by Chuck Wendig
Then his gaze flits beyond her—
The sound of running footsteps echoes.
Brentin.
Her husband leaps, slamming into Rax hard. The blaster goes off, but the shot goes wide, smacking into the ceiling above her head. Brentin gets underneath the blaster, wrenching it upward. The two men struggle. It all seems to happen in slow motion. Norra works to stand, dizzied by the blow—but she moves, has to move, even though it feels like her brain isn’t connected to anything, like her feet are stuck in mud. She throws her body against the wall behind Rax, and she reaches for him—
Even as he kicks out with a boot, knocking Brentin back—
Even as Rax raises the blaster—
Even as she hears herself screaming—
Even as her hands close on his throat from behind, as the blaster goes off, as Brentin staggers back, as a black burning hole blooms in the center of her husband’s chest like a dark flower opening to the sun—
Brentin falls backward, clutching at his breastbone.
Rax spins around to meet Norra face-to-face. His visage is a rictus of raw, blistering rage—it is the fury of a fiend trapped in the corner and desperate to claw its way free. He pumps a knee into her stomach. She doubles over but urges herself forward, slamming him into the wall. The pistol swings and cracks her across the cheek and she feels something there give way—a disk in her neck slipping as misery radiates in every direction across her body. She wants to stop. She wants to roll over and give up and plead—Let me have a moment with my husband, just one, before you kill me. But that mote of desperation is swallowed in a wave of rage all her own. Norra roars as she grabs the man behind the leg and yanks out—he slams backward and the two of them fall.
The blaster is between them. All hands on it. They struggle. He wrenches her sideways. Her head crashes into the wall, concussed. Her vision starts to slip like a broken gear. In her blurred vision, she sees Brentin there by the wall, holding his chest, staring up at her. His mouth forms words that she can’t hear, but she can see.
I love you.
“I love you too,” she says, the words garbled and messy.
She cries out as she summons every molecule of strength she can muster, turning the blaster centimeter by dreadful centimeter toward Rax’s chest.
Her finger finds the trigger—
His head slams hard into hers. The blaster goes off. Rax cries out and throws her off him. He pulls himself up as the whole place shakes and shudders and bangs. The man clutches at his shoulder, blood staining his whites. “You shot me,” he says, incredulous.
Norra, whimpering, pulls herself toward her husband. His name slips from her lips in a babbled mantra, Brentin, Brentin, Brentin, and she crawls over to him and cradles his head, telling him that he’ll be okay, that she’ll get him help, that she’s survived death so many times she knows he can survive, too. But his eyes are dead as coins and his mouth is slack. Norra cries out. She cradles him. She crumples against him.
I just want to sleep. I just want to be with him again. I’m so sorry, Brentin. So sorry I didn’t believe you. So sorry I…
Rax stumbles away from her, down the hall, holding his injured shoulder. Norra watches him escape through blurry vision.
No. Come back. I’m not done with you yet…
She drags herself off Brentin, crawling like a common cur toward her retreating foe. It’s then that her hand bumps into something…
The blaster.
He doesn’t have it. She does.
Gritting her teeth together so hard she fears they might grind down to powder, she raises the pistol from her position on the floor—
Her hand dips and swerves. Her vision smears. Everything is made worse by the shaking. The ground buckles underneath her.
Then a shape moves past her. It’s Sloane. The other woman is up on her feet, pursuing Rax now. Through Norra’s double—now triple—vision, she watches the two Imperials clash once more, each clumsily brutalizing the other with fists and kicks. Norra points the pistol at one, then the other, then feels her hand weakening. She doesn’t even know if she has the strength to pull the trigger. Sloane cries out, thrown against the wall as Rax uses the wall to pull himself up the steps…
She speaks a word. A name.
“Sloane.”
The woman turns toward her.
Norra, with the last measure of her strength, spins the blaster across the floor toward the other woman. And unconsciousness takes her away like a swift river.
Security speeders hover in the space around the Senate tower. Strobing lights throb against the white. Down below, a crowd has gathered, and Sinjir steps into it, pushing past, driven by the dueling forces of grief and anger. He doesn’t even know what he’s looking for or what he hopes to accomplish—once security forces came and took away Tolwar Wartol, Sinjir had to come here and see it for himself. Perhaps for a vigil. Perhaps as a detective. Perhaps simply as a witness to it all.
It reminds him again of Endor. After it had all happened, with the battle ending and his comrades strewn about, bloodied and defeated—he felt the same sense of dislocation. Like he was no longer connected to anything—a man untethered. Takask wallask ti dan. Man without a star.
But now he has a star. Or had, until this.
Ahead, he finds someone joining him—
“Leia,” he says.
She cradles her stomach, but it doesn’t slow her down. “I should’ve known they’d make a second attempt on her. They hate her. I should’ve seen it—how she was at the center of it all.” To the crowd, Leia barks, “Move. Move out of my way!” A murmur of awe in her wake.
Ahead, through the crowd, Sinjir sees something impossible.
A specter, surely. A wraith summoned by his own guilt.
He sees her for only a moment, when the security forces around her part—Chancellor Mon Mothma, shrugging a blanket off her shoulders, denying its comfort. No. It can’t be. Can it? The crowd closes around her again and Sinjir can’t see. He thinks to get ahead of Leia to help her part the crowd, but the princess is doing a fine enough job of that on her own, the volume of her voice rising to express her natural gift of command. As everyone moves aside, Sinjir leaps into Leia’s wake to follow her. A guard steps in front of him, separating Sinjir from the princess, a sparking baton thrusting toward him—Leia reaches back and twists it from the man’s grip. The baton clatters. Two guards move into the fray when—
“Stop!”
Her voice. One word. Tolling like a bell, clear and crisp.
The chancellor steps forward, easing herself between the security peace officer and Sinjir. “He is my adviser,” she says, coolly.
“Chancellor. I…” Sinjir gasps. “You’re alive.”
“I am.” Her face is a stern, grim mask.
Leia gasps, “Mon.” And the two of them melt together in a crushing hug. Leia’s head falls to the chancellor’s shoulder, and Mon lifts her head back, eyes closed, seeming to savor the moment.
When they pull away from each other, Sinjir asks, “But how? That blast—”
“I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t here.” She must see the confusion on his face, so she answers it: “You made me feel guilty for not buying my own baby gift for a dear friend, remember?” With that, she gives a knowing look to Leia. “I went out on my own. I left Auxi in my place…”
That last sentence is a struggle for her to get out. Sadness crosses her face like the shadow from a passing cloud.
“Auxi,” Leia asks. “Is she—”
She nods. “Auxi is gone.”
Mon says: “That leaves you as my only adviser, Sinjir. And your counsel is needed swiftly.” To Leia: “Yours as well, my friend.”
Sinjir assures her: “We will find whoever did this, starting now.”
“No. Not that. Something else.”
“What could possibly be more important?”
She clasps his hands and holds them tight. “Mas Amedda has come out of hiding and wants to sign a cease-fire.
He wants to end it. All of it. The Empire is surrendering, and I need the both of you.”
The ground is shaking now hard enough that Rae Sloane is sure the Observatory is going to collapse into the ground, a consumptive fissure swallowing them all. Sloane isn’t sure she can do anything about it, but she has to try—she’s here, trapped on this world, and what else can be done but try to save it? Woozy, bloodied, and beaten, she follows Rax up the steps.
Blaster in hand.
He looks over his shoulder, a craven fear crossing his face as the mask of confidence falls away. “Get away,” he seethes, batting at the air with a bloody hand. Sloane shoots him in the back of his right leg.
Gallius Rax—Galli—bugles in pain and falls against the steps. With a groan he pushes himself up on both hands.
She shoots him in the other shoulder. He slumps, sobbing.
Then, as he turns over, his hands up in surrender as he pleads, “Don’t, don’t, don’t, please,” she shoots him in the stomach.
Every shot feels perfect. Every shot feels like revenge. Sloane’s heard stories about revenge, about how it never really finishes everything, about how it never truly completes you, but at this moment, she disbelieves. Because this feels better than anything has ever felt to her.
Rax’s hands move to his midriff, where a spreading red stains his raiment. Soon his naval white matches the red cape spilled beneath him.
Unblinking, he stares at her. Mouth gasping. Something wet slides in the back of his throat like a creeping thing.
“You’re dying,” she tells him. And he is. That much is plain to see. His lips have gone chapped and pale.
“Fellow outcast,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You serve the Contingency, now.”
“I serve no one,” she says.
“Listen. Listen. There’s a ship. Short walk from here.” He wheezes. “Imperialis. Take it. Hux is there. Others. Use the map—in a data spike in the, the computer. Set a course for the unexplored…” He coughs. Flecks of red dot his lips along with bubbles of spit. “Infinity. Already sent a ship ahead. A dreadnought…the Emperor’s…”
It hits her. Of course. Back on Coruscant, looking through the Imperial Archives and taking an accounting of all the ships, one stood out as not being accounted for properly—it was said the New Republic took it down, but no tracking record showed that fate.
“The Eclipse,” she says.
He nods. “Go to it. Leave this place. Find a new demesne. Start the game over.” His teeth clinch together with a vise grip. Through them he keeps talking, babbling now: “Undeserving. I am undeserving. Just a skittermouse, not a vworkka. Outcast, always the outcast. Shah-tezh. Cora Vessora. Undeserved…”
His head thuds against the step. A line of blood oozes from his nose as the last flash of light goes dark behind his eyes.
Sloane stands. From his hand, she takes something else: the pair of game pieces. Imperator and Outcast. Mine, she thinks.
—
The vibration underneath her wakes her. Norra groans, picking herself up. Her husband is beneath her. Eyes shut, as if sleeping. She pretends that’s what it is. He’s just asleep. I’ll wake him later. When it’s time to go. She grabs the wall and pulls herself up.
Moving toward the steps, she sees another body there. It’s him. Gallius Rax. His red cape pools beneath him like spilled viscera. For him she tells a different story: He is not asleep. He is dead. Revenge has won the day. Justice has fled into the shadows.
Nearby, a sound—fingers on keys. The ground suddenly shifts hard and she almost loses her footing. Norra continues up the stairs, one agonizing step at a time. Her gaze follows the sound, the tapping sound, and ahead stands a figure—a bit blurry, but when she blinks the gauzy smear of her vision clarifies. It’s Sloane.
The blaster pistol is on the floor between them.
Norra staggers to it and picks it up.
“Sloane,” she says, pointing the blaster.
The Imperial—or not, who knows where her loyalties lie anymore—turns toward her, hands by her side. Behind her, the computers project an image of a mechanism: locks and chain-drive banding and telescoping doors. Those are the baffles Brentin was trying to close—but he didn’t. He stopped to save her. No, he stopped to die.
“Norra Wexley,” Sloane says. “You and me, once again. At the end of things.”
“Yes.” It’s all she can say. What else is there? Is any of this even real? Is it all a fever dream? Or is she still lying there on the floor with her husband, asleep, dying, or already dead?
“Brentin. Is he?”
“He’s fine,” Norra protests, the words so firm and so fierce they serve as a kind of sharp-tongued protest. But she knows he’s not. Tears streak down her cheeks and she has to lift her chin to try to deny them. “He’s gone,” she says, finally, admitting the truth out loud.
“I’m sorry. He was a better traveling companion than I deserved.”
“Yes. That’s true.” Norra swallows hard.
“What are we going to do here?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I need to finish what Brentin started and stop this planet from destroying itself. Something has happened in the core. But I can end it. Best I can tell, there are mechanisms that can close the borehole, that can seal off the reaction from heating the mantle and cracking this planet like a geode.”
“Oh.”
“You should let me do that. Just in case, you should go.”
“I don’t know where.”
“Find your son. Go home. Have a life.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Easier for you than it will be for me. I have none of those things. I never had a husband or a wife to die in my hands. I never had a child. I had only the Empire and now…” Norra doesn’t need her to say any more.
“I’m sad for you,” Norra says, and she’s surprised that she means it.
“I am, too. Are you going to kill me?”
“Brentin said you weren’t as bad as I thought you were.”
Sloane shrugs. “Damned with faint praise yet again, it seems.”
“Aren’t we all. Damned, I mean.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You go ahead. Save the world. I’m going to leave, now,” Norra says, sighing and wiping tears away. The blaster clatters from her hand. “Let’s hope Brentin is right and you aren’t as bad as I think.”
Sloane gives her a small nod. “Good luck, Norra Wexley.”
“You too, Grand Admiral Sloane.”
Norra turns and goes back down the steps to claim her husband.
—
Outside, the air is red, choked with dust. Norra tucks her chin and mouth under the collar of her shirt, affording her some small reprieve. Brentin is heavy, but a burden she feels necessary to bear. She intends to take him back to Akiva. Back to where she can bury a body in the salt marshes as is the way of her people. Back to the world where he’s not just a memory. Where he can be a face that her son can touch. A body over which Temmin can grieve.
But where? Where will she go?
Again the ground shudders. She staggers, dropping to one knee, then struggling to stand anew.
The shuttle. It’s safe there, at least, from the storm. She takes him inside the darkened Imperial ship. She summons as much saliva to her mouth as she can muster (which is very little) and she cleans his cheeks.
Then she tries to start the ship.
No go. It’s dead. The engines have failed, and the fuel cells have died trying to give life to this ruined machine.
She is stranded.
She sits in the pilot’s seat. She eases Brentin into the seat next to her. Norra holds his cold, stiff hand. For a time, she sleeps.
The sound of a ship’s engine wakes her. She looks out the cockpit viewport and sees through the dust storm a gleaming, shining vessel rise up through the crimson clouds—the yacht moves swiftly and is gone. A hallucination, she thinks. Some dread
phantasm to tease her. Look at the pretty shiny ship. Don’t you wish you could be on it?
Sleep takes her again. Sleep like death, dark and dreamless.
The same sound, a replay of the last, draws her once more out of the deep: ship engines humming. She peers out and sees nothing.
But the scuff of a heel behind her has her lurch to her feet.
Sloane.
“Norra!”
It’s not Sloane. It’s Jas. Jas, flanked by a tall Kyuzo alien in a broad, domed hat. Jas Emari, her savior. Jas Emari, her ride home.
An empire does not end all at once, and this one, the Galactic Empire that began when Palpatine stole the Old Republic, is no different.
For this empire, it is death by a thousand cuts. A slow bleed that began perhaps not when the first Death Star was destroyed, but very early, when it killed the Jedi to make way for its regime. When a pair of twins—one named Luke, the other named Leia—fell through the cracks, lost to their father and to his dark Master, both of whom were blinded by hate and ego. Other injuries only hastened its demise: the birth of the Rebellion, the death of their first superweapon, the distrust that widened the gap between Vader and the Emperor, and of course the Empire’s colossal loss at Endor.
Now an even greater loss at Jakku was the final wound. History would remember that the New Republic was victorious on this day, and that is true. History will forget, however, how in reality this final wound was a self-inflicted one: a contingency plan by a callous, vengeful Emperor who never wanted his Empire in the hands of a successor.
Even still, though the Empire’s death comprises a thousand cuts, only one thing makes it official: The signing of a cease-fire, one that accords both the end of combat and the full, unconditional surrender of the Galactic Empire.
Mas Amedda comes out of hiding, rescued (in his account) by a gaggle of Coruscanti children who had helped form the backbone of their own resistance movement. He had been held captive by his own people, on order from the usurper, Gallius Rax. Now free, and with Imperial forces destroyed, he was free to sign a meaningful Imperial Instrument of Surrender.
