.

The golden fireball glows on the horizon, her eyes riveted to its mesmerizing deadly spectacle. Somewhere at the back of her mind there flickers a desperate will to run, to fight, to live; but her body refuses to obey her as she sits slumped on the beach by the oceanside. Cassian is there with her; and she is both heartbroken that he too will be dead in a matter of seconds and comforted despite herself by the knowledge that he will be there, with her, until they both cease to exist. He holds her close and she clings to him as the blinding light and unbearable scorching heat draws nearer…

Jyn sits bolt upright with a sharp gasp that makes her throat burn, at once panicking and soothed by the inky darkness surrounding her. There is no beach, no explosion, no Cassian.

From what she can tell she is sitting on a bed – a bunk, she corrects herself as her legs swing off the narrow pallet. As she struggles to steady her breath, she runs through a habitual mental checklist, prompting herself to remember her surroundings. She is in her cabin at the guest quarters at Nawara's residence on Dorvalla. She is known here as Liana Hallik. She arrived the previous evening and was given temporary shelter on the pretext of being an unlucky thief. Cassian Andor – Cassian Rook – who was with her, is getting treatment at the med bay. The explosion… the explosion was real, she remembers, but they escaped. Barely, but still.

Her eyes search around for a source of light; twisting her head toward the door she sees a climate control panel glowing dimly next to the entrance. 02:48; she remembers Dorvalla's 12-hour day and figures that the others will be getting up in just over an hour; their sleeping pattern alternates roughly four hours' worth of sleep with eight hours' wakefulness. She doubts if she will be able to follow the local example, at least this morning. Hopefully she will be forgiven a late awakening at least this once, if only on account of her recent arrival and exhausting travel that preceded it.

She settles back down on the mattress and forces her breathing to a steady slow rhythm until she drifts back into blissfully dreamless sleep.

x x x

She wakes up three hours later considerably better rested; by then it is late morning and the compound looks empty and quiet in the late morning light, Nawara and his lieutenants attending to business elsewhere, so it is left to the 3PO to take her to the dining room for a lonely but relaxed breakfast, after which she is left to her own devices. She wants to take advantage of the good weather to take a walk, or better a ride, or maybe a bit of both, around Ridgeside City, but before she can do that she has a more urgent mission in mind.

"I must warn you, Mistress Hallik, that the 2-1B who runs this facility is quite adamant about the rules of admission for visiting guests," the 3PO prattles on. They are standing outside the door to the med bay, and he has already activated the entrance buzzer, so his fussing about is a mere minor nuisance that carries little threat of thwarting her plan. But once door slides open and they are greeted by the somber-voiced, burnished-grey 2-1B on the other side, she begins to see the truth in his warning.

"I am afraid that is not possible," he intones gravely in response to Jyn's request to see Captain Rook. "After I operated on his back and knee yesterday evening, he spent the entire night immersed in bacta, and is now recovering still under medication. He is asleep," he clarifies, seeing how Jyn shows no sign of budging from the doorway, "so I am afraid you cannot talk to him, Miss."

Grateful as she is to him for his surgical skills and for his apparent concern for Cassian's recovery, she is acutely annoyed at the same time. How can she explain to a droid that it is very important for her to see Cassian even if they cannot talk and even if he is unaware of her visit?

Well, where droids are concerned, the direct approach usually works best.

"I only want to take a look at him," she insists. "It is important for me to see him in a better condition than he was when I last saw him. I will only take a minute…" That was a silly thing to say; seeing his attitude, she can fully expect him to start a timer the moment she steps inside. "…not more than a couple of minutes, at most."

If the 2-1B had the vocal range that would allow him to sigh, he would have surely used it now. But thankfully, he relents. "Very well, Miss. You have five minutes." Her heart leaps at the generosity. "Second door on your right, Miss."

He must have confused his directions, she figures, when she takes a quick glance into the room. She is about to pop back out into the hallway and ask the droid for amended directions when she takes another look – and stops.

It is not just that Cassian looks younger; that alone would not have stopped her from recognizing him. Admittedly, her task is hindered somewhat by the oxygen mask fitted over the lower half of his face; but it is the fact that he looks perfectly relaxed, for once free of all pain and preoccupation, that has made such an incredible difference. With the blood and grime washed off his face, and with his hair brushed back from his forehead, he looks uncharacteristically contented… and downright adorable.

She presently remembers that her visiting time is rather limited, and steps over to the side of the bed.

"Cassian?" she calls softly, on the off chance of him waking up.

He does not stir.

She gently takes his hand resting atop the blanket, her fingers stroking it in a reflexive caress; but he stays asleep.

She stands watching him for a while longer, barely aware of the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She wishes he would have cause to look like this more often, and not just when he is asleep on sedatives. She wishes it were in her power to make it so.

When the 2-1B taps quietly at the side of the doorway to indicate that her time is up, she walks away and pauses to thank him, and the droid has trouble reconciling her smile of gratitude that looks quite genuine with the tears brimming in her eyes.

x x x

There is something to be said for laid-back Imperial governments, she muses as her speeder bike, which Malloc the Devaronian graciously allowed her to borrow from Nawara's hangar bay, skims above the sleepy city streets. Sure, no Imperial government at all would be better yet, but given a dire choice between this kind of pleasantly sleepy backwater and the oppression of Jedha City prior to its annihilation, let alone the paranoid gloom that Coruscant has become, she would take this kind of Imperial control any time.

Shame that it is the exception that proves the rule.

Ridgeside City is just as she remembers it, rows of steep greenish-yellow stone terraces cut lengthwise by impossibly narrow streets, leaving speeder bikes as virtually the only viable means of transport. Once she has done a few laps back and forth on both sides of the valley, she takes her bike to the top of a particularly steep cliff, its near-vertical sides sparing it from encroaching construction, and gets off, leaving the bike hovering in power-down mode as she sits down on the rocks and surveys the valley.

Seen from this height, it is a place of captivating beauty, her vantage point allowing her to see the plentiful vegetation on the mountain slopes and in tiny private gardens that the high walls bordering the streets hide from view, a profusion of thick low shrubs and rambling creeper vines in bright emerald green and turquoise hues dotted with sprays of miniature orange and yellow blossoms. Not only that, but rising above the city murmur lets her better appreciate the subtle background whisper of dozens of tall, narrow silvery-grey waterfalls, most of them blocked from view by buildings and bridges, carrying water down the mountain slopes to the rushing river at the dark, dank bottom of the valley.

She catches herself wondering what Cassian would have thought of this, and whether he might like it enough to let it lift his spirits; and then mentally kicks herself for utter silliness when she catches herself imagining what exactly he might say and how exactly she would like to respond.

When the pale green of the Dorvallan sky starts deepening into a darker shade, signifying the approaching sunset, she gets on the bike and heads back to Nawara's residence.

x x x

"K?" she calls out tentatively when she has completed the power-up sequence and keyed in their agreed-upon password within the memory bank, fighting the sudden dread that K has somehow become inaccessible after she had shut down the shuttle sixteen hours earlier – or worse yet, has disappeared altogether.

She beams with joy when the now-familiar monotone greets her.

"Hello, Jyn."

"Good to know you're still here," she greets him in turn, her voice dripping with relief. "But remember, on this planet my name's Liana."

"Of course it is," he agrees readily. "I simply assumed that since you correctly keyed in my reactivation access code, you were alone and free to talk."

"You're right. And yes, I'm alone." Though that is not necessarily a good thing; half an hour earlier, right after dinner, she stopped by the med bay on the off chance that Cassian was awake and feeling better and might care to come along with her to the spaceport, but the 2-1B informed her that he was back in the bacta tank for his second round of intensive treatment – It will take at least one more session after this one, he said, before he can be declared 95% healthy, which was apparently his benchmark for successful recovery. And so, as the others dispersed to their sleeping quarters after dinner, Jyn, still wide awake and unaccustomed to the local pattern of frequent but short spells of sleep, could think of nothing better than ask for a set of infrared goggles, get back to the hangar bay to pick up the speeder bike she had ridden earlier in the day, and ride it through the impenetrable darkness of the moonless Dorvallan night to the spaceport about twenty minutes west of Ridgeside City.

The dinner that followed her town excursion and preceded this nighttime foray was a livelier affair than the one the night before, its star attendee being Shani, freshly returned from Ryloth and eager to show off her intricate lekku tattoos and the shimmery purple silk outfit she had just bought on her homeworld. She was every bit as youthful-looking and sinuously alluring in person as her hologram had suggested, and the way she sat, draped seductively against her husband's side, meant that Nawara apparently paid little attention to the other guests and goings-on. The other dozen or so of his associates and employees could not help stealing appreciative glances at her but were careful to keep these short and furtive. They were a curious bunch, Jyn observed; apart from Nawara and Naroon and Shani, the rest were all non-Twi'leks: a couple of fellow humans, young men about Cassian's age but considerably less good-looking in her view, half a dozen male Devaronians, including Nawara's four guards and two cargo pilots, a pair of silver-pelted male Bothans who sat just about as far apart from one another as the long dinner table would allow, and a slinky Selonian female covered in sleek amber-coloured fur. The Devaronians' attitudes of easy, if somewhat crude, camaraderie were the easiest to read, but the Selonian and the Bothans, whose extensive range of non-vocal communication included gestures expressed through rippling fur, were something of a mystery to her. Maybe this gives them an affinity with the Twi'leks, she pondered, considering that the Twi'leks are likewise proficient in non-vocal exchanges by way of twitching their lekku tips.

Now that she is back at the shuttle and has taken advantage of Nawara's gracious instructions to spaceport control to activate the landing bay power supply, she has finally hooked up the drained power cells to the external cables and must wait for two to three standard hours until the charge is complete before she can disconnect them. Not that it bothers her; her tactical meeting with Nawara and Naroon is still four hours away, and she hopes to use her time aboard the shuttle to see what she can do about patching up an interface between K's stored memory and the main shuttle systems.

"K?" she calls out again.

"Yes, Liana?" he comes back, and she smirks.

"I'm going to put together the programming patches to hook you up to the shuttle's navicomputer and comm encryption module. Can you put up a restore marker in your memory so you can revert to your last known good configuration if anything goes wrong?"

"Of course. Do you want me to set it now?"

"Now's as good as ever," she mutters as she scrolls through the main shuttle system menu looking for administrator access. "One more thing, can you find me a default master password for accessing Lambda computer registry files?"

A minute later, the required sequence lights up on the memory bank readout screen.

"Thank you, K."

"You're welcome, and may the Force be with you." She wonders if droids can really believe in the Force or are simply programmed to use the popular valediction. "Let me know when you are done writing the patches so I can put myself in standby when you apply them."

"I will, K. Give me a couple of hours, I want to make sure I don't let slip any glitches."

She wonders briefly if she might use this opportunity of one-on-one time with K to ask him things she wants to know about Cassian. He has told her enough to give her a good idea of what his life has been like, but there is so very much she still wants to know, and no matter how curious she may be, she hopes she never again has to keep him talking to stave off a potentially lethal coma, and yet she may not have a chance to ask him otherwise. Those are not the kind of things she can just bring up out of the blue without it seeming silly or sentimental. Like what he might have wanted to do if there had been no war. What kind of music he likes. What those serious girlfriends of his looked like, for that matter.

She opens her mouth but then bites down on her tongue. No, that would be wrong, like using his trust under false pretenses. She has done it plenty of times with marks and other useful idiots, but she will not be able to face him without shame if she does it now. Not to mention that K, despite all his good intentions, is notoriously confused about what exactly constitutes the notion of personal privacy and what kind of conversations are best forgotten once they have happened.

With a sigh, she keys in the admin password and sets about putting together the code patches.

x x x

"Do you mean it has been stolen already?"

She is back in Nawara's quarters; this would be a good time to admire the breathtaking panorama finally visible beyond the transparisteel, but the occasion does not allow it. They are huddled together at an expansive desk, herself and Naroon perched on durasteel crates flanking Nawara in a high-backed padded chair, surveying at a map readout as Nawara gives her the lowdown. She was surprised to see such a small group in attendance, but then again, she does not yet know the nature of the heist.

"Already would be too hasty an assessment, but as of nine hours tomorrow evening it will have been."

"But then.., what is the purpose of blowing up the data vault after that?" she blurts out before the likely answer hits her.

One thing she recalls about Nawara is his patience; no matter how angry or annoyed, he always manages to keep his temper and his voice in check. So now he calmly and patiently sets about explaining the situation to her.

"To cover up the theft, obviously. Ever since the First Imperial Bank of Dorvalla refused my loan request last month, Naroon and I have been working on breaking into their systems to duplicate a number of trading transaction authorisations, all of them due to be executed tomorrow. I applied for the loan citing my de-humidifier business," he explains for her benefit, "although in reality I urgently need the funds to upgrade and expand my synthetic ryll refinement facility. But if the Empire ever got wind of that one, they would expropriate it on customs duty evasion charges and all manner of other ridiculous pretexts. As it was, the bank managers stated that there were no business fundamentals to justify a new credit line for de-humidifier imports. And I let them believe I had accepted it as their final word," Nawara purrs, his eyes glowing brighter. "But I still need the money."

And unlike most Twi'leki businessmen who rely on their clan relatives in such circumstances, you have no such option, she adds mentally, but keeps it to herself.

"So tomorrow when your duplicate transactions are executed, the credits will leave the bank to end up on your accounts somewhere?" she prompts.

Nawara inclines his head. "Broadly speaking, yes. There are several intermediate steps involving their use to purchase non-traceable valuables to make certain that there is no way of connecting me to the missing funds. But in the end I shall be the beneficiary and First Imperial Bank should be none the wiser."

She can appreciate the elegance of the solution, so long as it goes as planned.

"The only weak link, if you wish, is the very first transfer from the bank into correspondent accounts," Nawara continues. "If Imperial investigators should decide to study the transaction records, they may notice the irregularities and might even have the misguided idea of linking them to me as a suspected disgruntled customer. So to make certain that nothing remains of those records to be studied, we need to destroy the data vault storage before the daily transaction data batch is copied to their offsite backup facility. An added advantage of the timing," he finishes, "is that the end of the business day coincides with the time the fog tends to pass through that part of town."

Now that makes sense. Destroy the evidence to make sure that once the money is gone, Nawara stays beyond suspicion. "And what if the explosion itself can be tracked to you?"

"Ah." His eyes grow dimmer. "That is where I would suggest that you come in. You, and a droid we are going to load with explosives whose job it will be to plant them. The timing of your arrival was very fortunate in that it allows us to use someone who has not been seen on Dorvalla in years and is, as such, unknown to the local security forces. And with your proficiency with such tasks, I was thinking it would be an easy job for you to remotely manipulate the droid to plant the charges along the vault's perimeter." He pauses and looks at her, trying to gauge her reaction; she does her best to look serenely confident. "The droid will have had its memory banks wiped and re-formatted to leave only the most basic commands that will allow you to manipulate its circuitry, and will be fitted with a self-destruct module mimicking a power cell malfunction, so even if any part of it survives the explosion, it will be of no use in any investigation and will arouse no suspicion."

"What sort of droid?" she asks.

"A Treadwell," Naroon supplies, and both she and Nawara look up at him.

Seeing how Nawara says nothing, she has to say what both of them must be thinking. "It's too small to carry the kind of charge needed to destroy Imperial regulation-grade vault walls, let alone whatever is inside."

Naroon looks momentarily uncomfortable, though she cannot tell whether this is due to embarrassment from being unused to speaking in front of an elder, or irritation at having his decision challenged by an outsider. "It is the only droid we currently have that bears no registration markings and was brought to Dorvalla completely under the radar, so as to be untraceable to us." He pauses before continuing in an almost-sulky tone. "It is either that one or the K-2SO– "

She literally jumps up from the crate before she can stop herself. "K-2SO?!" Belatedly she realizes that she is urgently in need of a plausible excuse for why she should have found the mention so exciting.

Well, like Cassian said, it is best to limit the lies to the necessary minimum and stick to the truth in other respects. "We had a K-2SO droid helping us along on a previous mission but he underwent a… critical failure and we were informed that his body was beyond repair. So we have his memory data saved back at our base but we need a new body to put him into." This is as close to the real events as it can get, so long as the shuttle can be considered their base. "If there is any chance– "

She abruptly stops herself. She has already asked one favour of Nawara, and he has been gracious enough; to ask for another one now before she has even been able to repay the first one would be considered a grave breach of Twi'leki etiquette. No, she needs to try a different tack. "If there is any chance I can take on and fulfill that duty myself, I would gladly do so if it then allowed for us to discuss my possible use of that– "

Naroon puts up a hand to interrupt her before she can finish, sharp claws glinting in the sunlight. "It is too risky," he states, his voice suddenly decisive. For me, or for you? she wonders, trying to keep her face blank. "What if you fail, if something happens to stop you from planting all the charges so the data is left intact? A mechanical being has a much higher probability of carrying out its assigned task regardless of external circumstances."

Ever tried to transmit top secret plans from an enemy fortress while being shot at by TIE interceptors? she thinks sourly. It is not Naroon's place to lecture her about external circumstances; but she cannot let him know that. Then again, it is not as if his concern is unfounded. Unlike Nawara, he had never seen her until twenty hours ago, and is probably worried about her bailing out as much, if not more, as he is about her failing.

Unexpectedly, Nawara comes to her defence. "You were not here, Naroon, when Liana worked for me. She is very resourceful and determined. And we can arrange for an armed lookout to keep an eye on her via an infrared scope to make certain he sees through the fog, who can warn her of any approaching danger."

Naroon inclines his head. "Who did you have in mind?"

Nawara hesitates, but only for an instant. "I was thinking about sending Malloc…"

She can tell that Naroon wants to object but stops himself. Then again, with the way their lekku tips have been twitching lately, she suspects that the part in Basic that she hears is only half of the full conversation.

"I think it may be better if we send two lookouts, one on the same side of the valley and one on the opposite side," he says eventually, and no matter what else may be going on, it strikes Jyn as a supremely reasonable suggestion.

"And who would you suggest for the second lookout?" Nawara purrs.

Naroon goes still for a couple of seconds; not even the lekku tips move. How hard is it to pick a lookout, she wonders, when their entire outfit is just over a dozen beings?

"I would suggest sending Krey'lya," he finally says. One of the Bothans, she figures, hearing the characteristic name structure.

"Very well," Nawara says. Is it her, or did he agree to this all too easily?

"What if they need to provide covering fire and end up shooting me instead?" she asks as the uncomfortable notion hits her.

Nawara gives her an inscrutable sideways glance, but Naroon is quick to answer. "I will give you a one-directional in-ear comlink that will serve as your position marker for the lookouts. That way the lookouts can warn you of any danger and they will also know who not to shoot if there is a need to."

"Thank you," she says, and means it. Somehow, despite the seemingly simple task ahead of her, she has a feeling she is going to need all the help she can get.

x x x

Three hours later, she is sitting in a town cantina a block away from the bank building nursing a by-now-warm mug of lomin ale and fighting a nagging sense of apprehension. Years of experience have taught her that if a heist seems too easy, it is usually because she has not considered all the scenarios and something is about to go spectacularly wrong. Trouble is, knowing that this may be one of those cases does not bring her any closer to figuring out what in the galaxy she is missing.

The backups they arranged for her all seem legit; after their planning was concluded, Naroon took her to the supplies depot to demonstrate the workings of the in-ear comlink before leaving it to her. He then took her to the surprisingly well-stocked explosives safe – she was baffled for an instant before she remembered that Nawara's synthetic ryll production still depended on what was essentially a mining operation – so she could pick up the explosives and detonators of her choice, with the proviso that she could amend her selection should her on-site survey of the vault later in the day give her grounds for it.

Now that she has seen the bank building and the vault occupying its back portion, and scanned it with a portable sonar array, all the while wearing an infrared vision helmet to avoid her face being accidentally recorded by any security equipment, she is, if anything, even more confident in her choice. It is indeed a regulation-grade Imperial medium-security data vault – the Empire tends to reserve top-notch security measures for its military installations rather than monetary institutions – and the cumulative power of the charges she picked out should be more than enough to put the data storage banks fully out of commission. The way the unremarkable windowless backside of the building looks out onto a deserted alley, with entry and exit points at its either end, is nothing if not fortuitous, and the fact that the bank office sits close to the base of the high cliff she visited earlier for her view of the valley means that at least one of her lookouts will have a superb vantage point to keep track of any movement in the area. The only tricky aspect is caused by the presence of an overly sensitive weapons detector at the bank entrance; the way it flashed and squawked when she passed it with her holstered blaster was enough to make her jump, and she will have to pass close enough to it to trigger it no matter which side of the building she chooses to access the back alley. She will have to leave her blaster on her getaway speeder bike a half a block away, but then again, she will be there to blow the place up, not shoot blaster bolts at it.

…And yet, as she waits for her food to arrive – she excused herself from the communal dinner on this occasion so as to better familiarize herself with the vault surroundings and listen for any relevant chatter among the cantina regulars – she could practically channel K with his bad feeling line.

x x x

She hits the brake on the speeder bike a touch too hard, and has to steady herself on top of it as inertia pushes her forward. Lost in thought, she was mechanically retracing her route back to Nawara's compound when it occurred to her that, with its occupants by now asleep, her time could be better spent getting up to date on galactic happenings. She could do it at Nawara's, true, but with the uneasy feeling from the morning's meeting still tugging at the back of her mind, she thinks it may be a safer bet to do it from the shuttle, especially now that she has patched K into the system and he can scramble all her incoming and outgoing data traffic. She will have to get some sleep this night – by now she has been awake for two Dorvallan days in a row and, at 19 hours spent awake, is pushing close to the duration of a really long standard day – but after two days cut off from the news of the galaxy she is beginning to feel restless. And maybe just a bit hopeful that by now, she might be able to pick up an odd news snippet about an unsuccessful military facility test or the like signifying the destruction of the nightmarish weapon they raced against time, and fought against the odds, to stop.

K greets her with his usual good humour, and she replies in kind; it is best not to tell him about her upcoming heist, she figures, as it will only make him worry unnecessarily in a situation where he can do practically nothing to help. The small talk completed, she calls up the external-source data query and sets about scanning the headlines.

And then, two minutes in, her breath gives out.

URGENT NEWS BULLETIN: Alderaan planetary core destroyed in massive magma eruption triggered by unexpected magnetic disturbance. All travel to the Alderaan system is suspended until further notice.

She stares at the words swimming up at her from the display surface. Imperial propaganda news-speak may choose whatever falsehood to wrap it in, but she knows, with the horrifying certainty of an eyewitness, what has happened.

They have failed.

.

TBC

.

Bothans get their honourable mention in Return of the Jedi, but the most detailed description and characterization of their species is found in Timothy Zahn's trilogy. Selonians feature in the so-called [rather mediocre] Corellian Trilogy by I-forget-who, and are briefly mentioned in one of the X-Wing series books. They are human-sized but weasel-like furry sentient aliens who, oddly, have a hive structure and social hierarchy not unlike bees.

Now that I have reached the halfway point in my tale, I figure I owe my dear readers, in addition to continued profound gratitude for the appreciation and encouragement, a mini-situation report. The remaining six chapters should, for the most part, be shorter but bigger on action / drama – I hope that the quality makes up for the quantity ;) Also, hope-wise, I hope to post the next chapter tomorrow but then have a red-eye flight to catch on Wednesday evening and will have slightly less time to write after that, so I may take a bit longer, say 2-3 days, between chapters; but in any case I hope to finish the story within the first week of January before work resumes [and becomes a bitch].

And rest assured, Cassian is not going to sit out the remainder of the plot in med bay :)