Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (34 page)

“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.

H
OURS 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.