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Dissociation

Chapter 1

Scarif

Jyn leaned on Cassian, and he against her. The turbolift was a hundred paces behind them when a flash brighter than any sunrise light the horizon. Within moments, Scarif's surface began to peel back as the shockwave of the Death Star's blast expanded. Just like on Jedha, only this time there would be no daring escape.

They were finished, both of them. They had given everything they had to the Rebellion. The plans were sent. There was nothing left for them to do, other than meet their fate. The beach ahead of them was as good a place as any. Jyn had never seen a beach before. Not on Coruscant in her youth, or on any of the planets between then and now. With the fighters in the sky breaking off their dogfights to make a hasty exit, and the fighting on the ground finished, it seemed peaceful, almost welcoming.

A shout from the right caught Jyn's attention. An imperial officer there was directing men into a shuttle, frantically trying to evacuate before they were destroyed. Destroyed by her father's creation, as she soon would be. Ironic.

Whatever I do, I do it to protect you. Her father had said that to her once, right before Krennic had come for them. Galen Erso wouldn't have wanted his work to be what killed his daughter. Jyn was sure of that.

The Empire had taken everything from her eventually. Her mother, her father, Saw, not to mention any semblance of normalcy. Now all that was left for them to take was her life, but a stubborn voice inside of her—her mother's, perhaps—protested. Had she really come this far to just give up now?

For the first time since she had sent the signal to the Rebellion Fleet, Jyn began to hope again—hope that she might survive.

"Cassian," she whispered.

"What?" he answered back. He sounded bad. That fall had done a lot of damage. Even if the two of them escaped, there was no guarantee he would make it…

"We've got to get out of here," she told him.

He turned his head slightly and wearily caught her eye. "Now's really not a good time."

She almost laughed, because she felt the same way. After everything they had been through, lying down and letting it end sounded wonderfully appealing… but some part of her protested. Chirrut had never given up. Even two decades after the Empire had purged all memory of the Jedi, he remained a guardian of their holy temple. Baze, for all of his protestations, had stayed as well. If the two of them had continued to defy the Empire, then so could she.

"I'm serious. We've got to go," Jyn said.

"How?" Cassian asked.

Fair question. Bodhi hadn't answered their comms in the elevator, and they both expected the worst. Jyn looked around again, and her gaze stuck on the evacuating Imperial officers. Past a stripe of foliage, she could see a steady line of Imperials streaming from the Citadel Tower. They moved quickly, but orderly, with classic Imperial precision. The only other ships that Jyn could see around them were either already airborne or smoldering wrecks on the beach. There was only one way out of here…

You know where to go, her mother said. And Jyn realized that she did. The timing would have to be perfect, and they would have to hope that the Imperials weren't paying close attention, but with the planet literally being ripped apart around them, that seemed like a safe bet.

"Come on," Jyn said, changing their course away from the beach and toward the landing pad in the tower's shadow.

Cassian grunted in pain as she quickened their pace, but he kept up with her. The sand beneath their feet kept giving way, forcing the two of them to move at an awkward jog exacerbated by their injuries. TIE fighters screamed at them as they passed overhead, and Jyn ducked instinctively as they crashed into the foliage, pulling Cassian along with her. She could feel him sagging as they picked there way through the shoot of woods that separated them from the rear of the landing pad.

"Just a little further," she said, not certain which of them she was reassuring

He grunted something in response, but she didn't catch it. There was a dull roar coming from the ocean that was growing louder every second. Unlike on Jedha, she couldn't see the growing wave of destruction approaching. Somehow that made things even worse.

One more stumble over the roots of a large tree and they were at one of the durasteel barriers that demarcated the landing pad. Jyn peeked around the edge and saw that the stream of Imperials was petering out. The officer waving people on looked in Jyn's direction, but not at her, over the treeline. Whatever he saw there was enough to make him pick up his urgency. He banged on the underside of the shuttle and shouted something into a comlink.

Jyn turned to find Cassian sitting with his back to the barrier. He looked at her without turning his head.

"The ground's shaking. Did you notice?"

She had. The tropical forest was starting to collapse behind them too. There were sharp cracks of splitting wood echoing around them. A gnarled tree that looked decades old twisted awkwardly and fell away from them, taking down two of its smaller neighbors on the way to the ground.

"Yeah, like I said, we've got to go. Come on." Jyn grabbed Cassian by the arm and pulled him to his feet. He winced, but didn't complain. "That's our ride out," she said, pointing around the barrier.

"Tell me you're joking," Cassian said.

"Got a better idea?" she countered. When he didn't voice any she continued. "When they take off, we sneak onto the landing gear. It's standard Imperial design for the gear to retract into the cargo hold." Or at least, she was pretty sure it was. "If all goes well, we end up with a free ride out of here."

"And if it doesn't?"

"We get crushed, fall to our deaths, or suffocate in a vacuum. Take your pick."

"I'll go with 'all goes well,'" he replied.

"Good."

Anything else Jyn was going to say was drowned out by the shuttle's engines firing.

"Let's go!" Cassian shouted over the roar with surprising vigor. He crouched low and moved past her around the barrier, pushing off of it as though giving himself the last burst of strength he needed. She was right behind him. No time for second guessing now.

The boarding ramp of the shuttle was retracting into the body of the craft. Cassian shuffled forward under the side of the shuttle. He passed by the nearest landing leg, leaving it for Jyn, and practically collapsed against the further one. She ran after him and wrapped her arms around the landing strut nearest the trees. She found a hydralic line on the other side to use as a handhold, then held on as the shuttle's repulsorlifts fired and it rose off the landing pad.

The minute it was over the trees, Jyn could see the planet's crust rising out of the ocean as the shockwave of the Death Star's attack marched toward them. Behind it was a ball of fire so bright that she had to avert her eyes. The wind whipped through her hair, merging with the roaring of the planet beginning to shatter. Jyn squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the landing gear as hard as she could while the shuttle climbed higher and higher.

Suddenly, the sound around her was shut off. Jyn opened her eyes to darkness. She tried to move around and found that there was hardly any space around her.

She cursed. The shuttle had a small separate hold for each of its landing struts. There would be no way to access the primary cargo hold from inside, and even if there was, the chances of her finding her way out in the dark with hardly any room to move were slim.

Cassian had likely discovered the same thing, assuming he hadn't been crushed by some awkward angle when the strut retracted.

A bang broke through Jyn's thoughts as she felt the ship buck. There was a building vibration, and the sound of something smacking at the outer hull. For a tense moment, Jyn thought that their escape was about to be cut abruptly short, then the vibration ceased and the shuttle flew freely.

Above her, in what she assumed must be the main cargo hold, Jyn could hear the pounding of dozens of footfalls. It sounded like the entire staff of the Citadel Tower had been loaded onto the shuttle. In that case, maybe it was a blessing in disguise that they hadn't been lifted directly into the hold. She didn't fancy finding herself back in Imperial captivity, especially after what the Alliance had just pulled.

The question of what would happen once they reached the shuttle's destination crossed Jyn's mind, but there was a far more pressing problem than that.

The shuttle was likely going to rendezvous with a larger ship, a destroyer or a frigate. What exactly were they supposed to do if the pilot lowered the landing struts before they were inside of the hangar's mag-barrier? It was Imperial regulation to not lower the landing struts until you were inside the hangar… at least Jyn was pretty sure it was, and her current predicament was evidence that she didn't exactly know Imperial regulations front-to-back.

She gripped the kyber crystal around her neck. Somehow it had survived through the battle on the surface. Chirrut seemed to think that it had some sort of power—a connection to the Force maybe. Jyn didn't know if she believed that, but if there was any luck, or Force, or whatever, left in it, she and Cassian were going to need it.

A few long minutes later, Jyn felt a shift in the shuttle's engines, like they were coming in for a final approach. Gears began shifting around her, and a cool blast of air hit her as the compartment door under her opened. For some reason she held her breath, as though that would help against the vacuum of space, but as the strut lowered, she saw a dark hangar floor, not a field of stars.

To her left, Cassian looked like he was barely hanging on as the stuts hit the ground. The instant they did, he collapsed, head lolling back and arms limp.

"Cassian!" Jyn yelled before she could stop herself. She clanked across the dark metal floor and fell to her knees next to her lifeless body.

Somewhere behind her, maintenance crew members were calling for security, but she didn't care. Two fingers on Cassian's throat found a pulse, but it was weak and inconsistent.

"Cassian, get up!" she said, shaking his shoulders.

He didn't respond.

She turned around, and found half of the hangar's crew staring at her. She instinctively reached for her blaster, but it was gone, destroyed along with K2 on Scarif. That left her empty-handed, surrounded by Imperials, with a squad of stormtroopers pushing through the crowd to bear down on her. If K2 were there, he probably would have assessed the situation as "very bad".

"Freeze!" one of the stormtroopers said.

He must have been the commander, because the rest took positions to support him. These were no lax local police on some backwater planet. Their formation was perfect—reminiscent of Krennic's Death Troopers. She wouldn't make it two steps before one of them dropped her, and even if she did, there was nowhere to go.

They were completely outmatched, she had no blaster, Cassian was unconscious and fading. So Jyn did the only thing she could think of.

"Help us!"