Azros told himself that Helix would be fine. She could look after herself better than most of the other Intel agents working for the Resistance, knew her way around primitive weaponry enough to be a threat even if she did find herself in a difficult position. She had told him to focus on his piloting, to not even worry about Loren, and so he decided to do that.
Loren still wasn't talking to him. Azros had lived with it his whole life, but given the events of the past few months, he had hoped that their brother-like bond might be re-forged. He had missed Loren, but the older didn't seem to care for him any more. Their working hours rarely fell at the same time, so it was rare for him to see Loren outside of work. Sometimes, he'd hear Loren's voice over the comms when he was flying patrols around the station, but usually he pretended he didn't have a brother, and that seemed to suit Loren fine.
"He's just busy," Rey told Azros one afternoon. Azros had begun to join her in the meditation room sometimes, enjoying her company more than anyone else, and they discussed a lot of things - Loren being one of them. Rey had told him about meeting Helix briefly, how Helix had seemed stunned to recognise her, had thought Rey to be dead - though why Helix would have thought that, Azros didn't understand.
"I'm worried about him," he admitted, "Helix was always able to pull him into line when he got too out of control, but aside from those few days, she hasn't been here since she started training,"
"She spoke to Master Luke," Rey reassured him, "I didn't hear what they spoke about, she wanted to discuss it in private, but I sensed she was troubled, and he's the only thing that worries her, if what you've told me is true,"
"I hope we can reach him before it becomes too much of a problem," Azros admitted.
He wanted to talk to Helix about it, learn how to talk to Loren about his problem without setting him off. The problem was, Loren didn't follow any predefined rules of human - or even sentient species - interaction, which made it difficult for Azros to translate. Helix, however - she was the same, but he had interacted with her enough that he could read her body language.
He had noticed when they'd last spoken that he also seemed to sense her moods. Perhaps it was an indication of spending so much time around her, or perhaps the new hardware had given him enough processing speed to recognise such things.
He waited eagerly for the end of the week. A week, Helix had promised, and then she would have two weeks rest, to recover from the injuries from her D'Qar posting.
He had mentioned it to Finn, who had been upset.
"They shouldn't have sent her on another assignment if she wasn't fully healed!" he had fumed, "She could make them worse, or endanger herself or the mission."
"I'm sure she'll be fine," Rey had said reassuringly, with a glance at Azros. He had told her of his sickening feeling when he'd said goodbye to Helix. She had been insistent in reassuring him that he was mistaken, but there had been something about her manner that suggested she had reason to doubt her own words.
Helix didn't return after the first week. The knot that had been tightening in his stomach clenched, and he was anxious with worry by the end of the second week. For some inexplicable reason, his leg had been aching for the past two days as well, and he wondered more than once if it was his body, warning him something was about to happen. He didn't often subscribe to superstition, but the pain in his leg seemed to be set off by nothing.
The knot of fear clenched in his stomach when he returned from his patrol at the end of the second week, to find Major Tanaka waiting for him in the hangar.
"Come with me, Kess," he told Azros, who signalled to his astromech droid to wait with the ship and followed Tanaka.
He was surprised when Tanaka led him to the restricted area of the station. Only a handful of the intelligence agents and recon agents were allowed to enter the area, Helix now among those notable few. Azros tried to contain his curiosity and excitement as he followed Tanaka into a small room.
There was a circular table in the centre of the room, around which a few people stood. Azros recognised Poe Dameron - Commander Dameron, he reminded himself. Next to him stood Luke Skywalker, peering at something on the table and speaking softly to General Organa, who stood beside him. Beside her was a space, and on the other side of that stood Loren, of all people.
"Kess, please," General Organa gestured, and he hurried to join them at the table. He exchanged glances with Loren, feeling the knot in his stomach tighten sickeningly, all feelings of excitement banished from his mind. Organa's tone was one that he had seen her reserve for dire situations.
General Organa fixed him and Loren with a steely glare as Major Tanaka left the room. "I want you to understand that you are only here as a privilege, not because it is your place to know," she told them, "What you hear in this room is not to be discussed beyond these walls, not even with each other. For all intents and purposes, this meeting never took place. If you are caught passing along information from this room, you will be stripped of rank and discharged, do you both understand?"
Azros and Loren nodded slowly, carefully. Azros felt his leg aching again, and grimaced slightly, shifting his weight to his other leg. He would have to get someone in medical to check over the implant. Maybe a loose wire was wreaking havoc in his nervous system, or perhaps it was simply a telltale sign of stress.
General Organa turned to the table as the lights dimmed, "Early last week, we sent Agent Helix Reyne to recover four data pods from the planet D'evan. The task was projected to take a week, at most, as the planet recently surrendered to the First Order. We received a confirmation of landing from Reyne, and a signal confirming that she had obtained the pods. We expected a return signal before the end of the week; instead, seven days ago, we received a termination."
Azros had been told about those in training; if the ship was damaged to the point a total destruction was imminent, it would send out a strong, one-off signal in first generation binary, in the moments before the ship was destroyed. It couldn't be falsified, as it was the ship's self-destruct system that initiated the sequence, and the signal was sent exactly three seconds before the ship destroyed itself.
Azros felt his mouth go dry as General Organa continued. "We feared the worst until this morning, when this message finally reached us from a remote location on D'evan,"
She pressed a button, and a rough, faltering holographic image of Helix appeared. Binary issued from the astromech droid she had been assigned, out of view, and the figure nodded.
"Better than nothing, C4," her voice, distorted from the bad signal, stated, "General Organa, this is Agent Helix Reyne reporting from D'evan. I regret to inform that my mission has been compromised. The informant who secured the target for us turned at the last moment and I barely managed to evade capture. I have managed to seize the target, but have been stranded on D'evan. This signal may take several hours or days to reach you, by which time it is likely I will have been detained. I am making my way to Point One, where I will leave a final mess-"
She dropped to one knee, crying out suddenly, before scrambling for a blaster and firing at something beyond the projection's range. A squeal from the droid was immediately followed by the message cutting out.
Azros realised he was gripping the edge of the table tightly, his heart pounding in his throat, and he could hear Loren breathing shakily beside him.
"We traced the signal back," General Organa continued, a map of a small planet appearing before them, "It appears to have originated from here, about a day's hike from the original target location of the mission, and half a day from the predetermined landing site. In accordance with her stated intentions, she is moving south towards the first rendezvous point, and analysis of the message confirms that she had intended to say "final message". As no such message has been received, we must assume she has not reached the point yet. The message was time coded at seven days ago, shortly after the termination signal was received. She is believed to be carrying a blaster, which would register on a weapons scan, and there is very little distance between her last known location and Point One. Commander?"
Poe inclined his head, looking thoughtful. "It'll be difficult, but I can do it,"
"You'll have to go without a droid," Skywalker told him, "And D'evan is more dangerous than it seems. Much of the water there contains a virus that attacks the nervous system and can cause death if consumed."
"I'll remember that," Poe remarked, straightening up, "I can leave immediately,"
"Then go," Organa told him, "And may the Force be with you,"
Poe nodded, pausing at the door. His eyes swept over Loren, settling on Azros. "I'll bring her back, I promise,"
Azros tried not to remember how Helix had promised that she would be fine.
Helix wasn't fine.
The virus had taken hold, spreading first through her injured leg and then through the rest of her body. Everything ached, but nothing more than her leg - it felt as though it were on fire, like a star was burning through her veins. Helix hadn't slept in days because of the pain, yet somehow she managed to continue moving, heading south towards Point One. If the infection hadn't passed by then, she would leave the data pods there and continue on, in search of someone, anyone, who could help heal this infection.
She had cut away the lower half of her trousers, exposing her lower legs, and had modified her singlet top to provide better camouflage. Her jacket had been torn into strips which had been used to form a tourniquet around the top of her leg, hopefully stopping the worst of the virus from spreading. She had passed through a small native village before the virus had struck, and they had given her what they called a sling - a long piece of cloth that wrapped around the waist and up over a shoulder, cutting across her torso diagonally. She had tucked the data pods into small pockets on the belt part, as well as anything useful she could carry, anything that would lend to her survival.
It had seemed easy at first. Now, her entire body wracked with pain, even breathing seemed a struggle.
She gasped, slumping to the ground. She hadn't eaten since the virus had set in, so distracted by the pain at first and then physically unable to hold herself steady long enough to get a clear shot, even with the blaster that she had eventually discarded.
Loren stood over her, shaking his head in disapproval. "Weak," he hissed at her, his voice strangely disembodied. Helix closed her eyes, knowing it to be one of the all-too-familiar apparitions that now invaded her waking moments. Some of them stood there and watched, others would try to fight her. Not a single one of them bled, though, she had discovered.
Unable to reach any other point, Helix stabbed the apparition of Loren in the knee, and he twisted and faded into nothingness, hissing his curses at her. Helix slumped back on the ground, exhausted but unable to sleep. They had been coming for her more and more frequently, different scenarios playing out, old nightmares returning. Rey in the Takodana forest with the metal-masked man, but it was Loren instead of Rey, now it was her, Helix, instead of Loren, now it was Loren behind the mask-
Sometime after dusk, reality bled through her delirium, and she sat up to inspect her wounded leg. Without giving much thought to it, she drew a line across the five-day-old blaster wound with her knife, drawing a dark line across her leg. The blood that drained out certainly didn't look like normal blood - it had clearly been infected with something, now jet black instead of dark red, and she watched with delirious, odd detachment as her blackened, infected blood drained away into the soil. She had added new fire to the burning that raged through her leg, but now she had also hopefully provided somewhere for that infected blood to escape.
She wanted to hope that someone would find her and rescue her, but the likelihood of that was decreasing every day. She would have to rig snares, have to go back to surviving on her wits, either until she died or someone found her.
At this point, Helix told herself, the former was more likely.