Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Lost Stars (22 page)

“I love you.” He couldn’t believe he’d never said it before. It was like stating that the sky was overhead—so obvious, so fundamentally true, that verbalizing it
ought to be unnecessary.

She lifted her face to his. “I love you, too. Always have. One way or another.”

“I love you in every way.”

“Yes.” Ciena smiled, but the expression was so sad that
it hurt Thane—a literal ache in the center of his chest. “In every way.”

“If I begged you to stay with me, it wouldn’t make any difference, would it?”

She shook her head. “If I begged you to get on the next transport back to Coruscant, you wouldn’t, would you?”

He didn’t have to say anything. They both knew the answer.

“So that’s the end.” The words came out more harshly than Thane
had intended, but he trusted Ciena to understand his anger wasn’t aimed at her. “The Empire takes us
from each other forever.”

“If it weren’t for the Empire, we would never have come together in the first place. Think about it. Would you have ever made friends with a girl from the valleys any other
way?”

Thane had been so small when Jelucan was annexed by the Empire that his earlier
memories were jumbled and unsure. In some ways, it felt like his life had truly begun that day, with his dream of
flying for the Empire, and with Ciena. “I guess not.”

Ciena sat up, as if she was going to get out of bed, but Thane pulled her back. She wouldn’t look him in the face any longer. “I should go.”

“Stay.”

“If I stay, leaving will only be harder.”

“Would leaving now
be any easier? Really?”

“No.” Finally, Ciena met his eyes. “Thane, you have to get off Jelucan, within the week. Because at the end of one week, I’m going to report you.”

Thane felt it like a stab wound between the ribs. “What happened to choosing which loyalty to honor?”

“I chose you tonight. I wish I could always choose you. But if I covered for you forever, my oath of loyalty to
the Empire would be worthless. This is the only time, do you
understand?” By now her voice had begun to shake. “This is the first time and the last.”

Somehow, deep inside, Thane had still been convinced he would see Ciena again. He wanted to believe they could find each other no matter what. But now he realized that was foolish, the dream of
a child.

“Do you understand?” Ciena repeated.

“…yes.” The word was bitter. “So you’d throw me in a military prison, even after this.” Thane gestured at the rumpled bed, their discarded clothes on the
floor. Her insignia plaque shone slightly in the dim light.

“I gave you fair warning, just now! Besides, you have to get on the move sooner or later. How much time have you wasted here?”

“Wasted? I was waiting for you.” He hadn’t
known he could be so angry at someone and still love her. “I guess that was wasted time after all.”

Ciena winced but she kept on. “You can’t get a job on Jelucan. Catch the next freighter to an independent world—and don’t even think about indenturing yourself, okay?
Find yourself some work somewhere else in the Outer Rim, where they’ll never look for you.”

“I don’t need your
advice
—”

“You need
someone’s
advice. Otherwise you’re just going to stay here in Valentia, moping and losing your way.”

That stung, but Thane began to realize she wasn’t completely wrong. “Okay, fine. I’ll ship out of here soon.”

“Within the week.”

Because after one week she would report him. The woman he loved would report him to the Empire. “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Within the week.”

She took a deep breath. “So there’s nothing more to say.”

But Ciena made no move to leave. Instead she brushed her palm against his cheek; her thumb traced the line of his cheekbone.

He ought to tell her to get out. To tell her he was done sharing his bed with someone who cared more about the Empire than she did about him. Cruel words like the ones his father and Dalven used
came into
his mind fully formed, as if the wickedness he’d known from them had been buried deep inside, waiting to hatch:
I’ve already had everything I want from you. Gave it up
easy, didn’t you?

But he said none of that. Instead he asked himself what he’d regret more—leaving her now or going to bed with her again. Either way was going to hurt.

Their gazes met, and when she leaned closer, he cupped
his hand around the back of her head to bring her in for a kiss.

The time Thane had left with Ciena could be measured in mere hours. They wouldn’t waste it.

Ronnadam scowled down at her report on his screen. “You’re quite sure of this, Lieutenant Commander Ree?”

“As certain as anyone can be without finding a body—and in the crevasses, it’s difficult for even scanner droids to search.
The sky burial takes the dead within days,
sir.”

“Sky burial?”

Ciena wished she could have taken back those words; her thoughts were too much on Jelucan and all she had left behind there. “On Jelucan, sir, we put our dead in open cairns at high
altitude. Birds devour the body, taking both the flesh and the soul of the deceased into the sky with them, forever.”

“Barbaric,” Ronnadam
said with a sniff. She managed not to flinch. “But I suppose the same thing would happen with an accident—or suicide, as it seems we have
here.”

Ciena nodded. “Lieutenant Kyrell was overcome with grief after the loss of so many fellow officers and friends aboard the Death Star. Based on my interviews on Jelucan, I believe that he
originally deserted and returned to his homeworld in an
effort to restore his will to live, but it didn’t work. He leaped from one of the higher cliffs in our home province, leaving his
ridgecrawler behind. Still running.”

She shouldn’t have added that. Lies were best kept simple, or so Ciena had been given to understand. But she had lied so little in her life. The dishonesty tasted foul in her mouth.

When she’d parted from Thane, Ciena had
fully intended to live up to her word and report his desertion after one week. A week was long enough for him to get his act together, escape to
some obscure world, and vanish from her life forever.

That also gave her time to go home to her parents, who had been happy and surprised to see her—and no doubt even more surprised when she burst into tears at the door. Although Ciena had
pulled
herself together well enough, and had said not one word about Thane to her family, she knew they sensed that this was no routine visit. Mumma had sat up with her late into the night, asking
no intrusive questions, simply braiding Ciena’s hair the way she’d done when Ciena was a little girl. Her mother’s touch had been comforting, but nothing could assuage
Ciena’s misery at the thought of turning
Thane in.

In the end, she hadn’t been able to do it. If the Empire made any effort to track him down, however minimal, it was possible they would find Thane and bring him back to stand trial.

So she chose her loyalty to him once again and protected him with the best lie she could create.

“Very well.” Ronnadam signed off on her report without even fully reading it. Had Thane deserted
at any less desperate time for the Imperial fleet, Ciena realized, her story would
have been scrutinized much more closely. Now all Ronnadam wanted to do was cross a task off his list. “You handled this well, Lieutenant Commander Ree.”

The praise felt like stones on her back, growing heavier throughout the day. Ciena burned with shame to have been commended by a superior officer for violating
her oath of loyalty.

Never again,
she promised herself. From that day on, her service to the Empire would be more than her duty: it would be her atonement for loving even one person in the galaxy more than
her honor.

Seven Months After the Battle of Yavin

T
HANE TURNED DOWN the blue-white flame of the welding torch, lifted his goggles, and frowned at the snarl of metal
he was attempting to fix. The
independent freighter
Moa
had been old before he was born but kept going thanks to a series of makeshift upgrades installed over the decades. Right then he was trying to make a
sixty-year-old power cell work inside a twenty-year-old processor—with limited success.

Cursing under his breath, he shut off the torch and walked through the
Moa
’s corridors until
he reached the bridge. It wasn’t the dark, angular kind of space Thane had learned
to expect on Imperial vessels but a small, brightly lit chamber where console panels glowed in five different colors, each testifying to a completely different origin. Everything on the ship had
been pieced together from parts to suit the very particular needs of the
Moa
—or, more precisely, the ship everyone
on board usually called the
Moa
. That was only an acronym for
its full name,
Mighty Oak Apocalypse
, a title that apparently sounded a lot more badass to Wookiees, such as their captain.

“I’m still only getting sixty percent charge,” Thane reported to Lohgarra. “When we dock at Zeitooine, we’ve got to pick up a better power cell.”

Lohgarra growled, wanting to know where, exactly, they
would get the credits for a new power cell.

“I know we’re broke.” Technically, Thane was only a hired copilot and navigator, but Lohgarra treated her crew members with respect—like members of a team. He could bring
up objections; he could say
we
. “But it doesn’t have to be a
new
power cell. Just one that’s not quite as old.”

Lohgarra asked whether Thane thought all old things should
be thrown out. That was a joke at her own expense; she was elderly even by the standards of the long-lived Wookiees, her fur by then
almost entirely white.

Thane leaned against the wall and smiled. “Most things don’t age as well as you do, Lohgarra.”

That earned him a dismissive wave of her hand. She agreed to give him a budget to search for a newer battery for the aft sensor array but
warned him with a growl that Zeitooine might not be the
cheapest place to pick one up.

“I know. But we’re not going to do much better in this area of space. We’d find something less expensive in the Outer Rim.”

Being within the Inner Rim of the Empire made Thane uneasy. He’d signed on to the
Moa
precisely because Lohgarra and her crew mostly stuck to the Outer Rim, or the Expansion Region.
Working for her had seemed like a good way to hide out for a while. Lohgarra transported only legal cargo, but she operated on the fringes, where Imperial oversight was rarely an issue. Although
Thane hadn’t outright told Lohgarra that he was an Imperial deserter, he could tell she’d guessed right away, and that she didn’t care. Even though her dark blue eyes had gone
slightly milky with
age, her vision and mind were still sharp.

Lohgarra hired crew members who were not only competent but also easy to get along with—and not driven to make money by any means possible. The jobs they took were determined more by
Lohgarra’s character than by any quest for riches; a lucrative run of luxury goods might be followed by a zero-sum haul of emergency generators to a troubled outpost.
She said she needed
people around her who could be trusted; privately, Thane believed she was too trusting, but it was her ship and her business. She’d run a freighter for a couple of centuries without his help,
so he figured she could size people up well enough. As he’d learned to understand Shyriiwook better, he’d realized how intelligent his captain was. And when Lohgarra really took a crew
member under her wing—as she had Thane—she could be affectionate to the point of acting maternal. It was a little ridiculous, but he didn’t mind. At least he worked for someone he
could respect.

Always perceptive, Lohgarra had obviously picked up on his unease. She reminded him briskly that Zeitooine was a jungle planet with only a handful of large cities, and not an active trading
center.

“Yeah, I know,” Thane admitted. “We’ll be fine.” But he still felt uneasy and probably looked it, too.

The only other “crew member” on the bridge at the moment was their astromech droid, a JJH2 model in purple and black. Thane was grateful that nobody else would see his discomfort at
the thought of landing on a world with an Imperial presence. Lohgarra had to remain the only one who really
understood what was going on.

Concerned, she leaned forward to peer at Thane, squinting her blue eyes, then said he’d become too thin and asked if he was getting enough food.

He managed not to roll his eyes. “
Yes
, I’m eating.”

But Lohgarra knew it could be difficult, finding rations that would provide adequate nutrition for all the different species aboard—

“I promise I’m fine.
Don’t worry, all right?” Thane turned to go.

As the bridge door slid open again, Lohgarra whined on a low, scolding note.

He laughed in exasperation as he walked out. “My coat is plenty shiny!”

As he walked down the corridor, he thought,
I just called my hair “my coat.” Before too long I ought to spend some time with other humans again.