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Cinta sleeps poorly alone, a fact that she managed to keep from all but two of her lovers during the war. Marki probably has the information filed away on one of her prohibitively expensive datapads, knowing her. And Vel, well, Vel is dead.
Vel was always going to find out. It was the Aldhani job, and they had just started sharing a bed. On one of those first mornings, Vel had smoothed the skin of her forehead and next to her eyes as if by doing so she could divine the insides of Cinta’s head.
“What kinds of dreams worry you so much?” she asked, half-teasing, her breath warm on Cinta’s cheeks.
“I don’t dream at all,” Cinta murmured, still half asleep. “My sisters used to have them for me.”
Vel, only a few inches from her face, looked stricken. Cinta, suddenly very angry with herself, and very awake, could only blink warily at her.
Vel regained control of her expression, and cautiously, lip between her teeth, asked Cinta if she would like to hear her night’s dreams.
Cinta lay back in the hammock, thinking, watching drops of water congregate on the branches of the roof above them. “Yes,” she decided and turned to face a very relieved-looking Vel.
Vel’s dreams involved things like yearly school theater productions and lakes and Luthen cooking them breakfast in her mother’s heirloom wok. Cinta was grateful for how different they were from the ones shared with her in the big bed at home.
They didn’t always sleep together. Once, when Cinta caught a cold worse than she’d had in years, she hunkered down in the hammock furthest from anyone else, bundled in quilts and Dray hides. Even when she had been ill, her family would never banish her from the bed, pressing cold or warm clothes to her forehead, kicking each other’s shins, and inevitably catching the same thing she had— her mother coughing while she brewed the family cold cure. There was no time for that here, she knew, and hated it in the way only the mildly but uncomfortably sick can.
Vel said, offhandedly, a week later, when Cinta was better but still didn’t want to risk sleeping next to her, “You turn in your sleep, it makes the roof creak.”
Cinta silently cursed the construction of their shelter, eyes sweeping from the ceiling back to Vel’s gaze in an approximation of a motionless shrug. Vel’s eyes crinkled in the corner like they were both in on the same joke. Like she wanted something. I sleep better with you, or, I’ll come back to bed tonight.
“Don’t look so pleased with yourself, Sartha,” she said, still feeling slightly raw from the restless nights and the memory of her mother. “It’s not anything you’re doing.”
They had their first real fight after that, which was followed by a quiet and desolate hostility that Cinta hoped was imperceptible to the rest of the crew. Cinta didn’t go with Vel to get water and instead helped Skeen clean the guns. Vel refrained from all the small touches of their daily lives together— hand on the back of the arm, the bump of shoulders. Cinta found she could not bear it, which surprised her. She apologized two days later and came back to bed. Vel welcomed her, as she always did.
Cinta is on the giant moon Urol when the war turns, buying blasters from a man who’s pretending he isn’t a former Imperial. She’s got a small crew, three people Luthen let her pick by hand. They’re filing back to the ship with the gunmetal cases of ammo when someone yells, “The Emperor is dead!” It’s someone from the former Imperial’s team, Cinta’s crew know better, and hardly blink at the outburst, still handing bulky crates up into the hold of their ship.
Cinta’s heard as much from many mouths over the course of the years, and learned not to take it seriously without intelligence, and be skeptical even when there is. They leave the moon soon after. Cinta isn’t willing to risk the chaos. Thinking the Emperor is dead often leads people to do very stupid things, she’s learned.
They leave atmo seven minutes early and Cinta comms Kleya. “Our friend loved the gift and is sending something over in proper thanks. Be home soon.”
There’s silence on the other side, but that’s not new, or even particularly worrying. Then, Kleya’s voice, slightly wrong, and pitched in a way that Cinta is not familiar with comes in clear, and Cinta realizes she’s been waiting on the call the whole time.
“Kaz,” she says, “we may win this war.”
Cinta lets out a long rush of breath. “So he’s really dead?”
“They just found his head above Endor, along with the remains of his last project.”
“You shouldn’t be telling me any of this, you know,” Cinta says, one of her ears has started ringing, the aftermath of an explosion she was too close to which has an almost impeccable sense of timing.
Kleya laughs, short and tired, Cinta tries to think of the last time she heard her do that. “I wanted you to know. I’ll see you at our Uncle’s house.”
Cinta drops the weapons where they’re needed and suggests whoever wants to can stay with the other revelers. She has a brief but enlightening conversation about Ewoks with the Commander in charge of the cell who needed the resupply and says goodbye to the single crew member who’s staying behind.
“I’m going to get married,” Winnie says and kisses both of Cinta’s cheeks with her weatherworn lips. “Isn’t that exciting?”
Cinta has to admit that it is.
“They’ll be sorry about it in the morning,” the Commander, Justi, says before Cinta leaves. “But I let them have our wins.” Cinta can hear the waver in her voice, the one that’s hoping desperately that everyone is right. That this is the beginning of the end.
Vel died in the ordinary way of soldiers and spies— shot in the head on a Star Destroyer she was infiltrating. Cinta wasn’t there, although she knew about the mission, and was apprehensive about Vel playing an Imperial. She had never been very good at being anything but herself.
Before she died, Vel and the other one, Waryn, did what they had gone there to do, and shorted the electrics of the entire ship for five minutes, killed it dead in the water. Its carcass is still floating somewhere in the Abrion Sector, not far from Scarif. Each ship destroyed was only a drop in the bucket, but their corpses have become whole ecosystems of scavengers. Cinta tries to honor Vel by thinking this particular monster mattered. What did Nemik say? Small acts of resistance and a flood, the drop in the bucket becoming a downpour. Cinta had never been clear on his metaphors.
Wayrn made it out, without Vel’s body, but with an account of what happened as best as he could put together. Cinta was grateful. It wasn’t that she was unprepared or hadn’t thought about it, or never had Vel’s lips over her heart and thought, we’re alive for this moment and never again. Subconsciously, she realized she thought she would go first. She had been ready to die for so long, she realized, and Vel talked about the future so much Cinta thought she would reach it. It surprised her how unfair she found it.
She had Vel in her bed the night before, the first night in a long time, and a quiet understanding between them. Vel, who knew more about her than most people, but who didn’t act like it, who saw a Cinta who’s life went on beyond the war, and on and on. She had slept well.
She shoves Kleya lightly in the shoulder when she sees her, rumpling the perfect pleating of her pinafore, and eliciting that sharp unhappy sound that Cinta once loved to bully out of her. Coruscant is bright with fireworks, which Cinta thinks is inadvisable, but the effect cannot be understated. Luthen’s shop, with only the back room lights on, glimmers with refracting light.
“You used my real name.”
“It was an encrypted channel.”
Cinta hums. “You would have never done that before. Something really is different.”
“Yes,” Kleya says shortly, “Luthen will talk to you about it. There’s work to be done, of course.”
Kleya’s eyes are already on her datapad, sliding over something that Cinta can’t see, and Cinta for once wants to celebrate, so she takes Kleya by the back of the neck and kisses her. They press against each other in the almost dark, Kleya pulling a hand through her hair and tugging once, sharply.
Cinta breaks off the kiss but stays close. “The fireworks, what does he think of them?”
“They’re mostly long range,” Kleya says, “shot up from the lower levels. But some of it is a distraction, we think. There are a lot of people who are starting to get worried.”
“Good,” Cinta says.
“We won’t sleep tonight,” Kleya warns, her fingers finding the place where Cinta’s neck meets her shoulder and squeezing. “The whole system is about a day away from total chaos.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Cinta says, and thinks briefly, and for the first time since her childhood, about the rest of her life.