A Rodian screams in the corner. Her hulking Gammorean attackers drag her away, ham-fists tight on her spindle-arms. Her lip bleeds.
Cipher Nine tries not to see. Two years, eleven identities, and seventy-three kills out of the Academy, Nine is not the righteous patriot she was at twenty-two. She's battle-hardened, now, and she's always been cool-headed. It doesn't take a lot for her to stride past, screams no different to her ears than the clang of aging shuttle engines or the mutterings of jittering junkies.
Nar Shaddaa is a rotting world, and no amount of angst on Nine's part will eradicate the stench. That kind of lesson is hard learned, that small kindnesses can lead to mission failures, big failures. The kind of failures that will land you dead. Or worse—the kind that will land you at the mercy of the Empire, glory to its dominion all the same.
Nine isn't here to rescue starving Rodians. She's here to recover an agent. Nothing more, nothing less.
Alive is preferable. Dead is acceptable.
"Please, lady, please," a pale twi'lek says from the street corner. His teeth are rot, his eyes are rimmed with red and flies, and weeping sores pick a winding trail down his lekku. He reeks of piss and sickness. "Just a couple o' credits. C'mon, lady. Please."
Nine ignores him, too. As she walks past, deep sobs wrack his shallow lungs. Fat tears stain dirty cheeks. Nine's own chest gives a sympathetic twinge. He is aching and desperate. Wretched. She thinks about killing him on the way out. It would be the biggest kindness she could give him.
He might make his red sand money reporting to some Hutt when times are good, though. Or the Republic. They don't have a lot of influence in this sector, but they've been making a play for power of late. Someone might notice. Someone might see.
Someone might always see.
So Nine digs her fingers deeper into her favorite black leather jacket, ducking her chin between its high lapels. Escapist tendrils of ink-black hair creep in front of her ruby-red eyes. Her whisper-quiet feet carry her to a dim, smoky cantina, its less than savory patrons spilling onto the street. Nine slips among them. She shifts her feet in her boots, feeling the vibroknife against her calf. She wears her blaster on her hip—she doesn't mind if others know that she's armed, she just doesn't want them to know about all of her weapons. Besides, the knife is quiet. Nine likes quiet.
"Juma," she says to the bartender, tossing him a credit chip and a scowl. She's a gangster, tonight. Dirty face, modified blaster, twitchy hands. Lots of eyeliner. It's an easy disguise, one that she's used a lot. She's good at this.
No. Not just good. She's the best.
The drink comes at the same time as a baby-faced human with a gang tattoo on the left side of his neck, his shoulder-length hair swept into a stubby ponytail behind his head. He gives her a beaming smile with his too-white teeth and his too pretty face.
"Well hey there, lovely. I ain't seen you 'round here before," he says. "Name's Jaden."
He's too charming by half. Too sweet, too young. Nine lets herself pity him for the barest of moments. A flash of real emotion, and she's back to her hardened affect. She's working.
"Well, I haven't been around in a while. Name's Lena," Nine says. She lifts a dark brow at him, and glances from his eyes to the chair next to her and back to those wide, blue eyes. She sees the recognition, and the relief. Then, for a long second, she sees his fear. She smells it, wafting above all the sweat and smoke of the dirty cantina. His identity slips for too long. No wonder Keeper sent her in for extraction. Jaden isn't stable here. He isn't in control.
If Nine has seen it, others have seen it. If others have seen it, 'Jaden' doesn't have a whole lot of time to get away.
"Buy you a drink?" Jaden says, slipping into the barstool next to her. He's back to flirtatious eyes and big grins. Perhaps there is hope for him, yet.
"Hmm. You could do that," Nine purrs. She presses the glass to her lips, but doesn't even let herself taste the rancid drink. Juma juice is Lena's usual order. Cipher Nine thinks it's vile. Those kinds of disconnects make the disguise easier. Nine is wearing her Lena-skin, and Lena drinks juma juice. Or at least she pretends to. Nine doesn't drink on jobs unless she absolutely has to.
"Could do that? Got a better suggestion?" Jaden asks.
"Way I see it, we've got a couple of options. We could sit at this bar for a while, you could buy me drinks, and I could drink you under the table. Then we'd go back to my place, pretty thing like you. That sounds a little sloppy, though, and indirect."
"And the other option?" Jaden says. He leans forward, putting his hand on the back of Nine's stool. Nine paints a mock grin on her face, and whispers into his ear.
"Or, we could go back to my place right now and see where the evening takes us." There's a pair of Nikto in the corner, glaring at them. Nine doesn't like the look in their eyes or the slant of their blasters. Jaden plays with her hair for a moment, as though considering his options, but Nine puts a hand on his leg. To the casual observer, it might be a seductive move. She digs her nails through the rough fabric of his pants. "I don't think you have time to consider your options."
Nine doesn't wait for him to answer. She grabs his hand and abandons her drink, dragging him back into the relatively fresh air of the Nar Shaddaa night.
"Stop dragging me, 'Lena.' I've got everything under control, if Keeper—"
"I don't know who the hell you're talking about, babe, but if you want to get to my ship tonight, you'll follow me quietly. Got it?" Nine snaps. Idiot boy, talking about Keeper ten yards away from a cantina crawling with Hutt lackeys. Crawling with the people he's been spying on.
"Seriously, we can slow down. There's no—"
"Shut. Up." Nine keeps her feet moving and her face forward, but the Nikto from the cantina are following behind.
She puts her hand on her gun.
Left, right, two flights up. Where is her speeder? Too far. Her landing pad is too far. Her heart rate remains steady. She's been in worse spots. Much worse.
She passes the same Twi'lek from before, his sobs still heaving in his chest. She's almost back, almost there. Almost, almost—
"Hey, Lena. Haven't seen you in a while," one of the Nikto says. The taller one. Jeedo. The short one was T'wagu. Nine has met them before, but not here. It takes her a moment to place them. Kessel. She knows them from Kessel.
Kessel did not go well.
"Hey, boys." She does not hesitate. Her knife comes out of her boot. It lands in T'wagu's throat. Jaden, for all his faltering bravery, shoots clean, and Jeedo falls to the ground. They weren't bad guys for gangsters. Nine had almost liked them, once. A moment of emotion, a twinge of regret. Then nothing. She is empty as a dress-form, existing only as the meaty insides for her many identity-skins.
Jaden curses. He does so loudly and verbosely and in several languages while Nine grabs her knife and pulls it from T'wagu's scaly skin.
"This is bad, this is really bad. Sithspit. Shavit. You're—what am I gonna do? Ked'ro is going to know, shavit, shavit, shavit! I've made an enemy of a Hutt, and I've only been an agent for three frakking months. I have to get off world, I have to—"
"Look, kid. Jaden. Jaden."
He keeps babbling, though, keeps cursing. He's stuck. He's panicking. He's too green for failure.
"Mik," Nine says. At the sound of his real name, the boy stops. "I'm taking you to my speeder, and then you and me are going home, you hear me? We're going home." This still isn't the kind of alleyway where you speak words like "Dromund Kaas," not if you want to walk away with your life.
Mik nods silently. Nodding is good. Silent is good.
#
The Phantom casts bright light throughout its holds and decks. Agent Mik Nauten sits cross-legged on his temporary bunk. Hyperspace streaks by his window, and his hair drips clean refresher water onto his borrowed shirt—Imperial gray, of course. Glory to the Empire, of course. Glory to the nation that made this too-young broken boy, may she conquer all her enemies with the stolen innocence of all her brightest youth.
"Hey," Nine says, rapping lightly on the door frame. He looks up. Without his dirt-and-grime mask, Nine can see the freckles on his cheeks. He'll need a specialized medical droid for the tattoo removal, but his Watcher will see to that. He looks like a boy named Mik again.
"Five," he says. The word echoes off the metal and wood walls of Nine's beloved Phantom. Its minimalist aesthetic feels cold for a moment, empty compared to the rough-edged emotion in that single utterance. "That's my count. I've killed five people now. Five people are dead because of me, and none of them were the monsters I'd thought they'd be."
Nine knows that feeling. Was it only two years ago that her count had been as low as five? Five had been a hard number. Ten had been harder. Fifty was the worst. Fifty is when the girl that used to live inside Cipher Nine died, the one who once wore pigtails and pink dresses, the one who made crowns of wildflowers in the summertime, the one who bore the name her parents gave her. Terraz'enia'naverrod.
She hasn't heard that name spoken properly in years. When she entered the academy, she became the Imperial-friendly Zenian Averrod, and even that fiercely competitive, sharp-tongued patriot is gone. Zenian Averrod died even before Terraz'enia'naverrod. Somewhere around fifteen kills. Maybe she limped along until twenty. It's hard to be a patriot when you spend your whole life as the underhanded shadow of the Empire, the knife in the dark.
"The monsters are easy, and you'll find some," Nine says. "The thrilling heroics come around occasionally."
"I always thought…I thought the thrilling heroics would be more common. They're not, are they? I wasn't trained to be a hero. I was trained to be gun on legs."
It's a sharp truth. Zenian has already been cut by it. Nine doesn't feel the sting.
"Listen, Mik. You aren't a Watcher. You're a field agent. It's not your job to know the big picture, and it's not mine either. Sometimes…sometimes when you're in there, when you're talking to people and knowing them-even if you knew it before, which you probably didn't-that big picture gets lost. The best way to deal with it, the best way to get through it is to just put your head down and do exactly the job you need to do. If that job is stealing weapons, steal weapons. If that job is killing a good person, you kill that good person. Stop being Mik. Build a self that would do what you have to, and be that self."
"What if I don't want to? What if I want to be Mik?" His eyes well with tears, but his voice is steady. Nine hears all that raw emotion, all of his loss and hurt.
"You don't get to be Mik anymore. You don't get to go back."
"Can you really kill people without feeling anything? Can you really just put yourself away like that?"
"Someday…someday you won't have to put Mik away anymore. Mik will just be gone. It'll be easier, then."
"Easy? Is whoever you were before all this really gone?"
"That's a big question," Nine says. She doesn't want to say yes. She doesn't want to say that Zenian is gone.
"That wasn't a lot of answers." He stares at her with steady defiance, his shoulders still hunched.
"Get some sleep. We'll be back in Kaas City tomorrow afternoon."
Cipher Nine leaves Mik alone, and picks her way back to the cockpit. She can hear Kaliyo scurrying around the cargo hold somewhere, and from Mik's room she imagines she can hear a soft sob.
He is broken, surely as that twi'lek junkie with his sores and his stench. He has the Empire to rebuild him, though, the same Empire that tore him apart. When they solder him back together, he will be scarred and hollow, but he will be stronger. That's how it works. That's how it always works.
An hour later, Mik knocks on the door of the cockpit.
"Cipher Nine," he muses. "What's your real name?"
"You just said it. It's Cipher Nine." Her word's ring true in the sterile air, but Mik shakes his head.
"I don't want to forget how to feel compassionate." He and Nine lock eyes. He looks barely old enough to drink in a Cantina. He's barely younger than Nine. He's so much fuller than her. Some people fill up as they grow old. They fill up with good food and good wine, with husbands and wives and children and grandchildren. They gobble up holiday photographs and summers on a beach. Not Nine. Probably not Mik, either. They'll drain out of scars left by too many kills, their souls leaking through holes in their skin.
"It's seventy-four," Nine says. She speaks with the same steady cadence she always uses, her unmasked voice. It sounds hollow. "T'wagu makes seventy-four. You'll lose yourself, but you won't forget your count."
"Seventy-four is a lot."
"Yeah. Seventy-four is a lot."
Mik settles into the copilot's chair, and Nine stares out the window. For a split second, she is Zenian, she is Terraz'enia'naverrod, she is a girl who used to laugh. She is a girl who used to ache.
She feels the weight of seventy-four lives. It is a bittersweet agony, the kind that makes a person feel alive.