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Cinta never looks at him. Gorn has no objection to this. She listens, which is what’s important. And he’s not especially eager to know what he’d see in her eyes if they met his. He understands the visceral, snarling hate she has for the runaway stormtrooper. Even if she never saw a man in grey give them their order, she must know that there was one, some officer somewhere who was saluted, black glove to white helmet, before the guns came to find her and everyone she loved.
He expects no kindness from her, and receives none. None of them receive any, even the frantic little boy who talks like fire about rebellion and submits to Vel Sartha’s authority as meekly as a spring dew.
Some people might say Vel receives some kindness from her. Gorn has been married. He’s commanded an isolated outpost of lonely soldiers. Linked hands, kisses, even the most private intimacies can mean all kinds of things, most of which have nothing to do with kindness. People fuck from boredom as often as from compassion — probably more.
(Shona’s mouth on his, doubt and challenge. Her hand in his, an adjuration.)
Vel’s eyes follow Cinta; at the slightest hint of danger, she steps in front of her like a shepherd’s hound. She sneaks Cinta extra food, and smiles into her cup when Cinta takes it.
In his more cynical moments, Gorn wonders if she isn’t fucking Sartha for the cause. Keeping up morale and shoring up leadership with her head between leadership’s legs.
But, on balance, he thinks not. She could have kept Vel on a string, and Vel wouldn’t have been any less devoted to her, determined to prove herself to her, than she is now, when Cinta shares her blanket.
He remembers that part of love. The desire to prove something. To be worthy. Vel wants to be equal to what she sees in Cinta.
Just once, some idiosyncrasy of patrol leaves them alone together. They’re silent for almost an hour — not resentful, not companionable, just silent — and then, as the camp comes into view, she says, in that musical, brutal voice, “How did they kill her?”
That’s not a question he’d answer for most of them. But he wets his lips and breathes in the cold, fog-softened air of the hills. “Shot. An officer in the Enterprise Zone had her sister under arrest. Shona saw him dragging her away. She ran after him. She was screaming. A patrol officer shot her. Six blaster wounds.”
She’s silent again for a few steps. “I don’t think they’re very good shots,” she says. “They make up for it by firing more shots.”
It’s a technical, strategic observation, cooly delivered. He could tell her about the marksmanship requirements at the Imperial Academy, which are in fact lax, though not so lax that she should depend on his men missing their shots. He could tell her how the dedlanite to make new cartridges for E-11 blaster rifles which ran down was mined by private enterprise, who assured the Empire that the supply was endless.
But he knows, even without looking, that her eyes are fixed in the middle distance, full of plasma burns to flesh and fabric. No one had told him Shona was dead, and so he had never seen her body before it was disposed of. But he read the report, and he’s seen enough plasma wounds to know how the edges of a wound can melt skin and cloth together. The black char where the bolt strikes. It was all he could see, for months, that black char, the way he knows she’s seeing it now.
He doesn’t say anything.
Vel appears, at the end of the path, looking up the hill at them. Her eyes narrow. Their watch isn’t good enough; Cinta’s there, so the horizon has to be examined again and again for threats before Vel’s shoulders can relax even a little.
Cinta sighs. It isn’t quite fond, but it’s not exasperated, either. She’ll be glad, tonight, to have Vel there to kiss and touch, warm and alive.
But if Cinta whispered in Vel’s ear tonight that they should go, forget the rebellion and follow the river past the Enterprise Zone and into the quiet lowlands at the shore, Vel would go. She would throw it all away, for a chance for peace and quiet in Cinta’s arms.
Gorn understands. If Shona walked out from between those rocks, somehow alive again, her hands outstretched, and asked him to go away with her, he’d do the same.
But she never will ask. So nothing can move him from this path they’re on. And nothing can move Cinta. She wouldn’t leave for Vel.
Imperial protocol on Aldhani demands the incineration of all corpses not under investigation within eighteen standard hours. Aldhani burns its dead, too. But there is a difference between the hilltop pyre Shona should have had, and an unmarked furnace in the Enterprise Zone where cremains were collected to be broken down for alkalis. The depth of that difference is one way he measures the life he has left to him.
If they carry this off, they’ll have eighty million credits to buy ships, to arm rebels, perhaps to feed the people the Empire starves. An Imperial sector will go unpaid for the quarter, troops getting restless and contractors putting down tools. Blasters will go dead in the hands of men who shoot too many times, with no new dedlanite cartridges to recharge them.
“It’s not enough,” Cinta says. As if she’s read his thoughts without ever looking at him.
It’s not enough. He could refill the dry bed of the sacred river with the blood of Imperial officers. He could put a blaster bolt through Palpatine’s own head and consign him to the unmarked industrial furnace. It will never be enough, because Shona is dead, and her worth can never be equaled by the lives of the ones who thought she was worthless, any more than the weight of a sun can be balanced by feathers.
But if he does not try — if he doesn’t try, he’ll be worth less than all those worthless lives combined.
“After this,” he says, “the next one. And then the next.”
“It will never. Be enough,” she says, and her voice is choked with rage and pain and she is so young, younger than Shona’s little sister, who he could not save, who labors under an alien sky where the Eye will never open, and he wishes so much that he could spare her.
But it’s too late.
And so he’s glad, at last, in the last short days before the mercenary arrives, that she never looks at him. There are tears in his eyes, and there’s no benefit to the mission in anyone seeing that.