Ryssa Jeanida never saw the highest levels of Coruscant until the day she boarded an Imperial shuttle to the COMPNOR training academy.
Kel Aani spent every afternoon since the age of six hanging around the Kuat Drive Yards. None of his friends were surprised when he became an apprentice.
Ryssa learned which words can sway a population and how to paint a culture as "other" with a few strokes.
Kel built faster, more efficient engines, then tried to design one that could save a pilot's life in a firefight.
"Well done," said her instructor after her first patriotic play. Test audiences were quantifiably swayed without a mention of Imperial military might.
"Amazing," said his master, noting how he'd halved the weight of the neutralizer.
Within weeks, they were handed grey uniforms and white assignment papers and sent to the star destroyer Scylla.
Kel at once explored the control room, in awe of everything he found.
Ryssa stared, dazed, at the expanse of space, where Scylla and its sister ship the Charybdis reigned unchallenged.
They'd never seen anything so beautiful.
After that day, they were lucky if they caught another glimpse. Ryssa worked at a holodesk far from the wide viewports. Her superior officer had little skill and less taste, so she spent late nights redoing his work until it was clever, subtle, and almost artistic.
Kel, still too junior to touch the Destroyer's systems, worked in a hangar near the front of the ship. Frantic TIE pilots and disgruntled shuttle mechanics found a ready listener, eager to try an experimental realignment if it might solve their problems.
The Emperor would never hear of them—the general commanding the Scylla might never hear of them—but in their circles people knew their work at a glance.
Ryssa had the night off. Her superior officer had received no new assignments, so she had no reworking to do. She turned off the holodesk, threw her coat over her shoulder, and tripped on a mouse droid in her haste to reach the starboard viewports.
"Oh." They were passing over Felucia, and it turned beneath them, teals and purples, chaotic. They had just launched a campaign there celebrating the model Imperial citizen. Orin took the primary assignments, but she was proud of the news stories he gave her.
The longer route to her quarters kept her near the viewports as long as possible. When a stormtrooper platoon threatened to march over her on its way to barracks, she cut through a hangar bay—and there she met him.
His smile was too genuine for a man fixing a hyperdrive long past the day's official end. The freighter pilot he was explaining his methods to watched from the ground in a mixture of wonder and exhaustion. The boy—he couldn't be much older than her—tossed his cap aside and rolled up his sleeves, revealing curly hair and matching oil stains smeared across his face and arm from wiping his forehead. Their eyes met as she passed. Before she could look away awkwardly, he raised a hand and said, "Have a good night!" She did, and continued to do so the following nights, because she went back.
The second night she properly introduced herself, rank and all, and he said, "Kel Aani, ma'am," wiping his hands on his jumpsuit before offering her one. One didn't usually shake hands with superior officers. Either she looked so junior he didn't realize she technically outranked him or he already wanted to be better friends than official designations allowed. She hoped the second was more than wishful thinking.
The third night he showed her his work. It fascinated her, as if she were watching him speak some tactile alien language. When the shuttle's engine finally shifted from spitting to a low hum, they both smiled. She didn't return to her quarters until very late.
The fourth night Orin had a special assignment, so she came to work early, stayed late, and had no time to visit the hangar bay.
She couldn't make late trips the next week either. The model Imperial citizen campaign was being expanded to the Galidraan system, but every few mornings she took the long way to the office and said hello to Kel. She'd bring two drinks and stand by his tool cabinet, one hand behind her back, while he sat on the nose of the shuttle.
Their conversations were rarely long and never dull. Kel talked about his apprenticeship; Ryssa explained her extended family back on Coruscant. She loved most hearing about his brother's home in the hills of Kuat. She'd never walked on grass, but this boy told stories of waking up with bug bites, of cleaning dirt out of skinned knees. The lone jebwa flower, floating in a bowl of water on her shelf at home, seemed suddenly insignificant.
"What's it like in COMPNOR?" he asked, and she, anxious for him to find her as interesting as she found him, told her most impressive stories. When he met these with polite encouragement but nothing special, she remembered the briefing she ran when Orin showed up hung over—and made Kel laugh.
If Ryssa was getting less and less sleep, working later to cover her mornings, her posture never faltered. The new shine in her eyes overmatched the shadows beneath them. If Kel seemed expectant and scatterbrained some mornings, his team didn't mention it. Even he didn't realize how often he glanced to the bay doors at footsteps. The week Ryssa went to the medbay, Kel had the strangest sense of forgetting something important. When he was temporarily transferred to a different hangar to work with the Interceptor squadron there, Ryssa woke up every morning too early and couldn't fall asleep again.
The Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Star. Ryssa had never liked the campaigns based around "Obey or your planet is dust." That style of persuasion required no cleverness.
Kel didn't know how he felt, so he landed on sadness he'd never seen the Death Star control systems. They were said to be a marvel.
The morning after the announcement, Ryssa sat with her hands in her lap as Kel wired a new compressor. The silence built to a colossal weight. They finally said at once, "I just repaired a TIE pilot's targeting;" "My Academy bunkmates were there," "he was there."
The next day Ryssa didn't come. The day after they talked about the new food in the starboard canteen.
Orin still couldn't design a slogan without appealing to violence, but the general on the Charybdis preferred that approach. There were whispers of a transfer that would leave Ryssa in charge of the department. After twelve recommendations and three evaluations, the chief systems designer was finally considering Kel for an apprenticeship. Conversation now simmered with hazy mentions of the future, but they never fell to daydreaming. It felt wrong to be excited, knowing how things must then change. Then the rebel ship came.
It crashed in a mid-level port hangar with nothing but smoking engines, a mud-stained astromech, and a wispy corpse in pilot's uniform. Officers took the droid away and stripped its memory. Stormtroopers shot the corpse in the head, then disposed of it. Loitering around the ship was forbidden, but by nightfall most of the Scylla's crew had run an errand near that hangar.
Ryssa was one of the few with legitimate business that took her to that side of the ship. She saw Kel leaning against the bay doors in silence. "BTL-A4 starfighter," he explained, but realized that didn't actually explain and tried again. "Y-wing." She recognized it. "It's a wreck; they'll junk it. I'd do anything to get inside her."
"What's so special?"
He shrugged. "Something different."
When she returned to the office, Orin was closing a holoscreen conversation with the general. The droid carried Rebel propaganda, which the general had issued them for analysis.
Ryssa didn't know what came over her. "May I see it?" she asked.
"Can I have a look?" asked Kel of his commanding officer.
Orin and the chief technician hesitated.
"If I understand their technique—"
"—see what makes her tick—"
"—I can combat it more directly in future campaigns."
"—I might pick up new ideas for our boys."
Orin rolled his eyes. "I'm not lifting a finger for it. Don't try anything funny."
The chief technician shrugged. "Do it on your own time. Any problems in your hangar take precedence." Kel beamed. "I'll get you clearance."
"I'll transfer you the files."
Past a certain point every night, the only ones awake on the ship were the guard troopers and the flight crew. At that empty hour Ryssa was bent over her holodesk and Kel over the Y-wing's control systems.
The propaganda consisted of a four-minute speech, a prettied-up actor dressed as a rebel officer. Ryssa frowned. The words were trite, the statistics unsubstantiated. The speechwriter had tried to follow the rules of persuasion, but she wasn't sure they'd ever been taught them. The dangerous Rebel Alliance.
She listened to the speech thrice more with a notes file open. After the fourth listen, she dictated counterarguments: officially cited statistics, character defamations. It was too easy to fight them. The rebels pushed the underdog angle relentlessly, but what else did they have? A real challenge would be writing an effective speech in their shoes; without popular recognition, celebrity appeal, even the option to back up persuasion with force.
She rechecked the lackluster statistics. If expressed as a percentage rather than hard data, they painted the rebellion in a more successful light. The actor-speaker rang false and had to go. She opened a new file.
Kel sat on his heels in the midst of the deconstructed sensor array. He was up to his elbows in grease-marks; his nose and the curl hanging over his forehead were singed from a stray ion burst. He smiled, wiped his nose and winced when he touched the burn, and began reassembling. The rebel ship had stronger engines than its TIE counterparts, and he'd noted a few tweaks to try later.
He found a wiring arrangement that had to cause poor acceleration. It could be fixed. One sleeve had fallen down, and he pushed it back up. He set into the alterations happily enough, but as time ticked by, unease crept into him. He was doing the right thing. His research would make Imperial fighters better. This couldn't help the rebellion. As he climbed up to reinforce the thruster couplings, he wondered if the chief technician would agree.
Ryssa didn't go back to her quarters, and she didn't mean to sleep. When she started awake, head on the holodesk, she found a note beneath her hand. For once, Kel had come to her. I'm at the Y-wing today, it said, if you want. She ejected the files and hid them in her pocket.
Kel's eyes were heavy and he looked away when officers passed, but he was excited to see her, and she let him lift her into the cockpit to show her what he'd done. She took in none of the technical terms and all of how happy it made him to say them and point them out. The ship ran better than new.
"And how are you?" he finally said.
Exhausted.
"I saw. What were you working on so late?"
She stepped out of the guard trooper's line of sight and showed him the propaganda. At first she only explained her counterarguments, but under the hangar bay lights they read like student work. Hesitantly, she gave him her reworked speech.
Once she finished, he whistled low. It was good work, and absolute treason. He asked why.
"Intellectual exercise," she said. "Why did you fix the rebel's ship?"
"It was a challenge. It was fun." They'd both faltered in their answers.
He leaned back in the pilot's seat, tinkering with displays. She ran her fingers over the cracked leather of the gunner's chair.
"What'll you do with it?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"I don't either."
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at the hangar ceiling. Ryssa stood as an officer ought and as she hadn't around him in weeks, feet shoulder-width apart, hands behind her back.
"It's not like we could get them to the rebels," she said. Her words were heavy.
"Course not," he said, tense. "No pilot."
Ryssa watched Kel run his hands over the controls. She tried to think of a funny thing Orin did yesterday. Her hands twitched. She'd forgotten drinks. The buzz of hangar lights melded with the low rumble of speech around them; welding torches hissed, droids chattered, hundreds of boots marched, far away the flight crew pressed buttons flashing white and green and red.
"I was never afraid to work here," she said. The silence had just enough space to hang the unspoken "until." "What can we do?" she breathed.
His eyes met hers; braver and more frightened at once. "I don't know."
A hollow little laugh. "I don't either."
She reached out to him. He took her hand.