Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  “You almost shot me,” Chirrut said.

  “You’re welcome,” his partner replied. Without looking, he fired a bolt into the back of a stormtrooper crawling nearby.

  Then Chirrut’s partner turned toward Jyn and Cassian. He raised his cannon, expression wary but not outright hostile. Chirrut watched with blind eyes. You both saved us, Jyn thought. You won’t kill us now.

  “Clear of hostiles!” K-2SO announced, striding forward to survey the remnants of the battle.

  Immediately, Chirrut’s partner aimed at the droid. K-2SO halted and amended, “One hostile!”

  “He’s with us!” Jyn cried.

  “No.” Chirrut spoke to his partner gently. “They’re okay.”

  The red-armored man lowered his weapon again. Jyn thought he looked disappointed.

  —

  Jyn nursed her scraped wrists and flexed her fingers, glad to be free of the cuffs. She’d spent too much time in restraints, gone to too much trouble to ensure her freedom. Even a few minutes was more than she wanted to endure.

  K-2SO was freeing Cassian as Chirrut and his partner looked on. “Go back to the ship,” Cassian told the droid. “Wait for my call.”

  “You’re wasting your most valuable resource,” the droid returned, but he strode away obediently. Jyn looked to Cassian for an explanation. They were still in danger, and while the droid brought unwanted attention he’d also proven useful. She didn’t much like K-2; he was still more reliable than their new allies.

  Cassian, evidently, had other things on his mind. He watched Chirrut’s partner. “Is he Jedi?” he asked, with the hushed doubt of a man on the verge of a great discovery.

  Jyn thought of the spinning staff, of Chirrut’s graceful dance of battle. Was that what Jedi were like? Her mother had told her stories: the mystic warriors and guardians of the Republic in the centuries before the Empire, believers in a Force that guided living creatures.

  She’d never really believed in the stories. The Jedi, yes, but not the legend.

  “No Jedi anymore,” Chirrut’s partner said. “Only dreamers like this fool.”

  Chirrut shrugged mildly. “The Force did protect me.”

  “I protected you,” his partner replied.

  If Cassian was disappointed by his answer, Jyn couldn’t tell. She was willing to take Chirrut’s partner at his word; easier to believe in what existed now rather than what might have been long ago.

  She bit back her next words, savored the sour taste before asking, “Can you get us to Saw Gerrera?”

  She’d already committed to the mission. Might as well see it through.

  Neither Chirrut nor his partner had the opportunity to reply before someone called: “Hands in the air!”

  Rebel fighters emerged from alleys and rooftops. Jyn recognized several from the plaza. She wanted to shout in rage—for hours, it seemed, she’d done nothing but fight, and her body had been sapped of every erg of strength; had turned to nothing but a collection of bruises and aching muscles.

  Cassian was the first to drop his weapon. Jyn followed suit. Cassian mouthed something to her: Not the enemy.

  “Can’t you see we are no friends of the Empire?” Chirrut asked. He’d set his bowcaster in the dust. Even his partner had relinquished his cannon.

  One rebel stepped forward: a thin, skull-faced Tognath in leathers who breathed through a mechanical respirator and spoke in his native dialect. “Tell that to the one who killed our men.”

  Jyn looked to Cassian. In her mind’s eye, she saw him fire his blaster in the plaza, felt the grenade explode over her head. She remembered the cold, guiltless sensation that had passed over her then; shame found her now, gripped her heart, and she tore through it with anger.

  These were Saw’s people. If Saw was alive, she knew how to deal with them.

  “Anyone who kills me or my friends will answer to Saw Gerrera,” she called.

  The rebels shuffled, murmured to one another. One of them chuckled hoarsely. The Tognath cocked his head, as if trying to recognize Jyn’s face.

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  “Because Saw knows me,” she said. “Because I know him. Because I was battling at his side when most of you were still crying in your beds instead of fighting back.” She’d begun by choosing her words carefully, but now they spilled from her lips unwanted. “I’ve seen that man at his worst. I know exactly what he does when he feels betrayed, and I’m still alive.”

  The broken hatch made it easy to stumble upon unwanted memories. The battle in the plaza had already dredged up a hundred bloody conflicts she’d barely survived, thirteen or fourteen or fifteen years old and already trusted with a blaster. Now she remembered the looks from her fellow rebels, the whispers behind her back. The things they wondered about her. The things they believed.

  “Because,” she finished, “I am the daughter of Galen Erso.”

  The Tognath watched her for a long moment. Everyone, friend and foe, was still.

  “Take them,” the Tognath said.

  Two rebels grappled Jyn. She didn’t fight. Coarse cloth scraped over her nose, and she fought to breathe through the sack that clung to her face. She heard Cassian groan nearby, a growl from Chirrut’s partner, and then Chirrut’s own voice:

  “Are you kidding me? I’m blind!”

  SUPPLEMENTAL DATA: PILGRIMS OF JEDHA

  [Document #DN4624 (“Faith and the Force of Others”), fragment excerpted from the archives of the Order of the Esoteric Pulsar; author unknown.]

  What is the Force of Others? To ask this, you must ask one question and a thousand.

  To a cultist of the Huiyui-Tni, you must ask, “What is the exhalation of the true, amphibious god?” To a Jedi, you must ask, “What is it that binds and defines all life?” To a child of the Esoteric Pulsar, you must ask, “Show me the secret pages of the Book of Stars.” To a faithless man, you must ask, “What power enables prophecy and sorcery in a world controlled by logic and law?”

  These thousand questions will garner a thousand answers, all pointing toward the same truth.

  Now ask, “Where is the Force of Others?” and one answer becomes inevitable: the kind and cold moon of Jedha. For a thousand faiths see truth in Jedha’s mysteries, no matter that their stories differ; no matter that not one history of the Temple of the Kyber can explain each brick in its foundation, or that our legends entwine and part in paradox.

  I ask you to believe that Jedha is a nexus for faith, life, and the Force of Others in all their forms. If the Force can be embodied in a vision or a living creature, why not a place? Or why not an idea? Why can pilgrimage not be Jedha, and Jedha not be the Force?

  I ask you to believe this not because it is true, but because it is a beginning.

  Imagine these things and you must conclude that every visit to Jedha is a pilgrimage—that every visit to Jedha is an expression of faith and a search for truth, intended or not. When a thief comes to Jedha to prey upon the vendors in the markets, she does so in accordance with her nature; she will trick and lie and steal, and if she does not trick or lie or steal then her faith and nature are altogether different.

  You say, “Why a thief? Why such a cynical conjecture?” To which I say, “Do you not wonder why the Guardians of the Whills protect their temple so? Why the Jedi carry their cruel swords of light, even here?” It is because our pilgrimages are in accordance with our faiths, and faith can bring terrible conflict. A thief is but the kindest example I can offer.

  Jedha does not give answers to those who do not know what answers they seek. Jedha does not bring into harmony those things that cannot harmonize. Jedha does not express faith and the Force through its pilgrims; pilgrims express faith and the Force through Jedha.

  Pilgrims express faith and the Force through life.

  For what is life but pilgrimage? And what is life bu
t conflict?

  There have been worlds and tyrants who have tried to prevent their people from journeying to Jedha. But such a thing cannot be stopped. Living beings will always find their way to the kind and cold moon, as they always have. Through the Force and Jedha, they will act as they must, for good and ill.

  And we will know them by their actions there.

  CASSIAN WAS BLIND BENEATH HIS hood, but although he lacked Chirrut’s preternatural senses, he knew how to listen.

  During the long march from the Holy City, he listened to his captors. He listened to the code words they murmured to unseen allies who granted them passage out of the settlement and into the desert. He listened to their confusion, the short-lived cheering and then the grim silence, as the Star Destroyer above Jedha shrank into the twilight sky. He listened to the Tognath state coolly, “Saw will know what it means.”

  He listened to Chirrut’s endless chanting (May the Force of others be with you. May the Force of others be with you.), muffled by the cloth sack. The combined effect seemed simultaneously profound and absurd.

  Most of all, he listened for Jyn. He listened for her struggles. He listened for her voice. He tried to determine which steady tread on the sand was hers.

  For all Cassian heard, she might have vanished from the face of Jedha.

  Was it concern that made him fixate on her? His mission was to find Saw and, through Saw, find the pilot; find proof of an Imperial weapon that could mutilate the galaxy. If possible, he was also to find and eliminate Galen Erso—a man very likely culpable in that weapon’s creation. Jyn was first and foremost a means of finding Saw. She’d already served that purpose, which meant she was now expendable.

  She dominated his thinking nonetheless. Cassian believed neither pity nor pragmatism explained it.

  He had sacrificed Tivik without hesitation.

  Maybe it was the need he’d seen in Jyn, the fire that had carried her through the fighting in the Holy Quarter. It seemed obscene to leave that need unanswered, abandoned to the dust.

  It was late into the night when the band left the desert for the rocky slopes of a mountainside, then on from the mountain to the echoing corridors of a stone shelter. Cassian recognized the heavier tread of Chirrut’s partner at his side and risked a low murmur. “We’re half a day out. A shrine?”

  “A monastery,” the man said. “The Catacombs of Cadera, down among the dead.”

  The name meant nothing to Cassian.

  He tried to count rebel voices in the distance, but he rapidly lost track. They’d reached a base of some kind: Weapons clattered and heaters hummed, and heavy doors opened and slammed shut. Shouts of triumph and the click of wooden game pieces suggested the presence of bored guards or off-duty soldiers. Without prelude, Cassian’s hood was torn off and a solid kick delivered to his lower back. He pivoted in time to see the blurred shadow of a cell door slam shut. He blinked furiously to adjust to the dim light.

  The cell was little more than a cramped alcove in the rock. Chirrut and his partner shared the space with Cassian. The former man chanted softly (May the Force of others be with you…) in one corner, while the latter stood with arms folded across his chest, staring into the darkness of the cavern beyond the door.

  Jyn was missing.

  “Hey!” Cassian called. He rushed to the bars, cried out, “Jyn Erso! Where is she?”

  No one answered.

  You’re a fool, Cassian told himself. They won’t talk to you. But they’ll try to spot your weakness.

  He mollified himself with the dubious pleasure of inhaling musty air unencumbered by a hood. The walls of the catacombs were inlaid with humanoid skulls—thousands of them, from what had to have been generations of monks—and draped with power cables leading from generators to heaters to comm stations. A handful of rebel guards sat on squat stools nearby, not far from where the group’s gear had been splayed on a table. Other cells neighbored Cassian’s own, silent and dark.

  He turned his attention to the door itself and pushed himself against the bars to peer at its outer control panel. The lock was mechanical, but wired into the systems of the rebel hideout. He could definitely reach it, suspected he could pick it, but not without triggering an alarm.

  “You pray?” Chirrut’s partner asked.

  Cassian turned to find the man speaking to the still-chanting Chirrut.

  “You pray,” the man said, and barked a laugh. He glanced at Cassian. “He’s praying for the door to open.”

  “Pray I get a chance to work,” Cassian murmured, but both men seemed to ignore him.

  Chirrut stopped his chant abruptly. “It bothers him,” he said, “because he knows it is possible.”

  Chirrut’s partner laughed again. The sound was brief and ugly, but Chirrut only shrugged and told Cassian, “Baze Malbus was once the most devoted Guardian of us all.”

  Baze Malbus. Cassian ran the name through his mental database and came up empty. “Now he’s just your guardian?” he asked.

  Neither man took the bait. Cassian ran his hands over his face, scratched at his beard. Both of the Guardians were formidable fighters, to be sure; and Chirrut, Jedi or not, half mad or overzealous or sincere, was an echo of an era the Empire had nearly erased.

  Even the leaders of the Rebellion rarely spoke about the Jedi. Had men like Chirrut been common? Men so certain in their faith that they wielded it like a shield? Men so disciplined that, even blind, they could down a dozen stormtroopers with nothing more than a stick?

  How many people were alive to remember?

  Before the rise of the Empire, Cassian would have considered the Jedi his enemies. But he’d been so young, too young to understand who he’d been fighting or who he’d been fighting for. Now the Separatists were as forgotten as their Jedi foes.

  “Why did you save us?” he asked.

  “Maybe I only saved her,” Chirrut said.

  Cassian grunted. “I’m beginning to think the Force and I have different priorities.”

  “Relax, Captain,” Chirrut answered. “We’ve been in worse cages than this one.”

  “Yeah? Well, this is a first for me.”

  “There is more than one sort of prison, Captain,” Chirrut said. “I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.”

  Baze laughed again, but there was no boisterousness this time—just a coarse, hollow sound.

  Cassian frowned and turned back to the lock and the cavern. It was some minutes later that he realized no one had told Chirrut he was a captain.

  —

  Jyn recognized the soldiers in the monastery, though she’d never met most of them. She knew their scars: the burn marks on their palms from overheated blasters, the short, jagged lines on cheeks and neck drawn by slivers of shrapnel. She knew their carriage: the proud, compact manner they maintained that readied them to take or return a blow. She recognized these things, recognized the soldiers not only as rebels but as Saw’s rebels, trained in his image, and she instinctively mirrored their posture, reflected their mistrustful glares.

  All these years later, she was still one of them—and they hated her for it.

  She couldn’t really blame them. They were mourning casualties in the Holy City because of her. They were mourning their brothers and sisters, dead at her hand (or close enough).

  She waited in the central chamber of the monastery, a place stacked with cots and cook stations attended by Saw’s people. The Tognath had left her there after guiding her away from Cassian, her hood off and her hands bound. The question of where Cassian might be now was no more than a distant distraction to Jyn—like the sound of a rat scuttling along rafters.

  She had other concerns on her mind. Saw Gerrera was somewhere close. She could almost smell the oil on his favorite rifle. For years, she had anticipated, fantasized about confronting him; picked hurtful words and braced herself for the wrath of the firs
t, last, and only true warrior to stand against the Empire.

  That confrontation had never come, and she’d let the fantasy die. Now she wasn’t sure she was ready for the fight.

  “I remember you.”

  Jyn turned to see a woman approaching. She was pale, almost chalk-skinned, but human, dressed in an armored jacket two sizes too large. Her speech was slurred. One of her arms hung limp.

  “Were you on Fashinder Prime?” the woman asked, as if trying to place an acquaintance.

  “No,” Jyn said, and furrowed her brow. “Must’ve been after my time.”

  Jyn tried to recall the woman’s face and caught other memories instead. She saw comrades she hadn’t thought about in a lifetime.

  “Is Staven still alive?” Jyn asked.

  Staven, who’d lectured her for hours one night for miswiring a detonator. Staven, who’d given Jyn her first sip of fermented bantha milk and let her sit with the adults telling dirty jokes before anyone else.

  “No,” the woman said.

  “What about Codo?”

  Codo, who’d taught Jyn how to swim in the mudhole they’d called a grotto. Codo, who’d tried to kiss her, and who wouldn’t talk to her after she refused.

  In response, the woman lifted her good hand, put an imaginary blaster to her head, and pulled the trigger.

  “Maia?” Jyn asked. But that was stupid; she remembered now, she had been there when Maia died. Jyn had been the one to inherit—and promptly lose—Maia’s synthskin gloves, the gloves that had been so soft and smelled like carbon scoring.

  People didn’t talk about the dead much among Saw’s rebels. It made it easy to forget when someone was gone.

  The woman grunted and drifted away. The Tognath emerged from a doorway and returned to Jyn’s side. With a swift, unkind motion, he cut the bonds around her wrists.

  “He’ll see you now,” the Tognath said.

  No more distractions, Jyn thought.