"The records clearly show that all targets in the creche were accounted for and successfully liquidated. With all due respect to Agent Quallum's theory, whatever affection Bail Organa may have had for the old Order, it does not appear to have extended to rescuing an infant."
- Agent Mendell Py, "ISB Internal Report 612-137: The Second Jedi Insurrection and the Origins of Leia Organa" (classified)

"Memories have stone roots."
- Naboo proverb

The Circle
Chapter Thirteen

Denilee Luwellan woke up from a dream that might, possibly, have been a nightmare.

She sat straight up in her bed, engulfed in septsilk quilts and surrounded by pillows and a small army of soft plush tookas, and tried to make sense of it. It had been a strange and surreal thing, and she hadn't felt afraid, not really - but there had been water, and then there had been beings floating in it, hundreds and thousands of them, all very still and with wide-open eyes and gaping mouths.

She didn't know what it meant. She did know, in some deep-down way, that it wasn't the sort of dream six-year-olds were supposed to have, and so she resolved not to tell her father about it. It went against the credo he had drilled into her head ever since she was a baby, maybe even since the day he had adopted her and her sister.

Don't stand out. Don't attract attention. If your friends go missing, don't ask questions. Keep quiet, whatever you do.

Denilee wasn't very good at any of those things. Her father said she was making him go prematurely gray.

Too jittery to close her eyes and try to sleep, she slid out of her bed and let her bare feet sink into the soft carpet. It was very late or maybe very early - it was hard to tell - but when she pulled back her curtains, she saw millions and millions of tiny lights glittering like stars. They all lived on the top of one of the best residential towers on Imperial Center, her and her father and her big sister when she was home from boarding school, and from her window Denilee could see the hulking shape of the Emperor's palace in the distance, where her father did something-or-other with databases. She could see her school, Education Center 14, which was where all the children of very important people like her father went and where they occasionally disappeared from when the Emperor decided their parents weren't very important anymore. If she squished her nose against the clear plastisteel and craned her head just right, she could see the moon.

She was less jittery now, but not tired at all. She also knew that the kitchen droids were powered down for the night, which meant that there was nothing standing between her and the bubble cakes her father had been stockpiling for Empire Day, the ones she wasn't supposed to touch or even look at until after he had a bunch of moffs over for a dinner party.

Denilee wasn't very good at following directions, either.

When she padded out of her room and toward the kitchen, she expected to hear the familiar middle-of-the-night sounds she had grown up with: the hum of the kitchen unit, the steps of the sentry droids, maybe the faint voices of a holodrama from her big sister's room now that Alai was home from school for the holidays and watching whatever it was sixteen-year-olds watched. Instead she heard strange sounds coming from the direction of the entry - odd buzzing noises, like bugs going past her ears.

Denilee changed course and walked through the dining room - the big one with the best furniture, big enough to hold a dinner party's worth of moffs - and then through the smaller sitting room, taking the roundabout approach to the entry. When she touched the control panel, the lighting strips that ran around the ceiling didn't even flicker. Now she was starting to get annoyed and maybe just a little worried. Power outages happened all the time in the lower levels of Imperial Center - she knew that because she had heard her father telling her big sister to never venture down there, not ever - but they didn't happen up here.

It was very dark, even with the lights streaming through cracks in the curtains, and she didn't see the shape on the ground until she tripped over it and went sprawling, scraping her hands on the carpet. She bit her tongue to stifle a yell and turned back to see what it was she had stumbled over.

She was staring into the blank-eyed face of a deactivated sentry droid, toppled over and left on the floor like one of her dolls.

Now, suddenly, Denilee wasn't worried. She was scared, more than she had ever been in her dream.

She scrambled to her feet and hurried back to her big sister's room, but when she burst in there was no sign of her. The bed was still made and everything was still neat and tidy. It was as if Alai hadn't even come home that night, as if she had walked out of the apartment after breakfast laughing about an appointment and then simply ceased to exist.

There was a noise from the entry that sounded like crackling and popping. The ever-present background hum of the atmospheric scrubbers stopped and the emergency lights flickered on, making everything look dim and yellow and strange. Denilee made a noise that sounded strangled even to her ears and ran for her father's bedroom.

Halfway there, an alarm she hadn't even known existed began to go off.

When she burst into her father's room, he was awake - just scrambling out of bed, unshaven, his pale hair sticking up all over the place. He caught her when she launched herself into his arms, hiding her face against his shoulder, but he kept moving. Still holding her, he knelt down and scrambled under the bed and pulled out a blaster.

Her father wasn't a soldier. He fixed databases. He wasn't even supposed to have a blaster.

"Daddy?" Denilee whispered.

"Be quiet," he told her. When she bit her lip and nodded, he quickly carried her into his study, where all of the datapads she wasn't allowed to touch were kept. He selected one, then two, removed the memory chips, and smashed them on the desk with the blaster, grinding them into dust.

Denilee scrubbed at her eyes and tried to stop tears from welling up in them. Outside, by the entry, something boomed like ships colliding and she remembered the stories she and her classmates whispered about the students who disappeared, about how soldiers came for them in the night and everyone pretended not to see, because the Emperor had decided their parents weren't important anymore.

The booming came again. Her father looked around frantically and then carried her to the garden, where she hid from her homework and the nanny droids high up in the jiri trees. The garden doors were as big and sturdy as the ones in the entry, with locks her father had encrypted himself and thick durasteel plates and their own energy source. She remembered that once he had grinned at her and jokingly threatened to lock her out in the garden forever the next time she skipped out on her tutoring.

"I'm the only one who can unlock those locks, kiddo. If I don't feel like telling anybody the codes, you'll be stuck out there for weeks."

She had promptly tested him the next day. He had indeed locked the doors, but only long enough for her to start stamping her feet and calling him a big jerk.

But that had been a beautiful afternoon and they had both been laughing and everything had been a game. Now it was cold and dark, and without the atmospheric scrubbers, the cold wind puncturing the permeable walls of the garden whipped around her. When her father set her down, the familiar gravel path bit into the bare soles of her feet.

"Where's the fire exit?" he asked her. There was a harsh urgency in his voice that she had never heard before. "Do you remember? Not the emergency lift. Where are the stairs?"

She was crying in earnest now, almost too hard to speak, so she pointed to the big jiri tree in the corner. It had overgrown most of the ancient fire exit a long time ago. She had had to scramble under its roots just to find the old unlit stairs.

Her father crouched in front of her and gripped her shoulder. "Don't ever let them catch you. Promise me, Denilee."

She nodded once. Inside the apartment, something exploded and the ground under her feet rocked.

"Run." Her father pushed her towards the big jiri tree and then stepped back into the apartment.

Denilee froze.

"Run!" her father yelled as the doors closed.

But Denilee couldn't. She took one step back, then another, but she watched as the doors slid shut. She watched the soldiers in black armor round the corner in the hallway, spilling up from the entry, looking like monsters in the yellow glow of the emergency lights.

She watched her father move his blaster up, like he was about to point it at his own chin.

The doors slammed closed and the locks engaged. There was the sound of a single blaster shot.

Denilee fell down on the gravel path.

Run! something inside her yelled. You promised! Run!

She half-crawled, half-ran for the jiri tree and flopped down on her belly to fit under the roots. Her nightgown tore and bark snagged at her hair. She ignored everything and ran into the fire exit and down the ancient rickety stairs. From somewhere above came the sound of another explosion, much larger than the first. The walls trembled. Someone started to scream.

Denilee ran down and down and down into the murky depths of Imperial Center. High above her, the apartment began to burn.

Lucéa was good at hiding what she was really feeling. Most Naboo were. Off-worlders thought of them as aloof and uncaring, not realizing that this was precisely the point.

Theed's etiquette was complicated and convoluted. Lucéa had learned it from her grandmother, who - possessing every bit of Great-Aunt Padmé's formidable intelligence and exactly none of her taste for politics - had opted to channel her intellect into navigating the cutthroat social world of Naboo high society. The reserve Lucéa and those like her had learned to display in front of the king and the moff, intended though it was as self-possession, was easily misinterpreted by non-Naboo as a haughty sort of complete and utter disinterest - and for Lucéa, that disinterest was just as valuable a mask as silly Holonet rumors about country holidays and frivolous trysts.

It was quite unfortunate that absolutely none of her hard-earned skills had any effect on Anakin.

"Are you okay?" he asked when she very pointedly did not slam her fist down on Queen of Mercy's comm controls. The way he said it, it wasn't actually a question at all.

Lucéa took a deep breath. She was most certainly not okay. "That's seven," she said in a perfectly level voice. "Eight, counting whoever it was that commed me."

Anakin gave her a long look, but pulled up the list he was helping her compile and quickly added to it. It now consisted of seven familiar names: Ly Ito, Sandra San-Kastri, Pria Olkwin, Nanna Freerunner, Hee Golland, Bodie Besh, and Jessa Calrissian. All of them had participated in the same aborted student-government experiment as Lucéa, and all of them had been expelled from Santi-Solis Ladies' Academy for it, just as she had been.

Now, all of them were missing.

She hadn't tried contacting any of the other expelled students - not yet. She suspected she already knew what the results would be.

"We don't know what happened to them," Anakin said with what she felt was a poor attempt at optimism. "They could just be out of contact."

Lucéa dropped polite Naboo serenity long enough to glare at him. They were missing, that was what mattered; dead or disappeared, in the Core there wasn't much difference. "That seems highly unlikely, don't you think?"

His sigh told her that however much he might like to argue, he secretly agreed with her.

Someone or something was going after her expelled schoolmates. The sheer suddenness and brazenness of their disappearances - along with the fact that most of them were from very prominent backgrounds - made Lucéa suspect that the Empire was involved somehow. In all likelihood, she was also a target.

Worse, her mother and grandmother might be as well.

She was going to have to decide - quickly - if going back to Naboo, where she was unquestionably more vulnerable, and keeping her position as deputy prime minister was worth risking their lives as well as her own.

She cleared her throat and attempted to steer the conversation in a different direction. "How long until we reach this base of yours?"

Because that was where they were heading: the Rebel base and the collection of rundown and out-of-date ships that passed as its fleet. There was no point in trying to circumspectly deliver Anakin to a halfway point if she was hiding from would-be kidnappers and murderers, state-sponsored or otherwise - and if someone was killing the daughters of high-profile families, the Rebel Alliance's intelligence arm needed to know. The disappearances could signal a potential instability in the Empire, perhaps even something that could be used to win important factions or worlds to the Rebellion's side.

She hadn't known all seven of those girls well, but they had been as driven and determined as she was. She tried not to hate herself too much for thinking of them so coldly and distantly, as nothing more than pawns - for wearing that disinterested mask even for herself and pretending they hadn't had families, too.

Anakin was peering at her, but whatever it was he sensed, he let it drop and smiled instead. "If I told you where we were going, I'd have to kill you, you know." He checked the navigation console. "We're almost there. And we're actually sort of between bases at the moment. Hope you don't mind a visit to an old Star Cruiser."

"Wonderful," Lucéa said flatly. She rose from her seat in one fluid motion. "I'll be in my quarters. Let me know when we're ready to dock."

Leaving Queen of Mercy in Anakin's capable hands, she quickly returned to her cabin and set about doing all the mindless little necessary things that always accompanied clandestine trips like this. She pulled up her own navicomputer console and double-checked that the logs were automatically erasing. She found herself a cloak made of a heavy draping fabric she couldn't immediately identify and a deep hood that would shadow her face. She summoned Threepio long enough to give him instructions on what to do if it became necessary to flee before Anakin had returned to fetch him.

And then, finally, there was her hair.

Lucéa's grandmother had taught her this, too. There were certain ironclad laws behind the most intricate of those complicated braids and twists - which could only be worn by a queen and a queen alone, which were for off-worlders' eyes and which weren't, which signaled support for this faction or that. There was no style deemed appropriate for meeting the chief intelligence officer of a secret revolution on an outdated and possibly unsafe battleship, so for the moment she simply worked on autopilot, braiding her hair into one thick plait as she frowned at her reflection.

She didn't look exactly like Great-Aunt Padmé. Not really, anyway. Not up close. But she was just similar enough - a tilt of the jaw here, an arch of the eyebrows there - that the mistake was easy to make from a distance. The Naboo had great fondness for their onetime ruler, so the resemblance had been a benefit more than a burden; Lucéa didn't begrudge it and never had.

And yet.

Undoubtedly the legendary Queen Amidala wouldn't have thought of her old schoolmates as tools, not even for a moment. Surely it would have repulsed her.

Lucéa set her jaw and quickly wrapped her braid in a crown around her head. It was a simple style, common among the Alderaanian diaspora scattered across Naboo, that had no place in Theed political circles. Her grandmother would have been appalled.

So be it. There was little place for Great-Aunt Padmé's lofty ideals in the galaxy now.

When she returned to the cockpit, cloak around her shoulders and braid firmly pinned in place, Anakin was just bringing Queen of Mercy out of hyperspace. They appeared right in front of the Rebel fleet, which was the same depressing sight it always was, although Lucéa had truly only seen it from afar. It was a collection of antiques in questionable states of repair, all huddled together as if for protection. Lucéa's sleek ship stuck out without even trying to.

She slid into the pilot's seat as Anakin opened a comm channel and rattled off a complex series of codes that she wasn't going to bother trying to memorize. Once he had received permission to dock from Home One, he ignored the copilot's chair in favor of lurking behind her.

Lucéa gave him a sour look as she steered Queen of Mercy towards the largest and least decrepit of the Rebel ships. "Could you at least tell me if General Palla is on Home One, while you're encroaching on my personal space? She's the one I'll need to speak to."

"That's not really how the Force works," Anakin said cheerfully, but he backed away from her chair while Lucéa went about flying Queen of Mercy with more wounded dignity than was strictly necessary.

When they docked, the only people waiting to meet them at Home One's airlock were a pair of guards. That wasn't terribly surprising, of course; the Rebellion valued security, but it was perpetually lacking in manpower and Anakin was trusted and well-known, having been practically raised in the fleet. What did surprise Lucéa was the way one of the guards snapped to attention and saluted - probably a holdover from whatever military he had defected from.

"Your Highness," the guard said, and Lucéa had a moment of profound confusion before she glanced at Anakin. There was the faintest twitch of embarrassment marring his otherwise placid Jedi composure. "Admiral Antilles wishes to speak to you and your guest in the command center as soon as possible."

With what she felt was superhuman restraint, Lucéa watched Anakin acknowledge the guard with a polite nod and then waited until they were safely out of earshot before she quirked an eyebrow. "Your Highness?"

This time the embarrassment was plain to see. It made Anakin actually look his age, rather than like an old soul trying to carry a whole galaxy on his shoulders. "His parents are Alderaanian. I feel bad asking him to stop."

Sometimes it was difficult to remember that Leia Organa hadn't been born a half-mythical Jedi, much less that she had been rather important in the grand sweep of galactic history long before she picked up a lightsaber. "You're a prince of Alderaan, are you? Shall I curtsy?"

"Don't you start."

"You could always abdicate."

"I tried," he said in something that could almost have been called a grumble. "They have an elected ruling council, you know. It's just a ceremonial title, but they won't let me give it up."

She tried to imagine Anakin maneuvering his way through the tangled political infighting that plagued every government, even if said government consisted largely of crotchety white-haired Alderaanian nobility-in-exile. Maybe it was the potential death threat looming over her, but the absurdity of that image made it very hard not to laugh, her grandmother's etiquette lessons be damned. "I'll have you know," she said instead, "that as deputy prime minister, I'm third in line for the Naboo throne. I'm more than happy to inherit another one."

"Maybe I'll take you up on that," Anakin muttered as they stepped into the lift. Like everything else on Home One, it was older than Lucéa by several decades and made her miss Queen of Mercy's sleek, clean lines. "Do you think the admiral already knows about your missing friends?"

"Schoolmates, not friends," Lucéa corrected, but yes, it did seem odd that Admiral Antilles had summoned her without prompting. Aside from providing shelter and financial assistance to the Rebel cell in Theed, her primary connection to the Rebellion was through General Palla's intelligence network, not its military.

She pulled her deep hood down to shade her face as the lift rumbled and shuddered to a halt. The Rebellion didn't value the regal poise and stoic dignity her grandmother had worked so hard to instill in her - and there was certainly no reason for her to feign disinterest right at that moment - but old habits died hard. There was no point in letting anyone see just how worried she actually was.

Those worries only heightened when the room Anakin led her into proved to contain more than just Admiral Antilles. General Palla was there as well. To Lucéa's great astonishment, so was Chancellor Mon Mothma, frail but still sharp-eyed. Lucéa hastily clasped her hands in front of her and bowed in what she hoped was the proper Chandrillan fashion before standing straight-backed beside Anakin.

"Minister Naberrie," Admiral Antilles said with a slight nod. "Jedi Organa. If you would."

Lucéa glanced at Anakin, who gave her the faintest of shrugs. Once they had joined the majority of the Rebellion's leadership around a large holoprojector, Admiral Antilles activated it, projecting dozens and dozens of grayed-out faces arranged in a grid.

Lucéa sucked in a breath. She had a good memory and recognized the majority of the young women. They were all Santi-Solis students. Some of them were the seven names on her list or other expelled members of the student government, but the rest were classmates and roommates, utterly innocent and - as far as she was aware - still safely enrolled. A few she even counted as personal friends, or as close as she could come to having friends when half of her life was a closely-guarded secret.

She didn't have to ask what had happened to them.

"When?" she asked instead, careful to keep her voice steady and her face impassive. "I spoke to some of them just before I left Naboo."

"Accidents. Disappearances. Tragic crimes." Admiral Antilles's expression was very grave. "Someone is targeting you and your schoolmates, Minister."

Lucéa's mind raced. This was far more than just an attempt to eliminate everyone who had taken part in the student government. Some of these girls were completely unknown to her, or faces without names, or barely-tolerated acquaintances who had wholeheartedly loved the Empire and everything it stood for. She forced herself to take a deep breath. "These are the daughters of very important people - of Imperial officers. Surely - "

"The Core lives and dies at the Emperor's pleasure," General Palla said. "You and I both know he's the only one with the power to do this. We need to know why he is killing your classmates, Minister Naberrie."

She shook her head. She would have been a fool to think someone in the Empire didn't suspect her and her family of Rebel sympathies, but this? "I don't know, General. I wish I did. If I hadn't..." She forced herself to look back up at the faces and tried to call on every lesson in perfect dispassionate politeness that her grandmother had ever taught her. She felt a steadying touch on her shoulder that must have been Anakin's hand, so light that she could almost have imagined it. "If I had been on Naboo, I would be dead, too."

"And for that reason, I would encourage you to remain on Home One, at least for the time being." Chancellor Mothma's voice was very soft, but Lucéa could hear the durasteel core underneath it. "I am aware of your duties to the Theed cell and to your people. However, you would be equally valuable here."

There were times when a lapse of Naboo etiquette was necessary. This was one of them, Lucéa decided. She respected the Chancellor too much to do otherwise. For that reason, she pulled back her hood and allowed some of the worry and fear she had worked so hard to hide to creep through into her voice. "With respect, Chancellor Mothma, I will remain with the fleet long enough to provide you with information on my schoolmates, but I will not abandon my home or my family. I can't."

"Understood," Chancellor Mothma said. Then her expression softened. "You are far more like her than I expected."

There was no need to ask whom she meant. There never was. "Queen Amidala was my grandmother's sister," she said as she reached back for her hood. "I'm pleased to have been told I resemble her."

"You do," Chancellor Mothma said quietly, "and she was a dear colleague of mine. But that wasn't to whom I was referring, Minister Naberrie."

Lucéa stood for a moment, frozen in place, the fabric of her hood held between her fingers. She darted a glance at Anakin, but his expression was even more unreadable than usual. She had been compared to her great-aunt for so long, in so many different ways, that the idea that she might bring to mind anyone else - in any way - seemed almost absurd. "Chancellor?"

In answer, Chancellor Mothma nodded to something behind her. Lucéa turned and saw what she had missed before.

A portion of the command room wall near the doors was a sort of shrine to the Rebellion's high command - to those who had been executed or hunted down or who had otherwise died striving to restore the Republic. She recognized most of them, if only from wanted notices or her great-aunt's holos: Bail and Breha Organa, Gial Ackbar, Garm Bel Iblis, Jan Dodonna.

In the center of them all, wearing the exact same crown of braids as Lucéa herself, was Leia Organa.

It probably said something about the state of Hal's life that this wasn't the first time he had needed to escape from Imp custody. Hell, this wasn't even his first time crawling around in the bowels of a Star Destroyer, although that last little misadventure had involved more squabbling with scavengers over badly-needed spare parts and less running for his life. Fortunately, the Imps didn't have much of an imagination; they tended to cast their ships out of molds, so the ventilation shaft he was crawling through twisted and turned in a familiar and fairly predictable manner.

Which was why he wasn't all that surprising when he turned a corner and found himself face-to-face with a bulkhead.

"What the frag is this thing?" Melody asked as their entire escape party huddled around this newest obstacle like a gaggle of lost baby gundarks. She had shed her stolen Imp armor at some point - Hal wasn't entirely sure how - and she looked about as grimy and disheveled as he felt.

He sat back on his heels. "Quarantine barrier, I think. Rage has to know we're in here somewhere." He glanced back at Ben, who had only managed to lose his helmet and was sitting rather miserably on the deck, looking less like a person and more like a heap of discarded white armor. The ventilation shaft's sticky humidity had plastered his hair to his forehead and sweat was dripping off his nose.

Well, Hal thought with a very very small pang of sympathy, this was hardly going to be the worst situation the kid found himself in. Not when that Force presence of his was pulsing like very compact, very self-contained, white-hot sun.

He jerked his chin at the lightsaber hanging from Ben's belt. "Let me borrow that."

Ben gave him a blank look. "My tools?"

"No, the lightsaber, idiot. It can handle durasteel." He held out his hand and waited until Ben finished laboriously unhooking it, caught it easily as it was tossed to him -

fire death blood

- and immediately threw it away as hard and fast as he could. It landed on the deck with what sounded like a thunderous clatter in the confines of the ventilation shafts.

Ben was frozen in mid-motion, staring at him with round, startled eyes, alarm rippling through the Force.

Hal didn't care how scared he was. "Where the hell did you get that?" he snarled.

Ben just shook his head. His gaze darted from Hal to the lightsaber and back again as if he wasn't sure which one was going to attack him first. "It's - I didn't - I found it. On Tatooine."

"And you don't feel that?"

Now Ben just looked hopelessly lost. "Feel what?"

He had no idea, Hal realized. How was that even possible? He had felt Ben using the Force on Ludlii, mindlessly and unconsciously, the same way other beings used their lungs. And the shrieking of that lightsaber wasn't a small or subtle thing. It was a dark stain on the Force that to Hal, barely trained though he was, felt like screams of terror and the scraping of claws over raw nerves.

Why the hell couldn't Ben sense it?

He pushed his growing unease to the back of his mind and tried to stop his hands from clenching into fists. "That's not a Jedi's lightsaber."

"Wait, what?" Melody demanded beside him. She rounded on Ben, who leaned so far away from her that he had to pinwheel his arms in order to avoid overbalancing and falling flat on the deck. "I swear to every fragging god out there, kid, just when I think you can't get us into any more trouble - "

Their newest tagalong cleared her throat.

Hal still wasn't entirely sure what to do with her. Everything about her, from her now-filthy dress to her Core accent to her neatly manicured nails, suggested rich and soft and sheltered. But she was the one who had suggested escaping through the air ducts in the first place. She had been locked up just like Hal instead of being summarily executed, she had crawled uncomplaining along with the rest of them, and now she reached down and snatched up the lightsaber before he could stop her.

"I don't care if this belonged to Rage himself," she said crisply. "We don't have time for whatever this nonsense is."

She pressed the hilt to the barrier. The red blade cut through it in a flash of betrayal and pain and blood.

Once they were past the smoking durasteel ruins and the lightsaber had been returned to Ben - the horrible shriek of it once again thoroughly muffled by his bright chaotic presence - they moved in relative silence for what felt like and might have actually been hours. Parts of Rage's ship weren't laid out exactly to Imp Navy regulations, as it turned out, but between Hal and Melody's combined knowledge and Artoo beeping at them over the comlink every time they made a wrong turn, they found themselves crowded around a grate, right above something that was probably a storage room.

There were a pair of presences somewhere just outside it, bored and methodical in a way that practically screamed Imps.

"Guards?" Melody whispered when Hal held up an arm to bring everyone to a halt.

"Outside. Two of them, probably stormtroopers." He tapped the barrel of her blaster rifle before she could switch the safety off. "We need to keep it down. There's others down the corridor."

"How can you tell?" Ben asked.

He pointed at his own temple and hoped that was enough of an answer. He didn't have time to go into the details of his haphazard training at the moment. "Just try not to make too much noise," he said as he eased the grate open.

They dropped to the deck as silently as possible - even the new girl, who let Ben catch her before quickly pulling herself upright to stand on her own two feet. Her presence was gray with fatigue at the edges, but she was holding up well enough for someone who obviously wasn't used to sneaking around warships and had just gone through who-knew-how-many days of interrogation and sleep deprivation.

Melody was already crouched behind the high towers of crates and boxes. She smirked as the girl slid down beside her with a sigh, her skirts puddling around her. "Try not to swoon on us, princess."

"Oh for the love of - " The girl scowled at all three of them, but at least had the sense to keep her voice down. "My name is Jessa Calrissian, not princess."

Hal glanced at Melody and saw her quirk an eyebrow. Their thoughts were clearly running on the same course. "The shipping company kind of Calrissian?" he asked, aiming for disinterested nonchalance.

Calrissian wasn't buying it. "As in nothing that will get you or the Rebellion a reward. All the company assets are in my father's and sister's names and they want nothing to do with this. Insurrections are bad for business." She waved a hand in one quick gesture, as if brushing aside her family and her wealth. "Forget about that. The message you're carrying is very important. It needs to get to the Rebellion, regardless of what happens to me."

"Yeah?" Melody asked. "So what's in it?"

Jessa pressed her lips together and said nothing.

"Really? Really? You don't know?" Melody's voice was starting to climb; Hal reached over long enough to give her a warning shove. She made a rude gesture at him, but quieted, never taking her eyes off of Calrissian. "What in the seven kriffing hells are you risking your life for, then?"

"Because it doesn't matter what's in it! That message has coded information from the Emperor's most private databases. No matter what it is, it's something he doesn't want anyone else to know about. That makes it invaluable." Calrissian looked from one face to the next as if trying to impress the importance of her words with sheer force of will. "The person who sent me the message isn't a Rebel agent, but she's scared. Everyone on Imperial Center is scared. There are rumors about what the Emperor really is, and if you're heard spreading them, you and your entire family disappear."

"What the Emperor really is?" Ben echoed - and that, at least, made his presence thrum with sudden fear.

Hal cut him off. He felt ill. "Whatever rumors you've heard," he said to Calrissian, "the truth's worse. Trust me."

"Then you should understand why this is so important," Calrissian said. "We must get to a hangar bay and escape."

"Not without Han we aren't." He could feel Melody glaring at him, but this wasn't negotiable and they both knew it. "And not without Ben's cousin, either. We all get off this boat or no one does."

Calrissian just folded her arms and looked disgruntled. "We barely escaped from the detention block. How exactly are we going to rescue two other people?"

"We could ask him to rig up another catastrophe for us," Melody suggested, jabbing a finger in Ben's general direction. He was hastily shedding the rest of his stormtrooper armor as if it was burning him, but he stopped long enough to shake his head at her. She shrugged, unrepentant. "Just thought I'd ask, kid."

Once they got out of this - if they got out of this - Hal was going to have to find out exactly what it was Ben had done to rattle an entire Star Destroyer so badly. Now clearly wasn't the time, however. "We could do what we did on Nar Shaddaa?" he offered.

Melody's eyebrows shot up to somewhere around her hairline. "Pretty sure that was a one-time thing, Hal. I don't care what that Hutt said, you don't look that good in - "

"No, not - " Hal offered a prayer for patience to whichever deity happened to be listening. "Not that. The thing with the hovercar."

"The what with what?" Calrissian asked, even as Melody started to get a contemplative look on her face that was frankly alarming.

"Punching holes in things with a ship. It worked great with that tent on Nar Shaddaa."

"Sure!" Melody added. "Hovercar, Imp shuttle, tent, hull, same difference."

Calrissian's expression was slowly collapsing into an expression of mounting horror. "You're half-witted nerfherders, all of you. I should have stayed in my cell." She put her head in her hands and gave a short, strangled scream of frustration.

Hal was about to suggest she could waltz right back to the detention block if she wasn't going to offer any better ideas, but before he could do more than open his mouth, an alarm started blaring at near-deafening volume.

Everyone, even Calrissian, turned and looked at Ben, who had sidled away from them at some point. He was standing by the door, up to his elbows in its emergency access panel.

"I switched on the fire alarm," he said, expression waffling between sheepish and defiant. "At least it's better than your shuttle-stealing idea."

Melody clapped Hal on the shoulder and leaned in close to his ear as she pulled herself up. "I'm gonna murder both of them, I fragging swear."

Just this once, Hal was inclined to agree with her.

Sasha was almost starting to wish Rage would come back. At least with him she knew what she was dealing with.

But no. Despite the fact that sirens were going off, Imps kept coming in to talk to her. Some of them were friendly in a saccharine treacly way that made her want to snap that she was thirteen, not two, and treating her like a toddler wasn't going to make her answer any questions. Some were much angrier, and one had even hit her across the jaw hard enough to make tears spring to her eyes and the metallic tang of blood well up in her mouth.

"Ow," she snarled, and then wished she hadn't, because speaking made her face hurt.

The Imp regarded her impassively and then left the room.

Probably to get an interrogation droid, Sasha realized. She refused to blink until the Imp was gone and she was alone again. When she did, hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

She wanted her mom and dad. She wanted Ben back. She wanted to pick fights with Brin Farstrider and watch stupid holodramas and cuss at broken vaporators. She wanted to go home.

The sirens got louder. Sasha took a deep shuddering breath. Shut up, she scolded herself. Shut up and pull it together, you stupid crybaby.

Ben was somewhere on this ship - he had to be - and she had been looking out for him ever since she was old enough to understand what being called a space bastard meant. Her family was stronger than the whole Empire.

It was time she acted like it.

She looked around the room. It clearly wasn't designed to hold prisoners, which suggested just how little the Imps thought of her resourcefulness. Clearly Rage had forgotten something about living on Tatooine, or maybe he had just never had to scrape out a living in the settlements on the very edge of the Dune Sea.

Growing up in Draco's Well meant learning to find a use for anything.

There was a picture hanging on one of the walls - a real old-fashioned picture, not a holoprojection. Sasha pushed her chair over to it, suddenly very grateful that her hands had been cuffed in front of her, and scrambled up to get a better look. It was some kind of night view of a big sprawling city, probably Imperial Center. More importantly, it was fastened to the wall with a hook. It took a bit of muscle and a lot of swearing, but she was able to wrench it free. The frame was solid and hard enough to leave a sizable dent in someone's skull if she hit hard enough.

From there, she pushed the chair over to the door and climbed onto it, picture held at ready.

She had nervously hummed her way through seven and a half rounds of the Thunder TIEs theme song when the door finally slid open again. She swung the picture down hard and -

"Ow! What the hell, kid?"

Oh, no. She dropped the picture and covered her face with her hands, trying to peek through her fingers. "Oh frag, oh frag, Captain Solo I am so sorry - "

The slightly concussed hero of the Rebellion rubbed his head and scowled at her, but all he said was, "Let's get out of here."

She didn't have to be told twice. Captain Solo uncuffed her and led her into a nondescript corridor. There was a guard sprawled in front of the door to her makeshift prison, a smoking hole in their chest armor. Sasha stumbled over nothing and gulped down a wave of nausea that surprised her, somehow. She saw dead bodies all the time on Thunder TIEs. So what if they weren't real? She had seen Brin Farstrider's uncle laid out before his funeral, hadn't she? She had helped butcher a womprat that one time, right?

She could do this. She could.

Captain Solo scooped up the Imp's discarded blaster and handed it to her. It sat lighter and more compact in her hands than her family's old carbine. "How good are you at shooting?" he asked.

"Better than my cousin."

He gave her a look. "And how good's your cousin?"

"Awful," Sasha admitted.

That got a noncommittal hmph in response before he set off down the corridor. Sasha double-checked the blaster rifle's safety and hurried after him, trying to keep close to the bulkheads like he did. Everything was empty and quiet except for the sirens. She didn't understand why.

"Where are we going?" she asked instead of voicing her concerns.

"Shuttle bay. With any luck that's where Hal will try to meet up with us."

"Hal escaped?"

In answer, Captain Solo pointed at a flashing alarm just down the corridor. "That wasn't me, kid."

Maybe it was Ben, Sasha thought. She tried not to grin to herself. Captain Solo could think whatever he wanted, but she would have bet every credit on Tatooine that this mayhem was somehow her cousin's doing. Deep down, he was just as much of a stubborn Darklighter as she was.

The thought made her heart feel lighter.

When they finally did stumble across Imps some time later, it was by complete accident. They rounded a corner and there was a squad. Sasha froze - but to be fair, so did they.

Captain Solo didn't. He grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back around the corner, firing all the while. A moment later a hail of blaster bolts answered them. Sasha clutched her blaster rifle in shaking hands and squeezed her eyes shut, because this - the screaming and the mayhem, the acrid smell of burnt ozone - was nothing at all like Thunder TIEs.

She wanted to go home.

Not without Ben. It was like a mantra. Not without Ben.

And under that, darker and stronger: Don't you let them kill him too.

She opened her eyes and leaned around the corner once, twice, again - each time squeezing off a shot. On her fourth try, she found her mark. A stormtrooper dropped dead, chest smoking, just like the Imp she had seen when Captain Solo had rescued her.

Don't you let them kill him too.

She ducked around the corner again, firing with more surety this time. She didn't feel ill anymore.

It turned out that it was almost easy to kill, knowing that she had someone to protect.