Before she can shoot, the mirrored visor of his helmet slides up, and the blaster falls out of her hand.

"Cassian– " she gasps, her mind a tumult of shock and relief.

Her first inkling that something might be off is when he shakes off the helmet and hangs it up on one of the bike handles by the chin strap, but does not make a move in her direction; so she is compelled to dismount and walk up to him. She suspects that the reason for his standoffishness must have something to do with the fact that he, an Intelligence operative and a trained assassin, has now found himself in her crosshairs, outsmarted by his quarry; but while that might explain a spot of wounded pride, it does nothing to explain his expression when she is close enough to take a good look.

He is absolutely white-hot furious.

She stops dead in her tracks a couple of meters from him, momentarily lost for words.

"What in the pits of Kessel are you doing?!" he lunges verbally at her, eyes blazing. "What in the Emperor's black name made you – "

…made you hold me at blaster point, she mentally finishes for him. Well, if that's the only reason he is seething at her, it is easy to explain.

"I'm sorry I didn't know it was you, really – "

The effect of her words is the exact opposite of what she was hoping for.

"What the blazes are you talking about?!" By now he has finished seething and started barking. Compared to this, the way he berated her for branding him a Stormtrooper on board his U-wing a while back can be considered an endearment. "What were you thinking trying to get yourself blown up?!"

Well, she wasn't exactly going for that.

"I can explain – "

He still won't let her finish.

"Why didn't you bother to explain it before you left on a suicide mission?" he snaps.

"Cassian, it wasn't meant to be a suicide mission!" she protests. "I may have made a mistake trusting Nawara but I had no idea I'd get cornered the way it happened – "

She cuts herself off seeing how he has turned away and taken a couple of steps away from her. Is he going towalk back to Nawara's, or to the spaceport, from here?

But then he stops and remains standing there, still facing away from her. By the time she is thinking about coming over to him, or at least calling out to him, he turns around and comes back in her direction; this time they are just a couple of paces apart when he speaks, and she is relieved to see that he looks less angry; or at least lessobviously angry.

"You were damn lucky I got there when I did," he growls at her.

So it wasn't Nawara's lookouts who shot the Imperials off her back. It figures, remembering the kind of lightning-fast lethal accuracy she saw those bolts fired with. Well, whatever chain of events brought about his fortuitous intervention, she is not inclined to argue this last point.

"How did you find out?" she asks, trying to steer him onto a less-contentious track of thought that will hopefully distract him enough to dispel some of that anger. "And how did you get – " she gestures to his security officer outfit and the regulation-issue bike, "all this?"

It works, to an extent. At least he does not snap at her immediately, but instead takes a second or two to collect his wits.

"I woke up in your quarters to see you gone," he starts, "and thought you were back at the spaceport looking at the news again." Makes sense, considering the terrible news they heard the night before; in fact, had she not been bound by obligation to stick to this near-disaster of a plan, that is exactly what she would have done. "And K told me you'd left a message for me."

Of course. Trust K, with his big mouth, to have spilled the beans in blatant disregard of her instructions to pass on the message only if she wasn't back by nightfall.

"So I went back to Nawara's place – he continues, at which point she really has to interject.

"You talked to Nawara?!"

"You bet I talked to Nawara," he says darkly, making her wonder what sort of bodily damage her former boss may have sustained in the encounter; but his next words surprise her. "By the time I got there he was trying to reach his man, the Devaronian he had sent to watch over you whose comlink had gone off, and when I – asked him – he told me about that plan of his." Maybe her initial guess was right after all, depending on what exactly the asking involved. But the part about Nawara trying to reach Malloc is at odds with the betrayal scenario her mind had painted over the past half hour or so. Could it be Malloc's own initiative; but if so, why?

"Next thing I went out to ambush the guy I got all this from," Cassian continues, and once again she has to interrupt him.

"Do you happen to know that killing a Dorvallan security officer carries a twenty-year prison term if you're caught?" she reprimands him, trying to get back at him, just a little bit, for the dressing-down he has just given her.

But she is out of luck, after a fashion, though on balance it means that they both are kind of lucky.

"Unlike you," he grumbles, eyeing her with all the disdain he can muster up, "I don't always aim to shoot first and ask questions later in a strange situation. Not unless it's absolutely necessary," he adds. "I asked Nawara for a stun dart to shoot the officer with, and then hid him in an alley under the cliff near where he'd been sitting on his bike. He'll come around in a few hours none the wiser."

"What if you were caught impersonating a security officer?" she insists.

"What if you got yourself blown up?" he snaps, his hands tightening into fists before he forces himself back to a calmer state.

"That wasn't intentional," she argues, "unlike you switching on that siren bull blast – "

"What, you think that after firing three blaster bolts off the clifftop, I should have just come riding down and wait for the real Dorvallan security, or better still, for the Imperials to arrest me?" he cuts in. "It was the only way to avert suspicion."

She is ready to kick herself; since the rancorous start of their encounter she was too eager to latch onto something to criticize him for, to have seen the perfect reason in his choice.

Luckily for her, this time he lets it pass. "I got to the base of the cliff and was heading back to Nawara's, and then I heard another bike two streets down and by the time we'd been going in parallel for two minutes I knew it was you," he goes on; despite the tense exchange, she almost wants to smirk at the irony. "And then you were gone and by the time I'd stopped and tried to figure out what had happened you charged me here like a wild Bantha."

In a calmer situation, she might object to the comparison, considering that in her own mind she saw her cornering him – or the officer she had believed him to be – as an elegantly deft manoeuvre. But this is not the time to argue the fine points of semantics.

"And since your comlink was out of range, I couldn't hail you either," he finishes.

"What do you mean, out of range?" she protests. Surely with at least one of her supposed lookouts due to be on that same clifftop, she had to be in range of a comm hail from the distance Cassian was driving at.

"I mean out of range," he insists, not quite helpfully. "Let me see it."

She takes the bullet-shaped device out of her ear and hand it to him; and sees his face fall.

"Who gave you this?"

"Naroon, Nawara's deputy, right after we'd discussed the plan. I tested it with both lookouts and it worked. Why?

"It's a Merr-Somm SRR make 4," he explains; he is not being very helpful this time, either. But seeing her perplexed look, he relents. "It's a short range device, only works at a distance of about 50 meters."

Which was pretty much the maximum distance she could have tested it at, and did test it at, back at the hangar.

So it had not been Nawara setting her up, after all.

And with Naroon having insisted on a second lookout sniper of his choosing, she now knows Malloc the Devaronian's likely fate.

No doubt Cassian has put the pieces together as well, arriving at the same conclusion. Strangely, he does not seem surprised.

"I figured it might be him after I'd talked to Nawara," he explains presently. "But I didn't have this past bit of info to be certain."

So perhaps Nawara made it through their encounter with both of his lekku, and other vital appendages, still attached; and considering this latest revelation, it looks to be a good thing.

Unlike, for example, the fact that Cassian was supposed to have spent the day undergoing the crucial final bacta treatment, not careening down the streets of an unfamiliar city.

"If you two saw eye-to-eye on this after you'd talked, why didn't you get Nawara to send another of his men to cover me? I mean you were supposed to be – "

But this last part of her question is completely lost on its target audience.

"Great." The word sounds like the sharp crack of a high-voltage charge. "Next time you get in trouble, you pick whoever the blazes you want to get you out of it."

Before she can say another word, he is back on the bike and roaring off into the distance.

.

TBC

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To anyone who may be tempted to Force-choke me for ending this on yet another quasi cliffhanger, I solemnly swear it was the last one.