by Claudia Gray
From the Glee Anselm pod, Leia heard someone mutter, “Is this where she tells us how her dreams prophesy future fashion trends or something?” She would’ve glared at them for ridiculing a fellow apprentice, if that prediction hadn’t sounded exactly like something Amilyn would say.
Amilyn’s long face was tinted blue by the lights of the three-dimensional charts she brought up on the holos. “If you’ll look at this, you’ll see that it represents Lolet’s fuel reserves at the period in question. Those levels are much lower than usual, to the point most planets would consider themselves in a state of crisis. My research indicates that the Lolet had taxed their reserves almost to the breaking point while evacuating one of their moons after major geological instability earlier in the year. They didn’t give the Empire the requested fuel because they didn’t have it.”
It seemed to Leia as though she hadn’t known she was asleep until Amilyn’s words had woken her up. While she’d been searching for proof of Imperial wrongdoing in the farthest reaches of the galaxy, it was Amilyn Holdo who’d turned up another crime right under their noses. Never again would she let her mood make her so careless.
“They had it!” protested the kid from Arkanis. “The chart clearly shows they could’ve filled the quota.”
“Only by completely depleting their reserves,” Amilyn answered, pointing one of her skinny arms toward the holographic chart; she was so long-limbed it looked as though she might push her finger through the blue columns of data. “Lolet would have had nothing left to deal with any future emergencies in their system. Imagine their—” She visibly caught herself; at least she was trying to come across like a normal person, even if she wasn’t quite managing it. “No regulations require a planet to put itself at risk in that way.”
The Arkanis kid was unbowed. “No regulations say a planet can hold fuel back for that reason, either. If the Imperial Starfleet reported Lolet, and we’ve been assigned to levy sanctions, then that means planets are supposed to hand over that fuel when the Empire needs it.”
“Besides,” one of the Glee Anselm apprentices chimed in, “why does Lolet have to worry about some hypothetical emergency that might never happen? If something did come up, they could call on the Empire for help.”
Amilyn shook her head. “The Empire doesn’t always respond to those calls!”
It felt like a punch to Leia’s gut. Saying such things even in private, among friends, felt like a risk. Only someone as guileless as Amilyn Holdo would ever speak a truth that explosive in public.
“Excuse me?” The Arkanis apprentice seized the opportunity. “The Emperor has made it clear that his concern extends to all his peoples, and denying that is very nearly an act of treason!”
Or sedition, Leia thought automatically.
Kier leaned so close to her that she could feel his breath against her ear as he whispered, “We have to come up with a distraction, or else this is going to end with stormtroopers dragging Holdo off to jail.”
She nodded—he was right—but what kind of distraction could they possibly come up with? For one crazy moment, Leia imagined pretending their pod was broken and driving it wildly through the air like this was kiddie bump-speeders instead of a legislative assembly.
Amilyn either hadn’t caught on to the danger yet or didn’t care. “It’s a big galaxy! Entire planets sometimes escape our notice! That’s just—natural.”
“Maybe it’s natural for you,” sniped the Glee Anselm apprentice. “With your head filled with feathers—that’s why they’re always poking from your hair, I bet.”
Leia decided rage was distracting. She got to her feet and raised her voice. “That’s enough! If you’re shallow enough to care about what anybody’s wearing, then maybe you need to go back to playing with the other children and leave governing to people who’ve grown up a little.”
The Glee Anselm apprentice had the grace to look embarrassed, but that only seemed to goad the one from Arkanis. “So you think it’s appropriate to criticize the Emperor in public?”
As baited hooks went, that one was pretty clumsy. Leia only raised an eyebrow. “I think criticizing other apprentices’ clothing choices in public demeans this entire assembly.”
Amilyn didn’t appear to know a lifeline when she saw one. “I just don’t think it’s right to penalize a planet for—for—” She struggled for words that wouldn’t doom her, and came up short.
But that was when Kier cut in, “For a lack of clarity in the law. As you’ve said, no regulations clearly state what a planet is supposed to do in this situation.”
Leia seized on this. “Exactly. What we need to do is recommend new language for the legal code, so no other world will make a mistake out of confusion, like Lolet did.”
The idea of recommending new legal code was novel for most of the apprentice legislators, and exciting—a hint at real authority. Immediately people began discussing who might draft the language and how they’d present it. Even the ones who wanted to make an example of Lolet were eager to establish a new regulation that would turn their severity into law.
It occurred to Leia that Lolet would almost certainly be punished anyway. Whatever new law they proposed would have to be draconian in its harshness, requiring every planet to deplete its own emergency stores at the whim of any Imperial commander who came by, regardless of genuine need. But they’d bought Lolet a little time, a chance to maybe come up with sources of funding to deal with the eventual penalty. Not much help—but something.
“That is, Amilyn Holdo bought them that time,” she said to Kier later as the two of them walked along one of the broad skyways that led away from the senatorial complex. “There was a weakness in the Imperial case, but I didn’t even see it.”
“It was tricky.” Kier wasn’t the kind of guy who felt the need to point out that he’d spotted the critical flaw for himself. He was more interested in what she was driving at.
Leia considered her words carefully as they went along, a flickering hologram for some advertisement or other throwing prisms of multicolored light through the skyway. It felt like walking through a kaleidoscope. Beneath them, thick ribbons of hover traffic levitated almost at a standstill, a true Coruscant traffic jam in three dimensions.
“I’ve been feeling discouraged lately,” she admitted. “Knowing…what we know reminds me of how much there is to be done. When I let myself get discouraged, though, I don’t see the opportunities to actually accomplish something good.”
He weighed her words for several paces more. She liked the comfortableness of the silences between them. “You’re always asking what you can do for the greater good.”
Nonplussed, Leia nodded.
“You know, every once in a while, it’s okay to just live for yourself.” Kier held up a hand, forestalling her objection. “I’m not telling you to be, I don’t know, selfish or trivial. You’d never want that; that’s not who you are. But it’s all right to just, you know, be a person. Every once in a while, you can let go and live in the moment. I think you have to. Because if you’re carrying the weight of the worlds every single day, you get tired. You don’t have your strength when you need it most, because you already burned yourself out.”
That sounded…much too familiar.
He continued, “It’s okay to want some things just for yourself. To go out and have fun once in a while. To be glad your world is secure, and the people you care about are safe.”
“Sometimes it feels like we don’t have a right to be happy when so many others are suffering.”
“We don’t have a right not to be happy, if we can be.” When she stared at him, Kier nodded. “I mean it. If we all live in fear and misery all the time, his victory is complete.”
She knew whom he was referring to. On a public walkway on Coruscant, it would be suicide to use Palpatine’s name openly like this. Besides, they were learning to understand each other without words.
Quoting an Alderaanian philosopher, Leia said, “Strength through joy.”
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Kier grinned. “Exactly.”
“Got any suggestions?”
“Let’s see.” He pretended to consider the situation seriously for a long moment. By now they were walking very slowly. “We could…go to the Glarus Lagoons together, the next time we’re home.”
The Glarus Lagoons were known for their spectacular scenery and sea life. Located in one of the thin ribbons of Alderaan’s climate that was warm enough to be called balmy, the lagoons drew many travelers who longed for heat, sunshine, chances to swim or dive—or the famously romantic atmosphere.
She tilted her head. “You and me.”
Once again she glimpsed the shyness she’d seen in him at first, back when she didn’t even understand it was shyness at all. “If you’d like.”
Leia didn’t answer right away. There was something about his face when he looked at her like this, that mixture of uncertainty and hope and something else she couldn’t name but recognized within her own heart. This silence wasn’t comfortable at all, and somehow that made it even better.
“I would,” she said. “I’d like that a lot.”
The smile returned to his face. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Maybe she didn’t have to fight the entire Empire every single day. Maybe it was all right to find out who she was besides a senator-in-training or a princess. To find out what it meant to just be Leia.
Step one in being a totally normal person with totally normal concerns was to spend more time hanging out with friends, doing nothing. Leia had become comfortable with the people she’d gotten to know in her pathfinding class, but they still mostly spent time together on expeditions or in quasi-official gatherings tied to the Apprentice Legislature. Time to try doing something purely social, for no purpose besides wasting time, having fun.
But she hadn’t expected to be “hanging out” quite so literally….
“Imagine you’re carved of wood!” Amilyn Holdo held herself firmly in the splits, despite the fact that she wasn’t on the floor but suspended in midair, held aloft by brilliantly colored scarves she’d acrobatically twisted around each leg. “Unbending! Unyielding!”
“Unbelievable,” muttered Leia, who had only just managed to wrangle herself into a seated position without feeling like she’d topple four meters to the floor at any second.
Apparently this was a Gatalentan calisthenics practice called skyfaring, which was said to make their entire world stronger. The supposed reason for this was that advanced practitioners could meditate in place, “unmoored to the ground,” and so enhance their spiritual well-being and that of those around them. Leia thought the real reason was that the weak hung themselves in these damned scarves, and only the strong survived.
She also wasn’t sure she was going to make it into the “strong” category. As far as she could tell, skyfaring mostly involved pale blue leotards and a disregard for human life.
“All right,” Leia muttered to herself. “One leg out. You can do this.”
As she awkwardly reached out with one foot, trying to snag the nearest scarlet scarf, Amilyn easily unwound herself from the splits. She kept one leg tethered as she let her body fall back until she was suspended upside down. For someone so awkward and ungainly on the ground, Amilyn possessed considerable grace midair.
“Remember,” she said in her odd, singsong voice, “you’re made of wood. Strong but organic! Life force–made material!”
I’m carved of wood. I’m carved of wood. Leia bent her knee and made a circle with her leg, capturing the scarf just right. For one instant, she felt a flicker of understanding of what “carved from wood” might actually mean. Encouraged, she eased herself into one of the lunging stances. Her sides ached, but she could keep her balance.
“That’s it!” Amilyn clapped her hands together. Her long hair (currently magenta) streamed down from her head like another of the bright scarves. “You’re getting there!”
In a rush of confidence, Leia extended her arms to complete the pose—
—and then spun out like a cyclone for a long second before she tumbled onto the floor. Fortunately the surface was so springy she bounced once before making a soft landing. Still, she groaned as she flopped down with her limbs splayed wide.
Amilyn rotated down to her, slowly spinning along the length of a pink streamer with such elegance that if Amilyn were anybody else, Leia would’ve assumed she was showing off. She simply flowed into her position at Leia’s side. “You didn’t hurt yourself?”
“No, just drank deeply from the cup of humiliation.”
“Don’t be humiliated.” Amilyn had a funny, crooked grin. “You did very well for your first time, especially as an offworlder. Even natives don’t get the swing of it until they’re five or six, sometimes.”
Leia made a mental note to look up the child mortality rate on Gatalenta.
This skyfaring room was part of the Gatalentan senatorial complex, something they considered important enough to maintain along with their offices. Many planets had such unique “essentials,” such as the Mon Calamari saline tanks and the Toydarian wind tunnel for wing exercise. Maybe a meditative-gymnastics complex seemed odd to Leia, but each planet set its own priorities.
Amilyn said, “Why don’t we do some basic floor stretches? That would get you more used to the muscle combinations involved.”
Leia had the distinct sense she was being coddled. After her last tumble from the streamers, however, some coddling didn’t seem like a bad idea. “Let’s try that.”
Even on the floor exercises, she had to work to keep up. Although her dancing and exercise classes kept Leia lithe and flexible, Amilyn could twist and turn her limbs in combinations seemingly impossible for a species with a skeletal structure. But she was good at suggesting modifications Leia could use, and helping her find the right mental state. “Any imbalance we carry within us, we carry into the sky. You have to be firmly grounded before you can try anything in the air. Would some more incense help?”
Incense smoke already drifted so thickly through the air that they could’ve been in one of the fog-forests of Eriadu. “I think we’ve got that covered.”
“Then maybe you should talk through the imbalance.” Amilyn struck a pose on one foot that looked easy to accomplish. “If you don’t want to reveal too much in front of me, speak in metaphors. Many people find that enlightening.”
Leia hit the same pose and discovered it was easy—at first. Holding it required significant muscle control. “I can’t come up with metaphors and do this at the same time. But—I guess I can talk about a few things.” Bottling it all up inside definitely wasn’t helping. And as peculiar as Amilyn Holdo was, she genuinely tried to help people around her. That had to count for something.
“All confidences during skyfaring remain in the room to dissipate with the smoke,” Amilyn promised.
“Uh, great.” Leia steadied her balance as she lifted her arms higher. “Well, for one, I’ve always been close to my parents, but it seems like we don’t understand each other anymore.” The specific reasons why had to remain unspoken; only Kier could be trusted with that truth. “Every once in a while, we’ll connect, but most of the time—I feel like they’re so far away from me, even when we’re in the same room.”
“That’s the evolutionary principle at work.”
“Come again?”
Still on one foot, Amilyn lowered herself gracefully to the floor. “If the young of the species don’t have motivation to leave the care of their parents, they’ll never lead an independent existence, which means they’ll never reproduce. The species would soon die out. Ergo, the last stage of life before adulthood always involves conflict between parent and offspring.”
Maybe the incense smoke was getting to Leia, because that seemed to make a kind of sense, even if it certainly didn’t explain everything between her and her parents. “I’m also frustrated by how little we can accomplish in the Apprentice Legislature. The Senate has more power, but even they’re subject
to the Emperor. My whole life, I’ve expected to go into politics, to try to make the galaxy a better place. Now I wonder if that’s even possible.”
She flinched from the memory of the explosion on Onoam, the terrible smell of smoldering rubble and death. Her mother and father hadn’t wanted that—but was that where plans like theirs inevitably led?
“The Force gains strength from our intentions as well as our actions,” Amilyn said brightly. “We must try to stand and succeed, but we must never fail to stand.”
“No.” The word came out harsher than she’d meant, and for the first time that day, Amilyn’s smile faltered. Leia managed to be calmer when she added, “Good intentions aren’t enough. They’re not meaningless, but—that’s where we have to start. Not where we end.”
“That’s—that’s a good point, actually.” A wrinkle appeared between Amilyn’s eyebrows as she considered this. “On Gatalenta we try to lead the life of the mind, and in our culture intentions can have great influence—we discuss them, judge by them—but in the galaxy at large, things are—well—less pleasant.”
Leia nodded. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“This will be the focus of my next meditative trance.” Amilyn shifted into a spine-defying backbend. “You’ve already given vent to your frustrations. Now speak to the joy in your life. What makes you happy, here and now?”
Leia’s heart provided the answer instantly—so much so that she was startled. Something in her quailed from that knowledge, but something else, far more powerful, kept taking her back to the shooting arena, or the hidden passageways of the palace, or the snowy lodge where Kier had brought her that first mug of mocoa.
She didn’t say his name out loud. As she made her own attempt at the backbend, she asked, “Can it be morally right to feel happy when there’s so much injustice all around us?”
“Of course. Happiness is our moral imperative.”
“That sounds”—Leia actually got into the backbend, but felt like her abdominal muscles were pressing the breath from her—“like—like hedonism.”
