Backfire

16 ATC. Rishi.

Vector's research was right- there are definitely Mandalorians on Rishi, though she hasn't been able to get anywhere close yet. But the clans aren't going anywhere, as far as she can tell, so that lead'll keep until she can work her way around to it.

Nine's first priority is to find whoever sliced her ship.

Nobody messes with her ship.

At least no one recognizes her here. More properly, no one on Rishi seems to know who the captain of the Howling Tempest Gang actually is, so the charade's holding nicely so far. Pretending to be a pirate is extraordinarily tedious, especially in an Outer Rim shithole like this where there's no hierarchy, just group upon group like rats gnawing on each other, squabbling for dominance. She's had to kill a dozen cocky idiots trying to prove themselves against her.

But after only a few days' work she's nearly on top of her target, finally, after months of failed leads and dead ends, so if it means acting like something out of a holiday pantomime- why was it always pirates?- she'll act the part.

(Not like Hutta, at the beginning of everything, where not ten minutes into her sojourn as the Red Blade she'd had the bad luck to run into someone who not only knew the real Blade- who wasn't human and definitely wasn't female- but who had him in hock for more credits than her whole operations budget.

Thank the Force for stupid men. For all his bragging Dheno had been a pretty mediocre fuck, but at least he hadn't blown her cover.)

When the message comes in, then, she mishears it at first - but no. The droid definitely said Red Blade.

It gets her hackles up. Old business like that raises a few possibilities- besides Kaliyo there aren't many people left who knew her that well that long ago- and none of them are good. Most of them ought to be dead and ashed. She should ignore it.

She doesn't, of course. No point in delaying the inevitable.

When she gets to the meeting point he's already there, facing away from the door with his head bowed over a console, but she knows the slope of his shoulders at a glance. He'd always stood up so straight one could practically hear his heels click together, like the soldier she'd always suspected he once was, when anyone else was watching. But when they'd been alone, the day Intelligence died, or the day she pressed the Black Codex into his hand-

"Minister." Her hand's still halfway on her knife as he turns around toward her; in the end he gave her freedom, but he let them chain her in the beginning. They would have executed you, otherwise, he'd said once, a whisper of rationality beneath the storm of her rage. It was better this way. Wasn't it? "I thought you were dead."

(Lana startles. They told me- she shuts her eyes tight, face contorting in anger- the Council assured me that he'd been dealt with. No loose ends. They promised-

She curls her hand around Lana's fist, unfolding her tense fingers one by one. The Council lies. They always have. They controlled what they could, they destroyed what they couldn't, and when they couldn't do either one…

They lied. And I believed them.

You were lucky, she says. You only got a lie.)

She wouldn't have agreed if it hadn't been Shara.

When she was young and stupid and fresh out of the Academy she thought the Watcher program was brilliant. Training field agents was hard enough; only three out of sixty of her cadet class went to the field, with another eight in support roles and the remainder shunted off to the Diplomatic Corps, and field work didn't require a quarter of the skillset that Watching did. Why wait for natural talent to turn up when the ability could be bred?

The program was an abomination. She knows that now. Calling it "conditioning" made it sound somehow respectable, to say nothing of what must have happened to the failures, but it warped Shara just as badly on so many levels as the Castellan restraints had altered her. In most ways it was worse: even now, just the thought of the word onomatophobia makes her shake and sweat, but at least she'd known when her actions weren't her own. The Watchers were so controlled, so restrained by their conditioning-

"I do have to be scared," Shara says, her tongue tripping over the words, her magnificent brain still shattered years after Hunter's vicious little trap. "The Empire altered my limbic system."

Poor Shara. She deserves the chance to choose, for better or for worse.

(Sometimes, even now, she wonders what else the program altered.

She'd seen other field agents go to bed with their assigned Watchers. Intelligence encouraged fraternization on a shallow level, a sort of trust-building exercise as long as one didn't take it too far; with Fixers or Minders it was one thing, but with Watchers she'd begun to wonder, as the years passed, whether it was genuine affection or something else. Something less voluntary and more calculated: not force- never force- but a tendency engineered, seeded deep and cultivated and shaped into thoughts that seemed spontaneous but weren't, not really, not at their heart.

And then she thinks of other things- a hundred half-remembered medical evaluations of her own; dozens of injections she never thought to question; the Advanced Interpersonal Negotiation seminar, officially optional and available only by permission, that unofficially meant shortlisted for Intelligence assignment and that they'd unofficially subtitled Lie Back and Think of the Empire-

And she stops thinking about it at all. It's better that way.

She'd had a choice.

She'd had a choice.)

She leaves the Minister behind, a drive full of dossiers tucked into her jacket pocket and a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Even with her own file purged, the Council knows her history, at least in part; unless she takes herself entirely off the board it's only a matter of time before the game catches up with her. If Intelligence really is reforming, with a Darth at its head-

Well. That's a thought for another day.

I gave the files to you, after Yavin. Do you remember?

Lana nods. I do. Darth Marr never quite approved of most of them, but the ones that came aboard were some of my best agents. Why didn't you keep them for yourself?

He made you the new Minister, not me, and I thought you might need a little leverage. It's a hard game, Intelligence, she says, especially when you don't know the rules.

Kai Zykken was an idiot, and she had to chase a larcenous monkey-lizard through the entire marketplace and electrocute a droid- that earned her more than a few raised eyebrows- but at last she's headed toward the rendezvous point.

Face covered and voice distorted, the woman in the holorecording isn't familiar. Either Zykken was even dumber than she'd first thought, though, or there's Force trickery in play, which wouldn't surprise her at all. The Revanites are recruiting from both sides, and with the war back on it hasn't only been the soldiers growing more and more disillusioned with every passing year. If the woman is a Jedi, or a Sith, hopefully she's a friendly one.

Still, she brings backup, just in case. Since they got to Rishi she's tried to keep her crew on the ship as much as possible- if someone's watching, they'll only see her- but this time around she sends Vector up to the rooftops, close but not too close. When she looks up, he's there, half-hidden behind a smokestack.

At her signal, he disappears.

Then, of course, she's halfway down the alley when-

"You! Howling Tempest!" The thing that's shouting looks like a Wookiee fucked a tusk-cat and it's (he, maybe? She's guessing, there) completely blocking her path. "You killed my brother, pirate."

This pirate thing is getting decidedly old. She looks the creature up and down, considering: no, she definitely hasn't killed anything that looks like that recently. "I don't think so. I feel like I'd remember that."

"Liar. Gorro's dead," he snarls, drawing a nasty-looking vibroblade, "and I'm going to rip your arms off."

She tilts her head. She does remember Gorro, but- "The mouthy little Rodian was your brother? You'll have to explain the genetics once you've stopped bleeding."

When he lunges for her she sidesteps and draws her rifle, pops off three quick shots- kneecap, kneecap, right shoulder, launching a dart along the barrel into the side of his neck just for the sake of caution. He hits the ground hard and she grinds her heel against the back of his hand; the vibroblade clatters free and she kicks it away, out of his reach, as he scrabbles for its handle along the cobblestones of the alley.

"Cipher. If you wish us to take the shot-" Vector's a shadow at the roofline in her peripheral vision, a voice in her ear- "step to the left, please. You're in our line."

"That won't be necessary. Stand down." She looks down at her opponent as the shadow withdraws. "What's your name, idiot?"

He doesn't answer. She steps on his other hand.

"Well?"

"Grumm."

"Okay, Grumm. Lucky for you, I've got bigger fish to fry, but you're still in my way." When she lifts her foot off his fingers he flinches, but doesn't look to his blade. "You've got thirty seconds to get out of it. Starting now."

He doesn't move particularly quickly. Then again, she did shoot both his kneecaps.

She watches Grumm hobble back down the length of the alley, rifle trained on him just in case he decides to try anything stupid, and when he's out of sight she shoulders it and turns back toward the rendezvous point.

The woman from the holo's leaning against a wall at the far end of the alley, arms folded across her chest and a lightsaber hilt clipped to a low-slung belt. "The Howling Tempest, I presume?" Even face to face, the woman's voice is distorted by her mask; she can't get a sense of an accent. "We've been waiting for you."

Oh, honestly.

She sighs. "First of all, the gang is called the Howling Tempest. Their leader is called- frankly, I have no idea what their leader is called, because I am not their leader, although I'm quite sure you know that. And as you probably saw-" she gestures back toward the blood spatter on the cobbles behind her- "I've already shot someone today, so let's just skip right over the pleasantries and get to the part where you tell me why I've got every idiot on this planet gunning for me, yes?"

The woman laughs, reaching up to pull off her mask, and shakes her hair free from where it was bound up in her hood-

"Lana Beniko," she says, resisting the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her like a disobedient child. "You realize you could have just called me."

"It's good to see you, too." Lana grins. "Come inside. We'll explain everything, I promise."

"We?"

Theron steps out from the doorway behind Lana, looking impossibly smug. "Took you long enough. I gave you directions and everything."

"You." That's it. She is going to murder him. "You sliced my ship."

(I hate you.

Liar. But aren't you glad I stopped you? Lana reaches across her lap to steal the last of the biscuits off the plate.

Now, yes. At the time, the only thing saving both of you was that I couldn't decide who to strangle first.

She might be pouting; it's hard to tell mid-bite. Oh, be nice.

Do you remember how many damned pirates I had to kill that month? She breaks a piece off the biscuit as Lana, squawking objection around a mouthful of crumbs, swats at her hand. And whatever gave you the idea I was nice?)

An hour later, mostly placated by Lana and Theron's explanations, she sends Vector back to the ship to grab her field duffel. If they're really being tracked as closely as the two of them seem to believe (and she doesn't doubt it- she's only had to dodge the Revanites, not the Empire and the Republic, too) then the less often she goes back and forth between the safehouse and the dock the better; she'll stay there, they'd all agreed, and make do with a bedroll and a camp mattress if they can't scrounge up another cot.

"Now, this isn't a vacation." She doesn't have to tell him that, of course. Vector, like her, never really switches off. Still, she grins into the shadows as he hands her the heavy bag. "Take tonight off, but be ready for my comm first thing tomorrow. Kaliyo, too."

"An entire evening free? We'll need a new hobby at this rate. Knitting, perhaps."

"Don't get too used to it. And don't let SCORPIO do any major upgrades. If things heat up, we need to be mobile."

Vector nods, and she turns to set the bag down in the doorway; when she turns around again, he's gone.

So she settles into her new quarters, setting up her bedroll in an empty corner. The safehouse isn't exactly the lap of luxury- a few cots along the walls, an inexpensive holoprojector on a central table, a few maps- but she's had worse: there's a 'fresher and a lock on the door, and the security's actually not bad when she looks more closely, with motion sensors in the entrance hall and an exit to the roof hidden behind one of the projection screens.

It'll do, for now.

Lana, apparently on dinner duty tonight, puts her hood back on and slips away to the market; Theron, who'd been sitting at the table with his head bent over a datapad, looks up at her once Lana's out of earshot.

"I hope you brought ration bars, or you're going to be hungry. I ran out two weeks ago, and the market here's only got those vanilla ones that taste like chalk, so-"

Her duffel half-unpacked, she pauses. "Those are awful, yeah. But isn't Lana bringing food back?"

"Yup," he says, nose wrinkling. "It's her night to cook." To judge by his tone of voice she probably shouldn't expect much. "Yesterday was my turn, so you're up tomorrow. We go by rota."

"I don't cook." (She doesn't. She never learned to make much beyond caf and instant noodles.) "There's a stand in the market that's got good sandwiches. Tomorrow's takeaway night. And as for ration bars-" she rummages in one of the side pockets. "Chocolate chip, or peanut?"

"You offering? I'll take chocolate chip."

She aims right between his eyes, lobbing the bar at his head. "No, I thought I'd eat them all and let you starve. Tell me there's caf, at least."

"Caf, yes. Cream, no." Theron gets his hand up before the ration bar hits him, snatches it out of the air and peels the wrapper back, shoving it halfway into his mouth with the first bite. "This is seriously the best thing I've eaten in a month. Including my cooking."

"I'll take that as a warning." As she watches, he demolishes the rest of it. "Missed you on Port Nowhere, by the way. The party didn't pick up until after you left."

He blinks, mouth full, and narrows his eyes. "I didn't-" he starts, then swallows. "What makes you think I was on Port Nowhere recently?"

"You sliced my ship, you asshole. Of course you were there."

"And here I thought we were bonding." Theron flicks the folded wrapper in her direction; it arcs wide and she bats it down. "Okay, maybe. But I had to get you here somehow. How'd you-"

"Free advice? Lose the jacket. I recognized you on description alone, and I wasn't even looking for you."

"I like this jacket."

He really is impossible. "What were you doing there to begin with?"

"Just a quick trip. Someone picked up the bounty contract on Lana. She was worried about it, but it turned out to be nothing." He shrugs. "Random hunter. No ties to the Revanites, as far as I could tell, so I let it go. The better question is what you were doing there."

"Me? Oddly enough-" she sits down in one of the empty chairs, kicks back and takes a bite of ration bar; she may as well eat, if Lana's cooking is really that bad-

(I beg your pardon, Lana grumbles at her.

She winks.)

"-I was bounty hunting."

Setting his datapad aside, Theron tilts his head and looks at her. He's staring, really, for a solid half a minute, and she's almost ready to pull out a mirror and check if she's got something in her teeth when he closes his eyes, pressing his hands to his temples. "It was you. You're Vairavi."

"When I need to be. Or she's me, more properly, or was. Won't be using her anymore, I don't think."

"The description didn't sound anything-" he trails off, head still buried in his hands. "Oh, Force. I am an actual idiot."

"You won't hear me argue." She's got a holo on her own datapad, now that she thinks of it, that she'd taken that last night- her and Vesja and Eri, drunk and laughing at the bar. Pulling up the image, she slides the pad across to him. "Here. I'm sure you can pick me out."

Theron mutters something under his breath, staring down at the holo. "Yeah. I remember the tall one from the Rancor, too." After a moment, he pushes it back. "Dark hair doesn't suit you."

"Opinion noted." She tucks it back into her pocket. He's right, actually. It doesn't; the one thing she inherited from her father was his coloring, too-pale skin and red hair shading more into brown as she gets older, and the black wig makes her look sallow. That he has an opinion on it at all is-

-interesting.

"Is that your name? Vairavi?"

She doubts it. The sound of it doesn't trigger anything, at least: no headache, none of the warning pressure that tends to kick in when she gets too close to things locked away. They'd said her name, just once, after they took it (they had to check the algorithm, Keeper said), and she couldn't even hear it for the pain it caused.

"No," she says. "My name is Cipher Nine."

Angling his chair to face her more directly, Theron sighs. "Look. I know we got off on the wrong foot, and I don't expect us to be friends or anything, but the rest of us are on a first-name basis. What-"

"I'm not trying to be difficult, Theron. That's the only name I have."

"You're kidding, right?" He just looks at her again; she meets his gaze and doesn't blink, and he's the first to turn away. "You're not kidding. Okay. I thought you were a freelancer."

"I am. It's just-" Where would she even go looking, if she wanted to remember? At the Academy, probably, but- ah. Too close, that thought. That hurts. "Old habits die hard."

Theron does call her Cipher after that.

He talks more, too, though he hasn't gotten any less prone to blushing since she last saw him (which has yet to lose its entertainment value. She's like a serpent that way- the more he squirms, the tighter she circles- and oh, stars, she needs something to keep her mind off the ceaseless tedium of fight after fight after fight). She ought to stop. She really ought to, except that every so often she catches him watching her, appraising, and after weeks of them all stuck in the safehouse together he actually starts to answer back and-

Nothing's likely to come of it, of course. But it helps to pass the time.

(He really is cute when he blushes.)

They do work well together, she has to admit.

Lana and Theron can't join her in the field, not yet. It'd blow her cover and expose the two of them, and without any real objectives beyond "find out what the Revanites are up to and try to stop them" it's too likely to get them all killed. But Lana's a meticulous planner (you're welcome, she says, preening), and with Jakarro scouting and Theron slicing from the base she's got maps and schematics and security systems rerouted to her advantage.

They're getting closer. They keep telling themselves that.

Rishi's tropical, even this early in the year, and with the heat clinging like a damp blanket she can't sleep so she stays up, working. Lana's gone to check on Jakarro- poor Jakarro, too conspicuous to even enter Raider's Cove proper, except in the middle of the night- and she and Theron are crunching numbers, exactly the sort of analytics busywork she loathes. The more data they gather and the more of the Nova Blades' network she dismantles, camp by camp, the clearer the plan becomes: the pirates are rerouting the hyperlanes one by one until every single route in the quadrant converges over Rishi.

"But why?" She shoves her datapad away in frustration, lets her forehead hit the table an inch shy of her mostly-empty beer and her entirely-empty caf cup. It doesn't make sense. It's a lousy strategy for piracy, since it'd only work until everyone figures it out and then not at all, giving them perhaps a month or two of easy pickings before the traders just bypass Rishi entirely. Worse, it reroutes patrols directly past the planet, Republic and Imperial both. "What are you playing at, Revan?"

Theron makes a noise from across the table, and when she turns her head he's pulling headphones out of both ears. (Despite the implant on his temple he usually wore them while they worked- probably more so he wouldn't be bothered, though he swore it was something to do with the acoustics.) "Sorry, what? I didn't catch that."

"Oh, nothing. Just grumbling. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what."

"I know what you mean." He pokes at his own screen, then sets it aside with headphones piled on top. "With any luck you'll pull something off Margok's computers, but I'm not getting anywhere with what we've got now."

She nods. "If I don't get turreted to death. That ship's a fortress."

"As soon as you can patch me in, I'll try to get them offline. Assuming you don't get shot in the meantime-"

Her arm's still healing from the last run. For far Rim pirates, the Blades have some serious artillery. "Funny."

Theron makes a face. "Wasn't meant to be a joke. I know you're getting stomped out there."

"Only a little. I'll manage."

"You know, you say that a lot."

"Power of positive thinking." She finishes off the last of her beer- beer's pretty well toward the bottom of the list of things she'd prefer to be drinking, but anything decent here's at least a hundred credits a bottle in the market and since her scrap with Gorro she pretty much has to stay out of the cantina unless she wants to pay for her drinks with knife fights- and flips the bottle backward into the trash bin. "If I say it enough, it might actually be true."

That makes him laugh, at least, before his headphones crackle as the volume of whatever's playing through them increases exponentially and he grabs for them, pressing down on the control switch. "That song got loud, sorry."

"You apologize too much."

"Probably, yeah. It's a common trait in perpetual fuckups, or so my therapist tells me." His chair scrapes along the floor as he pushes back from the table. "Not in those exact words, obviously, but I got what she meant. You want another beer?"

She snorts. "Therapists. Like they have any clue what this is like." She gestures broadly at the room around them. "And maybe, if it's still cold, although Lana's probably going to roll her eyes at me when she gets back. She thinks I drink too much."

(You do drink too much, Lana says.

She looks down at the bottle sitting between them, mostly empty, and back up at Lana. Said the pot to the kettle.

She probably does. Good luck finding an intelligence agent who doesn't, though- it's practically a job requirement, and frankly none of them live long enough that it ever really matters.)

"You're still awake, right? You're fine." He crosses the room to the ice chest they'd rigged up to replace the broken refrigerator, since they can't exactly call the landlord to come fix it, and flips it open. "They are… mostly cold."

"Good enough." When Theron hands her the bottle she presses it to the back of her neck with a contented sigh. "What are you listening to?"

"Just music. It's too quiet in here."

She nods, pops the bottlecap off with the flat edge of her boot knife. "Does your datapad have speakers? I wouldn't mind music."

"If you want." His method's more conventional, a bottle opener built into a pocket multitool. "I should probably mention my music preferences are apparently not to Imperial liking. Hence-" he hooks his finger under one of the earpieces- "compromise. Hang on."

A song's just ending as he switches over to the speakers, not one she recognizes- but the next one to begin makes her laugh out loud.

"Yeah, yeah." Theron goes to skip over it. "Teenage me had questionable taste."

She catches his wrist before he can tap the screen and he blinks at her, startled. "No, leave it. You know this was the first concert I ever went to?"

"Calling bullshit on that one, Cipher. There's no way they ever went anywhere near Imp space."

"Concert might be overstating things, but that was what we used to call them- about ten of us sixth-formers crammed into a locked room in the sub-basement and one very degraded album recording." Letting his wrist go, she taps out the beat along the neck of her bottle. "And it was still the best thing I'd ever heard."

He laughs. "Teenage you had questionable taste, too. You didn't get caught?"

"Of course we did. We were all copying lines out of the Imperial Code for days."

"Worth it?"

"Totally."

She doesn't recognize all the songs he plays, but she hums along with the ones she knows and before too long Theron's singing under his breath and-

(He has, she thinks, a very nice voice.)

"What in the Void," Lana says, rounding the corner from the entryway, "are you listening to?"

The next day, when she gets back from scouting, there's a datachip sitting on her bedroll. Fourteen songs.

It's a much better copy than the one she remembers.

The raid on the main base was a bust.

When she finally got close to Margok, she wasted too much time taking on the lackeys he threw at her, afraid of getting flanked and of the turrets (Theron did his best, she knows, but the Blades had four of their own slicers countering him and he's good but not that good), and he wiped the entire mainframe before she finally took him down. All that work for nothing.

Damn it all.

They've got one option left after that- two, technically, but she's not optimistic about the second. Jakarro's been tracking a pair of Revanites for three days, watching them go back and forth between a house on the outskirts and a boat slip, arriving every day at dusk and gone by sunrise. If they hit the house in the middle of the day, Lana says, it should be empty. Maybe they'll find something they can use.

"I've got a bad feeling about this." She's getting suited up; their only other lead is the Mandalorians, and knowing Mandalorians she'll almost definitely have to fight her way through. "It's a big if. Let it sit until tomorrow, and I'll cloak in with Kaliyo."

"Let us do some of the work for once, Cipher." Lana slides the last kolto syringe into its pouch, then hands her belt over to her. "It's just an empty house. Between the three of us, I'm sure it'll be fine."

"And besides," Theron mutters around a mouthful of ration bar- he'd eventually decided he preferred the peanut ones and her stash dwindled accordingly, but they're toe to toe on caf consumption and his is better so she lets it slide- "'m getting bored cooped up here, and maybe you'll finally stop giving me shit about not doing field work."

She winks back over her shoulder as she fastens her belt. "Doubt it. But if you think it's safe-"

"It'll be fine," Lana says again. "What's the worst that could happen?"

(Lana sinks down, hands over her face, until all that's visible among the pillows are a few strands of pale-blonde hair.

Ahem.

You were right. She sighs. I know. I know.)

The Mandalorians are a bust, too.

She gets the nickname, now. Shae Vizla makes her run the gauntlet of both creatures and clans before she'll even show her face, then roasts her to medium rare until finally they're both exhausted, her armor smoldering and Torch half-blind from poison before she signals and the ring of fighters around them withdraws.

Even then, even defeated, all she does is confirm what they'd already suspected. As far as the Revanites are concerned, it is Revan leading them.

"Sure, the clans have history with Revan, all the way back to Mandalore the Preserver." Shae scowls as the antivenom runs in. "But that was a long time ago, and when he came back-" she shakes her head. "If that's really him, the old stories forgot to mention the crazy. He doesn't want to save the galaxy. He just wants to watch it burn."

"Do you know what he's planning?" The salve on both her hands smells of lavender, sweet and floral, easing the pain of her blistered fingertips.

"No. He's got a whole fleet in reserve, but that's all I know. The minute he contracted with the Nova Blades I picked up my people and moved. I kept the peace with those fuckers for years, but Margok is-" she pauses- "was always a monster and with money and power behind him he was ten times worse. Hear I've got you to thank for taking him down. I've wanted to do it for years but it wasn't worth the war it would've started."

She inclines her head. "You're welcome. There's still plenty of fighting coming, though. Sure we can't convince you to join us?"

"Sorry, Imperial." Shae chuckles, pulling the syringe out of her arm, and rolls her sleeve back down. "I was fighting your wars when you were in primary school. I'm retired."

"I know. We used to read stories about you." She stands. "If you ever decide to un-retire, look me up. Or if you just want someone who'll fight you properly."

Vizla must be well into her forties- what she'd said wasn't wrong; the Sack of Coruscant happened just before her own eleventh birthday- but her grin takes years off her face. "I might just do that, Cipher Nine. If you'll hang on a minute. I'll have the Beroyas run you back over to the mainland. Jos! Valk! K'olar. " At her wave, two of the nearby warriors approach, the woman in white armor painted with wide grey stripes and the man in grey and red. "You beat them, so they owe you one."

The woman in white shrugs. "Sorry, alor. Just distracted."

She remembers, then. She was a Beroya before we got married. "Valk Beroya? Your sister's name was Haniya?"

"Yeah." When she pulls her helmet off her eyes are wary. "Do I know you?"

"I met her last year, before- well. Jori mentioned you when I went to pay my respects. I'm sorry for your loss."

"D'you know," Valk's lip curls, her husband's hand on her back and the pitch of her voice lowering to a growl, "he still won't talk about how she died? Damn him. How am I supposed to mourn her if I can't tell the story properly?"

"I don't know the details," she says. "But if it helps, they were hunting a Jedi."

The woman blinks, nodding slowly. "A Jedi." She turns to Shae, the next words too fast for Nine to pick out with her rudimentary grasp of Mando'a, but whatever Valk says, Shae nods and answers back, her tone surprisingly gentle.

"A Jedi," Valk says again. "Good. Good. Come on, then. Let's get you back to your camp."

Something's wrong.

When she gets in earshot of the safehouse she can hear Jakarro somewhere inside, raging. The sun's just setting, and even then he never comes to the base- they always go to him.

Something's really wrong. She runs the rest of the way down the alley. Screw being inconspicuous; if the roaring Wookiee hasn't brought the neighbors out to stare yet, she doubts one woman running will manage it.

The door's unlocked and open, another bad sign, and when she rounds the corner from the hall into the main room Jakarro's pacing back and forth and Lana's got one finger on the switch of her saber.

"There were only ten of them! We could have fought them all!"

Lana raises her other hand, her tone brooking no argument. "I know you don't agree with me-"

"-but you let them take him, Sith!"

He's about three seconds away from going for Lana's throat before Dee-Four notices her. "Oh! Cipher, we have terrible news. Theron-"

"Theron's been captured by the Revanites." Lana looks to her, too, and takes a careful step to one side, slowly putting her between the two of them. Which is not a place she thinks she would like to be, not at the moment.

"What does he mean, you let them take him?"

"They only saw Theron. It's possible we could have intervened, yes, but I thought it was better-"

(It'll be fine, she'd said. It's just an empty house, she'd said. What's the worst that could happen?

There are things worse than dying.)

She draws her pistol, and before any of them can stop her she aims it squarely at Lana's face. "I think," she says, "you ought to choose your next words very carefully."