It is always chilly on the Rogue Shadow, except in the engine rooms where it's uncomfortably warm, and Juno wishes that the regulation jackets were a bit thicker because she is cold.

And then she wonders why she's wearing a regulation jacket at all. They are fugitives from the Empire; there is no one here to upbraid her for letting her hair down or wearing a green shirt instead of a gray one. There is no one here at all.

Except Galen, who doesn't care, and PROXY, who doesn't really count.

Suddenly impatient with herself, Juno pulls off the jacket and tosses it onto the co-pilot's chair. She remembers a fragment of wisdom from her first-year chemistry class on Corulag and smiles to herself—the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time—

But not in so many words, of course. At the time it was symbols scrawled across a projection screen in the lecture hall, two-hundred students in a room all typing furiously into their datapads; the change in entropy with respect to time is always greater than or equal to zero, the professor said, only in calculus it is not so unwieldy as that. In calculus, all of thermodynamics can be summed up in six neat equations—five, really, if you consider that one of them is a direct corollary of another.

Defiantly, and feeling rather silly about it, Juno reaches up and unclips her hair as well.

It's even colder without her jacket. She picks it up and wanders out of the cockpit; perhaps there is something else for her to wear? PROXY is a droid of course, and Galen doesn't seem to notice the cold. And her wardrobe is severely limited. A laugh bubbles out of her. Perhaps she can go shopping when they dock on Nar Shadda.

"What's so funny?"

She hasn't seen him sitting there. He's fiddling with his lightsaber again, restlessly, and she says, "I'm cold," as though that explains anything. But he smiles at her anyway.

"You can borrow my jacket," he offers.

All things tend toward equilibrium—heat, entropy, interpersonal relationships. Perhaps even people; Galen has been restless lately, and she would not say that she knows him well but Juno thinks it is because there is no Empire now, for them. Chaos increases; military delineations break down. He is not so unapproachable as he was before. "Thank you," she says.

"How long—"

"Sixteen hours and thirty-two minutes until we reach Nar Shadda space," she replies, and his smile is rueful because he knows just as well as she how restless and uncertain he is.

He is shy, she thinks. He is deadly with a lightsaber and utterly silent when he moves; but he is shy, because Darth Vader is not the best role model for learning how to make friends. Is that heat or entropy or energy? Or perhaps no one has formulated an accurate model for emotions; he can be heartbreakingly sweet sometimes, and it is incongruous against the scars.

Uncertainty, like chaos, tends toward a maximum. Juno runs her fingers through her hair and wonders absently if he finds her attractive.

"PROXY can show you where it is," he is saying, and Juno realizes that he is speaking of jackets, and heat, and why the Shadow is always cold even when the hyperdrive and stealth systems are fully engaged.

Perhaps they will find direction when they find Kota.

"All right," Juno says.

Entropy is always increasing—

But they are not in a closed system.