"Mumma, there's somefing on my arm. I didn't do it!"
His mother leaned over from stirring the pot on the stove to see the part of his arm three-year old Han was holding out to her. "It's a message from your soulmate, baby."
"Oh." He frowned at the neatly printed blue lines. "Wassa solmeet?"
"Soulmate. It's someone who's destined to be your closest friend. You know Auntie Zay? She's Mumma's soulmate." Jaina tried to keep her expression as neutral as possible. Her husband, Jonash, had been killed in an accident at work the year previous, before Han had really been old enough to remember him, and Zay had moved in to help Jaina cover rent and bills so Jaina could mind Han. It wasn't an ideal situation - their little apartment only had two rooms, so Zay slept on the sofa in the living room so she wouldn't disturb Han when she left for work every day - but the bereavement stipend wasn't nearly enough to cover expenses.
"Wassit say, Mumma?"
She shook herself back to the present and tilted her head to read the neatly printed Aurebesh. "They say, 'Good morning.'"
Han's round little face curled into a frown. "But is dinnertime?"
"In some places, the time is different, baby. Wherever your soulmate is, it must be morning." It was something of a relief to learn that her son's future friend was a few years older. Once Han's reading comprehension improved, he would have someone to talk to.
Her son shoved his left arm at her. "Tell them?"
She grinned and patted his hand. "You can tell them yourself, honey. Soulmates are special, nobody else is supposed to write to them for you except in an emergency, like if you're hurt."
He pouted adorably until she asked him to help set the table - the duraglass set her gran had left was safely stored, and only indestructible plasfiber dishes and flatware filled the cupboards for curious toddlers to find.
Zay got home a few minutes later and immediately dunked herself in the fresher to scrub the industrial chemicals off. She showered at work - a Health & Safety precaution to make sure nothing caustic had invaded their work suits - but the cleansers in the water mix did a job on one's hair and skin.
Beyond the Corellian system, the Clone Wars raged, but this far into the Core, it was easy to forget about. Life carried on much as it had before, and only the garrison staff changed. They had dinner and would spend the hour before Han's bedtime watching old reruns of a kids' holoserial that had been popular when Jaina and Zay had been young. Han loved the adventures of Vykk Draygo - or rather, Vykk Draygo's ship. He couldn't get enough of the battered YT-1300, the Starstrider. "Time to watch my ship!" he'd say, and no amount of pointing out that the ship was Vykk's would change his mind.
Maybe someday he would have a ship like that. There were several years to go, but if Han still wanted to be a pilot when he was older, Jaina would find the right school for him and figure out how to afford it.
And then the Republic fell.
Zay's division at the shipyards got moved to the orbital - "for security" - when the Empire moved in on Corellia's industry. Their little family felt like it had been splintered; Han, now almost six, vaguely understood what was going on, but he wasn't old enough to understand that Mum couldn't fix things. The very rare, ten-minute comm calls Jaina and Zay could afford were not nearly enough, and the bereavement stipend and Zay's pay weren't being increased to match the rising rental fees.
Things were getting tight for everyone, everywhere.
Han squinted at the piece of flimsi in front of him, then set his marker to it and tried again, copying the letters from Mum's datapad screen carefully. After Mum had told him he was the only one who could write to the person who wrote greetings on his arm every day, Han had been determined to get good enough to write back. Whoever they were, he knew they were a few years older, and he'd been practicing for a week to get his first letters perfect.
He could have tried before now, of course, but Han really wanted to make a good impression with the older kid. He'd even fretted over what colour ink to use before settling on green.
But what if they were Mirialan, like Aunt Zay?
Han stared at the marker in his hand. Green wouldn't show up so well, right?
He grabbed a purple marker instead. Now he just had to wait for his soulmate to wake up and greet him.
They'd been learning about time at school, and how Galactic Time - "spacer time" it was called by Captain Vykk Draygo - was universal and coordinated with the Palace District on Imperial Centre. Han had carefully counted hours and come to the conclusion that his soulmate probably lived on a ship or station. That was cool! Han only lived in Mot Koufel, which was crowded and smelly and grey from the factories. It wasn't cool at all.
"Good morning," appeared on the inside of Han's forearm, one letter at a time, and Han jumped.
"It is afternoon here," he wrote back with all the care he could muster. "But good morning."
There was a long minute of silence as the letters lingered, and Han realised with a start that he should have used smaller letters. There was almost no room left!
Then: "I'm Sentra. I use he/him."
A name! They'd given him their name!
'Han' was his grampy's name, it wasn't very cool, either. Han chewed his lower lip, then wrote back in the tiny space that remained, "I'm Vykk. He/him, too".
There. Now his soulmate knew he was super cool.
"Han, baby?" Mum was standing in the doorway, taking her coat off, and looking like she was melting. Everything about her slumped, and Han put down his school datapad and sat up from his sprawl on the floor. He might only be seven, but he knew something was wrong.
Things had been getting wrong-er for a while. Mum always made soup when credits were tight, and they'd been eating soup for weeks.
Mum collapsed in her chair, the one that rocked, and Han immediately climbed onto the arm to hug her. She squeezed him tightly and then dragged him over until he was sitting on her lap. "I'm so sorry, baby. It's- They're making it too expensive for us to live here, now. We can't stay here anymore."
"Where are we going?" Han shoved down the unhappy feeling in his stomach at the idea.
Mum ran her fingers through his shaggy hair comfortingly. "I just had a talk with the shipyard foreman. They have a spot open for me, but I'll need to go live on the orbital platform for it. And they don't allow kids on the platform, it's too dangerous. Do you remember my cousin Korol?"
Korol was a skinny guy who always looked wet and smelled of tabac. But he wasn't mean, just indifferent. "Yeah."
"His place is close enough to your school that you won't have to leave your friends, and he's offered to let you stay in his spare room, as long as you can keep your own things tidy. Do you think you can do that, baby?"
Han could - he didn't own very much, neither of them did, since they'd had to sell so much. Even gran's duraglass dishes had eventually been sold to a collector in exchange for enough credits to feed them for a few months. But- "Do we have to?" Everything here was familiar and safe. If they had to lose even that…. It felt like his entire world was falling apart.
His mum sighed and hugged him tighter. "There aren't a lot of options anymore, baby. Aunt Zay put in a good word for me; I haven't had any luck elsewhere."
Han frowned. "Not even at Mahgie's?" The owner of the diner on the corner was always nice to them.
Mum's face tightened. "It's hard to explain, baby, but trust me when I say Mahgie isn't as nice as he acts around you. At least on the orbital the women's barracks are separate and I can stay with Aunt Zay."
Of course the first person Han told was Sentra. The people he knew in school weren't exactly his 'friends' - although Han knew what fate awaited 'the new kid' and was glad that didn't have to be him - and he didn't really have anyone else to talk to. He'd got better at writing small, and then they'd learned how to clean the writing from their arms by pressing over it with their hands at the same time. Han thought of it like they were standing on either side of a foggy window, clearing the letters from the glass. Sentra was fun. Once they'd broken the ice, Sentra had a lot to say, about everything, but he also wanted to know everything about Han.
"What's wrong with Korol?" Sentra asked immediately.
"I don't know if I like him." Han paused. He didn't have the words to describe how Mum's cousin made him feel. "He seems nice, but it doesn't feel real? And when we visit, he makes us leave really soon after we get there."
"Bet he's involved in something illegal, doesn't want you caught up in it."
Han's first impulse was to deny that, but he stopped himself. Sentra was almost seven years older than him, and had a lot of experience that Mum said most kids shouldn't have. Bad things had happened to him, stuff he wouldn't talk about. Maybe he'd seen behaviour like that before?
"What should I do?"
There was a long moment of nothing. Then the words began to appear, slowly, like Sentra was thinking hard. "You have two options. You can ask to go stay with someone else and risk being the new kid at a new school. Or you go stay with Korol, and keep your head down and your mouth shut and your eyes open."
Neither option sounded great. Han asked Mum about who else he could stay with, and the only other person who was willing to take Han in whom his Mum trusted was his Pop's sister, Tiion, but she lived on Tralus, which was a completely different planet, and Mum would have to pay for the ticket for Han to get there herself. Han wasn't thrilled at the idea of just getting on a ship, alone, and hoping there would be someone waiting at the spaceport for him, especially when they weren't willing to help him get there. Mum didn't seem keen on it either.
The 'spare room' Korol was offering was a workroom he'd clearly cleaned out in a hurry, with barely enough room for the threadbare couch which would be Han's bed, and a worktable in the corner. But it was all Han's space, and his mum's cousin had presented Han with a secondhand footlocker to store his things in, to make up for the lack of other storage space.
Han immediately found the hidden button that unlocked the false bottom in the footlocker - Captain Vykk Draygo used hiding places like it all the time. Korol was impressed, and started showing Han how the mechanisms worked.
He never thought to ask how the man just happened to have a series of stripped-down locks and other gadgets lying around.
Three nights later, Korol was waiting when Han got back from school.
"What were you doing, taking the scenic route back?" his cousin hissed as he chivvied Han quickly down the hall to his room. "Look, there's no time to explain. You stay in here with the door closed and the lights off, and all nine Hels help you if you make a sound. Stay in here until I open the door, okay. I'll knock two times, then three times first!" He shoved a pair of unwrapped ration bars and a bottle of juice into Han's hands. "Just… trust me. No matter what you hear-"
The door buzzed, and Korol cursed under his breath. "No matter what! Don't come out!" He closed the door and hurried down the hall, leaving Han alone in a room lit solely by the late afternoon light coming through the grimy window.
Han curled up beneath the window, so he wouldn't cast a shadow that might be seen under the door, and pulled his purple marker out. "I think you were right about Korol. He made me hide in my room."
He and Sentra wrote back and forth until the light faded. In the other room, rough voices talked for hours. Eventually Han fell asleep there on the floor, and woke up with a crick in his neck, with none of his schoolwork done. Sentra's advice was: "Close the window blind, and roll up a blanket and use it to cover the door gap. Then you can at least use your datapad and it won't be noticed from outside. But room lights are still too bright, leave em off."
Whatever Sentra did, it was definitely similar to what Korol did. It became a regular occurrence: every few days, Korol would tell Han to hurry back from school, and Han would spend that afternoon and evening hiding in his room, doing his beginner maths courses and writing to his soulmate, while people who talked like the scum Captain Vykk Draygo dealt with smoked tabac in the main room. Every couple weeks, they would schedule a holocomm call with Han's mum and Aunt Zay. Things were almost normal.
Until the day Korol took Han out to a diner for a rare meal together. Han had learned that his cousin was just awkward with people and didn't know how to talk to them; the man was nice, but in his own, very quiet way, and sometimes if he had the credits, he'd buy them nerfburgers and shakes.
Han's back was to the door, so he didn't see who'd entered when the bell jingled, but Korol stiffened and muttered a curse under his breath. "Han, kid, whatever happens, don't say nothing," he hissed.
Keep your head down and your mouth closed and your eyes open. Han swallowed hard on a suddenly dry mouth and nodded.
"Gann!" a heavy voice boomed. It sounded cheerful, but there was something about it that made Han want to shrink into his seat. A big human man with a patchy beard loomed over their table, grinning, and Han thought maybe he recognised the man's voice. "Fancy seein' you outta your hole. When were you gonna tell us you had a kid?"
Korol's answering smile looked pretty real, but he was fidgeting with the piercing in his left ear the way he did when he was nervous. "Welles. He's not mine, he's my cousin's. I'm looking after him while his mum's working."
"No kidding! Well, aren't you a good humanitarian sort?" Welles turned that grin on Han, who took a big bite of his burger. "Yer cousin an' me go way back. Been workin' together a long while. You know what yer cousin does fer a living? He ever mention me?"
Mouth full, Han shook his head honestly.
The corners of Welles' mouth turned down. "Aw, Gann. I'm heartbroken! You never talk about your pals to yer family?"
"You know why I don't, Welles," Korol replied, like they were discussing boloball scores.
Welles was eyeing Han up; Han washed his bite down with a sip of his shake and wished Welles would leave.
"Kid's a lil scrawny, isn't he?"
Korol scowled. "You are not getting my cousin's kid involved, Welles."
"No? He'd get a cut, too. You need the creds, Gann, I know ya do. Just the one job. We'll be by to pick him up in three days, get him back to you in one piece in an hour. Seeya then!"
Welles walked away and out the door, whistling something off-key, and Korol started cursing again.
Han looked down at his plate. "Did I do something wrong?"
"What? No! No." Korol sighed and ran a hand back through his greasy dark hair. "One of his buddies prob'ly saw us together an' tipped him off. There's a reason I live in this end of town, they're not usually around here. Lissen. Han, lissen. You talk to your soulmate a lot, yeah?"
Han nodded. "Sentra thinks you're doing illegal things. And he told me to keep my head down, my mouth shut, and my eyes open."
"You got a savvy soulmate, kiddo. Do you understand what just happened?"
Biting his lip, Han ventured, "They need someone small to get into something, and if you don't let me go with 'em, they'll hurt you and make me do it anyway."
Korol gave him a miserable look. "Too sharp for your age, kiddo. I'm not gonna just let them take you; I'm going, too. To make damn sure they don't get ideas about making you do other things. Problem is, he's lyin' about it only being one job. They'll want to use you for other jobs, if you do well on this one. But if you don't do well…."
Han had seen Captain Vykk Draygo get caught in similar situations. "They'll hurt me, or you, or both of us. An' we can't talk about it, ever. Sentra thinks your friends are bad people."
"I'm a bad person, Han. I'm letting them push my cousin's seven year old kid into B'n'E." He pushed his plate, with the last of his fried tubers, towards Han. "But we don't have any choice, either. I'm sorry, kid. This life… once you're in it, it never lets you go."
He had Han practice on a slightly more advanced lock in the three days in between, just in case Han had trouble. Welles wanted Han to slip through a window - one of the narrow ones right at street level - into a basement and unlock a door. Korol gave Han a tiny penlight, a folding pocket knife, and a small hydrodriver, and coached him through what to do if he got stuck.
Sentra didn't like it, but agreed that they had no other choices. "If things go bad, you run, you hide. Don't take risks, Vykk."
For all the stress around what might have gone wrong, actually doing it was easy. Han slipped through the grate and dropped the metre and a half to the dirty floor without hurting his feet. Someday he wanted to be able to drop and land like Captain Vykk Draygo - silent as a tooka - but he figured he could learn that later. The door opened with only a little work to pop the latch off and prod two wires together with the 'driver. It was when Korol tried to take him home that things got ugly.
"You cutting out on us early, Gann?" Welles asked.
Korol glared. "Kid has schoolwork to do and needs sleep. If his marks start dropping or he misses too many days, they'll start to notice."
"Who needs school, anyway?" one of the others said. "They don't teach nothing useful there."
"Things've changed, Hark," Korol growled. "Empire keeps track of who's skimping on classes now. If they think something's wrong, kid gets taken away and questioned. None of us want that, an' you know it."
"Yeah," Welles scoffed, "cus they want perfect little drones to feed their military with. That what you want kid?" he asked Han. "To be just another faceless army goon?"
"I'm gonna be a pilot," Han blurted. "The best ever!"
Welles blinked down at him in surprise, then chuckled."Alright! Kid's got ambition, after all! And I guess that means he really does need to know his numbers, huh?" He ruffled Han's hair with a heavy hand.
Han didn't like the way Welles messed up his hair, or the way he was eyeing Korol.
Korol glared back. "Damn right, he does. So we'll be taking our cut now, so I can get him home. It's late."
Welles reached into his pocket and pulled out a credit chip, but held it back. "You get half your cuts now, and half once we get paid. Seeya next week."
Korol's lips thinned, but he took the chip when Welles finally offered it, and Han clenched his teeth.
Head down, mouth shut, eyes open.
"Welles wants to teach me to drive a speeder," Han wrote. Over the last couple years of Han and Korol doing odd jobs for Welles and his crew, Han had received 'bonus pay' in the form of navigation training programs, a holographic flight simulator game, and a bunch of extra training manuals for beginners. Han had gone through a growth spurt recently, and now his feet could just reach the pedals if they cranked the seat as far forward as it would go.
"You know he's just trying to get you to like him better than you like Korol, right?"
Once again, Sentra's cynical assessment brought Han back down to reality. "You think so?"
"Once he thinks you like him cus he gave you stuff, he'll start trying to talk you into spending time with his crew without Korol around."
"How do you know?"
There was a long silence, then: "When I was little, there was a guy my dad worked with. I saw him do that with other kids and he tried it with me."
Sentra never talked about when he was little, or his parents. He was definitely serious.
Every part of his left forearm that he could comfortably write on was covered. Han pressed his hand over the ink there until he felt the mild tingling that meant it had disappeared. "What do I do?"
"Take what he gives you, but never let him use it to control you. He'll probly say you owe him, but if those things were really gifts, you don't owe anything."
Han sighed. People were complicated. But he trusted Sentra, a boy whose face he'd never seen, more than anyone except his mum. Head down, mouth shut, eyes open. He could do that.
Korol taught Han magic credit chip tricks - sleight of hand, he called it - and then demonstrated how to use those tricks to thieve little items from people on the street or the train, things that could be sold, bartered, or used. "The trick is to not take anything that will be immediately missed. Necklaces, no. Anything they're using frequently, like a comm or wrist unit, are right out. Only take their ID if you intend to use it and lose it. And leave the poor ones alone; they're on your side unless you push them away. They'll protect you until it's in their better interests to turn you in."
Crowded trains right as everyone was finishing a work shift were the best: everyone was tired and inattentive, and someone small like Han could quickly get lost in the press of people. Then he showed Han how to use a tiny device called a data skimmer to scan the work badges and citizen IDs of people nearby - it didn't erase the data, just made a copy of it so someone else could use it later.
"Use it for what?"
"Anything. Getting into the places they work or live, finding where a very particular person frequents without being obvious, gaining access to their accounts. Or just… borrowing their name for a little while."
From the information Han lifted, Korol showed him how to make a false ID for himself. It wouldn't fool anyone for too long, but long enough for Han to evade notice. It took a while for Han to realise that Korol was preparing Han to get away from Welles and his gang.
After a year, Han started working on his own. His favourite targets were the pickpocket gangs - he'd keep an eye on the people doing the actual grabbing, then swipe it from them while they were eyeing up a new mark. Korol winced when Han told him: it was dangerous, messing with gangs like that, but Han still had the benefit of being on the small and skinny side, and he'd grown quick on his feet after years of working with Welles' crew.
They never told Mum or Aunt Zay. Not because Han didn't want to worry them, but because Korol didn't trust the comms security. He had all sorts of stories about how, 'before', they wouldn't have had to arrange comm calls, and it would have been just like picking up a holocommunicator and talking to Mum, even though she was on the orbital. But communications for ordinary workers had been locked down - Korol had a lot of technical terms for it, but the short version was they had installed some kind of signal jamming - and now they had to pay to use it. And Korol didn't trust whoever maintained that system to not be listening in.
"Doesn't matter who's running the show, the government is not your friend, kiddo. Sure, sometimes they'll do something that helps you out, but mostly they're in it for themselves. It's the money and power they want."
Things got worse when, the next time they were able to comm, only Aunt Zay was there, her usual smile absent. "Your mum's sick, Han," she said without waiting. "We don't know what's wrong, but the medic's best guess is tibanna poisoning."
Korol had gone tense. "That's not supposed to happen. There are regulations about storing that stuff-"
"When people care to follow them," Zay said bitterly.
"But what does that mean?" Han asked, his voice gone small.
"It means she's having trouble breathing, and is showing signs of blood iron deficiency. And if it gets worse-" Zay stopped and pressed her hands over her face.
"But… the doctors can fix it. Right?" It didn't feel real at all. Han kept expecting Mum to show up in the field next to her soulmate, grinning with reassurances that she was fine, everything was fine.
"If they have the equipment," Korol muttered. "But the odds of them having bacta these days…"
"Not good," Zay agreed quietly, dropping her hands. "They wouldn't use it on ordinary workers. Not when they can replace us with droids for less than half the cost."
Han looked down at his hands, balled up tightly on his knees. He was only eleven, still in school and only barely managing passing marks because he was spending so much time working the shift-change crowds and doing jobs for Welles. He'd offered part of his take to Korol to help with the bills, but Korol - who never once complained about money issues even though Han knew there was a reason the apartment was on the cold side - had just pushed it back into Han's hands and said, "Let's set you up a bank account for that." It was registered under one of Han's fake IDs, with a Banking Clan guild that didn't ask questions. The guild even pawned the non-currency items Han had kept.
The number in that account was scary, to him. Lots of zeroes. But he knew that it still wouldn't be nearly enough to afford to send Mum to a proper doctor for treatment. He swallowed hard. "Is there anything we can do?
Zay smiled at him sadly. "Stay safe. And… can I take a still of you? Right now? It'll make her happy."
"Yeah. Yeah, anything."
Mum never did recover.
A couple years later, Korol came home with a pamphlet, which he shoved into Han's hands. "Here's your ticket out, kid."
Han frowned at the glossy flimsi and the shimmering semi-holos etched into its surface. "Imperial Cadet Academy?"
Korol dropped down onto the sofa opposite Han's chair and reached over to grasp his hand. "Kid. Remember how I told you I got into all this mess to start with?"
It had been a while and Han had to think. "You got in debt and Shrike offered to pay it for you, yeah?"
Garris Shrike was bad news. He flew a ship full of kids around the twenty-four systems in the Corellian Sector, and the kids were all forced to go out into various cities to steal from and con people for Shrike. He never got in trouble for it because the new Sector Diktat, Zekka Thyne, was both a friend of his and on Black Sun's payroll. If Shrike wanted Han to work for him, even the Imperial education system was no protection.
"Yeah, long story cut very short. Shrike's been offworld a while, but I heard he'll be returning soon. Chances are good he'll be wanting back what I owe him, plus interest-"
"But you don't have that kind of money."
"Nobody does. So what he'll likely do is make me work it off. And he'll make you work it off, too, if you're still here. You're thirteen, old enough for the academy's cadet program. It's…" he sighed and pulled his hands back, running them through his thinning hair. In only six years he seemed to have aged twenty. "It's not what your mum wanted for you; fuck, if there were any other options, I wouldn't even consider it. But-"
"It'll get me off Corellia."
"And maybe even give you a chance at a better life," his cousin finished. "You've been working on your piloting skills, I know you have. Maybe you'll even get your own Starstrider one day. But if Shrike gets his claws into you… well, Welles is smalltime compared to him."
Welles had never pushed the issue of getting Han further into his crew, mostly because Han was still in school, and the Empire did track attendance and punish truancy severely. The cadet academy was likely just as strict, if not worse. Han thumbed through the pamphlet. They spent a lot of page space talking about glory and honour and pride, and it took a bit to find the less impressive stuff: requirements. It looked like his marks wouldn't be an issue, since they had entry exams and aptitude tests - which made sense, considering Sentra's assessment of Imperial troops as 'cannon fodder.' They probably wanted as many warm bodies in white plastoid as possible.
"Hey, Korol?"
His cousin looked over from where he'd been lost in miserable thought staring at the wall. "Yeah kid?"
Han met his eyes. "How come you never mention your soulmate? I mean, you know all about mine…."
Korol's thin lips tightened in a humourless smile. "It's too dangerous. I haven't written to her in years. She…. She was a Jedi, with the Green Order, here on Corellia."
Everything Han had learned in school said the Jedi were nothing more than deluded religious types who had been tricked into following their leaders in rebellion against the Empire. Sentra hadn't said much about that, except, "If they're so deluded and harmless, why is it a crime to even know one?"
"So… she's still alive?"
"Oh yes." Korol's smile turned genuine for a moment. "We were each other's best information sources for a long time; Welles always wondered where I got such good tip-offs. She never once pressured me to change my life, even though she must have disapproved. But she once told me, 'The galaxy requires all types of people, at all levels; without people like you, it would cease to function, because everything is connected.' Maybe you and I commit little crimes to get by, Han, but the bigger crimes are those committed by people in suits that cost more than our year's rent, which cause us to have to live as we do. When the Empire rose, she went into hiding. But every once in a while, she'll leave a little mark-" he tugged at the leather cuff around his right wrist- "just to let me know she's still there."
"Could…." Han frowned, thinking hard. "Could she help you disappear?" He wanted to say us, but the way the Empire tracked their future workforce would make it difficult for a teenager already in the system to hide.
His cousin hesitated. "Maybe. But I wouldn't be able to tell you."
"That's fine, I get it." Han got up and paced the worn carpet. The shabby apartment that had been his home for six years suddenly seemed worth remembering. "So… we get me into the academy. Then you wait long enough for Shrike to be a potential reason for your disappearance. We both know the Empire doesn't give a damn about missing people who aren't rich or useful to them. They'll make an assumption and never investigate."
"How'd you get so clever all of a sudden?" Korol asked with a teasing smirk.
Han shrugged. "It's what Captain Vykk Draygo would do."
"Or your soulmate." Korol's smile faded. "I don't know what their policies about soulmates are, so be damn careful about whom you tell about Sentra, Han. I'm pretty certain that whatever his life is like, it's similar to ours."
He wasn't referring to their social status. Han nodded solemnly. "I'll just keep my head down, my mouth shut, and my eyes open."
The quoted line brought the smile back to Korol's face. "Here's another word to live by: less is more. Only give people exactly what they asked for, whether it's assistance, a favour, or information. Everyone has a limit, and if you go beyond yours once, people will expect it again and again, until you lose yourself. The military is no different. If you don't do nothing to get special attention, you can get through your enlistment period unnoticed." He reached out and ruffled Han's hair affectionately. "You'll get your chance to be Captain Vykk Draygo, but Vykk is an independent pilot, not enlisted. There's a big difference between the two. And what does Captain Vykk never do?"
Han ducked his head, grinning. "Never sticks his neck out for people who aren't worth it."
"The Navy? Isn't worth it. You hear me? Sentra will probably tell you the same." Korol sighed. "Guess I have to see if Purnnil is able to reply."
"Wait. She's Selonian?" Han frowned when his cousin nodded. "How's that work with her fur?"
"You know how if you scrape yourself, the skin gets a little puffy? That's what it's like for her, without the damage. She writes back using the tip of her claw, so I guess it all works out."
Sentra thought the idea was terrible, unless Han could assessment-test his way into being a pilot for shuttles or larger ships - "Fighter pilots don't live long, those TIEs have no shielding or life support." - but agreed that sticking around long enough for Shrike to notice him was worse.
The next day, Han walked into the Imperial Recruitment Center with his ID (the legitimate one), and walked out ten hours later with his head spinning and an offer of commission for the Naval piloting corps. A week later he said goodbye to Korol at the base entrance - his mum's cousin wasn't permitted past the doors, and they knew it would be the last time they saw each other.
There were twenty-two other kids about his age there. They were each given a severe haircut, handed a stiff grey uniform and boots, and directed to shower thoroughly and change. It was a real water shower - the first Han could remember having since he'd had to live with Korol - but the water was unheated, and he tried with dismay to bundle the too-small towel around himself for a moment.
The first problem he noticed was that there were no pockets in the uniform anywhere; nowhere to store a pen, credits, or ID. Now Han understood why Korol had instructed him to put everything into a flat-rate storage locker at the spaceport the day before; but the locker still had a code cylinder. Han stuffed the cylinder and his pen down into his boots, wiggling until they rested against the sides of his calves without jamming his ankles.
The second problem he noticed was that the uniform included stretchy, skintight fingerless gloves that went all the way to the elbow under his shirt. Maybe they just didn't want people getting distracted while at work or in training, but that plus the lack of pen loops suggested they weren't to have any contact with their soulmates at all.
Before he pulled the glove down his left arm, Han fished the pen out of his boot and wrote, "I have a bad feeling about this."
"Me too," Sentra replied immediately. "But we'll meet someday, I'm sure of it."
Now that he mentioned it, Han had that feeling, too. He smiled.