Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars

by Claudia Gray

  “And nearly a million aboard the Death Star.” Ciena refused to ignore Jude’s death. She still had nightmares of running through the station’s corridors, screaming for Jude to get on a shuttlecraft, but never finding her friend. “Now the Death Star is gone. Even if the Emperor wanted to do something so drastic again, he couldn’t. Besides—the only reason to attack Alderaan was to prevent an even more devastating war. The war has begun anyway. It’s too late to save the galaxy from that. All I can do is fight on the side of law and order and stability.”

  Thane’s laugh was harsh. “Things fall apart, Ciena. Our parents saw the Republic self-destruct. The Empire might last another year or another decade, but eventually there’s going to be a brand-new order and brand-new law. Who will you serve then?”

  “You don’t have to be cruel just because I won’t—because I can’t desert my post.” She couldn’t even be angry with Thane; her sorrow was too great. Of course he would rage against Alderaan’s destruction, but that didn’t have to change everything. And of course he hated slavery—she did, too—but the Empire had scarcely invented the practice. What counted now was bigger than any individual incident. This was a matter of the deepest principle. “We took an oath. We swore ourselves to the Empire’s service. We can’t break that, not ever.”

  Thane shook his head. The amber lights in the cantina painted his hair a deeper red and cast shadows on his face that showed how much he was struggling. “You’re still the girl from the valleys. You won’t go against your word, even when you’ve promised yourself to a leader and a fleet that don’t deserve you.”

  “And you’re still the second-waver. You find it easier to break your promises than to keep them.” But Ciena was ashamed of the words as soon as she’d spoken them. That was her father’s prejudice talking, and her own misery at the thought of losing Thane.

  He wasn’t offended. Instead he whispered, “It’s not easy for me to leave you. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  She turned away, unable to look at him any longer.

  Thane seemed to think she was reacting out of anger rather than grief, because he spoke more formally when he asked, “Will you report me?”

  “I—” What could she say or do? She was trapped now between her loyalty to Thane and her loyalty to the Empire. As angry as she was with Thane for deserting his commission, she couldn’t imagine sending him to jail. How could she ever do something like that to the person she loved? “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. Great.” He ran one hand through his hair. “Do you at least know if you’re going to report me tonight?”

  Something within her broke. “Of course not.”

  Thane’s voice had turned harsh, cutting. “That won’t be breaking your oath? Destroying your precious honor?”

  “Sometimes we’re loyal to more than one thing. When there’s a conflict, we have to choose which loyalty to honor.” Ciena had begun trembling; she felt as if she were being torn in two. “I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. But tonight, right now, I choose my loyalty to you.”

  All the anger melted away from Thane then. His hand cupped the side of her face, and she couldn’t hold back any longer. Ciena leaned closer, clutching at his jacket so he wouldn’t get away from her. She wanted nothing but for him to stay with her now, tonight, however long they could have. She wanted to believe he wouldn’t go away.

  Thane kissed her again, more deeply than before. Ciena closed her eyes, wound her arms around him, and imagined that she could stop time. This moment would be crystallized and eternal—his chest pressed against hers, the soft rasp of his stubble against her cheeks, the low rough sound he made as his hand found the curve of her waist.

  When they pulled apart, breathing hard, she leaned her forehead against his and whispered, “Upstairs.”

  It took Thane another couple of breaths to answer. “Are you sure?”

  In that moment she felt as if she could be sure of nothing. Thane—one of the constants in her life, her polestar—was leaving forever. The world had turned upside down, and she suspected it could never be put fully right again.

  But that was why she was determined to take everything she could have. To live completely in this moment, this night with Thane. To stop time.

  “Yes,” she whispered against his mouth. “Yes.”

  Thane couldn’t sleep.

  It was the dead of night and he was worn out, but it didn’t matter. All he could do was look at Ciena.

  She drowsed against his shoulder, not entirely asleep or awake. Her tightly curled hair, set free, spread around her head on the pillow like a dark halo. Her full lips were swollen from their kisses. And even though he’d spent the better part of the last three hours learning absolutely every detail of her body, it still exhilarated him to see her lying next to him, wearing nothing but a corner of the sheet.

  As he lay beside her, Thane—for the first time—asked himself if he could do what Ciena asked. Could he return to base, admit to a moment of weakness, and go back into service? Probably Ciena was right about the current crisis absolving many sins. What would’ve earned him months in the brig a year ago was now likely to be no more than a smudge on his record.

  If he returned right now, he could stay with Ciena—

  But he couldn’t go back. Not after what he’d seen. He’d spent his entire childhood suffering under the cruelty of one hypocrite; he refused to inflict suffering on behalf of another, even if that person was the Emperor.

  For Ciena it was different. Her loyalty, once given, was absolute. The Empire didn’t deserve her, yet it had her in its grasp forever. She didn’t remain a part of the Emperor’s machine because she was ambitious or corrupt. No, the Empire had found a way to use her honor against her. The strength of her character was the exact reason why she would remain in the service of evil.

  It was as if she were already gone forever, even as he felt her soft breath against his shoulder. Thane hugged her tighter, burrowing his face into the curve of her neck. Ciena sighed softly as she came closer to consciousness; her hand slipped around his waist to deepen their embrace.

  “You awake?” he murmured.

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Then she stirred again and answered more believably, “I am now.”

  “I love you.” He couldn’t believe he’d never said it before. It was like stating that the sky was overhead—so obvious, so fundamentally true, that verbalizing it ought to be unnecessary.

  She lifted her face to his. “I love you, too. Always have. One way or another.”

  “I love you in every way.”

  “Yes.” Ciena smiled, but the expression was so sad that it hurt Thane—a literal ache in the center of his chest. “In every way.”

  “If I begged you to stay with me, it wouldn’t make any difference, would it?”

  She shook her head. “If I begged you to get on the next transport back to Coruscant, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  He didn’t have to say anything. They both knew the answer.

  “So that’s the end.” The words came out more harshly than Thane had intended, but he trusted Ciena to understand his anger wasn’t aimed at her. “The Empire takes us from each other forever.”

  “If it weren’t for the Empire, we would never have come together in the first place. Think about it. Would you have ever made friends with a girl from the valleys any other way?”

  Thane had been so small when Jelucan was annexed by the Empire that his earlier memories were jumbled and unsure. In some ways, it felt like his life had truly begun that day, with his dream of flying for the Empire, and with Ciena. “I guess not.”

  Ciena sat up, as if she was going to get out of bed, but Thane pulled her back. She wouldn’t look him in the face any longer. “I should go.”

  “Stay.”

  “If I stay, leaving will only be harder.”

  “Would leaving now be any easier? Really?”

  “No.” Finally, Ciena met his eyes. “Thane, you have to ge
t off Jelucan, within the week. Because at the end of one week, I’m going to report you.”

  Thane felt it like a stab wound between the ribs. “What happened to choosing which loyalty to honor?”

  “I chose you tonight. I wish I could always choose you. But if I covered for you forever, my oath of loyalty to the Empire would be worthless. This is the only time, do you understand?” By now her voice had begun to shake. “This is the first time and the last.”

  Somehow, deep inside, Thane had still been convinced he would see Ciena again. He wanted to believe they could find each other no matter what. But now he realized that was foolish, the dream of a child.

  “Do you understand?” Ciena repeated.

  “…yes.” The word was bitter. “So you’d throw me in a military prison, even after this.” Thane gestured at the rumpled bed, their discarded clothes on the floor. Her insignia plaque shone slightly in the dim light.

  “I gave you fair warning, just now! Besides, you have to get on the move sooner or later. How much time have you wasted here?”

  “Wasted? I was waiting for you.” He hadn’t known he could be so angry at someone and still love her. “I guess that was wasted time after all.”

  Ciena winced but she kept on. “You can’t get a job on Jelucan. Catch the next freighter to an independent world—and don’t even think about indenturing yourself, okay? Find yourself some work somewhere else in the Outer Rim, where they’ll never look for you.”

  “I don’t need your advice—”

  “You need someone’s advice. Otherwise you’re just going to stay here in Valentia, moping and losing your way.”

  That stung, but Thane began to realize she wasn’t completely wrong. “Okay, fine. I’ll ship out of here soon.”

  “Within the week.”

  Because after one week she would report him. The woman he loved would report him to the Empire. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Within the week.”

  She took a deep breath. “So there’s nothing more to say.”

  But Ciena made no move to leave. Instead she brushed her palm against his cheek; her thumb traced the line of his cheekbone.

  He ought to tell her to get out. To tell her he was done sharing his bed with someone who cared more about the Empire than she did about him. Cruel words like the ones his father and Dalven used came into his mind fully formed, as if the wickedness he’d known from them had been buried deep inside, waiting to hatch: I’ve already had everything I want from you. Gave it up easy, didn’t you?

  But he said none of that. Instead he asked himself what he’d regret more—leaving her now or going to bed with her again. Either way was going to hurt.

  Their gazes met, and when she leaned closer, he cupped his hand around the back of her head to bring her in for a kiss.

  The time Thane had left with Ciena could be measured in mere hours. They wouldn’t waste it.

  Ronnadam scowled down at her report on his screen. “You’re quite sure of this, Lieutenant Commander Ree?”

  “As certain as anyone can be without finding a body—and in the crevasses, it’s difficult for even scanner droids to search. The sky burial takes the dead within days, sir.”

  “Sky burial?”

  Ciena wished she could have taken back those words; her thoughts were too much on Jelucan and all she had left behind there. “On Jelucan, sir, we put our dead in open cairns at high altitude. Birds devour the body, taking both the flesh and the soul of the deceased into the sky with them, forever.”

  “Barbaric,” Ronnadam said with a sniff. She managed not to flinch. “But I suppose the same thing would happen with an accident—or suicide, as it seems we have here.”

  Ciena nodded. “Lieutenant Kyrell was overcome with grief after the loss of so many fellow officers and friends aboard the Death Star. Based on my interviews on Jelucan, I believe that he originally deserted and returned to his homeworld in an effort to restore his will to live, but it didn’t work. He leaped from one of the higher cliffs in our home province, leaving his ridgecrawler behind. Still running.”

  She shouldn’t have added that. Lies were best kept simple, or so Ciena had been given to understand. But she had lied so little in her life. The dishonesty tasted foul in her mouth.

  When she’d parted from Thane, Ciena had fully intended to live up to her word and report his desertion after one week. A week was long enough for him to get his act together, escape to some obscure world, and vanish from her life forever.

  That also gave her time to go home to her parents, who had been happy and surprised to see her—and no doubt even more surprised when she burst into tears at the door. Although Ciena had pulled herself together well enough, and had said not one word about Thane to her family, she knew they sensed that this was no routine visit. Mumma had sat up with her late into the night, asking no intrusive questions, simply braiding Ciena’s hair the way she’d done when Ciena was a little girl. Her mother’s touch had been comforting, but nothing could assuage Ciena’s misery at the thought of turning Thane in.

  In the end, she hadn’t been able to do it. If the Empire made any effort to track him down, however minimal, it was possible they would find Thane and bring him back to stand trial.

  So she chose her loyalty to him once again and protected him with the best lie she could create.

  “Very well.” Ronnadam signed off on her report without even fully reading it. Had Thane deserted at any less desperate time for the Imperial fleet, Ciena realized, her story would have been scrutinized much more closely. Now all Ronnadam wanted to do was cross a task off his list. “You handled this well, Lieutenant Commander Ree.”

  The praise felt like stones on her back, growing heavier throughout the day. Ciena burned with shame to have been commended by a superior officer for violating her oath of loyalty.

  Never again, she promised herself. From that day on, her service to the Empire would be more than her duty: it would be her atonement for loving even one person in the galaxy more than her honor.

  Seven Months After the Battle of Yavin

  THANE TURNED DOWN the blue-white flame of the welding torch, lifted his goggles, and frowned at the snarl of metal he was attempting to fix. The independent freighter Moa had been old before he was born but kept going thanks to a series of makeshift upgrades installed over the decades. Right then he was trying to make a sixty-year-old power cell work inside a twenty-year-old processor—with limited success.

  Cursing under his breath, he shut off the torch and walked through the Moa’s corridors until he reached the bridge. It wasn’t the dark, angular kind of space Thane had learned to expect on Imperial vessels but a small, brightly lit chamber where console panels glowed in five different colors, each testifying to a completely different origin. Everything on the ship had been pieced together from parts to suit the very particular needs of the Moa—or, more precisely, the ship everyone on board usually called the Moa. That was only an acronym for its full name, Mighty Oak Apocalypse, a title that apparently sounded a lot more badass to Wookiees, such as their captain.

  “I’m still only getting sixty percent charge,” Thane reported to Lohgarra. “When we dock at Zeitooine, we’ve got to pick up a better power cell.”

  Lohgarra growled, wanting to know where, exactly, they would get the credits for a new power cell.

  “I know we’re broke.” Technically, Thane was only a hired copilot and navigator, but Lohgarra treated her crew members with respect—like members of a team. He could bring up objections; he could say we. “But it doesn’t have to be a new power cell. Just one that’s not quite as old.”

  Lohgarra asked whether Thane thought all old things should be thrown out. That was a joke at her own expense; she was elderly even by the standards of the long-lived Wookiees, her fur by then almost entirely white.

  Thane leaned against the wall and smiled. “Most things don’t age as well as you do, Lohgarra.”

  That earned him a dismissive wave of her hand. She agreed to give
him a budget to search for a newer battery for the aft sensor array but warned him with a growl that Zeitooine might not be the cheapest place to pick one up.

  “I know. But we’re not going to do much better in this area of space. We’d find something less expensive in the Outer Rim.”

  Being within the Inner Rim of the Empire made Thane uneasy. He’d signed on to the Moa precisely because Lohgarra and her crew mostly stuck to the Outer Rim, or the Expansion Region. Working for her had seemed like a good way to hide out for a while. Lohgarra transported only legal cargo, but she operated on the fringes, where Imperial oversight was rarely an issue. Although Thane hadn’t outright told Lohgarra that he was an Imperial deserter, he could tell she’d guessed right away, and that she didn’t care. Even though her dark blue eyes had gone slightly milky with age, her vision and mind were still sharp.

  Lohgarra hired crew members who were not only competent but also easy to get along with—and not driven to make money by any means possible. The jobs they took were determined more by Lohgarra’s character than by any quest for riches; a lucrative run of luxury goods might be followed by a zero-sum haul of emergency generators to a troubled outpost. She said she needed people around her who could be trusted; privately, Thane believed she was too trusting, but it was her ship and her business. She’d run a freighter for a couple of centuries without his help, so he figured she could size people up well enough. As he’d learned to understand Shyriiwook better, he’d realized how intelligent his captain was. And when Lohgarra really took a crew member under her wing—as she had Thane—she could be affectionate to the point of acting maternal. It was a little ridiculous, but he didn’t mind. At least he worked for someone he could respect.

  Always perceptive, Lohgarra had obviously picked up on his unease. She reminded him briskly that Zeitooine was a jungle planet with only a handful of large cities, and not an active trading center.

  “Yeah, I know,” Thane admitted. “We’ll be fine.” But he still felt uneasy and probably looked it, too.