The sand was black on Lah'mu, and the skies were gray. The moisture vaporators and the droids used for agricultural work continued to whir through their daily motions as if nothing much had changed, and he supposed that very little really had.

Lyra Erso lay where she had fallen. No one had seen to her body, and two days left out in the cold had left her clothing and her hair as wet as everything else on Lah'mu, as if she had drowned rather than burned with the sudden burst of a blaster rifle.

He'd see to her before he went; there would be time enough for that after he had seen to the living, if there was anything here left living to be seen to. He hadn't known Lyra well, but he thought she'd probably prefer that. She'd always seemed practical, in the way that any woman whose husband was a target on his family's back would have to be in order to survive.

The moment that he saw the open hatch on the hidden place that he had helped to build, he knew what he would find. He went to look anyway. The years and two rebellions had built a hard shell of metal and pragmatism around his bones, but he had always been a dreamer at heart.

The hole was deep, and it was dark. He was almost – almost – glad not to see the Erso girl crouched there, staring up at him from the thick blackness at the bottom. Alone in the dark was no place for a child.

He didn't linger. No helping her now, and no rescue to ride to this time. The Erso girl was gone, or dead, and he had suffered enough losses not to linger over this one. This wasn't the first, or the worst; it wouldn't be the last.

Saw Gerrera returned to the farm, gathered his men from their fruitless search of the house (as if Galen Erso or his daughter would be found tucked away in some corner, perhaps hiding under thin sheets on beds or in with chipped plates in cupboards), and did what he could for the dead. He left.

In the years that would follow, he wouldn't linger overlong on the memory of the Ersos; they would wander across his mind less frequently than some and perhaps a little more frequently than others, given the rumors that trickled to his ears about Galen Erso's resumed work for the Empire, for all that the form and function of that work remained amorphous even insofar as rumors went.

He didn't forget the girl, though (for all that he barely remembered her at all, big green eyes and chubby toddler legs and an alarming tendency to grab at his blaster during the long journey to Lah'mu that had left him wondering if there was a way to slap at her fingers without Lyra Erso suddenly and spontaneously developing Force powers that allowed her to kill him with motherly ire alone). He didn't forget her, and when the subject of her father arose, he would always think, briefly and perhaps a little wistfully (he had always been a dreamer at heart), that it would have been nice to save her.

Jyn's papa's fingers were cold, white-knuckled where he bent them around her own, much smaller hand. She thought that the grip was meant to be comforting, but his jaw was tight and his gaze set straight ahead, and she was not comforted.

The shuttle was too-bright and cold, nothing like the soft gray light outside the farm or the muted gold within, so she curled closer into his side anyway, clung to his big fingers until they stole some of the warmth from hers.

"What a sweet child you've raised, Galen," said the man in white, and it was too bright and too jovial a way to speak to the bereaved, even if he hadn't been the one to cause the bereavement, so disconnected from the moment that it took Jyn a moment to realize that he was talking about her. "So calm and well-behaved."

Perhaps that was the moment when she decided to be anything but.

It was not a conscious decision, and in the moment she mostly felt cold and small and scared. Beneath more physical discomforts, there was a yawning hole somewhere low in her chest that would swallow her if she thought for too long about why her mama was not there, bracketing her in and providing all of the warmth and protection and courage that she couldn't quite reach on her own.

When the shuttle landed on Eadu and the troopers pulled her away from her papa, responding to the order implicit in the hand that the man in white waved, she squirmed and struggled , scraped dull nails futilely against sleek armor and kicked one of them in the helmet hard enough to make him recoil, even if it did no good. She screamed like a thing possessed, threw the sort of tantrum that her mama never would have tolerated.

Only after she was safely ensconced in the room that was to be hers, its windowless duracrete walls covered in filmy white drapes and its single narrow bed swaddled in pale blue the color of the sky between rains – "You'll all live in comfort," the man she would learn was named Orson Krennic had told Lyra, and it had been a lie but it hadn't been intended as one – did she stop to wonder if her father had screamed too, or if that had just been her own voice ricocheting off the close walls of the shuttle, filling the silence where his protests should have been.

The man in white visited Jyn three times during her first year on Eadu.

The first time he swept around the room, running gloved hands over every surface in a way that made her feel itchy and angry beneath her skin even though she remained reluctant to claim the space as her own. He smiled too much and asked her how she was settling in, as if he expected her to like him, as though a fistful of days were enough for her to have forgotten the way her mother's arms fit around her.

He took off one of his gloves and crouched to offer his hand to her, the smile still sitting strange on his thin lips. "My name is Orson Krennic," he said, "and I hope that you and I will become friends."

Jyn considered his outstretched hand for a long moment before reaching out her own. Then she dug her nails into his hand hard enough to make him bleed, childish fingers scrambling against his skin even as he jerked back.

The way he muttered the words her mother had tried to pretend she hadn't accidentally taught Jyn as he strode out of the room and the red on his bare hand felt like a victory.

The way that he tossed, "Galen will be so disappointed that you're not ready to see him yet," over his shoulder felt like less of one.

In the broad scheme of things, Lyra Erso had not had very long to teach her daughter anything.

When the simplified math problems that Galen Erso provided for his daughter (always about things like crop yield and water usage, never touching on the things that he pondered late into the night and which they all politely pretended had been left behind on Coruscant) began to outstrip her ability to understand them, Jyn had not worried that he would love her less for not having inherited his unrivaled genius; in the manner of a child who had never been anything other than well-loved, the possibility had never occurred to her. She had worried about disappointing him, though.

Lyra had pressed a kiss to her cheek and said, "Better to be clever than to be a genius, in any case," with the kind of sly glance at her husband that marked the comment as a joke for him as much as an attempt to comfort their daughter.

She had gone with her mother when Lyra visited neighboring farms, to trade for replacement parts for the droids or seeds or utensils, things that they needed but wouldn't dare trade for directly when the rare cargo shipments came from off world, because even the smallest chance of Galen or Lyra being recognized was too great a risk. Lyra had bartered with and wheedled the women from whom they bought their few precious luxury goods, datacrons for Galen and the occasional toy for Jyn, until they were both red-cheeked and breathless and smiling, but had listened silently when the pinched-faced man who hoarded mechanical parts told her his prices, countered only once, and then doled out the credits regardless of how much he had marked up the price and whether he had agreed to her counter-offer or not.

Jyn had asked about it once. Her mother had shrugged and said, "If you want something from someone, push them as hard as you can – but know when to stop pushing, at least if what you want from them isn't something you can afford to walk away from."

Lyra Erso had taught her daughter some things: that it was better to be clever and adaptable than it was to be almost anything else, that she had to know what she was willing to walk away from, and that she had to be willing to sacrifice for the things that she wasn't.

The finer points of those lessons did not really matter or make sense to Jyn until she was older, but she did not need the finer points to understand that she needed to be clever, because her papa was not something she could stand to walk away from, and would not have been even if he hadn't been all she had left.

The next time that Orson Krennic came to see her, she stared at him from her spot on the bed, surrounded by the datatapes and toys that had been sent in some strange, misguided effort to placate her ("You will all live in comfort.") and which she had largely ignored until boredom and a child's curiosity had undermined her resolve. She pretended that she was looking at the pinched-faced man back on Lah'mu, who was greedy and mean but who had not murdered her mother, and managed to sound very nearly polite when she said, "I want to see my papa."

Krennic tilted his head. He was not smiling this time; the curl of his lips said that he might want to sneer, and the expression looked more natural than smiles had. "Are you ready to behave?" he asked.

Jyn was not ready to behave. She was ready to rebel, throw fits, throw things at his stupid, stupid face.

She was ready to see her papa, though. "Yes," she mumbled.

Later, much later, Jyn would realize that Krennic had not been either convinced or swayed by any action of hers; he would have let her see Galen regardless, because Galen Erso and his genius were also things that Krennic was unwilling to walk away from, and Galen could only be assuaged by knowledge of Jyn's continued well-being offered by an untrustworthy source for so long. In the moment, when Krennic said, "Very well, then, why don't you change into a fresh frock and I'll take you to see him?" if felt nearly as much like a victory as his blood beneath her nails had.

She had ignored most of the offerings of clothing deposited in her room by silent droids or by the troopers, who tended to ignore her whenever they were forced to enter her room, as though she were the ghost of some particularly small and angry Jedi Master. There was rather a lot of clothing. Someone had apparently told Krennic that this was a thing that would matter to the daughter of a genius farmer; she had once admired the Nerf hide boots the teenage son of a neighbor had taken particular pride in, but other than that they had been wrong. Perhaps she would have cared more, had she grown up on Coruscant instead of Lah'mu.

Right now, she cared only because Krennic cared, and it seemed too little a thing to risk him changing his mind about taking her to her papa. She grabbed the clothing that seemed least wrinkled from a prolonged stay on the floor and stepped into the refresher to change when Krennic showed no intention of stepping out to accommodate her.

It was the first time she had been out of her room since arriving on Eadu. The lights in the hall were brighter, and the bare walls starker, and she almost liked them better than her room for that. The nice room was as much of a lie as Krennic's smiles; the ugliness of duracrete walls and unforgiving lighting seemed more honest.

They went down one corridor and then the next, a twisting maze that Jyn didn't have much time to contemplate, since Krennic didn't seem inclined to shorten his pace for her the way her father did when they walked together. It was briefly tempting to grab the edge of his flapping cloak, less to slow him down and more to annoy, but before Jyn could give the idea more than a passing thought they reached a door.

The room they entered was clearly intended for work, not for living in, and her papa was the only other occupant, although given the number of datapads and the amount of flimsiplast spread across the tables, he probably wasn't the only one who worked here. She had a moment to take in Galen Erso – hair too short, face too bare and too clean, clothing too crisp, dark circles beneath the eyes too dark, wrong – before he was crossing the short distance between them and folding her into his arms. That, at least, was right and familiar, if a touch more desperate than his hugs had ever been, saving that last one on Lah'mu when he had thought that their parting would last longer than it ultimately had.

"Stardust," he murmured into her hair, "my Stardust."

He was shaking, Jyn realized, just a little, enough for her to feel it where she was crushed against his chest but probably not enough for Krennic to see. "Papa," she said, unnerved, "I can't breathe." It wasn't what she had meant to say, and when his arms loosened reflexively she burrowed closer, because that also wasn't what she had meant to make happen.

"Touching," Krennic said, and Jyn had not been capable of forgetting that he was there, but she had perhaps for a moment come close, because the interruption was, if not quite startling, then more jarring than it ought to have been. "Try to keep the reunion brief, Galen. I still have use for you, and I expect results."

There was something in his voice, some sly insinuation that Jyn couldn't quite pin down. Her papa's arms tightened around her again, and this time, Jyn did not complain.

It was not the last time that Jyn visited her father, although after that she was always accompanied by a Stormtrooper, not by Krennic himself. Her papa was always happy to see her, but he always seemed distracted, too, and the inky smudges beneath his eyes were more pronounced with each visit.

The visits became fewer and further between.

"He barely asks about you at all anymore," Krennic said during his third visit, near the end of Jyn's first year on Eadu. His cruelty was casual, more a reflex than anything done with intentionality; Jyn did not matter to him enough as anything other than a pawn for him to set out deliberately to hurt her, but he was also not a man who could see a weapon in his hand and not give into the desire to use it.

Krennic tapped something into the computer set into the wall, the one that Jyn couldn't access other than to play the datatapes they gave her, and the door slid open. It slid closed again a moment later, and then open when he stepped closer to it to demonstrate. "I'm tired of diverting staff to make sure that you feed yourself and use the refresher. You're a big girl. Surely you can manage it yourself." He wagged a finger at her, the kind of friendly, playful gesture that was always so at odds with her desire to claw his eyes out and his own clear disdain for her. "You can see your papa, but I don't want you to distract him. He's doing important work for the Empire."

He left before she could find the words to reply.

The first time she got hungry enough to creep into the mess hall, she nearly walked right back out. Inside was a confusing mix of lab uniforms and civilian clothes and military armor, most of the noise coming from a group of science officers arguing heatedly at a corner table (her father was not among them) but the rest of the room underscoring their debate with a dull roar of speech and motion.

One of the off-duty troopers, recently enough from his shift that he'd only had time to remove his helmet and reveal the close-cropped hair beneath and the smattering of freckles over the dark skin of his nose, took pity when he saw her struggling with her tray and reached out to take it from her. "Come on. You can sit with me." He wasn't much friendlier than that, but after a year spent more-or-less starved for contact, not much friendly was friendly enough for her to trail willingly after him.

The men who had fired on her mother had been dressed in the same armor. For all she knew, he was one of them – she had never seen any of them without their helmets – but she didn't know what to do with that possibility, so she left if behind.

"Most of us are glad to get a break from nutrition bars and protein shakes," her companion noted, once they had both eaten enough to take the edge off their hunger. "Here we have—eh, looks like veg-meat in... some kind of sauce?" He sounded only moderately sure that this was an improvement; the shiny white armor over his shoulders moved awkwardly when he shrugged. There was a slick drop of gravy on the front of it, which Jyn found satisfying for reasons she couldn't quite name. "The caf here is better than what they serve on the ships, at least, and that's all I really care about." He smiled at her like he had made a joke. She didn't really get it, but she smiled back, and that seemed to be the correct response, because he kept up the idle string of conversation until she finished her food, long after his own had disappeared.

She saw him again at dinner, but not after that. She learned that, with the exception of the Death Troopers pulled from Krennic's personal guard and whatever officer had ended up in charge of the garrison which guarded the laboratory – so backwater regardless of how important the work going on there was that being given charge of it was generally considered either a mark of disfavor or a sign that the officer was new enough to need seasoning – the troopers stationed there were cycled out at regular intervals. Being posted on Eadu was something of a reward for them, light duty and comparatively decent food after long stints in space or the heavy concussion of grenades on worlds not yet quite tamed by the Empire.

It was the first thing that she learned about the Eadu that existed outside of the four walls of her room; it would not be the last. She learned what to eat in the mess and what to avoid, that the grim-faced man who doled it all out could be counted on to give her an extra portion, for all that he didn't speak more than two words to her at a time. She learned the maze of hallways, until she could navigate them blindfolded and, once security had loosed up enough for her to step outside, she learned that the skies never stopped pouring rain. That didn't bother her, child of a moisture-rich world that she was (Lah'mu, always Lah'mu; Coruscant was nothing but a distant dream by the time she was seven or eight, and sometimes a nightmare, because that had been the first place she had laid eyes on the monster that would rip her family apart). She learned that the engineer with the mousy brown hair would deny her entrance into the lab because she felt that Jyn was a distraction from the Work, but that the one with the broad, shiny bald patch on his head had daughters of his own back home, six of them, and would leave the door open behind him and slip her pieces of candy from the pockets of his jumpsuit when he thought that no one else was looking. She learned to judge which of the troopers assigned to the laboratory would ignore her, and which would resent her, and which would try to turn her into a pet, and how each of those might be useful in turn.

After that first meal, she never again forgot herself long enough to like any of them; this, too, was a lesson learned from Eadu.

It was easy not to like the troopers; all of them were gone in the time it took for the rainy season to become the rainier season, or for that to turn into the season in which occasionally two days in a row it didn't rain. Some days, it was harder to remember to hate the other faces that the Empire wore, the ones not hidden behind polished helmets of black or white.

She still visited her papa regularly, but sometimes, late at night and hidden away in her room, she wondered why she bothered. More and more, he was absorbed in his work. Even if her early memories from Coruscant were hazy ones, she remembered that he had been like this then: always loving, but always twisted up in some complex problem, so that sometimes if she spoke and drew him out of the workings of his mind he looked at her for a second, maybe two, as if she was wearing the face of a stranger, before the familiar warmth and affection returned.

Once, he said, voice as absently gentle as the hand that he stroked over her hair, eyes distant and mind deep in whatever equation was on the datapad in front of him, "Sometimes, I'm glad you're here. I would have missed you, Stardust."

Later that night, she would wonder if to be missed would have been better somehow; if a missing thing had more value than one constantly within reach.

Once, he put down whatever he had been working on and pulled her into his lap, arms closing around her bony shoulders. She did not fit as well as she once had, but she tucked her head under his chin anyway.

"Remember," he said, "whatever I do, I do it to protect you."

The words were familiar; he'd said them once before. She hadn't understood them then, but she had said that she did. She didn't say it this time; he had spoken softly, and she could pretend not to have heard.

There were small things, true things, which remained true no manner how much else changed, no matter how kind or how cruel the world or how capricious the roll of the dice. Here were two about Jyn Erso:

One: She had no home. No matter how close or how far, Galen Erso was at best a memory and at worst a ghost. He was the distant sun around which she perambulated, or perhaps she was the star, never quite pulling him into her orbit; he was not something which she could carry on her back, crawl inside and rest and be still. He was constant living proof that sometimes, to love a thing was not enough; and,

Two: She took her friends where she could find them.