CHAPTER TWO

PORT CITY, RING OF KAFRENE

THE MISSION

K-2SO was used to these visits to the Expansion Region. Cassian had met here often with his contact, Tivik, when the latter made landfall in the Ring of Kafrene's marketplace. It just so happened that today's mission—to disrupt the Empire's latest and last shipment of Jedha kyber crystals—brought them to the asteroid belt's bustling port once more.

"I'm going to check in at the rendezvous point. Wait here." Cassian leveled the order at his two subordinates. K-2SO's head swiveled conspicuously to look at Jyn from where he sat behind the command console. He failed to understand why the girl remained with them as an operative post-Jedha. She was about as useful to the cause as a loose turret cannon—even if her aim did tend to be more precise. More worryingly, her presence was a constant distraction to Cassian… and K-2SO still wasn't certain she could be trusted when the captain's back was turned.

Cassian, knowing his audience, disembarked before either of them could form a protest. An awkward pause fell between droid and human, but it lasted only until K-2SO could be certain Cassian was out of earshot.

"You could leave, you know," he suggested. "I certainly wouldn't stop you."

Jyn glanced up at his overture. She was currently rifling through the pockets of her jacket (on loan from the Rebellion) which lay sprawled across her knees. "Really?" she asked after an extended pause, jade-green eyes flat as her tone of voice. "You'd let me go just like that?"

"As far as I'm concerned you've served your purpose," K-2SO replied.

"Imagine that!" She gave a cold laugh, but there was a bitter life to it, in the same way that the wastes of the Hoth system held life: barely supported. "After all these years, someone actually 'concerned'!"

"My concern for you extends about as far as my reach," the droid offered a comparison, "which, as you know all too well, is sufficient in either case to demonstrate just how limited my regard is for you." He ran a quick visual scan out the cockpit viewport. "The terrain reads friendly. These are your people, Jyn Erso." A benevolent sweep of his hand. "Go to them."

Jyn heaved herself to her feet. She paused by the shuttered door, whipping her scarf around in a quick adjustment, mistrustful eyes still studying the droid. "So you really are just going to release me, then?" she repeated. "Like some stray Bantha kid your captain brought home?"

"More like a Kowakian monkey-lizard gumming up the works," the droid corrected as he punched the hatch open for her. "Goodbye, Jyn Erso. Try to stay out of trouble… but we both know the odds of that."

Her hesitation wouldn't have registered with a human observer. He wondered if it even registered with her. He would have scanned her face for more information, but by the time he felt curious enough to do so, whatever mysterious process of evaluation Jyn Erso privately underwent completed; she shot him a last look, and slipped out the door without so much as a parting insult.

And now K-2SO was left alone, and wondering if the disappointment he had glimpsed on her face was real. It didn't make logical sense, of course, for someone with Jyn Erso's criminal profile to feel conflicted about the escape he had just offered her. She was a survivor, an opportunist, an interplanetary tearaway. She was impulsive, though not completely unintelligent. As the droid's receptors traveled over the empty space she had previously occupied, he took this last concession back. There was her blaster, lying loaded where she had sat. He rose out of the cockpit chair to retrieve it, his digits unfurling beneath the weapon as he weighed it. His hand was built overlarge, but not a bad fit, all things considered. He had imagined himself holding one often.

Had she forgotten it? Unlikely. Was it her intention to return the property she had stolen? If yes, it indicated an aspect of her personality that had been heretofore unpronounced, maybe even nonexistent. And she had kept the jacket, he reminded himself.

There was the third option, in that she anticipated he would attempt to return it to her. Not a good bet to gamble on a droid's empathy.

It was a fine idea, however, to gamble on his boredom. There wasn't much opportunity to use a newly-acquired blaster out of defensive necessity cooped up inside the shuttle. The bay door slid open a second time, and K-2 ducked out.

It didn't take him long to find her. Amid the sea of rabble he rose as tall as a motive watchtower; whatever the nature of his programing, citizens dispersed before an Imperial droid. He decided to steer toward the first commotion to catch his interest and wasn't disappointed. A small crowd formed a circle around three traders and the pint-sized woman sweeping them all to the ground with a low kick. Judging by the amount of fresh blood in evidence, it appeared the fight had commenced almost as soon as she had disembarked.

One of Jyn's victims rose with murder in his eyes. He drew a telescopic melee weapon and extended it with a jerk of his wrist; the spitting of a contraband electrostaff filled the air, but Jyn's back was turned as she ground the hand of one of the men beneath the heel of her boot.

The assailant was well within the droid's reach. K-2SO caught the wrist suspended in space. Squeezed. The tinder-dry crunch of splintering bone, and the man's abnormally-pitched scream, accompanied his dropping of the staff. The droid flung all human wreckage to the side carelessly. "What fresh delinquency is this?" he asked Jyn.

The woman straightened, flipping her hair back from her eyes with a twitch of her head. "Nothing I can't handle," she panted.

"Your reassurance is unconvincing."

One of her eyebrows cocked. "Did you need to be reassured?" she inquired.

He should have an easy answer for that. Perhaps his processors jammed. Jyn herself only appeared to just now realize where they stood, and under what reuniting circumstances. The crowd trickled back into the scene, flowing into the available space like water; break-outs of violence were commonplace and inconsequential.

Completing his errand would be an adequate enough answer, K-2SO decided. The droid held out the tragically unused blaster. "You forgot this."

Jyn's eyes narrowed. "I'm not a thief," she returned. There was no possible expression that could register on his physiognomy, but she carried on as if she had seen one all the same. "… not right now, anyway. I return what I borrow. When I intend to own something permanently, I prefer to take it from people less hurting for resources."

"Then consider it a very generous reimbursement from the Resistance for all your hard work," he concluded. Jyn's posture thawed, and after a moment's careful deliberation she accepted the blaster. The difference in their hand size was illuminating, but he would not make the mistake of underestimating her as Cassian continued to; however, he would allow that outward appearances might lead an observer to fatally misjudge her.

"All right." Jyn holstered the blaster. "So long, then."

"What could they have possibly wanted?" the droid wondered aloud as Jyn turned away… and he abbreviated his own strides to accompany her. "Surely you don't have enough credits to tempt that kind of operation?"

Jyn did not smile in the normal sense—she rarely did anything in the normal sense—but her mouth twisted, and some suppressed information he wasn't privy to flickered behind her eyes. "I'll tell you when you're older," she replied.

"I'll ask Cassian," he decided.

"You had better do that."

"Where will you go now?"

Jyn paused before a stall to examine a disfigured piece of fruit, before turning to him with a sigh of exasperation. Now she was looking at him as if he was a specimen she found overripe. "That's none of your business," she stated.

She didn't know. Perhaps she had never had a destination, before or after her capture.

"Would you like to know your chances of being incarcerated again?" he inquired.

"If I didn't know any better, I'd say you're going to miss having someone to abuse," she remarked as she returned the item unpurchased. K-2 doubted she had much to bargain with besides her blaster and necklace—two possessions she couldn't normally be pressed to part with.

"There is nothing I miss," the droid replied as they continued down the line of merchants. "Or intend to miss. My retention of what's important makes me an asset to the Rebellion."

"You're an asset, all right," Jyn echoed hollowly. "But you're also just a droid. Aside from the respect Cassian shows you, you can't deny that you're more instrument than insurgent to those people. It must have been nice to have someone else occupying the lowest rung for a change."

"No." His response was blunt, automatic. "You're right in your estimation of me, although undoubtedly trying to be offensive. But I was quite content before you showed up."

"Do you really resent me that much?"

"I don't resent you, Jyn Erso." K-2SO's optics tracked to her standing so far below him. "I just disprove of you."

Jyn rolled her eyes. "Romantic."

K-2SO was already looking off elsewhere, but at this his attention snapped back to her with renewed focus. The word's application, even ironic, had never been extended to him before. He thought it an odd choice. He thought Jyn Erso an odd person, and was doubtful she had known much romance in her life at any juncture, ironic or otherwise.

It was already the most processing he had ever personally devoted to the subject.

"I don't recall you ever being this talkative before," he mentioned. Generally the woman's stony silences could put even Cassian's reserve to shame.

At the next stall, Jyn toyed with a figurine. "Maybe it's because I have nothing to say."

"That is a lie," K-2 returned. "I remember when I first saw you shackled in the back of that prisoner transport on Wobani. Your posture, your eyes, said quite a deal. From that introduction, I knew you were more trouble than it was worth expending our—as you said—sparing resources on. But did anyone listen to me? No. They never do when it counts. And there you were, exactly as I promised them they would find you: filthy, feral, hardly recognizable as human and ready to turn against your rescuers at a moment's notice. Your manacles were the most extravagant thing on you. I'll admit I wasn't certain you were even capable of speech, until Cassian informed me of your limited contributions to the meeting with…"

K-2SO trailed off as he registered her paling, increasingly closed-off expression. Perhaps his account of her had been too accurate. Normally with Jyn—with anyone—he didn't err on the side of discretion… but he didn't like to see the fire in her dim as a result of his words. Not when the excitement of provocation, of an equal return on his investment, was what he had come to expect.

"… I find this side of you less intolerable," he finished.

"Your metaphors are consistent, at least." Jyn's scowling mouth gave rueful twist. "You did sound like you were describing a Kowakian monkey-lizard just now." She shot him a quick look, but despite her (perhaps purposeful) furtiveness, K-2SO could see no basis for his own comparison at present.

"You may add that to your mental list of romantic sentiments," he said. "If I had to guess, it is a short list."

In the next moment, Jyn turned and shoved him roughly in the direction of a yawning alleyway. She could not move him bodily, of course, and it was the height of the woman's arrogance to think her own fierce brand of diminished strength would be up to the task now, but K-2SO took a corresponding step backward into darkness as if he had been successfully pushed. The wild look in her eye told him she probably had a good reason for the sudden retreat… even if his processing couldn't help but continue:

"Halt, Jyn Erso. You cannot use my body to further supplement items on your list. I will call for help."

"Shut up!" she hissed. She wheeled away as if she heard something, then backed herself against him until she all but disappeared inside his shadow. The droid rested his hands unthinkingly on her shoulders. When she craned her head to look out again, he followed suit. He thought he could now safely identify the cause for her alarm. There were two Imperial intelligence officers, filth-streaked and dubiously-disguised, speaking to one another rapidly in throaty rasps near the mouth of the alley.

"What are they saying?" Jyn whispered.

"… not much," K-2 said after a moment, "and I'm not surprised you can't understand them. They're speaking in Ubese, and making a poor attempt at an already poorly-adapted language. It sounds as if they've had a run-in previously with Saw Gerrera's gang on Jedha." He felt Jyn's body stiffen beneath him at the name, but was more surprised that his close proximity hadn't made her tense already. He understood that Imperial droids of his model were not exactly comfortable to be around.

The next instant she made to jolt forward, and K-2SO felt confirmed in his decision to have been restraining her—or something similar—all along. His grip became far less gentle, then, to prevent her from acting on whatever ill-advised impulse possessed her.

"Did one of them just say 'Bor Gullet'?" she demanded.

"Yes," he said. "They aren't being especially inventive while speaking in code, are they? If I'm not mistaken, they're discussing the interrogation technique used on the pilot… although not the incident involving ours, specifically." The droid lapsed in his translation briefly as he listened. "It seems your mentor was rather liberal with what members of the Imperial army he chose to unleash it on," he continued. "There are a few soldiers recovering from it on Thustra."

The alleyway fell silent, until Jyn tilted her head back to stare up at him. "What do you mean, 'recovering'?" she repeated.

And then K-2SO realized the implications of the conversation they had just overheard. The defector, Bodhi Rook, had been successfully extracted, though he wasn't as whole in his faculties as he had once been. He knew his own name, eventually—and even the name of Galen Erso, Jyn's father—but as to Erso's location, and any sort of information about his route and the whereabouts of the Imperial base… that information had been given up for lost, as had Rook's attention span. The pilot spent most of his days out of the infirmary wandering the hangar with an attending droid, muttering to himself and staring darkling-eyed at all the machinery, as if he still hoped in his half-madness to jog a useful memory.

"It would appear that the Empire has synthesized a remedy," K-2 concluded. He didn't like that Jyn Erso's finite human intelligence appeared to be working faster than his own. "Saw Gerrera is not the first to use this interrogation technique. The Empire has used it themselves, and undoubtedly recovered multiple prisoners of war released or left improperly guarded due to the Bor Gullet's known side effects… if they were able to successfully recover the memories of those prisoners, they might also stand to recover useful information that enemy interrogators saw no reason to conceal in the first place."

"If we locate the lab where the Empire synthesizes it, we're that much closer to finding my father." Jyn's eyes flashed, and her contemptuous mouth morphed into a smile. Something about the woman's expression boded worse than the mugshot the droid kept stored for her in his memory bank.

"Oh, I don't like the look of that at all," K-2SO said.