The Sign on the Door
Stone's directions were horribly vague, sharp turns through meandering paths. The speeder sat idle in neighborhoods of congested marketplaces in which Leia was certain side-lanes could have been used. A clear hoverlane zipped above them but they only used it twice: not because it was expedient but because there was no way to continue their trek through a dead-end.
And at the next moment they were flying past neighborhoods at Stone's word. The marketplaces were a sudden blur through the weather-shield: deep reds and proud purples mixing in furious speeds until Leia could discern nothing in their shapes. Quick, Stone would say. Quick, now: go. Han would comply, his jaw tight and his knuckles white on the steering controls, obviously on edge but showing the barest limit of his patience as he sped through the ever-present sickly-green mist of midday on Nar Shaddaa.
Through it all, Leia's frustration mounted like bricks in a towering edifice.
She would have been less angry about Stone's wayfaring instructions if they had been in service to Prisht's safety. Their trek out of the Pii had been purposefully peripatetic to protect The Distributary's location and the privacy of the Chev's partners. Leia wanted to return Prisht's maddening assistance with discretion of their own: a favor earned for a favor given.
She deserved a zero sum game, at the very least.
But they'd long ago left the Pii; Salla had confirmed as much. Leia hadn't bothered to ask the names of the quadrants that they'd breezed through, had barely noticed Basic signs when they sat, unmoving, for long stretches at a time. The geography and city-planning of Nar Shaddaa—if indeed any planning had been done—were beyond her capacity to understand.
Instead she'd focused on strangling out the veracity of Stone's intentions from the few hints he gave or taking note of the way Salla's accent rose and disappeared in moments of stress. Sometimes her tees melted into the surrounding sounds, sometimes she bit them off quick and vicious at her front teeth. It was fascinating in the same way Han's sometimes lazy drawl slid into the ether when he barked orders at others in the heat of the moment.
And when she started to think about Han, she'd lapsed into images that she'd rather not deal with at the moment and tried to suppress. Focus, she'd ordered herself. Live through this mission and you can daydream about his mouth all you want later on.
So. Business.
Salla and Leia agreed no one was following them, Salla careful in the front passenger seat and Leia annoyed in the back. They hadn't picked up a tail, and even if they had, there was no way the tail had held them in sight for too long. The maniacal journey—slow slogs and quick zips, both—had insured their safety.
But still they'd sidewinded through the eternal city, had dodged about the neighborhoods with no discernible direction. Frustration was voiced loud and often by Han and Chewie, who'd threatened to tear Stone's arms from their sockets for wasting their time.
The Falcon needs us, he'd growled. She has been too long without care.
The affection in his voice was dear to Leia, warming somehow, and she agreed. It was time to do. She was tired of waiting.
"My patience is wearing thin, Bril," she said, pitching her voice low.
"Is?" Han asked. "How the hell do you have any patience left?"
As if I had a great store of it in the first place, Leia thought, amused. Either Han gave her too much credit or she was hiding her restlessness better than she thought she was.
Salla turned to look at Leia over her left shoulder. "Seconded. We're going nowhere."
Peripherally Leia noted that Salla's consonants were heavy, clear, weighted. The dees and gees clear signals that frustration had eliminated the assumed informality of her speech.
"Where is the spice den?" Leia asked, turning angry eyes on Stone.
He pursed thin lips, shook his head with a tight movement. "You have to trust me, Your Highness. This is the way in."
"We don't trust you, pal. That's the whole point," Han argued.
Chewie's rumble came from Leia's left. It's been three hours. You either have nothing to offer or you are actively scheming to get us caught.
"No, you don't understand," Stone said, looking confused at Chewie's long series of growls. "This is how—"
But Leia had had enough. She was raw and tired, the edges of doubt creeping into her bones. Had she misunderstood Stone's intentions? She'd thought she'd reached him through their conversation in the early morning hours, brandishing her trauma like a lightsaber. But that tactic didn't always work; she'd thought she'd chosen her path well but perhaps his sincerity hadn't been won as thoroughly as she'd imagined?
The thought only made her angrier.
"Stop wasting our time," she interrupted him, and now it was her consonants that bit at her tongue. "This is not courage. This is idiocy."
"No, wait—"
"Enough," she said. "If this is the help you promised, we don't need it."
She needed to consider that Stone's bravery was incomplete, thin and feeble as it had always appeared to her. And if such cowardice got Salla killed, or Chewie, or Han … well. There was no justifying such stupidity.
"There's not a set spice den!"
Leia paused, blinked, mind grounded to a halt. "What?"
"It's not an address. That'd be stupid of Grouka, right?" Stone said, his hands spread in front of him like he was presenting a meal to guests.
"No stupider than the rest of what you've spewed lately," Han argued.
That's unhelpful, Han, Leia thought.
Stone thought so, too, but where Leia's thoughts reflected exasperated affection, Stone's voice carried pure condescension. "Grouka's supposed to be dead, asshole. A dead Hutt can't own property."
Chewie and Leia both tensed, and in a rare dissociative moment, Leia realized who exactly made up the Han Solo Defense Society in this group. She could feel the waves of anger emanating from their side of the backseat, was powerless to tamp down the edge of fury that swept through her.
"You wanna call me asshole again, coward?" Han goaded, never keen on his own defense. "Because I'm dying for some target practice and I've built up some rage the past couple of days."
I am prepared to help, Chewie growled to Leia's left, and Leia nodded with enough emphasis for Stone to see.
"I would refrain from insulting the man flying the speeder, Stone." she added. "And I would not call this particular man names when you have proven yourself less-than courageous in comparison."
Stone's face drained of color. "Look, the Hutts keep a pretty good eye on the spice dens. If one was distributing without a Hutt at the helm, they'd shut it down real quick."
Leia blinked, confused. "So if there's no set den location—?"
"—it moves around," Stone finished for her. "Every two standard weeks."
Leia paused, mouth open, running the possibility through her mind for the viability of the scheme. She didn't know much about the spice trade, had only dealt with it tangentially in the Senate, but the basic business model was based on the barest possible overhead cost per gram of spice moved. Extravagant moving costs—every two weeks!—seemed antithetical to the general model. What was spent in security alone would be astronomical in comparison to owning and utilizing one duracrete building in a slum somewhere, wouldn't it?
Perhaps there was something she was missing.
Han and Salla looked at each other and then Salla turned back to look at Stone. "Every two weeks? Are you sure?"
Stone nodded. "Yeah. Product seems to get out there fast enough that they don't actually move it from den to den."
"That's because spice gets smuggled from the mines every two weeks," Han said. "If Grouka's moving every gram that he gets from the mines in those two weeks, he's a fucking genius."
"Is that possible?" Leia asked.
"Depends on how much he's bringing in," Salla said. "Theoretically, yeah, if his intake is small enough he could refine it and move his whole product every two weeks. And he clearly has multiple refinement centers if I operated out of a totally different set-up than this one."
"Not having to transport it from one den to another," Han added. "Saves shipping costs. How long has he been doing it this way?"
Stone shrugged. "Since he went underground."
Leia shook her head. "So he distributes his product from a den, cleans the place out, moves elsewhere and notifies his clients where he's going next? That's an awful lot of people who would know he's alive."
"He's not," Stone said. "They don't get orders from anyone named Grouka that Hutt."
"It makes sense. He used personal property to plant coordinates for me. I'm sure he has the credits to move around some spice now and then." Salla glanced at Han, then turned back to Stone. "So how do the smugglers know where to pick up the product?"
"A sign on a door," Stone answered.
Leia waited for more detail. When he didn't offer any, she raised an eyebrow. "Would you like to elaborate?"
Stone shrugged. "Not really."
Chewie growled beside her—angrily and defensively, though she couldn't properly translate the tone—and Han swore beneath his breath. "Leia, please, let me kill him."
Leia smiled, weary and frustrated. "No."
"I'll help clean up the mess," Salla added, turning false-hopeful eyes to the backseat. "I mean, he can't weigh more than, what? Eighty-five kilos?"
"Best to round up, in my experience," Han said. "Ninety."
Their deadpan voices triggered Leia's laughter but she suppressed it. This was not a time to harass their only guide. Even if it was wickedly funny. Even if it said a great deal about how Han and Salla interacted with each other and bespoke to the layer of friendship beneath the anger and heartbreak between them.
"No," Leia repeated. "No one is killing anyone. Bril, what sign on which door are you looking for?"
Stone crossed his arms and glared at Han and Salla in the front seat. "You want me to tell those two? The ones planning on how to get rid of my body? I don't think so."
For the record, I would also very much like to get rid of his body, Chewie rumbled next to her.
She threw the Wookiee an eyeroll but quickly turned back to Stone before the coder saw it. "These three beings are more likely to kill you if you don't get us to the den than if you do. And they take their orders from me—"
"—I do what?"
"—Excuse me?"
"—so you can bet that if you hold up your end of the bargain, you will walk away from us intact," Leia continued over Han and Salla's exclamations.
Stone watched her carefully and she held his gaze. Be brave, she mouthed to him, trying to steel his spine. The more she connected his fledgling courage to herself, the more she solidified his assistance. She knew Stone wasn't courageous by nature, she knew he was idolizing the outcome of bravery and not bravery itself. To want the valor of courage without actually being courageous was despicable to her, particularly in light of the three truly courageous beings sitting in the speeder with them.
But she needed him, and she'd do whatever she needed to do to cement his assistance.
"What's the sign on the door?" she asked, low and level.
Stone's eyes slid to the side and he bit his lower lip. When he looked at her again, he shrugged. "You see the fluorescent lights above the doorways?"
"The safety lights?" Han asked.
Leia turned her head to examine the world outside the speeder. A residential area, pocketed by two marketplaces on either side of a square grid, and every doorway had a safety light installed above it. Obviously not a government regulation: the lights were all different shades and colors, of various brightnesses and located at different places. Some were carefully installed in the center of a doorway, some haphazardly to the side. Quite a few were helpfully installed directly above the door control panels.
Leia nodded. "I see them."
"The one we're looking for is standard red and it blinks," Stone said.
A pause, the only sound the rush of wind against the speeder's weathershield. Leia eyed the safety lights above door after door as Han slogged through the relentless traffic of the grid, thinking—
"That's it?" Han's voice held more anger than it had earlier, a sign of his impatience and frayed nerves. "A blinking red light? Hell, half of these lights are red and most of them are blinking."
Leia nodded. "He's right. Is there another marker?"
"I'll bet anything there's a specific pattern to the blinking," Salla said, and Leia's eyes shot to the woman in the front of the speeder. "Like the old Pagini code, right? Short, pause, long, long, pause, short? Shit like that?"
Stone nodded. "That's the part I'm not gonna tell you. Can't find the den if you're getting rid of my body, now, can you?"
Sithspawn, Leia thought. Stone was a wiley bastard, keeping himself indispensable for as long as possible.
She'd have to keep an eye on him.
"Fine," she said. "How do we help?"
Author's Note: Thank you for being patient with me during last week's sudden hiatus. Part of the danger of week-by-week writing, I suppose. I was happy to receive just a few notes about the lack of an update and most ot those were of the are-you-alive-and-if-not-where-do-I-send-the-flowers? variety, which was very kind of you, my friends. Thanks for your love and support! -KR