Phasma chuckles, a dark sound. “I’ve fought too hard and lost too much getting to where I am to risk everything by killing you,” she says. “But if you were to bleed out after this terrible training accident, I doubt General Hux would investigate the incident too closely. We had a little talk about you at the assembly. You, and your recent…what did Armitage call it? Break with reality. It was put forth that perhaps the repetition of our programming might need to be tweaked to keep any other recruits from reaching your same sad end. There was some discussion of implementing my far superior training methods and phasing out your little game room here. Once you’re gone.”
“No,” he says. “That would be the end of the First Order.”
“Wrong. It would only be the beginning.”
Phasma executes an escape that flips Cardinal onto his back on the ground. She’s on top, in the position of power now, but the fight has gone out of him. What good will it do? If he kills Phasma now—if he’s even able to do so, which is doubtful—his life is still over. If Armitage is against him, the entire First Order is against him. He doesn’t know how they weed out the undesirables, but he knows it happens. He’s watched children disappear over the years, or at least discovered their absence in the training room, their serial numbers erased from the records and scoreboards as if they’d never existed. They were always the slow ones, the clumsy ones, the ones who fought their programming or questioned the sims or pushed back when given commands. Almost like they were wired incorrectly. He’s always known it has to happen, but he’s never asked why or how. Maybe that’s part of the training—to not miss what’s gone, what’s been taken away. To never question.
Now that he’s questioning, of course he can’t last here.
His head falls back, and his helmet clanks against the floor.
“They made me. I’m what I’m supposed to be,” he murmurs, whether to himself or his enemy.
“Ah, Cardinal. That’s your problem. You were only ever meant to be the tool, not the hand that wields it. You’re what Brendol thought he wanted, a dull creature he crafted to do his will. But me? I’m what he didn’t know he needed. I am your evolution. And that means you’re deadweight. Extinct.”
With that, he feels a hot, sharp pain in the side of his chest, just under his shoulder pauldron. He doesn’t have to look down to know that it’s her knife. She holds it up between them, considering the bead of blood on the jagged edge.
“I haven’t seen this knife in a very long time. Where did you find it?”
Cardinal coughs and gulps.
“Parnassos.”
“Then it sounds like I’ll need to make another visit and see who survived. We can’t have witnesses running around with evidence, can we?”
His feet and hands are starting to go cold. For all his years of training and fighting, he’s never actually taken an injury anything like this. In his head, he hears a gentle voice intoning, Use a belt or rope to make a tourniquet between the stab wound and the heart. If an artery has been punctured, you will require immediate medical attention from a First Order–authorized med droid. Try to keep the injury above your heart and your head raised. If you relax, you have a better chance of surviving. If you suspect that you will not survive the wound, attempt to kill the enemy combatant and alert your sergeant so that they may plan around your failure.
Cardinal can’t do any of those things. And he’s pretty sure she hit a lung, maybe worse. It’s all happening so fast.
“Recorders everywhere,” he says. “They’re always watching.”
He lurches up as the knife plunges back in on the other side, even deeper.
“I’ve become quite adept over the years at shutting down cams and erasing extraneous feeds. Someone has to make the trash disappear around here.”
The weight leaves his chest, and Phasma stands over him. She pulls out her blaster, shoots, and Iris falls to the ground, sparking. The droid rolls a bit and gives a sad beep as her red light flashes out.
“Nice try, Cardinal. But you never had a chance. There’s a reason they put me on the posters instead of you. Oh, and look. You brought me an old friend.” His helmet turns sideways just in time to watch her stomp on the specimen case that’s tumbled out of his open ammo box. The beetle crunches amid the plastoid, the gold shards of its carapace glimmering in the gooey black of its guts.
He’s got one last play. He reaches for his blaster.
BUT HE’S NOT FAST ENOUGH. SHE sees his move and kicks his hand, hard enough to break bones. He never even touches the blaster. All Cardinal can do is lie there, suffering.
For all the time he’s spent in the sim room, creating and running and practicing and instructing, he has never seen it from this angle: on the ground. Reaching up, he pulls the knife out of his chest and is rewarded with a fresh gout of blood. Only Phasma could slam a blade between the armor plates and deep into the meat of him with such fatal accuracy. He can barely breathe; she definitely got a lung. Not that it matters what she did or didn’t hit. He knows well enough that the blade is poisoned. That’s why he tried to stab her with it in the first place.
As his blood drains away, so does his anger. For all his talk of loyalty, integrity, obedience, allegiance, now he knows that when it comes down to it, words mean nothing in the face of power. It was his first real fight, and Phasma was right. He lost. All the sims and sparring in the galaxy couldn’t match an entire lifetime spent fighting to survive.
At that last moment, the knife flashing down in his hand, did he flinch? Did he soften? Did he lack the instinct for such a personal kill? Or is she just that good at reading an opponent and controlling the fight? He still doesn’t quite know what happened, whether he missed or she parried. All he knows is that his blade didn’t find flesh. And hers did.
A noise reminds him that he’s not alone. Phasma is looking down at him, and he sees a field of red reflected in her helmet, armor and blood mixed.
“Are you still in there, CD-0922?” she asks. “Still trying to understand how you lost?”
“Hypocrite,” he mutters, although it’s an effort.
“I’m not a hypocrite just because I don’t believe the same things you believe.”
“Liar.”
“Yes, and who isn’t? Armitage doesn’t reward honesty. He rewards results.”
He coughs, and wetness splatters the inside of his helmet.
“Monster.”
Instead of answering this accusation, Phasma does the unthinkable: She takes off her helmet.
No one in the First Order has ever seen Phasma without her helmet, to Cardinal’s knowledge—he wasn’t lying when he told Vi that. When he still spent time among men his own age, it was a hotly debated topic, whether the tall warrior gleaming on the posters was actually hideous under her mask or terrifyingly beautiful. Now Cardinal knows, and he’s actually quite surprised. There are those blue eyes Siv told Vi about, and a crown of soft gold hair haloing pale white skin. A deadly beauty, and he’s the only one who knows. He can well imagine the dark green stripes under her eyes, her teeth bared to attack.
She kicks him, and when he can’t do anything but groan, she kneels and pulls off his helmet, setting both of their helmets side by side like an audience, one shiny silver and one red.
“Everyone is a monster,” she says, and her voice is so different without the vocoder.
“I’m…not…”
“Come now, Cardinal. Surely you’ve done something rebellious in your past. Something you regret. Besides attacking an officer tonight, of course.”
“I did what I had to do,” he sputters, “to get to you.”
“And I did what I had to do to get to me as well. I don’t regret it. That’s the difference between us. I know what I am, and I embrace it. I’m proud of it. I fought for everything that I have, every bit of what I am. Now that you see what you are, you despise it. You’re ashamed. And look where that’s gotten you.”
She shakes her head as if she’s disappointed in him and p
uts her helmet back on. He watches, sideways and through a red haze, as she reattaches her captain’s cape and slides the knife into her own ammo box. As she walks away, he feels a sudden desperation.
“You’re just going to leave me here? Not even going to finish me?” he taunts, his voice a whisper.
“I did finish you,” she says. “You just haven’t realized it yet.”
The door closes behind her.
Cardinal’s world goes dark.
“OH, EMERGENCY BRAKE. I KNEW RED was your color, but not quite this much red.”
Somehow, Cardinal is able to open his eyes, and he sees the strangest sight: a stormtrooper bending over him and speaking with the voice of Vi Moradi.
How did she manage it? He doesn’t want to know. He’d hate to think that the Absolution has strategic weaknesses that could be so easily infiltrated by a half-dead spy. But perhaps she’s not as damaged as she led him to believe. And perhaps he doesn’t care so much about the Absolution anymore.
“Phasma’s knife,” he says. “Poison.”
Vi’s helmet shakes. “I hate to say I told you so, but…”
He gives a sad chuckle and feels hot blood spray his chin. “Told me so.”
He wants to tell her to leave him alone so he can die in peace. His body, at least, has gone numb. There are worse places to die than his own training room, but he doesn’t want the last thing he sees to be a Resistance spy, especially not one gloating while wearing the armor he once wore himself.
“Go away,” he murmurs, turning his head away. “We had a deal.”
But instead of leaving, she puts his helmet back on him and rolls him over onto what he realizes is a hovergurney. They always keep a few in the training room in case emergency medical care is needed. Soon he’s floating, in mind and body, as Vi pushes him…somewhere.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Saving you,” she responds curtly. “Now tell me how to get to the hangar or shut up.”
Even half dead, he knows his ship, and he’s able to give her a few directions. The wounds don’t hurt as much right now, but he can feel the fever heating up, hear his blood beating in his ears.
“Waste of time,” he mutters. “Parnassos fever. Can’t amputate my lungs.”
“No, but I can put you in a medically induced coma and get you to a state-of-the-art medbay.”
He wants to laugh but can barely breathe. It’s like he’s drowning in his own blood.
“Why?” is all he can manage.
She nods tersely as they pass marching troopers, then leans close.
“Because I am an infinitely hopeful creature, and I still think you can be flipped.”
“Tough chance.”
“It’s one I’m willing to take. Thing is, I think you’re actually a good man under all that vicious red armor.”
He floats in and out of consciousness. The next time he looks up, they’re in the main hangar bay. Then she’s maneuvering him into a ship—not hers, something else. Something slightly bigger but still fast. Then they’re in the air and she’s barking into her comm. And then, blessedly, he sees the dark calm of space, and he’s dumbfounded to realize she might actually get away with it.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
Hyperspace swirls overhead, and he struggles to stay awake for her answer. Vi stands over him and removes her stormtrooper helmet, giving him that wry smile he now knows very well. There are dark circles under her eyes, and the torture chair left a scorch mark across her forehead. What a pair they are, mortal enemies, each of them about half dead, stumbling into space.
“I made a promise,” Vi reminds him. “I told Siv I’d come back for her, and you know I keep my promises. Turns out she and Torbi live in a station with an amazing medbay, so I don’t think you’ll mind. Now I’m going to put you out to slow down the infection, and you’re going to do me a favor and go unconscious so you won’t die.”
Before he can protest, he feels the needle stab into his shoulder, and his body relaxes. From here on out, everything is out of his hands. Maybe he’ll live, maybe he’ll die. Maybe, one day, he can find a way to take down Phasma for good. But for now, all he can do is succumb to the anesthetic.
The world starts to go dark.
The last thing he hears is Vi sigh and mutter, “Wish I had some knitting.”
THE BLACK TIE FIGHTER LANDED, SETTLING into the soft gray sand. It had been almost a year since Phasma had last seen her home planet, and Parnassos hadn’t changed much. It looked just as inhospitable and wretched as she remembered.
She didn’t immediately see the thing she came for, but then again she didn’t expect it to just be sitting there, on the surface. Luckily, she had brought machines to find it. A quick scan revealed the hidden shape, and she was soon scraping sand away with her hands. For all her careful planning, she hadn’t given enough thought to this part, hadn’t brought a shovel or even a droid to do the dirty work. Even though she knew how things worked on Parnassos, how the elements conspired to whip away everything that was important or good, she had forgotten that a year in the desert would leave anything buried in sand. There must’ve been dozens of bodies here, the bones a few meters or even less under her white boots. But that wasn’t why she had come. The dead were not her concern.
Soon her gloves scraped against something hard, and she began to find the shape of her prize. When the first glint of sun sparked off the metal, she had to look away. A year under the sand had done nothing to dull that spectacular brightness she had first touched a year ago, after dragging Brendol Hux across the endless desert, fighting for every step. It took hours to uncover the hidden prize, and she had to be careful of the beetles, which popped up from the sand every now and then, hungry for any kind of movement that could indicate liquid. She squashed each one she saw, knowing all too well their power. One of them, however, caught her eye, for no particular reason that came to mind. She recalled watching the sickness take over Carr, watching him fade into himself until he was practically transparent, far beyond help.
As the beetle crawled over her glove, its legs and proboscis hunting for the tiniest crack to invade and its golden carapace glinting like fire in the sun, she smiled under her helmet. Unclipping an ammo box from her belt, she opened and emptied it, dumping the energy cell into the sand. The beetle went in, and she clicked the top closed, jiggling it to be sure it was sound. The little beast might be useful, someday.
Returning to the real work at hand, she continued to dig out Brendol’s ship, the one he called the Emperor’s Naboo yacht. A silly name for a broken toy. She couldn’t help remembering the first time she had seen it, a falling star burning through the sky and plummeting into unknown lands, farther away than anyone she’d ever known had traveled. Phasma had left a trail of bodies behind her, getting here. And she would leave a trail of bodies behind on the way back if that was what it took to erase every sign of the girl who had been born here on a forgotten, broken planet called Parnassos.
Tearing the ship apart took hours. Even with her various tools, it was an exhausting job, all done under the blistering sun in her full armor, and she had to take several breaks to sit in her TIE, drinking water, watching out for beetles, wiping the sweat off her forehead. Funny how, even on Parnassos, she didn’t feel comfortable without her helmet. After she had joined the Scyre, she’d embraced their fierce masks and salve paint as her new visage, as a better way to face the world and terrify it, perhaps giving her a slight edge in any battle. Her helmet performed the same service. She’d first put on the fallen stormtrooper’s armor in the middle of this very desert and had never looked back. No one in the First Order knew what her true face looked like, except Brendol.
She would remedy that. Soon.
But first, she had to complete her task. It had the feel of a ritual, what she was doing here. It felt right. Transforming valuable remains into protection was, after all, a very Parnassian talent.
Not that it was easy. But, then again, what i
n her life had been? As she dragged the chrome plates back to her ship one by one and loaded them in, she recalled using plates of metal as sleds and then as shields. To think that all those years she had lived in the Nautilus and then in the Scyre, she had had no idea what existed outside of their small territory. It had felt like a revelation that an entire group could sleep on one patch of dirt, as Balder’s Claw folk did. And after she found the records and studied the colonization of Parnassos, she knew that, as Brendol had told her, there were indeed rich lands just out of reach that whole time. A few hours on a ship and life would have been entirely different, bereft of violence. She was going to visit one of those places of plenty now, in fact.
She only took as much of the yacht’s chrome plating as she needed, leaving the rest to the desert, where it would soon be buried. Back in her TIE, she lifted off and zoomed into the blue sky and over the ocean. It had seemed so deep and dark when she was a child, this immense and yawning promise of cold death and monsters. From up here, it looked friendly and blue and balmy. A short while later, she landed the ship on a broad swath of green land. Once planted with crops to feed the millions of Con Star Mining Corporation workers, it was now a riot of wildly flowering grains. A short walk away was the exact thing she needed, the thing that Con Star had been kind enough to build nearly two hundred years ago: a factory. Not just any factory, but one dedicated to making mining equipment from local metals and ores. Cleo Station.
In the year she’d been with the First Order, Phasma had spent as much time as possible learning. She was accustomed to sleeping four hours or less in a day cycle, so while the rest of the stormtroopers and officers were asleep, she’d been catching up on tech, tactics, galactic history. And even a little slicing. She punched the right code into the datapad, and the abandoned factory’s doors slid open as if they’d been greased only yesterday. Con Star hadn’t known how to terraform a planet, but they’d known what they were doing when it came to constructing and programming their facilities to last.
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