely safe from K-2’s prognostications. It had been five minutes already and they hadn’t been chased off by an Imperial patrol yet.

“Set it down, Kay,” Cassian said, striding toward the back of the ship, quickly shrugging into his fur-lined coat and slipping on gloves. Calling loudly as he slung a first-aid kit across his shoulder, he added, “Close as you can.”

“Oh, good. I was going to land kilometers from the crash if you hadn’t said that.”

“Just do what I said,” Cassian said, nowhere near as annoyed as he probably should have been. To be entirely honest, he found K-2’s abruptness more amusing than he cared to admit, and preferable to some of the more gratingly cheerful outlooks a lot of the people around him had adopted as things got worse. They were all fighting for a cause that should never have needed to exist in the first place; they didn’t have to be happy about it. So having one being around who wasn’t trying to convince themselves of anything was nice. Relaxing in a way. “And keep an eye out. I don’t want to be caught by surprise.”

“You don’t want me to go with you?”

Cassian allowed himself the smallest, briefest of smiles. “You said your joints would freeze, right?”

“I—yes? But I was lying. They won’t freeze up.” K-2 turned and looked at Cassian, his ocular sensors glowing bright. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” He adjusted his jacket and supplies and tried not to be impressed with the fact that he’d actually bought K-2’s line… and that K-2 was willing to admit it to him when it came down to it. “It’ll be fine.” He hadn’t actually expected it would be this easy. Not until they’d gotten here anyway.

“No.” K-2’s head swiveled back and forth and he rotated slightly to focus on landing. “I’m going with you. You said I had to.”

Cassian ducked his head and turned, waiting for K-2 to open the hatch. Droids really weren’t bad people. It was too bad more people didn’t see them as people at all.

“Can I have a blaster now?” K-2 asked.

“Just this once.” Tossing his spare to K-2, he wondered where his life had gone wrong. “And don’t tell Mon Mothma. Or Draven. Or anyone.”

A monitor beeped, lights flashing on the dash near K-2’s hand.

“Is that her?” Cassian asked. The little white dot told him little and it hadn’t yet scrawled out the analysis across the screen.

“Yes,” K-2 answered.

Clapping his hand on K-2’s shoulder, he squeezed as best he could, the metal unrelenting and cold under his fingertips, but he didn’t let that stop him and he didn’t let the reality of the situation stop him from believing that just this once, they’d pull it off.

“Put up the clock,” Cassian said. “We’ve got twenty minutes until they triangulate, right?”

“Or two.”

“No, Kay.” Cassian brushed his hand across his forehead, swiping his bangs out of the way. “I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

“That makes you the only one,” K-2 replied, but he did as Cassian asked, setting a timer.

Recon missions were tough work, Cassian knew that firsthand, but he suspected it was even more difficult for the pilots who went on these little jaunts, alone except for their ships. Cassian might have been alone, too, but there were still people on the other end of his assignments. There was always the chance of talking himself out of a situation—or shooting or blackmailing or whatever.

What did you do when your ship was disabled somehow and you were near a nearly uninhabited system?

“Did you notice any scans of the ship, KayToo?” Cassian asked, arm across the back of K-2’s chair.

“No.” A switch snapped over beneath K-2’s fingers. “The nearest Imperial settlement is in the southern hemisphere of the planet, thousands of kilometers from our entry point. No scans detected.”

“Initiate your own scans,” Cassian said. “Keep them as loose as you can manage, but don’t give their guys reason to come sniffing around.”

“Understood.”

Even though Cassian knew it wouldn’t help, he watched while the computer did its thing, searching the planet’s surface below them for a sign of life or a crash, anything that might indicate where Sam might have ended up. They’d already swept the vacuum surrounding the planet as best they could and came up with nothing. Either she was down there or she was someplace Cassian couldn’t risk going.

Or she was already gone.

But Cassian didn’t want to think about that.

The minutes stretched and folded back on themselves and stretched again, tension ratcheting up as each scan came back. Negative. Negative. Negative.

Closing his eyes, Cassian breathed deeply, his mind working furiously. He’d already forced Mon Mothma’s hand and she wasn’t here to countermand any orders he might give now. If it didn’t work out, it was only him and K-2 who would be at risk and he had… means to rectify that problem.

Lullaby pills weren’t a mandatory carry—not yet anyway—but that had never stopped Cassian before. He wouldn’t be risking anything he hadn’t given up for lost long ago. “How quickly can you get a scan of the southern hemisphere?”

“I can boost the processor if—”

“I don’t care how you do it, just whether you can.”

“Yes. Twelve percent speed and efficiency.”

“How much time does that buy us?”

“If they’re not paying attention? Twenty minutes maybe?” K-2 shrugged. “If they are? Then… two.”

“Do you think we can manage?”

“If we’re very, very lucky.”

Cassian bit his lip, glaring out at the planet below. Somewhere down there was a Rebellion pilot. Maybe. And if she was, she had either escaped Imperial attention or she hadn’t. And if she had escaped it and they didn’t get her, they risked putting her on their radar. He could just scrub the mission, say he’d done what he could, go without anyone the wiser.

He could do that.

Or he could… not do that.

“Do it, Kay,” he said. “And let’s hope we’re very, very lucky today.”

“I take it back,” K-2 said from the pilot’s seat, his head swiveling back and forth as he scanned the viewport and took in all the sensor readings and adjusted their course trajectory all at once. “You can do this on your own, can’t you?”

“What’s wrong?” Cassian stabbed at his console, pressing the button to start up a scan of the planet below. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, blood rushing throughout his body as he tried to figure out what it was K-2 had seen that Cassian hadn’t yet.

“There’s snow down there.”

What? Cassian stilled and turned slowly toward K-2, not a little amazed that this was the problem. “So?”

A little snow never hurt anything.

“That means cold. Cold means frozen joints. No, thank you.”

“No, no, no,” Cassian said, wagging his finger at K-2, something like annoyance burrowing under his skin. “You don’t get to decide that now.” I came up with a plan because of you. “You’re going.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are.” Clamoring to his feet, Cassian pushed his way out from behind his spot in the copilot’s seat. “There’s deicing fluid in the back. And if that’s not enough for you, I’ll pull out every spare jacket this ship has and wrap you in each of them, are we clear?”

K-2 shook his head. “I’m not wearing a jacket. That’s ridiculous.”

“Then stop complaining,” Cassian answered, vicious as he headed toward the back of the cockpit, “and do your job. You’re with the Rebellion now. This is what we do.”

“This is what you do,” K-2 muttered.

“What was that?” Cassian turned, leaning against the divide that separated the front of the ship from the back. But instead of answering, K-2 hunched forward, bowing his head. Cassian didn’t know what that meant, but if it stopped the droid from whining, it was good enough for him.

“Nothing,” K-2 said, prim, twisting this way and that at the controls and pressing buttons that probably didn’t need pressing. He lifted his head to scan the monitors set in the ceiling and along the top of the viewport.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Come on,” Cassian said, striding into the lab he’d procured for his wayward Imperial droid. Far away from people, it kept everyone out of trouble.

“Why would I do that?” K-2 asked, turning away from whatever project Cassian had last given him to occupy himself with. He couldn’t remember what it was, there’d been so many of them at this point, report upon report of K-2’s strategic analyses, datapads filled to capacity with them.

“Do you want to be stuck down here forever?”

“I don’t know,” K-2 said. “It’s cozy enough.”

Cassian blinked and glanced around. It was small, that was for sure, but it was also freezing. And underground. And only lit by one harsh lightbulb fixed into an indifferent installation overhead. It made Cassian feel guilty for stowing the droid here, but he hadn’t known what else to do with him most of the day.

And K-2 didn’t seem to mind.

“I need backup,” Cassian admitted. “You’re it, if I can convince you.”

“Why?”

I can’t go to anyone else with this. “Who better to bring along than someone of your experience?”

“Can I have a blaster?”

Cassian shook his head, vehement, his bangs brushing across his forehead. He’d already flouted plenty of protocols on K-2’s behalf. He couldn’t flout this one, too, not least of all because the memories of droid armies were still fresh enough in everyone’s minds some fifteen years later. And though Cassian had none of the context shared by many of his fellow rebels, he would respect their distrust in this instance. “No, absolutely not.”

The empty clank of K-2’s fingers tapping together echoed uncomfortably through the small room. And K-2’s ocular sensors focused too steadily on Cassian’s face. “Will it be dangerous?”

“I would say so, yes,” Cassian said, hoping it would entice rather than detract from the offer. Regardless, K-2 deserved to know at least that much. It wouldn’t have been fair otherwise.

“But I can’t have a blaster,” K-2 said, flat.

“You won’t need one.”

K-2 just stared.

Cassian paced forward a little. “Will you do it or not?”

K-2 sighed heavily. “Fine,” he said, more aggrieved than the situation required in Cassian’s opinion. “I’ll do it, Cassian.”

“Good,” he answered, inclining his head. “Thank you. We’re leaving in one hour. Be ready.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” K-2 said. And where he got the salute from, Cassian couldn’t say, but he had to turn away to keep from laughing. Even a hint of amusement might suggest encouragement and K-2 clearly needed none of that.

“…there’s nothing we can do,” Mon Mothma said and though Cassian hadn’t been privy to the conversation—he’d only meant to deliver a report to the senator and no one had thought to tell him she might be in a meeting—he could tell immediately that something bad had happened. He thought to clear his throat. Even though this was an open hallway, out of the way though it might have been, he felt like he was intruding on something.

Cassian vaguely recognized the man speaking with her as a somewhat recent recruit, his orange flight suit practically pristine, his eyes still bright with a fervor and zeal for action that Cassian recognized in so many people. Even he’d been that way once.

He wondered how long it would take for this one to lose his shine.

Mon Mothma looked up at him and nodded briefly in acknowledgment.

“All due respect, Senator,” the pilot said, demanding her attention through his words and tone alone, as effective as tugging on her arm and turning her head. “I’m happy to take full responsibility for any—”

“I never doubted that, Antilles,” she said, voice growing cold. She never had liked the implication that she didn’t do everything she could for her people at all times. If this kid had consulted Cassian on the matter, he could have told him that. “But I can’t risk losing more people than I have to. You’re a talented pilot with a very unique experience in this organization. I’m sorry. I’ve made my decision.”

The man turned his attention to Cassian, a plea in his eyes—for intervention or for Cassian to go away, he wasn’t sure. “Apologies, Senator,” he said, gruff, willing to take a chance here. The worst he’d do was alienate the pilot. “Antilles.” His mind clicked away at the bit of conversation he’d overheard, an answer coming to him like a strike of lightning. “Is this about that missing pilot?”

He probably shouldn’t have known about it, but he was an Intelligence officer. What good was he if he didn’t know things that he shouldn’t have?

To mitigate the possibility of Mon Mothma taking offense, he handed her the datapad he carried. It wouldn’t distract her entirely, but maybe it would help. Or… she looked at him, her eyes a little wider than usual and Cassian knew—he knew—she wanted an excuse, any excuse, to give Antilles what he wanted.

Well, Cassian could give her that. He racked his brain for what he knew about that pilot’s mission, where it was and why and when. It was all a little hazy, but he imagined—“She’s Red Flight’s leader, correct?”

Antilles nodded.

“Senator, it would be a devastating blow to the Rebellion if one of our squadron leaders fell into Imperial hands. She could tell them anything and everything about our flight patterns, how we fight, upcoming missions. Even the ship could give her away…” He knew he wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already heard from Antilles, he was sure, but maybe… “As this could be classed an intelligence risk, I would be remiss in not advising you to treat this with every degree of seriousness.”

“Understood,” she said. “And yet…”

“You can’t send a pilot, no,” Cassian said, glancing at Antilles. He didn’t apologize for the slight—and Antilles was absolutely taking it as a slight, his shoulders straightening and the heat of anger flaring in his eyes—and turned his attention back to Mon Mothma. “But you can send me.”

“Cassian, that is quite impossible.”

“I’m your most experienced field agent,” he pointed out, allowing the subtext to hang between them. He’ll do what has to be done, too, if necessary. But just once he’d like to do something for the people around him, not the people at the top. They were all just so much cannon fodder in the end, but before they reached that point, Cassian could do this one thing. “The system is only moderately patrolled by Imperial security and law enforcement. It wouldn’t hurt to try and, frankly speaking, you’ve sent me into worse places for less. If you can’t give Antilles permission, give it to me. I’ll take full responsibility for it.”

Anything to get him off this base; anything to make himself useful.

Antilles narrowed his eyes in Cassian’s direction and tilted his head, a frown on his mouth.

“You’re in Operations,” Mon Mothma points out. “Not Retrieval.”

“That never made a difference when I was younger, Senator. I can do it. You can disavow the mission if you’d like.” His record was spotless, but he was willing to sacrifice that if he could get this woman out of whatever danger she’d found herself in.

“Thank you for the permission.” Mon Mothma’s tone was prim and her eyebrow arched high on her forehead and if Cassian were any newer, he’d have flushed in embarrassment at the presumption. As it was, he lifted his chin and stared her down and hoped he wasn’t squandering all the goodwill he might have built up with her over the years before he’s had a chance to retrieve anyone. She turned her attention to the pilot. “Do you understand what you’re asking?”

He bit his lip and found the ground suspiciously fascinating all of a sudden. “Yes, Senator,” he said finally. “I do.”

“Do you, Cassian?”

Cassian nodded and held his breath, unwilling to do anything that might make Mon Mothma take back permission. Of course he knew. In fact, he would have wagered every credit to his name that he knew it better than she did.

Mon Mothma tipped her head in acknowledgment and glanced at Cassian. Her eyes conveyed an apology her mouth couldn’t voice. “Then you have my permission. And this operation is off the record. If you fail, you are on your own. The Rebellion will disavow all knowledge of it.”

What’s new, he thought. He’d been on so many missions like that by this point that it hardly mattered.

Would someone wish to come after him, he wondered. Probably not.

It was just as well. If he ever found himself in a situation he couldn’t get out of, it didn’t seem likely anyone else would be able to get him out either.

“You look bored,” K-2 said, staring at him from across the table. What K-2 was doing in the mess hall, Cassian couldn’t say, but here he was and bother Cassian on top of it he did.

“I’m not bored,” Cassian answered, stabbing at his plate. Bringing his fork to his lips, he chewed pointedly on the cube of tasteless meat that had been served tonight. Looking up at K-2, he realized the droid had no intention of moving. He then waved his fork vaguely in K-2’s direction. “Can you sit at least? This looming is… disconcerting.”

The bench on K-2’s side of the table squealed as he dragged it out from beneath the tabletop. Cassian winced the whole time, keenly aware of the attention being directed his way. K-2 only compounded the problem when he sat, the bench screeching beneath his weight. That was Cassian’s fault. He very clearly shouldn’t have suggested it.

Please just don’t let it break. Already the scrutiny of the others in the room made the back of his neck itch; the sooner this was done with, the better.

“You’re bored,” K-2 said. His hands settled on his knees and tapped at the metal joints as though they weren’t sure what to do either.

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why did you say anything?”

K-2 shrugged, an inherently ‘him’ action, because Cassian sure as hell didn’t program him to do it. “Because I could.”

Cassian would be fascinated if he wasn’t so… annoyed. “I’m not a toy for you to play with,” he said, leaning against the edge of the table with his elbows. He kept his voice low. This was definitely not a conversation he wanted others to overhear; this wasn’t even a conversation he wanted to have. There was an edge in his own tone that he didn’t like, a suggestion that K-2 may have struck a hit. K-2 may not have known it, Cassian certainly hoped that was the case, but he shouldn’t even have gotten that close in the first place.

“Of course not.”

Cassian wasn’t mollified. “Right,” he said. “Just keep that in mind.”

“I will.”

“I hear you.” Harsh, he stabbed his fork in K-2’s direction again. “And I’m holding you to it.”

“Okay, Cassian.” And it sounded very much like K-2 didn’t believe Cassian either. The droid was going to be more trouble than he was worth, Cassian could already tell.

Sighing, Cassian dragged his hand across his face. His stubble prickled at his palm, but he tried not to think about how much he didn’t want to shave—on top of everything else he had to do on a regular basis, that just felt like too much, too. “What was your specialty?” he asked. “When you were with the Imperials?”

“I didn’t have one.”

Taking a deep breath, Cassian reminded himself that it wasn’t K-2 that had gotten K-2 into this mess. It had been him and now he had to do something about it. “What were you good at?”

“Everything.”

Oh, for the love of—

“What did you like to do?” Cassian asked through clenched teeth. He wasn’t normally this… brusque with people. But something about K-2 got under his skin and settled there and Cassian hadn’t yet figured out how to dislodge it yet.

“I—didn’t?” K-2 tilted his head, ocular sensors flickering in what Cassian hoped was a thoughtful way. The last thing Cassian wanted to deal with was a malfunctioning Imperial droid, even if it was his fault the droid was the way he was now. “I was approximately five percent more efficient at compiling strategic reports for my… superiors. When I was tasked with such a job anyway. Is that what you mean?”

Honestly, Cassian wasn’t sure, but it was as good a place to start as any. “Yeah, KayToo. That’s what I mean.”

It was, Cassian supposed, a start.

“What are you doing?” K-2 asked, his shadow falling across Cassian’s side and into his lap before stretching across the hangar floor.

“You’re blocking the light,” Cassian answered, shifting the crate he was sitting slightly to regain the ability to see what he was doing. There was a reason he’d chosen to sit this close to the hangar entrance and it had everything to do with the perfection of the light coming in from the sun.

“I know what I’m doing.” But before Cassian could open his mouth to complain, K-2 stepped to the side. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” He raised his hand and flicked the brush between his fingers a few times in illustration. Then, he gestured at the partially disassembled blaster sitting across his thighs.

“It looks like you’re cleaning your blaster,” K-2 said.

“Very good.” Thinking this was the end of the conversation, Cassian hunched forward, scrubbing at a groove at random since K-2 had distracted him and now he couldn’t remember where he was at in the whole process. “Do you think we can continue this talk another time?”

“But you just did that yesterday.”

“I did.” Cassian’s grip on the brush tightened and he refused to look up at K-2. Who could have known the droid would be so much trouble? And they hadn’t even learned that much of immediate use from him yet; he was either the least important security droid in the entire Empire or he was being tight-lipped just to be ornery. And Cassian didn’t have the time to untangle it all just now. “Unfortunately, what I do has no bearing on whether dirt decides to get into the casing.”

“Hmm.” And the way K-2 spoke, Cassian was certain K-2 didn’t believe him. Which was fine, really. “And when might that dirt have gotten into it, I wonder.”

That wasn’t Cassian’s problem; it wouldn’t be the first time someone didn’t believe him anyway. He was used to it by now. It didn’t bother him that K-2 might have disbelieved him, too. It did bother him that K-2 was willing to question him about it though.

“That is not your concern.”

“It is my concern if we’re going to be working together.”

Cassian huffed, bangs falling into his eyes, and reminded himself that he’d brought this on himself. No one else was going to be willing to work with him.

Think it through next time, Cassian thought, before you do something this foolish.

“Who the hell are you?” K-2 said, even before his ocular sensor flared to life. The other one was still busted. Cassian had forgotten to check it if he was being honest, guilt layering itself upon him as he realized it, but he suspected they didn’t have the parts necessary to fix it anyway. He’d have to order them specially. And do so without cluing the Empire in on what was going on. Security droid parts were, as was to be expected, highly regulated. It wouldn’t be easy, but Cassian would do it.

Eventually.

Pushing himself to his feet, Cassian inspected the droid from head to foot and back up again. “I saved your life.”

“You—” Affronted, the droid cut itself off. He struggled upward and though it didn’t help at all, Cassian grabbed hold of his arm. “You shot me.”

“You nearly choked me to death.”

“That wasn’t me,” K-2 said, unaffected, light as a breeze. “That was my programming.” He tilted his head. “That you short-circuited with your blaster.” And tilted his head again. “This is all your fault.”

“My fault?” Cassian touched his hand to his chest. “I wasn’t the one prowling the streets…” Except that he was. And he had. And it was K-2’s job to find people like him. Frowning, he crossed his arms and, tightened his jaw, hoped the droid wouldn’t call him on that little fact. He asked, not a little belligerent at being so caught out, “How are you feeling?”

“I have a headache.” There was a mournful wobble in his voice that sounded to Cassian’s ears like he’d affected it on purpose.

Great. He’d saddled himself with a baby. And there was one of his father’s theories illustrated: don’t mess with the base programming if you weren’t willing to be flexible about the outcome. “I meant with your…” His hand circled through the space between himself and K-2. “…who you were.”

“Oh. That. I don’t…” The droid hummed as it swung his legs off the end of the table. Though Cassian stood his ground, it took everything in him not to flinch back. At least get out from within his immediate grasp. His neck still hurt despite the bacta salve he’d applied en route. And even the numbing lozenge hadn’t helped all that much. “I don’t know? Everything’s a little weird right now.”

You’re telling me. “What did I do to you?” Cassian muttered, though of course K-2 could hear. He would have been able to even if Cassian had tried harder to keep quiet.

“You don’t know?” he asked—and didn’t sound very impressed about it.

Cassian scrubbed at his elbow, looked at the ground, and very deliberately didn’t stub his toe against the ground. “I didn’t touch your personality matrix,” he insisted, raising his hands to fend off the judgment K-2 was exuding in his direction. “I just flipped the loyalty programming.” Not even all the way either, though he could have. He just wanted to ensure K-2 no longer served the Empire. Now it was up to K-2 to make a decision. He’d be decommissioned if he didn’t accept Cassian’s terms, but it was also his right to make that decision for himself. Cassian couldn’t take that from him. He wouldn’t. Not when there had already been so many times when he’d been forced to make that choice on another being’s behalf.

Cassian just—hadn’t imagined he’d end up with a mouthy droid for the trouble.

Somewhere his mother was laughing at him.

“Well, can you fix it?” K-2 asked.

Cassian shook his head, but that was a lie. Of course he’d hung onto the code. It was currently quarantined on a non-networked datapad and would probably make the slicers wet themselves when he handed it over to them. He could fix it, but he wouldn’t. He was willing to deprive K-2 of that much.

“Great.”

It didn’t take an intelligence officer to figure out that it wasn’t great in K-2’s mind.

K-2 sighed. “I take it I’m not allowed out of here?” He glanced around the room. “You are a rebel, right? I didn’t make that up?”

Cassian shook his head a second time. “No. And yes.”

K-2 nodded, more philosophical about it than Cassian was expecting. “My chances of survival are approximately fifteen percent if I try to leave,” he said, devoid of emotion, more droid-like now than before. It unsettled Cassian—and made him believe that perhaps K-2 was right and there was the slightest chance of him surviving against Cassian and everyone who stood between him and freedom. “Is that correct?”

Cassian seesawed his hand in the air and shrugged one shoulder. “Eh,” he said, patting his hip where his blaster sat flush against his thigh.

“Well.” K-2’s head swiveled. “I guess that settles it, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I believe,” K-2 said, “that I’ll take my chances with you.”

The corner of Cassian’s mouth quirked upward. He held his hand out and wondered then if K-2 would know to shake it. “Welcome to the Rebellion.”

K-2 took it and squeezed until Cassian’s joints cracked uncomfortably. “I’m not so sure that’s true, but I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

Ten hours and a case of dry eyes so bad it hurt to blink later, he was done.

Cassian had never dealt with a security droid before, not in this capacity anyway. He’d killed a few in his lifetime, and always with a little bit of guilt in the back of his mind, and relief, too, that he hadn’t had to kill a person. Maybe that made him a hypocrite. The Confederacy of Independent Systems made it a priority to explain to their citizenry the sacrifice made on their behalves by the fights droids took on—some of them as sentient as any organic being in the galaxy.

Maybe that was why he sat here in an isolated room that had been converted into a droid repair lab by someone more suited to this particular task than he was and who had only begrudgingly offered it up to Cassian for his exclusive use for the next—however long it took to complete this task or put the unit out of its misery.

He’d ordered K-2 onto the adjustable table before him as soon as they’d walked in, had him shut down entirely as he placed himself into a prone position, the back of his head easily accessible.

The room was quiet in a way that made the back of Cassian’s neck itch and the base of his palms sweat, discomforting like death had cast a pall over the place. How the woman who usually ran the place dealt with it, he’d never figure out. Maybe she played music. He hoped she did anyway. He didn’t want to imagine someone sitting in such oppressive silence under such oppressively bright lights.

Cracking the panel on the back of K-2’s head, he forced all of these morbid thoughts from his mind and focused on staring down into the access port. It was dead center, right where the brain would be in an organic creature.

Fishing the sensor rods from his pocket, each clamp attached to wire that attached to a chit that could be fitted into Cassian’s datapad, he stretched to look at K-2’s insides. His fingers slipped each clamp into place with ease, muscle memory doing the bulk of the work for him, older even than his experience with blasters and grenades and knives and death.

He might’ve grown up to reprogram droids if circumstances had been different. Maybe if he’d grown up in the Core. Or if the Republic hadn’t taken their fight to the innocents who only wanted independence from its grip, instead of going after the corrupt businessbeings who’d financed the war on the Separatist side instead. His father had been renowned for his theories of AI constructs. And his mother… she’d had the best understanding of droid mechanics and electronics in twelve systems and she’d never failed to show him a trick if she could help it and everything she knew of splicing, she shared with him.

As it was, he’d had to turn what he’d learned—quite a bit, despite his young age, he’d only ever wanted to do what his parents did after all—to repurposing scuttled battle droids, to bringing them back from the dead so that maybe just once it wouldn’t be one of his comrades falling in the fight, to improving their bloodthirsty instincts and reaction times and skills with a blaster.

He’d been good. He’d been better than good.

As he spooled up the datapad, waiting for it to spit back K-2’s entire being at him in language he could understand, he wondered what his mother would think of him now. Would she understand? He hoped she would. Father… father definitely wouldn’t have. Nothing was worth the violence he’d inflicted on others, his father would have said.

He hoped he could right that wrong, if only in miniature. A symbol, if not anything concrete. This was only one droid after all and he had turned many battle droids into more efficient versions of themselves in his time. Maybe he could prove—if only to himself now that he had no one else to prove it to—that he could take a battle droid in all but name and turn it into something better, something productive rather than destructive.

“All right, Kay-Tuesso,” he said, “let’s get you free of all that nasty Imp programming, hmm?”

“Would you,” Senator Organa said, perplexed, but doing a very good job of hiding it, “care to explain what this is?” His eyes scanned from the floor to the top of K-2SO’s seven foot tall head. Cassian turned and tried to see it from Organa’s perspective. And, in fact, it wasn’t very difficult to do so. He was a strange sight to behold, particularly because he still looked a hell of a lot like a security droid.

And he was. He was still a security droid. Cassian had no excuse save one and hoped the rebels arrayed on either side of Mon Mothma and Organa weren’t trigger happy. “He would have killed me if I didn’t...”

Organa’s brow arched. “He’s an Imperial security droid.” That is, his face said, what they are given to do.

“I—” And it sounded completely ridiculous now that he thought about it, but it was still the truth. “I shot him in the eye. It must have fried his primary motivators. He’s—I don’t know. Not a threat exactly, but he wouldn’t let me leave without him.”

Mon Mothma stepped forward—to the delight of no one, including Cassian, who stepped toward her, too, hands raised. “Senator, I don’t think…” A few of the rebels raised their blasters. Cassian couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or not that K-2SO had bled enough of his batteries to need to stand down. It meant Cassian had to explain everything, but on the other hand, it stopped the droid from being able to say anything that might have gotten him decommissioned. “Perhaps you should be careful.”

“He cannot be much of a threat if you thought to bring him here, risk to you or no.” She peered up at the thing, curious, a tiny smile playing at the corner of her mouth. Cassian hated the thread of pride that worked through him at Mon Mothma’s acknowledgement. Almost whispering, she confided, “I’ve never been this close to one.”

“He thinks he’s meant to escort me. I don’t know if he’s relieving a previous assignment or if it’s just a quirk of his programming,” Cassian said, both to Mon Mothma and to Bail.

“Why didn’t you kill it?”

Cassian swallowed. That was the question, wasn’t it? Why hadn’t he? He’d tried. And he could have succeeded in the end—if he’d wanted to. “I believe he may be useful to us in an intelligence capacity.” His gaze flickered toward the still, silent droid standing behind him. “I’ve already deactivated everything that could possibly transmit back to an Imperial base.” He tapped on K-2’s arm. “And he’s got a restraining bolt fitted for everything else.” His eyes searched both Organa’s and Mon Mothma’s faces. “I’d like to see if I can alter his programming. Turn him to our side. I can’t imagine a better source of information. And he’d make an excellent infiltration unit.”

Mon Mothma and Organa exchanged looks, not quite devoid of emotion, but close to it. They weren’t sure, that much was clear to Cassian, but they were still willing to entertain the thought. They just had to trust him.

Good thing the people of the old Republic tended toward trust. At least when it came to people they perceived to be on their side.

“All right, Cassian,” Mon Mothma said. “Do what you can to secure your safety and the base’s. You’ll get your chance with the security droid.”

Cassian released a pent-up breath and bobbed his head in crisp acknowledgment. “Thank you, Senators.” He jerked his head toward the hangar for K-2’s benefit and waved his arm. “Come on. Let’s see what we can do with you.”

K-2 didn’t speak, but his legs jerked and moved the rest of him with a lumbering, dragging stride. Cassian would get him figured out. Or he’d get rid of him. Just like he’d said he would.

This is not going so well, Cassian thought, running through the streets of Thela 3’s capital, Imperial officers hounding his steps. Twisting and slipping through the crowds—there were always crowds, one day Cassian would find himself on a world devoid of such clumps of people and on that day, he wasn’t sure what he’d do—he searched for a side street, an alcove, anything that might give him a chance to ditch the bright green rain slicker he had around his shoulders, a deliberately provocative piece of clothing that had far, far outlived its usefulness.

Breathing heavily, he pushed the hat he wore further down his head. This wouldn’t work if he lost that. It almost made him miss Operations, this did. Retrievals wasn’t usually his gig. His heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest. If he was going to keep this up, he’d have to see about changing his exercise routine.

Going undercover as a senatorial contact was nothing compared to this. Nothing physically anyway. Mentally, that was a different story all together.

Up ahead, he finally saw what looked like an opening in the unbroken line of businesses on either side of him. Sprinting, feet slapping hard against the paved duracrete sidewalk, he glanced down it to make sure it wasn’t likely to trap him.

Slipping sideways down it, he immediately lost both the hat and the slicker, balling up both and tossing them back toward the street and hoped someone either picked it up or kicked it far enough away to confuse his pursuers for even a moment. Following the winding path made up of buildings constructed by what could be safely called haphazard means, so different from the façade presented by the street perpendicular, he let himself slow to a…

“Halt,” a voice said, mechanical and droning, a little high-pitched for a droid, but familiar enough that Cassian fought the urge to wince. Lifting his hands instinctively, he turned to his left. “Let’s see some identification.”

Cassian’s eyebrow arched. “What are you, a stormtrooper?” He’d heard that same phrase uttered by a hundred men and women on a hundred different worlds. But never a droid.

“Clearly not,” the droid answered, a KX-series security droid. He didn’t carry a blaster or any weapon that Cassian could see. Not that it would matter if he got ahold of Cassian. It wouldn’t take a weapon for him to put an end to Cassian’s career.

Wiggling his fingers, Cassian asked, “My identchip’s in my jacket pocket. May I?”

“I… suppose so.”

He had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a smile from forming. Slipping his fingers into said jacket, he wrapped his fingers around the butt of a small blaster, nothing that would even pierce the military-grade durasteel Arakyd used to skin these things. But it was pretty good at doing something else.

Not giving himself time to think, he shot at the security droid. Right in the ocular sensor. Blue stun lines arced over his body and the hot, sharp scent of burning wires and metal singed the inside of Cassian’s nostrils. The droid spasmed, its body going even more rigid than it had started out being and groaned, sensors flickering and shutting off and back on.

Cassian backed up, glancing back to make sure he hadn’t been followed, and tried to calculate the odds of him getting around the droid without its long arms grabbing hold of him. It didn’t seem like it was in any position to move, and Cassian didn’t have much choice, but still. Inching as slow as he could around the edge of a building, back scraping against it as he took a sideways step and then another.

His eyes never left the droid. His fingers twitched and a fried, frantic sound emitted from somewhere. A wire maybe. Or something else. Cassian knew something about the code from his time working as aide to an unimportant Imperial officer stranded on an equally unimportant—by Imperial standards anyway—world.

Holding his breath, Cassian continued to shuffle slowly around the droid, hoping he wouldn’t wake up and—

As soon as he had enough clearance, he bolted.

Only to get caught in the droid’s grasp, his fingers tightening in Cassian’s shirt. Cassian hadn’t even heard…

“Imper-i-AL PROtocol,” the droid said, its voice a garbled, electronic mush, “statesthatunaccompaniedcitizensmust be… chaperoned.”

Nearly choking from the pressure of his collar against his throat, Cassian twisted and tried to get out of the droid’s grasp. “I think you’ve got the wrong planet,” he said, breathless. What the hell did I do to you?

When other people shoot droids, they die. When I do it… “You can’t chaperone me if I’m dead,” he said, voice a whisper. Grabbing at his collar, he failed to relieve any of the pressure against his neck, the fabric all but cutting into his skin. His feet kicked at the ground and he let out precious huffs of air.

“Negative, I sense-se-se-se life signs.”

“Not for long.” Was it his imagination or was his sight really dimming? Squirming, he kicked back, doing nothing except threatening to hurt himself even more as the toe of his boot slipped out from beneath him, pulling all of his weight down and—

The droid’s grip on him broke and he collapsed into a heap on the ground, barely keeping himself from having the wind further knocked out of him. Gasping and coughing, he stayed on his hands and knees, relearning how to breathe. His throat burned and swallowing razorblades might have been less painful, but he wouldn’t asphyxiate in midair, so he counted it as the price of doing business with a security droid.

Once he thought he was steady enough, he pushed himself to his feet. Still a little off-balance, he stumbled nearly into the droid and found himself caught again in the droid’s grasp.

This time though it just grabbed him a little roughly by the shoulder and stood him straight up. “All is well, citizen,” he said, voice modulating itself normally. The ocular sensor Cassian had shot was dim, burned out, not quite a cratering hole, but close. The other one was bright and operating normally though. “Allow me to escort you to your destination.”

Tables dissected the mess hall into perfectly even rows, perfectly orderly and perfectly plain. Cassian still found it weird to step inside and see it. He’d grown up in unruly cantinas and ate on the run, barely stopping to sit on an empty crate as he waited for insurgents to return or leave, sometimes bringing him along, sometimes not.

The raucous noise of off-duty personnel, though, that was familiar no matter how perfect the rows were. A whole slew of them had taken over the middle rows, leaving only spaces at the outermost tables and along the edges. They paid Cassian no heed as he skirted the edge of the room to grab a tray and reach the beginning of the line.

Someone behind him laughed and shoved at the person next to them, setting off a second laugh, this one from a different individual. Turning, Cassian looked to see what was happening.

They didn’t all freeze—some of them didn’t even notice Cassian’s scrutiny—but enough of them caught sight of him watching and did so, staring back with something like defiance in their eyes. Quickly, Cassian turned away again and waited for his turn to receive whatever uninspired meal the kitchens had seen fit to provide today.

It didn’t matter what it was, though, everything they’d thrown at him so far had been easier to swallow than anything he’d dealt with during his time with the insurgents. In more ways than one. In more ways than probably even the people behind him who wouldn’t look his way could imagine.

They were all here to fight the Empire and Cassian was fine with that. They didn’t need to be friends, too.

Hell, Cassian was pretty sure half the reason General Draven dumped him in Intelligence was because he’d seen this in Cassian and knew how to exploit it. Cassian probably would have requested it anyway if the alternative required camaraderie of the sort on display right now.

Getting his food, he passed very near to the group that wouldn’t look him in the eye until his back was to them and carried on his way.

Finding a seat that put his back as near to the corner of the room as possible that gave him the clearest view of his surroundings, he noticed one of the other intel officers sitting in another corner. She didn’t look up at him, her hair in her eyes and her attention firmly on the tray in front of her. He tried to recall her name and realized that he couldn’t. He’d seen her around most days, but…

He shook his head and picked up the fork that had come along with the nameless slop before him. Her name didn’t matter. And neither did his. In fact, it was better when they didn’t matter. It made things so much easier.

The woman lifted her head, perhaps sensing Cassian’s scrutiny.

And though their eyes met briefly, neither of them acknowledged the other.

Because they weren’t comrades in arms. They were islands.

Cassian had long ago given up watching the Imperial HoloNet, but there were some broadcasts you couldn’t miss no matter where you might go, the Empire’s propaganda machine far-reaching and many-fingered and determined to make sure you knew what was happening. The Empire’s version of what was happening anyway. You’d have had to travel to a Legacy world to avoid it and Cassian could afford neither the privilege nor gain the required credentials to go to one.

And so it was now, the public holofeeds alight with news of the capture and swift execution of a Rebel informant on Darknell of all places, an out of the way planet of little concern to most people on most days. Leoen Fissa was the man’s name, a traitor to the Empire and to everyone who lived in it. A man to be despised and remembered as an evil to be stamped out, a symbol of what would happen to you if you were foolish enough to step out of line.

Leoen Fissa.

His face jumped out of the holoprojectors everywhere Cassian turned, his mug shot far more eloquent than any newscaster’s words could be. Even marred by the shitty resolution and long-distance transmission of the image, the projection clearly bore signs of Imperial interrogation. There was a cut above Fissa’s eye. A slant to his nose that wasn’t there before, the bridge swollen and almost unrecognizable. His eyes, too, were haunted, hunted. No amount of static or interference could hide that.

Cassian didn’t dream that night, not that he could remember, safe in his Rebellion-issued bunk back at base, but when he woke up, the first thing he saw was Leoen Fissa—as he was, as he had been—flashing, accusatory, behind his eyelids.

“If you wanted to know how Senator Thylell was going to vote,” Cassian said, passing his hand over the top of his drink—detox pills, a trick he’d learned back at Teeso’s, a few seconds to let the hissing die down and it would be as harmless as water, if water tasted like a sewer, with no one the wiser. Holding the straw between two fingers, he stirred for good measure, the ice clinking against the sides of the glass. “You could have just asked.”

“Aach, I admire what you’ve done in the short time you’ve been here.” His companion hiccupped lightly and lifted his hand to his mouth, discreet. If one could be messily and elegantly drunk at the same time, it was Leoen. “But you made a lucky guess.”

Cassian snorted and sipped his drink, fighting the urge to gag at the flavor. He mostly made it, except for the cough that spluttered out of him at the last second. “Shit,” he said, letting the gravel of his voice do the work of explaining his actions for him. “I’m not drunk enough for this piss.” He raised his hand to indicate the need for more booze and waited for the bartender to pay enough attention to fulfill his request. “And neither are you.”

“That’s not true in the slightest.” Leoen sprawled forward, his arms reaching across the table to try and swipe the remnants of Cassian’s drink. Deft hands and a clear mind were the only things that saved him from discovery and he cradled the short, fat glass against his chest, protective.

“No, no, no. I don’t think so. This is mine,” he said, almost lazy. Then, he plucked a credit chit from the breast pocket of his blazer and slid it across the table. “But let me make it up to you.”

Leoen grabbed the chit between thumb and forefinger and let it slip into his palm as he hefted it. Silly, really. It wasn’t like he could tell how many credits it held from the weight. But Leoen had a taste for the dramatic that he never failed to indulge to the fullest. “You’re going to land me in the medical clinic one of these days. Leoen Fissa, cause of death: acute alcohol poisoning.”

But though Leoen might have complained, he clamored to his feet and curled his fingers around the chit and he weaved his way toward the bar, their bartender having never heeded Cassian’s wave. Without Leoen to focus on, Cassian stared down into what was left of his drink and pondered the possibility of letting himself get drunk. Genuinely so. Not this false version of it.

It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself the opportunity to unwind in that particular way. It wasn’t safe; and he was never sure what he’d do and feel if he let himself.

No, better to avoid it entirely.

And when Leoen returned, two drinks in hand, one for Cassian, he pulled the same trick as earlier and resigned himself to another round of sewer water while Leoen crashed against his upper limits.

It didn’t take long.

“I just—Senator Hewwig is… such an asshole, you know?” Leoen said, leaning forward, whispering the words, still too loud to be entirely circumspect, but considering the raucous noise around them, Cassian couldn’t fault him. “Did you know he’s cheating on his wife?”

This was what he’d been reduced to. No better than a private investigator, he gathered salacious crumbs for the Rebellion to use or not according to their discretion. At least Hewwig might be a useful subject for blackmail, but it didn’t make Cassian feel any better about it. “Doesn’t everybody?” Cassian asked, affecting boredom, unsure which part he was asking about—the knowing or the cheating. Both maybe. Or neither.

“Oh, no, my friend.” Leoen laughed and wagged his finger in Cassian’s face. “No. There’s no way in the twelve hells of Ka’lath you knew this. Don’t even try it.” He leaned in, conspiratorial. “And not with just anyone: Governor Ellaia. Of Xorre.”

Cassian’s brow arched. That was slightly more interesting than the average bit of gossip that passed the lips of senatorial aides in Darknell’s capital. In fact, it was probably the single most useful bit of information he’d gotten on this gods-forsaken planet.

And all for the price of a drink. “Who else knows this?” he asked, keeping his voice light despite the intensity of his need to know. “And why are you telling me?”

Leoen grinned. “Because, you bastard, I had to tell someone. And you’re the tightest-lipped man in this place. Darlea calls you the black hole where gossip goes to die. Everyone would hate you if they didn’t like knowing there was at least one guy walking around not trying to stab anybody in the back.” Punching Cassian in the shoulder—and it took all of Cassian’s self-control not to fight back, the instinct long-engrained—he laughed again, waggling his eyebrows for good measure. “Come on, it’s good, isn’t it?”

It’s none of my business was what Cassian thought, but instead he brought his hand to his mouth, thumbing at his lower lip. “I think you’re full of shit,” Cassian says, both the correct response and a challenge. Leoen hated being called a liar; he would do anything to avoid it. A weakness that Cassian might have exploited a time or two before. “If this information is so well-hidden, how do you know?”

“You really are a killjoy.” Leoen rolled his eyes. He sipped his drink, innocent by all accounts, but Cassian could tell by the sparkle in his eyes that he desperately wanted to give voice to his own brilliance or luck or whatever it was that brought this information to him. “Look, I found a holo, okay?”

This is disgusting. These people were… unbelievable. In every particular. If Cassian never had to interact with a single politician again in his life, it would be too soon. “Do you have it?”

“No, are you—no. I’m not stupid, Aach. Of course I don’t have it. What would I do with it?”

I can think of more than a few things, Cassian thought, refusing to feel sad about that fact. Discomfort twinged between his eyes, the earliest signs of a headache that no painkiller would kill. What he needed… well, he wasn’t going to get it.

Affronted, Leoen narrowed his eyes. “Not all of us are out for our own gains.”

“I know that.” It sounded weak. It was weak. The worst excuses usually were. And the hell of it was, Leoen wasn’t wrong. Cassian sure wasn’t here for the good it would do him personally. Not in the slightest. And yet here he was. “I didn’t mean—”

Frankly, he probably didn’t even need actual proof. The right—or wrong, in this case—word in the right ear was probably enough to topple Ellaia’s already shaky support on Xorre. If there was fire to be found behind the smoke, someone would get to it simply in the hopes that the rumor was true. To think: she was already an outsider who cared little for the opinions and feelings of the Xorran people. If anyone thought she was collaborating with their hated planetary neighbors on Darknell… well. It wouldn’t be good for her. And that meant a better chance for rebel insurgents to step in and put pressure on Xorre’s already thin Imperial presence.

It wasn’t what his job here was supposed to accomplish, but it amounted to the same thing in the end. Destabilizing one planet was almost as good as destabilizing another as far as the rebels were concerned anyway. And these two were so intertwined that accomplishing the one might complete his original goal, too.

Huffing, Leoen shook his head. “You really are where gossip goes to die,” he said, but it was fond. Fonder than Cassian deserved.

“I try to be,” Cassian answered, a purposefully ironic edge to his voice, mock serious. Designed to make Leoen laugh, it hit its mark. He looked impossibly young to Cassian, which was ridiculous given the circumstances. People still looked at Cassian like he was that young, too, though he didn’t think he’d ever felt young.

He couldn’t let himself feel the resentment that built up inside of him. Why had Leoen deserved a childhood that freed him from conflict with the Empire when Cassian and so many others were forced to suffer and endure in so many ways, the truth so obvious to them while it slid past most people in the Empire? Why did Leoen being born on the opposite side of an invisible, meaningless line get to mean growing up believing that your government meant to protect you while Cassian came to know the failing Republic for what it was? And as a result, know the Empire for what it was?

Maybe Cassian would have preferred not knowing the truth. Maybe he would have liked the chance to genuinely, truly believe the Empire meant well. Or maybe he would have liked to grow up somewhere where that was actually, legitimately true. There must have been some place in the whole damned galaxy where that could be said. The galaxy was a big place.

Cassian might have liked even what little choice in the matter Leoen had been given.

Climbing to his feet and feigning a stumble, he caught himself on Leoen’s shoulder, gripping hard. “I really am,” he said and it was not even true in the slightest. But Leoen wouldn’t know that. “And with that, I think I’m going to head out.”

Though Leoen looked disappointed, he nodded and held out Cassian’s credit chit to him. “You’ll be wanting this back.”

Cassian wrapped Leoen’s warm fingers around it, so much softer than Cassian’s own, and smiled. “Drinks are on me tonight. I’ll get it back from you in the morning.”

This was a lie, too. Cassian had no intention of staying on Darknell past the hour it would take him to catch a transport off this rock. His work was done here.

No hard feelings.

“This is it?” he asked, head tilted back to take in the—surprisingly small space around him. The Rebellion was spoken of with reverence by so many people he’d come across, he couldn’t understand…

Draven snorted and flapped his hand at their surroundings. “This is it.”

Blast, this wasn’t much better than his time with—

An alarm rang out and what few people were manning consoles in the command center barely lifted their heads, a few of them dragging headphones down from around their ears to rest against their neck. They peered up, almost bored, and waited for—something. Cassian had no idea what. Alarms in his world meant bad things were about to happen and someone ought to pull a blaster and shoot it first if they didn’t want to end up dead instead.

The loudspeaker crackled to life, a garbled, fuzzy voice at the other end, nearly impossible to understand over the buzz of static. “Patrol outgoing. Flight crew on deck. Prepare for launch.” Reasonable enough, Cassian supposed, though in truth he knew little of how flight operations ran and whether it was reasonable or not. Then, the voice added, “May the Force be with you.”

Something must’ve shown on his face, a tic visible enough that Draven caught enough of the nuances to look at him strangely, a disapproving set to his mouth, a hint of distrust in his eyes. “What is it?” Draven asked, though it was less a question and more of a demand.

“Nothing,” Cassian replied, more slowly than his mind was inclined to take it. Haste wouldn’t make his answer seem any more genuine, but speaking as though Draven hadn’t caught him by surprise might help. “It’s nothing.”

Admittedly, Cassian’s scant words probably did little to assuage Draven either, but at least it sounded laconic rather than guilty or like he’d figured something out about Cassian that he didn’t want to share.

“I know it’s not much,” Draven said to Cassian’s immense and immediate relief. But instead of making the same mistake a second time, he ensured none of it showed on his face. “There’s this idea that the Rebellion is…” He shrugged, threw his hands up to indicate the whole of the place.

And even though Cassian knew what people thought of the Rebellion, how arrogant of Draven to think that anyone thought much about the Rebellion at all. Maybe the people of the Core and the Mid Rim had grand ideas about the Rebellion’s ways and means and what that meant for them behind the scenes. Cassian merely thought it ridiculous that they had something so stationary and permanent, run by people who seemed so normal. Like they didn’t have to face combat situations daily. They could’ve been running a shipping operation, an upstanding business in which the worst that ever happened was damaged cargo.

Or so Cassian imagined. He didn’t have much experience with normal businesses going about their normal daily activities.

But better that Draven believe Cassian wasn’t impressed than he realize the truth: Cassian found it deeply, deeply unsettling that they were using a Jedi phrase to—to what? Cassian wasn’t sure of that either. To make themselves feel better about what they were doing? To console themselves when things went wrong?

The Jedi were—probably not as bad as he’d been told they were. He hadn’t known them after all and hadn’t even really fought against a unit of the Republic’s military which was led by a Jedi General, but he’d heard stories about the swathes they cut through the droid armies, the worlds they brought forcibly back into the fold, the people caught on the wrong side of their war who needed Jedi diplomacy and peacekeeping skills, too, and had at one time been privy to them because the Jedi weren’t partisan.

At one time, the Jedi hadn’t belonged to the Republic. They’d belonged to everyone equally, as they took children from worlds within and without the Republic regardless and trained them and released them back into the galaxy to do good wherever they went, Republic space or no.

As far as he was concerned, the Jedi were complicit in the rise of the Empire. They weren’t a group to honor now in his opinion. Had the Emperor not proved himself exactly as evil as most people in the Confederacy believed him to be, perhaps they would be serving the Empire now, keeping ‘peace’ and ‘order’ at his behest rather than acting as martyrs for the group trying to take the Emperor down. Listen to anyone in the Confederacy in those days—any of the billions of regular citizens anyway, the people who weren’t part of the Techno Union, the Banking Clans, the Trade Federation—they didn’t think the Jedi were evil.

They’d just felt betrayed.

But Cassian supposed there weren’t many like him left who knew what it was like from the other side—not people interested in fighting another war anyway. Not people who were still alive to want to fight another war.

The Empire liked to pretend the war was bloodless on the Confederacy side, that the only casualties were the droids who brought credits hand over fist to their manufacturers, a safe ending for a bad conflict. But it wasn’t. Cassian was a testament to that. The people he’d fought with, who’d died around him, so many he couldn’t even remember all of their names. They were a testament to that.

He’d seen plenty of blood when he fought for independence from the Republic, so young and only really aware that the Republic didn’t care about the Outer Rim worlds he’d called his home. There were more years of his life drenched in it, in fact, than years that weren’t.

He said nothing, keeping it locked up tight inside of him and Draven didn’t suspect a thing. It’s the past now, Cassian. The Jedi are gone now anyway, Cassian. It means something to them obviously, Cassian. It doesn’t hurt you to let them have it, Cassian.

Rebellions were built on hope.

But the Confederacy had had hope, too.

Maybe that was why they’d failed.

“You’ll have your first assignment soon. And you’ll ship out shortly after that. Good luck, kid,” Draven said.

“Why are you here, Cassian Andor?” the man asked. Draven, he’d called himself. Gruff and chisel-jawed in a way that would probably grow more severe the older he got. Some might have called him handsome, Cassian thought, if not for the dourness around his mouth, the bored tone of his voice, the absolutely flatness of his eyes. He was not a man to inspire loyalties, this one wasn’t.

He quite honestly didn’t look like the kind of man you’d find in a bar. And yet here he was. In Cassian’s—it wasn’t really his, it belonged to Teeso the Hutt, but Teeso was never around so it might as well have been—bar. And doing a very poor job of blending in by Cassian’s measure of such things.

Cassian sat across from him, slid a pair of shot glasses across the table toward him, a bottle of cheap, local whiskey not far behind. Then he crossed his arms and leaned forward, all one-hundred and forty pounds of him. “I want to enlist,” he said.

“You’re, what, twelve?” Draven picked up the bottle, poured a sloppy pair of shots.

“Seventeen actually.” If he meant to insult Cassian, he did a poor job of it. And when he pushed one of the glasses back toward him, he shook his head. “They’re both for you. I don’t drink.”

Draven scoffed and plucked one of the glasses up between two fingers, the rest of his hand curved around it like a shield, not quite touching, but protective anyway. “You really are green.”

Anger flared, tight and bright, in Cassian’s chest. A better effort. He wondered if Draven had guessed or just lucked out. Or maybe, just maybe, he was smart enough to figure it out. Not everyone was, but a few had the knack for it. “I’ve been fighting since I was six.”

“Why?”

“My father was a pacifist, a scholar,” Cassian said, toneless, the words almost devoid of meaning now. “Republic troopers killed him during a protest at Carida. I don’t remember much about him except he was the kindest man a place like Fest could produce and he knew everything about droid personalities.”

“Your homeworld? Fest?” Draven asked, affecting boredom. Or maybe he really was bored. Cassian didn’t have a monopoly on sob stories. Just about everyone in this damned galaxy had one.

“Mmm. Icy. Cold. A lot of fucking mountains. I went back once to—” He waved his hand, clearing the air or waving away something unpleasant, even he couldn’t say. “Well, I didn’t stay. It’s a miserable shithole, but they have no love for the Empire there these days.” It used to be they didn’t have much love for the Republic. Two sides of the same credit chit in his opinion.

Draven got this look about him, uptight and troubled as he glanced around the bar. Cassian fought the urge to snicker.

“This is Hutt space, Draven,” he said, almost proud. Some of the rebels refused to see the utility of operating in the shadows—the real shadows, the ones where the work actually got done. That Cassian had actually gotten Draven to come said something about him to Cassian, something good. “There are no Imps here yet.” Wistfulness overcame Cassian for a moment. One day, the call of credits would put an end to everything here—at least that was Cassian’s theory. The Empire would need the resources or they’d get tired of the Hutts doing deals under their noses without a cut going to them and they’d press just hard enough to convince the Hutts to play ball.

If only the Hutts knew what they were capable of. Or cared. They could do a lot of damage. But they wouldn’t. And in the meantime, Cassian and others like him would abuse the many loopholes offered to them here.

“Caution never hurt anyone.”

“Depending on where you are, caution can get people killed just as surely as indiscretion.” He gestured for Draven to pour himself another drink.

“Quite.” Draven’s mouth turned down, the grooves around his mouth deepening. Reluctantly, he poured a second shot and swallowed it in slow, painful sips. Cassian supposed he couldn’t blame him, but it did draw attention to him that he probably didn’t want. Or it would have if Cassian hadn’t sat down with him. One day maybe he’d tell Draven how to blend in better with the locals.

Even if the guy hadn’t screamed Rebel coming in here, the Core accent and the vague snobbery of his mien would give him away as an outsider every time. Perhaps Cassian would have the opportunity to explain to him just what kind of target he put on his back as a result. Hell, someone might just mistake him for an Imperial.

“Now explain to me why I should remove you from what I’m sure is an ironclad contract with a Hutt businessman instead of letting you find your own way out.”

“I’ve done about as much good as I can do here,” Cassian answered. “And if that is not enough, I’m pretty good with a blaster.”

Draven snorted and shook his head. “I’ve got plenty of fighters who’re good with a blaster.”

“They are not good like me.” He leaned forward, at the very least certain he’d gotten Draven’s attention. “You’re burdened with a few seasoned military leaders who know how to fight big wars with big armies and not a whole lot of inexperienced cannon fodder to train. The tactics you know are useless. One day you’ll learn how to fight small and mean, but today is not that day and it shows.”

“You talk like a boy who hasn’t had to do a lot of fighting, small, mean, or otherwise.” Draven smirked, bitter, and finished his drink. So he hadn’t figured it out at all. He’d just stumbled into one of Cassian’s sore spots. Good for him. “You wouldn’t be so cavalier about our inexperience if you had.”

If Cassian didn’t remind himself just how important this was, he might have punched Draven for his arrogance. Tight, teeth clenched together, he said, “We all start somewhere. But at least I know how to win against a superior force. I know how to slip through the Empire’s little—” Though at the time, they hadn’t been the Empire, had they? They’d been the Republic. And he’d been on what was decided by all as the wrong side when the dust settled. He clapped his hands together and wiggled them. “—cracks. How many of your fighters know this?”

Draven’s lips firmed in consideration. “You aren’t much for honoring your father’s memory, are you? Asking to join a fighting force like this.”

It’s already much, much too late for that. Cassian’s laughter was more of a bark than any true display of amusement, but it kept his knuckles from itching to sucker punch the man across from him. “Oh, you’re very funny. No, you’re right. It doesn’t honor my father’s memory. It isn’t meant to. On the other hand, I would very much like to make the galaxy safer for people like my father. Defeating the Empire will require more than passive resistance and they will not pay the price required of them. That’s fine. I can do it in their stead.” I’ve already done it.

“You may one day rethink that stance.”

No, I don’t think so. Cassian shrugged. “Then it should become easier, shouldn’t it? I can just fight for myself.”

Draven’s eyebrow climbed his forehead, his lips pulling together into a tight grimace. “You have an interesting perspective, Mr. Andor.”

“Most people do when you get to know them.”

Draven glanced at the bar, his features slackening slightly, all of them except his eyes, which tightened thoughtfully. “All right.” Draven nodded, decisive, his attention returning to Cassian. Now that he’d made the decision apparently, he was the type to move quickly. Good to know. Hand thrusted toward Cassian, he said, “Then I suppose I should say, ‘welcome aboard.’”

Cassian didn’t sigh in relief, but he wanted to. Taking Draven’s hand, he smiled slightly instead and hoped it didn’t look too threatening. He was out. He didn’t have to pretend he ran a bar so he could run blasters for rebels in nearby sectors anymore. “Thank you, sir.”

He was much better suited to the front line of any fight anyway.

“Aren’t you a little young to be a bartender?” a Togruta woman asked, hooking her foot around a barstool and pulling it out from under the bar top. Her orange hands contrasted with the dark, nearly black duraplast beneath them. There was dirt under her short, clipped nails, but the rest of her was spotless, not a single speck of dust marring her skin or her clothing.

Off-worlder for sure.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t laugh,” Cassian answered, swiping a rag through a glass before scrubbing his hand across his chin. “You wouldn’t be the first who’s said as much to me.” You probably won’t be the last.

Grinning, the Togruta tapped at her own chin. “Fair enough,” she answered as though she genuinely empathized.

“And what can I get you besides a better sense of humor?”

“Ouch,” she replied, taking no offense at the joke. “An Iced Whirlwind, I think.”

Cassian’s breath hitched slightly, but any outward sign he wanted to give—widened eyes, a frozen stance, anything—he kept locked away. The Togruta wasn’t just any Togruta. He’d heard of this particular Togruta before. Everyone who ran in his circles had. “That’s an unusual request,” he said, just like he’d been told to, but he busied himself with pulling a chilled glass from the refrigeration unit under the counter, the frost dry and painful against his palm, and tried not to give himself away.

“I’m an unusual woman.”

That wasn’t part of the script, but the script hardly mattered to Cassian anymore. “So you say,” he answered, a little awkward. She was beautiful after all and elegant in a way that the people around here generally weren’t. She shone, too, in a way he didn’t understand and her voice was melodic. And he might have been ‘young,’ but he was old enough to know better. She deserved his respect. He dropped a tab of carbopop into the bottom of the glass and poured the vodka and waited until the hissing and fizzling died down. A white cherry liqueur float across the top finished it off. Pushing it toward her, the liqueur bobbing on a cloud of vapor floating on a small pool of clear liquor, he crossed his arms. “You’ll have to tell me how it is,” he finished, bringing them back to the conversation at hand. “I haven’t made it in ages.”

She nodded, a little mischievous, and lifted the drink to her mouth. He could get used to this, he thought, the thrill of illicit conversation, a secret shared between two people in a room full of dozens more. It was exciting. And if it served a greater cause, all the better.

“It’s good,” she said, nodding with approval. “You’re good.”

You’re good. “That is gratifying to hear.”

“I have a friend coming into town,” she continued. “I’ll send him your way. A guy a little older than me, dirty blond hair. Human. He drinks whiskey. A lot of it.”

“Who doesn’t around here?” he answered, light, lifting his shoulders to show his lack of concern.

“You’ll know him, I’m sure.”

“If you say so.” Cassian’s attention got caught by the flash of a wrist chronometer, someone raising their hand and snapping their fingers at him. “Excuse me.”

“By all means.”

“What do I call you?” he asked, ducking his head just as he was about to step away. “In thank you for the compliment to my skill as a bartender of course.”

She smiled and it was beautiful the way he imagined anyone who did what she could do would feel in the same circumstances. It was the way he’d like to feel one day, righteous and just and good, secure in the knowledge that he was doing right in the galaxy, fixing it up and making it worthy of the beings who populated it.

“I go by Fulcrum,” she said, a harsh name, but one that suited her.

He didn’t repeat it; the walls had ears and though Fulcrum was clearly no secret, he didn’t feel it appropriate, but the name inspired a feeling of hope inside of him that pushed against his breastbone, heavy and comforting. Solid. Certain. With a feeling like this, he could do anything. And though he didn’t speak it aloud, he turned it over in his mind. Over and over and over again. Fulcrum. Fulcrum. Remember that name.

Remember that name.

He would like to be Fulcrum.

And one day, he’d like to be more than that.