by Claudia Gray
He still knew how she moved.
“Come on!” They were ten and Ciena wanted to weave through the stalactites for the first time. “We can do it!” He sent them spiraling down toward their goal, the sudden dizziness sweeping over them both at the same moment and making them laugh.
Their speeder bikes were locked together as they soared through Coruscant, each of them leaning toward the other as they aimed for the exact center of the final Reitgen Hoop, and victory.
“Like this?” He could feel the warm breath of Ciena’s whisper against his bare shoulder. Too overcome to speak, Thane had only been able to nod.
They took the V-171 in before the rains began. Ciena powered down in silence; whatever rapport they’d regained in the air had disappeared. As they disembarked and left the hangar, they might have been any two coworkers in a commercial spaceport.
But Ciena didn’t return to her ridgecrawler. Instead she walked to the far edge of the hangar’s terrace, toward the narrow, rocky path that led away from the main road—toward the Fortress. She paused for a moment to look over her shoulder, clearly daring Thane to follow.
He never could resist a dare.
Neither of them spoke until they had climbed inside the Fortress itself. When Ciena turned on one of the old lights they’d left up there, Thane looked around, blinking in surprise. He’d expected a dusty ruin; instead, the surfaces were clean, the blankets beaten. A few of their toy spaceships still dangled from the wire mobile they’d built when they were nine. He said, “This place held up well.”
“I came here yesterday,” she said. “My ship landed before my father could leave work, and Valentia—I couldn’t bear to stay there long. This was the only place I wanted to be. It needed some cleaning, but less than you’d think.” Ciena turned to face him then, and in the approaching dark of the storm, he could not read her expression. “So much had stayed the same.”
Thane took a step toward her. “Ciena—”
“You joined the Rebellion.” The words burst out of her, like water after a dam broke. “How could you do that? They’re terrorists! They killed Jude!”
“We are not terrorists. If anyone’s a terrorist it’s Palpatine himself, because he rules by fear—”
“You said you weren’t going to the rebels, you told me that to my face—”
“That was before I realized just how bad the Empire really is. The rebels might not be perfect but somebody’s got to do something!”
“So you decided you hate the Empire. You’re willing to kill the people you went to school with—your fellow officers, your friends.” Ciena took a step closer to him, her hands in fists at her sides. “You’re even willing to kill me.”
“Don’t you think that nearly destroys me every single time I go into battle? Don’t you know I’d rather die first? But I can’t stand aside and do nothing, Ciena. I can’t.”
She shook her head. “You had to stop being a cynic now?”
Thane wanted to shake her. He wanted to plead with her to listen. More than anything he wanted to be back in the air, where they still understood each other. But the storm was on them now. “That’s all you have to say? You dragged me up here just to yell at me?”
“No.”
“Then what—”
Ciena pulled his face down to hers and kissed him, hard.
The next few moments were a feverish blur—her small hands reaching beneath his jacket to splay across his chest—the feel of her in his arms—the taste of her lips. He couldn’t be close enough to her. Even now, entwined together, they were too far apart.
Thane embraced her tightly enough to lift her feet from the ground, then backed her against the wall, pinning her there with the weight of his body. He covered her open mouth with his.
When they parted long enough to gasp for breath, Ciena whispered, “Don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t.
HOURS LATER, Ciena sat at the mouth of the Fortress cave, wrapped in a blanket as she watched the last of the storm. The winds had died down a while ago, but the rain still fell across the lower ranges in silvery sheets. How had she forgotten the view could be so beautiful?
This had always been the place where she went to dream. Imperial service allowed so little time for that—no hours in which to let your mind wander, to imagine anything you liked.
Ciena rose and walked back inside the Fortress on legs that still felt pleasantly wobbly. The furs and blankets were piled in the back, near the old heater they’d dragged up there ten years before, and only the faintest light shone back that far. She paused for a moment to take in the sight of Thane sprawled facedown, more asleep than awake, almost completely uncovered.
She leaned one shoulder against the wall as she whispered, “Look through my eyes.”
That made him stir. Thane rolled over and smiled drowsily. “You’re showing your sister this?”
“I’m supposed to show her the most beautiful and extraordinary moments of my life. This qualifies.”
He held one arm out to her, and she curled by his side, draping her blanket over them both. Despite the small heater, the air inside the Fortress remained cool—but Thane kept her warm. Ciena wished they never had to acknowledge the world beyond the Fortress—that it could always be the two of them together, inseparable.
“You probably know this,” she said, “but I still love you.”
“And I love you. Everything else might change, but not that.”
Ciena rolled over to look at him. It was so hard to say this without anger, but she had to speak. “If you could join the Rebellion, you’ve changed more than I would have thought possible.”
“Do you still buy the Imperial dogma that they’re ‘terrorists’? They’re idealists, really. They believe the New Republic will be all the grand and glorious things the Old Republic never was. I’m not that kind of fool. Never will be. But the Empire must fall.”
“You took an oath—”
“Enough with the oaths, Ciena!” Thane paused until he had a handle on his temper again. “I’m sorry. I know what your honor means to you. But this isn’t about whether or not we’ve kept faith with the Empire. It’s about whether the Empire has kept faith with us.”
Too many of her own doubts responded to those words. In Ciena’s mind she saw the officers dying in vain, heard Penrie’s last scream, watched Alderaan explode again. And now, even her mother had to suffer.
She buried her face against Thane’s chest. It felt safer to speak within the warmth of his arms. “I see the darkness within the Empire. How could I not?”
He wound one of her curls around his finger, his playful touches contrasting with the gravity of what he said. “If you see that, then I don’t understand how you can keep serving the Empire just because of a promise you made years ago, when you didn’t know the whole truth.”
“Nobody ever knows the whole truth. That’s why promises mean something. Otherwise they’d be too easy, don’t you see? We look toward the unknown future and promise to be faithful no matter what comes.” Ciena sighed. “My oath matters to me, but that’s not the only reason I stay.”
“Then why?”
“Because the Empire is more than—than corruption and brutality.” It cost her to say those words, but Thane forced her to be honest with herself. “It’s also the structure that keeps the galaxy from collapsing into chaos again, like it did during the Clone Wars. And for every petty bureaucrat making himself rich by skimming profits, there’s also someone like Nash Windrider, who’s genuinely trying to do the right thing. If the good people leave, doesn’t that make everything worse? Don’t we have a responsibility to stand our ground and change the Empire, if we can?”
“Still an optimist.” Thane hesitated before he asked, “How is Nash?”
“He’s doing better now. The first year after Alderaan was hard, but he came through. I think he’s still lonely sometimes.” Ciena remembered the night Nash had propositioned her in front of the door to her bunk—but she had said no
, and it was nothing Thane needed to hear. “He talks about you from time to time. I hate that he has to keep thinking you’re dead.”
“Me too.”
They lay together in silence for a while after that, her head pillowed against Thane’s chest. Ciena thought back to those first few months at the academy, when they’d all been so trusting, so sure of their place in the galaxy. Could that have been only six years ago? It felt like another lifetime.
“Ciena?” Thane sounded wary. “I want to ask you a question that you might not like. Hear me out, okay?”
She figured that if she hadn’t killed Thane for joining the Rebellion, he was safe no matter what. “Ask.”
“What’s happening to your mother—have you asked yourself whether this is all a test? Another of the mind games the Empire plays on its troops?”
If only she could still believe those “tests” were meant to strengthen them, that they served a greater purpose. Had she really once been angry with Thane for suggesting otherwise? The memory of her naivety embarrassed her. In the years since, Ciena had learned that the Empire administered extreme tests of loyalty sometimes. Maybe for personnel being considered for sensitive positions, those tests could be justified. But to toy with the friendship between two young cadets, only to divorce them from any ties to their homeworld…that had been almost childish in its cruelty.
Maybe the Empire was testing her by putting her mother on trial, but Ciena doubted it. What was happening to Mumma was more likely simple, stupid provincial corruption. Everyone involved knew it, and no one would say so because they were all too afraid of what the Imperial officials would do to them.
From the Emperor down to the lowliest administrator—so much had to be transformed. Where could they even begin?
“I don’t think what’s happening to Mumma is part of any larger plot,” she said, and left it at that. “Do you trust your superiors in the Rebel Alliance?”
She expected Thane to say no immediately; he put his trust in so few people, and surely the dregs that ran the Rebellion wouldn’t qualify for the honor. Ciena was shocked when he said, “Some of them. Most of them, actually. You know I didn’t even have to ask permission to come here? They trusted that I’d only leave for a good reason, and believed I’d return. Sure, they dream some crazy dreams about this perfect galaxy they think they can build—but at least they respect the people who serve.”
Ciena could hardly believe what she’d heard. Thane Kyrell had finally found authority figures he didn’t hate and they were rebels? Surely he was talking like this in an effort to convince her to leave the Empire; she thought he might have said even wilder things if they would keep her with him. “How long have you been with them?”
“I joined up several months ago.” His thumb brushed along her cheekbone, the tiniest possible caress. “At first I did supply runs, but as the war intensified—I’m in combat more often now.”
“I recognized you at Hoth, you know.”
“You were there?” Thane’s face paled almost to white. “I told myself—the fleet is so huge—I thought the chances that I’d fight against you were—I didn’t think it would happen.”
“I was never in danger,” she said, sitting up and tucking the blanket around herself. Seeing his fear at the thought of hurting her—she couldn’t bear it. “It was that move of yours, when you spun through the AT-AT’s legs. I knew that instant it could only be you.”
“The one person in the entire fleet who could have identified me by how I flew—”
“Maybe the Force is guiding this. Bringing us together even though we ought to be apart.”
That made him grimace. Thane hadn’t changed enough to become religious, it seemed. “I seem to remember using my own fake identification to cross the galaxy and reach you. No Force involved.”
She held up one hand. “All right, all right.”
Thane sat up beside her and slid his arms around her waist. The sky outside the Fortress had nearly turned dark. “Listen,” he said. “I know you’re not ready to come with me today. And maybe you won’t consider joining the Rebellion.”
“Never.”
“But if I thought you might leave the Empire someday—even if it’s just to come back here, or start your life over on another world—”
Was he promising to leave the rebels and join her, if only she would desert? Ciena didn’t want to know. “I’m not going to leave, at least not before my tour of duty ends. If there’s any chance that the good in the Empire can outweigh the bad, then it’s our duty to preserve it.”
“The Empire’s rotten to the core. It’s our duty to destroy it.”
They were still at odds, and always would be it seemed. Ciena knew that. Yet the hard facts seemed so distant as he embraced her again, and she leaned her head against him. She and Thane had never been more in love—or further apart.
The next morning, the trial of Ciena’s mother began.
Trial. That word sounded far too official and grand for the hasty, sordid proceedings. Ciena sat in the semicircular stands around the judicial chamber, wearing her uniform with its red and blue rank squares proclaiming her an Imperial lieutenant commander. Next to her, Pappa kept his head bent as if he could not bear to see Mumma standing in the dock with her wrists cuffed.
The prosecutor—a man with small hands and oiled hair—officiously read the evidence line by line, entering it all into the record. He had not one bit of proof that couldn’t have been doctored by a halfway competent data engineer, a point that would no doubt have been made by the defense if her mother had been allowed a defense.
But now that was allowed only in civil cases, never in trials for crimes against the Empire.
Ciena could hear Thane’s voice in her head, asking if the Empire had kept faith with her. She did not dare answer him even in her own thoughts.
He had left late the night before to catch a red-eye shuttle—to where, she would never know. Thane had bid her father a formal, correct farewell; Pappa had been wise enough to let Ciena walk Thane out to the ridgecrawler on her own. They had kissed each other so long and so fiercely that her lips remained swollen, the discomfort welcome because it was proof he’d really been with her.
“Whatever else becomes of us,” she had said, “thank you for standing with my family. You took a tremendous risk to be here when I needed you the most. It was an act of…the truest loyalty and friendship.”
His smile had been so sad. “Actually I came here thinking I’d finally get over you. Should’ve known better.”
Ciena tried to catch her mother’s eye, hoping to give some comfort just by being there. Yet Mumma wouldn’t even look at her directly. It was as if she were ashamed, even though by now everyone in this sham of a trial had to know the charges were false.
Then the realization pierced her through: her mother wouldn’t look at her because she didn’t want to endanger Ciena any further by making her show sympathy to someone accused by the Empire.
Imperial rule wasn’t as cruel to every world as it had been to Jelucan. Ciena’s travels had told her that much. But it didn’t matter, because the cruelty was there, now, destroying her family and her home.
“You realize we can’t ever meet again,” Ciena had said as Thane held her close. He’d already started his ridgecrawler, the motor’s hum almost lost in the fierce winds.
“We said that last time.”
“It’s different now. You shouldn’t have come back this time, and I—I don’t know if I’ll ever return again.”
“We keep telling each other good-bye,” Thane had whispered into her ear. “When am I finally going to believe it?”
She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t. Even if she and Thane never saw each other again, she knew that in some ways their bond would endure. He was too much a part of her to be completely lost, not as long as she lived.
It was some consolation, but not much.
The magistrate didn’t even look up from his screens as he pronounced judgment.
“Guilty of embezzlement and fraud against representatives of the Emperor. Sentenced to six years’ labor in the mines.”
Ciena felt the verdict like poison injected into her veins—agonizing down to the bone. Hard labor? Jelucan had banned that as a punishment nearly a century ago, and even then had limited it to those accused of violent crimes. Her mother was a middle-aged woman, never particularly tall or strong; how was she supposed to endure long days of hauling heavy ore? With modern mine-droids, there was no need for anyone to do that kind of backbreaking work. The sentence was both primitive and punitive…and had been levied against a woman the judge had to know was innocent.
Verine Ree didn’t even glance at her husband and daughter as she was led away; Ciena realized they wouldn’t be given a chance to say good-bye.
“This is impossible,” she whispered as everyone else filed out of the courtroom, leaving only Ciena and her father behind. “A mockery of justice—”
“Say nothing more.”
“Of course.” There were probably recording devices somewhere in the room. “We can’t have more trouble.”
“No, Ciena. You should not speak against your government, ever, under any circumstances.”
“Pappa—how can you say that today?”
Paron Ree folded his hands together as solemnly as a village elder. “Because we gave our loyalty to the Empire on the day Jelucan was annexed. Because we do not betray our word, even when we are betrayed in return. Otherwise we are no better than they are.” His eyes blazed, but his voice remained low and calm. “This life has never been one made for fairness or justice. We endure, and we prevail not as crude matter but in the realm of the spirit.”
She had grown up believing that so devoutly, and now the words sounded hollow. Ciena could not take comfort in anger or in faith. All she could do was put her arms around her father and hope his beliefs sustained him more than they did her.
“And was justice done on Jelucan, Lieutenant Commander Ree?”
“Sir. Yes, sir.”
Ciena stood at attention in ISB officer Ronnadam’s office, staring past him at the small circle of starfield revealed through his one window. Her hands were clasped tightly behind her back, palms sweaty.
