Cham smiled, but without mirth. “I’m not trying to guarantee success. I’m trying to guarantee your very best efforts. No half measures, Belkor. You’re in fully. We succeed together or die together, each in our way. Understood?”
Belkor could not even bring himself to speak. He just gave a brisk nod of his head.
“Good,” Cham said. “Then let’s get out of here.”
They walked side by side, back through the tunnel, until they could see Isval’s silhouette in the cave mouth. Something struck Belkor. He faced Cham.
“If I hadn’t agreed to this? You’d have killed me, wouldn’t you? Or she would have?”
Cham didn’t hesitate. “I’d have done it, not her. That’s why this cave. It goes back a way. No scavenging animals, and the dry air desiccates a corpse with surprising speed. So I would have just left you back there and saved myself the trouble and dirt of burying your body. No one would have ever found you.”
Belkor stared into the darkness of the cavern behind them, imagining it as his tomb, then back at Cham.
“But it didn’t come to that,” Cham said. “Because you’re smart, Belkor. And now I’m going to tell you something important. You listening?”
Belkor nodded.
“The moment you get out of here, you’re going to start having second thoughts. You’re going to start thinking about how you can turn this around, save yourself, and throw me over. But you can’t. I have people everywhere, Belkor. That’s how I knew about Taa. All the information you’ve ever offered me in the past? I already knew it. I just wanted you to offer it so I could record you doing so, put you in my pocket so that I could take you back out and spend you when I needed to. So now I’m spending you. You slip up, try to flip this, and I’ll know about it the moment it happens. And then I’ll make everything known.”
“You committed those crimes. Not me.”
The words sounded stupid to Belkor even as he said them.
“Yes, but you abetted them. Dead Imperials, Belkor. Lots of them. The Empire will make those your responsibility, and no matter how you spin it, no one would forgive that. So when you walk out of here and the uncertainty sets in, you remember that I’m all you have. That if you betray me, there’s nothing coming for you but an ugly death and more scandal for your family. But—but—if you do as I ask, this will work to both our benefits. Taa will be dead, Mors will be disgraced, and we’ll arrange for you to look the hero somehow. Moff Dray. Sounds good, no?”
“I’ll still be in your pocket,” Belkor said.
“But you’ll be alive. And a Moff. That’s better than the alternative.”
Belkor said nothing.
“Good-bye, Belkor. Start making arrangements. I’ll be in touch soon. Oh, and welcome to the rebellion.”
Belkor walked out of the cave, passed Isval without really seeing her, and returned to his aircar. Once inside, he sat perfectly still for a moment before everything exploded out of him. He slammed his fist against the instrument panel again and again and again and again.
“Blast! Blast! Blast! Blast!”
He stopped only when he realized that he was bleeding. The pain helped refocus him. He cradled the hand against his shirt, fired up the engines, and headed back to Lessu in a haze. About halfway, the second thoughts Cham had anticipated started to bubble up. As best as his addled mind allowed, he turned the situation over in his mind, examining it from various angles. Other than collaborating with Cham or turning himself in, he saw only one other option: he could run, take up in some isolated location in the galaxy, and live out his life in obscurity. Cham could still expose him, of course, but he’d be long gone.
But by the time he saw Lessu’s lights in the distance, he’d dismissed the idea of running. He’d always been compromised. So, he was in Cham’s pocket. He could manage that; he could manage Cham. They’d need each other when he was Moff.
And all it would take was the murder of one Twi’lek senator.
Belkor could live with that.
—
Cham and Isval watched the dark and distance swallow Belkor’s aircar.
“He didn’t mention Vader or the Emperor?” Isval asked.
“He didn’t. I gave him the opportunity and he was off balance. He’d have said something or I’d have seen it in his face. He doesn’t know.”
Isval exhaled. “Then the intel is good. Vader and Palpatine are coming with Taa.”
Cham nodded. “It could still be a trap. Belkor just might not be in on it. They could suspect him of collaborating.”
“No,” Isval said. “We’ve been careful and so has he. And Mors is an idiot. She’s sat up there on that moon for years and let Belkor run the show, undermining her at every turn. No, they just haven’t told her that Vader and the Emperor are coming. They’re replacing her, Cham, and making a big show of it. Probably bringing a garrison of stormtroopers, too. We’re overdue for some heavier boots.”
Cham nodded. “I think you’re probably right.”
“Then we’re a go?” She was bouncing on the balls of her feet.
“We’re a go,” Cham answered. “And pity poor Belkor. When he learns what he’s actually signed on for…”
Isval stiffened. “He’s filth, Cham. Imperial filth. Don’t be sentimental. Not about him. Not about them. Not ever.”
Her vehemence didn’t surprise him, given what she’d experienced in her youth. “It’s not sentiment. It’s principle. What am I without that?”
“On the winning side, I hope,” Isval said. She changed the subject. “Now what?”
“Now we get everything ready,” Cham said. “And I mean everything. This is the operation we’ve been waiting for. Mobilize everyone and get all the weapons and ships ready for use. We’ll have full Imperial patrol schedules so we can move things into place. Let’s find out if we’re as good as we think we are.”
“We are,” she affirmed. “Consider it handled. But hear me, I’m heading back to Lessu for a day or two. I’ll see to matters from there.”
Cham turned to face her. Her beauty rarely registered with him, so often was it hidden behind the mask of her anger. But right then, in the dim light of the moons, she looked as vulnerable as she had the day he’d first met her. And as beautiful. He quieted the feelings for her that sometimes bubbled up. They were a complication he couldn’t afford. She’d said not to be sentimental. He wouldn’t be.
“What’s in Lessu?” he asked, concerned.
The mask came back up. “It’s just personal business. All right?”
He didn’t pry. He had no right to pry. “All right. Just be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“Sure you are,” Cham said, smiling.
—
Isval had rented another small garret in an underground housing complex in a poor part of Lessu. The thin walls allowed in noise from the adjacent rooms, shouting from one, shrill laughter from another. The smell of someone’s dinner leaked through the shared ventilation system. Isval found she was hungry, but not for food.
The sight of Dray—with his impeccably combed hair, his unwrinkled, sharply creased clothes, his intolerably smug, self-assured expression—had made her need more acute. She’d felt it coming on days before, like one of Ryloth’s sandstorms, brewing red and blurry on the horizon, until finally it exploded in violence.
She’d told Cham she’d be in Lessu two days, but she planned to use only the one. The need was too strong, the pressure, the agitation. She couldn’t wait two days. She had to do it tonight. She had to. She’d be useless to Cham if she didn’t, too sloppy, too angry. She needed release.
She knew how she appeared to others, with her pacing, her curtness, always on the verge of an explosion. Servitude had made her that way. If she was a monster, the Empire had spawned her.
Her reflection stared back her from the tiny mirror mounted on the wall. She’d donned a headband of the kind they loved, makeup to accent her high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and full lips. It was th
e mask she wore when she hunted.
It wasn’t her in the mask. It was the her she’d been, but made monstrous.
The pale-blue expanse of her skin looked like still water. How often had she heard those words out of the lips of some Imperial? Too often. She imagined them thinking that if they were nice, if they dressed oppression up in fine words, they were then somehow giving her a choice. But they weren’t. They were just lying to themselves about what they took from her and why she was forced to give it. She’d never had a choice, not a real one, not until she’d strangled that corporal with a headband and fled to the resistance.
But she carried the scars; she’d always carry them, not on her skin but on her soul, and she picked them open when she needed a reminder of pain or needed to add fuel to her anger. Servitude and its degradations had broken her. She knew she’d never put herself back together, not completely, but she didn’t care. The break had made her jagged, and now she used her edges and points to cut them. They’d made her into something—a slave, a possession, a thing—but after she’d escaped them, the making had continued. She’d gone on hammering the metal of her spirit until she’d made herself into something new: a warrior and, often enough, a killer. And Cham Syndulla had given her a place, and she loved him for that. For him it was a cause, but not for her. For her, it was just the vector she used to vent her anger against the Empire.
She tried out a smile in the mirror as she hung a necklace around her neck, found the smile serviceable, despite the sharpened eyeteeth. She wore fitted pants and a shirt that showed her bare midriff. She threw a sheer, shimmering robe over the whole, knowing the robe hugged her curves as she moved. She hid a blaster in a holster at the small of her back and her vibroblade in the leg wraps around her left calf.
She hesitated for a moment, recalling Cham’s words about principles. She knew he would disapprove of what she did—of what she’d done a dozen times—and that his disapproval wouldn’t be solely based in the risk she took, but also on principle. Principle. She paraphrased for herself her response to him, and it freed her to move.
“We do what we must to win, Cham. They’re filth, and they deserve what they get.”
She found she only half believed herself—Cham must have been influencing her more than she’d realized—but half was enough with the need on her.
She headed out and up the stairs, past a drunk sleeping in a heap against the wall, and onto the street. The thoroughfare filled her senses: the sounds of traffic and the hum of passersby; the smell of cooking fires, spice pipes, and the sweaty, dry stink of a typical Ryloth night. The wind painted her robe against her form and she felt eyes on her, gazes lingering on her sleek figure, but she ignored them.
She hailed a servicecar with a raised arm, and her curves and makeup drew one quickly. She told the driver to take her to the Octagon, one of the main plazas in Lessu, bordered on all eight sides by cantinas and clubs frequented by Imperials and working girls and men. She’d not hunted there before.
The Octagon sat about halfway up Lessu’s spire, dug deeply into the stone. The bottom level of the plaza was thirty meters down, and a series of carved stone stairways, tunnels, and balconies, all torchlit, led up to ever higher tiers and more stairways, creating a mazelike warren that eventually descended back to street level.
Various cantinas and clubs were burrowed out of the stone, their interiors hidden from view. A steady stream of Imperial vehicles and smiling Imperial officers, often in the company of Twi’lek escorts, made their way to and from the Octagon’s various levels. Pennons flapped in the wind, and lighted signs and paid hawkers advertised for this or that establishment. Isval eyed them from the window of her servicecar and hated them all.
“Level Seven, please,” she said, and the driver set her down on one of the tiers of Level Seven, the second one down. The vehicle’s door opened and the smells hit her instantly, the echoes of her previous life: smoke and perfume and spice. Laughter and music bounced up from the lower levels.
An older, paunchy officer in his dress grays eyed her as the servicecar flew off. He propositioned her with raised eyebrows and a knowing smirk, but she ignored him and headed down a nearby stairway.
“Stuck up,” he called after her.
The maze was littered with dark corners, secret nooks, narrow tunnels, and blind alleys. Drunks and spice users and working girls lingered here and there, the castaways of Lessu’s vice trade. As Isval descended the Octagon’s tiers, the vices grew worse, the lighted signs more graphic. She’d spent her youth on Level One, the Hole, as it was known. And the Hole was where she would hunt.
With a false smile and long-practiced skill, she avoided or extricated herself from the groping hands of drunk or spice-hazed Imperials on her way down. One of them removed himself too slowly, so she put a knee in his groin and left him moaning on a stairway. Laughter from above reminded her that she had to be careful about being seen.
She was sweating by the time she reached the bottom, and the stink of Level One brought it all back to her. The degradations, the hunger, the abuse, the constant unrelenting desperation.
Smoke and stink made a fog of the air. Torches were rare, signs were dim or unlit. Humans, Twi’leks, and other sentients moved through the dark stifling air like ghosts, too ashamed of their tastes to engage in them in anything other than near darkness. She moved among them, a ghost herself, looking for a likely spot and a likely target. She had both shortly.
She sat in a nook not far from a spice-and-vice club, cloaked in the darkness and her anger, and watched a junior officer walk out of the club with a young, underfed Twi’lek girl on his arm. The escort had seen maybe twenty summers, and she wore barely enough clothing to cover herself. The officer pawed at her as they walked through the night, his sweaty face flushed with the heat and his expectations of what was to come. He leaned over, stumbling, and murmured something in her ear. She smiled, the false smile that Isval knew well and had worn often.
She eyed him with contempt and growing rage. He was just some junior lieutenant, probably fresh off a transport from the Core, who thought wearing dress grays and carrying a weapon gave him a claim on Ryloth’s resources and women.
Isval dug down to mine her resolve, found it, and stepped out of the nook. Her sudden appearance brought both the officer and the girl up short. But his surprised look quickly gave way to a leer as he looked Isval up and down. There was no one else in the immediate area.
The officer’s drink-reddened face split in a sloppy smile and slurred words emerged. “Aren’t you pretty? Why don’t you join us—”
Isval sidled close, smiling, while she reached around to the small of her back. When she stood before him, she pulled the blaster and slammed its grip into his jaw. Teeth and blood spattered the street, and he fell in a groaning pile.
The girl gave a single startled exclamation and looked as though she might run.
“No, stay! Help me,” Isval said. She disarmed the officer, grabbed him under the armpits, and dragged him back into the dark nook. The girl did not help her but followed tentatively, warily.
“What’s your name?” Isval asked, standing over the officer.
The girl blinked and said nothing.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Isval said.
The officer moaned. His hand twitched. Isval stepped on it, felt a crunch, and the officer moaned again.
“Ryiin,” the girl said softly. Her eyes darted between Isval and the officer. “What are you…are you robbing us?”
“You and this”—she kicked the officer—“aren’t an ‘us,’ no matter what he told you.”
“I don’t…what?”
“Name your clan,” Isval said.
Ryiin looked away in shame.
“You don’t have one,” Isval said, nodding. She said what she’d said many times before. “Not anymore. Listen to me, Ryiin. I used to stand where you’re standing. I spent three years in the Hole before I escaped.”
There was no hope in Ry
iin’s eyes. “Escape? There’s no escape from this.”
“There is if you want there to be.”
Ryiin looked up. “How?”
“Come with me. I’ll take you out of here. I have a place you can stay. Start again. Away from…this. I know, I know. You don’t trust me. Why would you? But my offer is genuine.”
Ryiin backed up a step, as if Isval had offered to harm her rather than help. Isval was not surprised. Hope and trust didn’t appear much among the workers in the Octagon. “I can’t.”
“You can. You should. Look at me. Look. I’ll help you.”
She was shaking her head. “They’ll come after me.”
Isval didn’t lie. “They might. But they probably won’t. They don’t even know your full name. And once you’re gone, you’re gone. And if you want to, you can stay gone.”
“I…can’t.”
The officer groaned. Isval drew her vibroblade.
“What are you going to do?” Ryiin asked, horrified.
“What should be done to all of them,” Isval answered, and knelt down, blade bare.
“Don’t, don’t!” Ryiin said. She hurried forward and knelt beside Isval, her eyes pleading. She placed her fingers on Isval’s wrist. “Don’t, all right? I’ll go with you, but don’t do this.”
“I don’t want you to come with me to save him,” Isval snapped. “I want you to come with me to save you. What’s he to you?”
Ryiin glanced at the officer, back at Isval. “He’s nothing, but…he didn’t do anything bad to me.”
“He would have,” Isval snapped. “And he’s a soldier of the Empire. He’s done something bad to all of us.”
“I know that,” Ryiin said. “But don’t. All right? Just don’t. I’ll come with you. I want to. I’m just…afraid.”
Voices from the walkway outside their nook froze them both into silence, but the sounds soon passed.
“This one owes you his life then,” Isval said. She stood and kicked the officer in the head. He didn’t even groan, just went limp. “Come on. You can’t go back to get anything.”
“There’s nothing for me to go get.”