Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (21 page)

Like most cadets, Thane had dreamed of having a few days to sleep late, ignore military discipline, and do whatever he wanted. Yet without the strict framework he’d lived within for the
past few years, he found himself rudderless—bewildered and irritated
by more freedom than he knew what to do with. Instead of fulfilling his assigned tasks at a preset schedule, he
did…nothing. Stubble appeared on his face as the beard suppressant wore off, and buying more didn’t seem worth the credits it would cost. Every night he had nightmares—about
Alderaan, the Death Star, his father, or Ciena in danger. The only thing that separated him from the down-and-outers
around him was that Thane didn’t spend all his money on ale, though by now
he understood why some people did. With each day he sunk deeper into melancholy.

At first he’d thought it would be easy to find some kind of employment; there was always work for pilots, even unlicensed ones. But now he realized he couldn’t do that on Jelucan.
The Empire’s presence there was too strong for a deserter
to wander through the ports asking for a job. No doubt he could indenture himself to one of the less savory freighters that passed
through—they never looked into people’s backgrounds—but that was only one step removed from selling himself into slavery.

Very few things seemed worth trying any longer. It felt as if his entire life were frozen in time, waiting for Ciena to arrive. And if she
never came, he didn’t know what would become of
him and didn’t much care.

Thane hit his limit one night about two weeks in, as he sprawled on his bed in his sleep tunic and pants. The pale plaster walls of his room were blank, his coverlet a light beige without any
pattern. Given its price, the space was surprisingly comfortable—but Thane felt as if it were taunting him with its emptiness.

In the academy’s Security Protocols and Interrogation Techniques class, they’d taught that one of the most effective methods for breaking a person down was simply to make that person
stare at a plain wall without ever sleeping. The sleep deprivation and boredom did what pain and threats could not. A prisoner’s mind would split itself open, spilling every word hidden
inside, just to end
the exhausting monotony. Thane had never understood how that worked until now.

A commotion outside made him sit upright. It sounded like some of the street merchants were folding up their not-quite-legal wares in a hurry. Thane went to the one small window in his room and
pulled back the screen. On the ground a few floors down, he saw an Imperial patrol cruiser that had obviously just pulled
up.

Then, on the stairs outside, he heard the thump of boots as someone headed his way.

All right, think fast. That’s a single-person cruiser. They only sent one guy. You can take one guy out.
Not without a weapon, though. Was there anything he could use? But the few
items in the room were all either too big to be lifted or too small to do any meaningful damage.

Maybe he isn’t coming
for you. There are dealers in the neighborhood. Prostitutes. Smugglers. Plenty of people to arrest.
But then they’d send one of the local paramilitaries,
not an Imperial officer.

Thane took a deep breath as he ran his hands through his short hair. He’d have to bluff his way through it as best he could. If he denied being Thane Kyrell and acted completely confused,
he might throw the guy
off for a minute—long enough to grab the officer’s blaster.

But could he shoot a guy who was just doing his job? Someone who had been his fellow officer just a few days ago?

A fist thumped on Thane’s door. He mussed his covers as if he’d been asleep, went to the door, and said—as if groggy—“Mmhmmn. Yeah? Who is it?”

The reply: “I’m here on official business.”

He knew that voice.

Instantly, Thane opened the door and saw Ciena standing there in uniform. The sight of her felt like the first breath he’d taken in years.

“You made it.” He pulled her inside his room, locked the door behind them, and hugged her tightly. As he breathed in the scent of her skin, he had to marvel at Ciena’s
brilliance. She hadn’t deserted; she’d come here on official business, making sure
the Empire would pay her way and delaying any other pursuit. “You’re a genius, you know
that? I kept waiting, and I thought they might have stopped you, but here you are. Here you are.”

Thane kissed her then, long and deeply. That damned gray uniform was too stiff against his hands, but they could worry about that later. Ciena kissed him back just as passionately—but when
their lips parted
she looked so troubled that he wondered if he’d done something wrong.

Or maybe she was worried about their safety. “Did the Empire send anyone else?”

“No. They were sure you’d go somewhere besides Jelucan. I knew you’d guess that, so of course you’d come here—”

Thane grinned. She understood him so well.

But Ciena looked even more distressed than before. “Thane,
what have you done
?”

And then he finally began to realize how far apart they still were.

An hour later, Ciena sat with Thane in the cantina below. She’d been afraid they would be overheard, witnessed, maybe even turned in, but Thane had shaken his head.
“Trust me,” he’d told her. “The kind of people who come here? They give Imperial officers a wide berth. Nobody we know is likely to show up.”

“It’s
not worth the risk,” she’d said.

But Thane’s square jaw had set in the way that she knew meant complete determination or just plain stubbornness. “If I don’t get out of this room, I am going to lose it. Trust
me. We’ll be safe.”

Sure enough, they had the entire corner of the place to themselves. Most of the patrons were newcomers to the planet, not natives, and they crowded at the front
near the viewscreens. She and
Thane sat at their small table alone. Merely being in a run-down cantina like that would have unnerved her a few years ago or even now, if she weren’t so wrapped up in trying to stop Thane
from making the worst mistake of his life.

“You can come back,” she repeated. “I know you think they’ll arrest you, and at any other time they would have, but they badly
need qualified officers after what
happened.”

“I don’t want to come back,” he said, not for the first time.

Ciena still refused to believe it. “Three years in the academy—all that work, all that effort, for nothing?”

“You think I’m happy about this? I’m not. But after what I’ve seen, what the Empire is doing to the Bodach’i—after Alderaan—I can’t wear that
uniform any longer.”
Thane leaned over his glass of ale, head in one hand, like a man with a headache. “I thought we agreed about this.”

“I thought we agreed that after what happened to so many of our friends aboard the Death Star, we needed to stand together. The rebels killed thousands of our fellow officers. They killed
Grand Moff Tarkin—”

“Tarkin was nice to us,” Thane admitted. “Meeting him changed
our lives.”

“—and they killed Jude,” Ciena continued. “Do you condone that?”

“I’m not joining the damned Rebellion, Ciena. I’m not condoning what happened to the Death Star
or
what happened to Alderaan. Are you? That’s impossible.
You’d never think destroying an entire world was the right thing to do.”

Miserably, she shook her head. “No. I understand the thinking that led to the
attack on Alderaan—but I don’t condone it. The thing is, I
don’t have to
.”
Ciena leaned closer, looking into Thane’s blue eyes and willing him to understand. “The Emperor and the Moffs have to see, now, that destroying Alderaan did no good. It didn’t
stop the Rebellion; if anything, it made the rebels more desperate.”

“So two billion people died in vain,” Thane said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something within her broke. “Of course not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thane couldn’t sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You awake?” he murmured.

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