Chapter Text
Rey hates crowds. The shoving. Bodies pressing. The heat, the noise. It’s suffocating.
Nonetheless, she has a job to do today, crowds be damned. There is little she won’t do for General Organa.
Rey pushes off the wall and eases into the busy street, melting into the sea of people, eyes forward.
There is a relaxed kind of purpose in her steps. Her saber hangs against her thigh, hidden. She has always kept one weapon visible; her long staff rests diagonally over her back.
Smoke clouds her legs as she passes food carts, bringing an aroma of peppers and fried food to her nose.
Static crackles in her ear.
“Feel free to snag me anything that looks good, Rey,” comes the voice of Finn over the comm device. He is somewhere over her head, keeping watch from a rooftop, binoculars pressed against his eyes. Her look-out.
“ -- If I have to even look at another ration bar again -- “
Rey bites back a laugh. “They aren’t that bad.”
“Whatever you say, cap’n.”
Captain. Everyone in the Resistance has taken to calling her captain. Finn is especially fond of dropping the title whenever possible. To Rey it feels uncomfortable, like wearing a cloak that’s many sizes too big.
“Left up here,” says Finn. “Let’s get a drink somewhere after this, eh? I’m dyin’ up here.”
Rey veers down an alley, grateful for the cool shade it brings. Sparing a short glance over her shoulder to satisfy her paranoia that she’s not been followed, she withdraws a penknife. She could use the Force -- she could try, at least -- but for some things, she still just prefers using her hands.
"I'm at the building," she says, slipping the knife into the lock. “Try to keep eyes on me.”
“10-4. And--Rey?”
For the first time, Finn is serious as he adds, “Be careful.”
With a satisfying thud of metal, the lock falls open, rolling across brick.
In one motion Rey grasps the rusted door handle and slips inside, quickly as a cat.
"I'm in," she breathes, withdrawing a small flashlight from the knapsack laying against her hip.
Clicking it on, she takes a few slow, careful steps into the warehouse, following the pool of light. Crates gather inches of dust. Junk crowds the room. When she’s on jobs, she likes to snag Finn gifts, especially stupid ones, just for fun. Unfortunately --
"Pretty empty in here. No sign of any weaponry at all.”
General’s intel has told them there’s a cache here, hidden in the warehouse, long forgotten by an old street gang.
Finn says, “Check the next room -- the door on the south side of the building.”
Rey approaches the door. Holding the flashlight between her teeth, she tests the handle, then begins to pick the lock. She tilts the penknife left, then right, and then --
-- blood-red light drenches the room. A screeching alarm blares, and keeps blaring, as Rey jumps back.
"It’s a set-up, we’ve been set up," Rey growls over the noise, her flashlight crashing to her feet as she pivots back into the room. The door is thrown open, flooded with guards, and Rey throws herself behind a crate.
“Finn,” she hisses, barely breathing, “I'm trapped in here. Find me a way out!”
"Northwest corner, there’s windows to the alley,” says Finn’s clipped voice in her ear; she can sense him scrolling through a datapad, urgent, alarmed. “Straight across, but be careful, stay in cover, there's four coming in -- I’ll try to pick them off -- ”
Wincing, Rey lifts herself on top of a crate to better reach the window. She wrestles with the lock, but --
"It's stuck," she grunts, because of course it is.
Pausing to take a sharp inhale, Rey steps back, then launches her shoulder and the full weight of her body against the glass, making it crash in a waterfall of glass into the alley below as she followed after, into the dirt, coughing out a storm of dust from her lungs as she rolls onto her side.
"In the alley, she's in the alley!" a guard yells, a stampede of footsteps.
Pushing up to her feet clumsily, Rey breaks into a mad sprint, shoving past families and couples, parting the crowd around her. Annoyed, gruff yells followed her as she tears into the sea of people.
Mid-run, she touches the device in her ear.
"Poe?” she yells. “I mean, commander -- change of plans -- we're leaving early!”