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*
He remembers running through the forest on Kenari. Kerri, younger, shorter-legged, trying to keep up.
‘Kassa, wait! Kassa! Kassa, take me with you! You promised!’
He’d run, laughing, trying to join his friends without his little sister. He had almost made it, uphill and away.
‘Kassa! Come back! Come—’ His sister’s words broke off in a sharp cry.
He turned, reluctantly. Kerri lay sprawled under a tree, clutching her knee and crying.
‘Why do you have to run after me! You should stay home!’ But he crouched down next to her, and put his arm around her as she cried into his shoulder.
‘You promised,’ she sobbed, ‘you promised Kassa!’
He rocked her side to side, the way he’d seen their mother do, and she slowly quieted.
‘How’s your knee? Do we need to amputate your leg? Come on, I’ll carry you back to the healer’s hut, we’ve got to get your leg sorted if you’re going to climb the ridge with me!’
‘Kassa!’ She nearly started crying again, and then saw the smile he was failing to repress. ‘You’re mean!’ Her eyes welled. ‘You promised!’
He tightened his arm. ‘I did promise. I’m sorry you fell. Are you alright?’
She brushed at her knee. ‘It’s not even bleeding, much, when you fell down the ridge last spring your knee bled all over!’ She sprang to her feet, eyes alight, ignoring the leaves in her hair and the rip in her tunic. ‘Are we going to the ridge now?’
He stood and she grabbed his hand. ‘Kassa, please?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
He remembers how she kept hold of his hand the whole way there, dragging him off the path to admire ferns and leaves and a mushrooms and a giant toad, but never letting him go. Cassian thinks, now, that it is one of the last good memories he has of being touched.
**
There were a lot of things that Maarva and Clem didn’t talk about with their adopted son. There were a lot of things they couldn’t talk about, for years—neither of them spoke any of the languages of the Outer Rim, and Cassian has only scattered memories of his first few years on Ferrix. What he does remember are the fights.
Ferrix has a school system, but it isn’t a very good one. Not enough money, and no reason to bother when there’s little use for education in the future the planet and its system have to offer. You have to be fourteen to start working in the scrapyards—or large enough to pretend to be fourteen—with a family with enough spare credits to alter your identity records. By the time he knows enough Basic to understand that his own records have been already been altered once, his origins on Kenari replaced with a birthplace on Fest, Cassian also knows the real purpose of his so-called education.
Fighting.
Of course, the children on Kenari had fought with each other. Kerri kicked Kassa in the shins for taking her toys, and Kassa got into a shoving match with another boy that resulted in them both falling into a stream, ruining their clothes, and getting sent to bed without supper. But these were small fights, over things easily mended with—at least in the days before the mine—someone’s parent or grandparent around to step in and prevent anyone from getting seriously hurt.
Not on Ferrix. In Cassian’s first week of school, when he still thinks of himself as Kassa, he ends up in a class with boys about to age out of school and into their first work permits. It’s an obvious accident—Kassa is smaller than everyone else and doesn’t understand or respond to anything that’s said to him—but no one does anything. At the midday break, he tries follow the other students, but ends up trapped in a circle of older boys, in a corner of the schoolyard out of the reach of any teachers or kids his own age. Though he can’t understand what is said to him, the chopped speech of the other boys, punctuated by laughter, needs no translation, and eventually, he gets angry enough to try to push his way out of the circle
He goes home that day with a swollen lip and a black eye. The first of many.
***
He spends his fourteenth birthday in solitary confinement. Oh, they called it a youth centre, but it’s a prison and everyone inside knows it. Cassian sits, back against the wall, chin on his knees, trying not to think about his thirteenth birthday. Clem’s latest smuggling haul had paid for new clothes for them all, new shoes, even new knives, and as Clem handed one to Cassian, he’d said ‘I’m proud of the fighter you’re becoming’, and tried to rest his hand on Cassian’s shoulder.
Cassian had flinched and stepped back.
He remembers this now, sitting alone in his cell. The wardens of the youth centre are less disengaged than the teachers from Cassian’s erratic schooling on Ferrix; they intervene in the fights that happen in front of them, and finding a place that isn’t in front of them is almost impossible. His first year at the youth centre is the longest Cassian has gone without fighting—without the only kind of touch he knows—since he can remember.
Cassian cracks his head back against the wall, trying to pound out the memory of Clem’s hand on his shoulder, the flash of surprise on his face as Cassian stepped back, out of range of being choked or hugged or held.
****
The first time Cassian sees Bix Caleen again after he gets out of prison, it reminds him of being punched in the stomach. He needs to breathe but cannot get air into his lungs. He’d had a bit of a crush on her, before, but the way his face would heat and his words clot in his mouth feels like nothing compared to this. He wonders if he has been hit, and simply not realised it yet, the way the sound of a blow sometimes seems to register before the pain of it.
*****
Cassian follows Taramyn through the trees and into the valley where the rebels have set up their training course. Taramyn stops, beckons him over. ‘To pretend to be a solider, you need to look like one. Stand there.’ He walks behind Cassian.
‘You are imperial private Clem,’ Taramyn’s voice and demeanor have always made Cassian think he’s ex-imperial, but the note of command in his voice removes all doubt. Cassian stands, stiffly, his jaw working as Taramyn circles behind him. ‘You’re a sentry from the Alkenzi Airbase, transferred for special duty.’
Cassian lowers his gaze and and grinds his teeth. You don’t want to try me. Taramyn’s face hardens. He grabs Cassian’s shoulder and wrenches it, hard. ‘Shoulders back.’ Cassian remembers being a child, in the scrapyard, when fights were about to start. The response to the first shove deciding whether it would escalate. He fights the urge to throw the first punch. I will make you hurt.
Taramyn crosses in front of Cassian, wrenches his other shoulder back, harder ‘More!’
Cassian shakes himself free, steps back to square up, traps Taramyn’s gaze with his own. ‘Don’t touch me.’ The words rasp out.
Taramyn’s eyes narrow and his face hardens.
Cassian glares at him. ‘You want something, you tell me,’ he says, unsmiling, summoning all the times he has touched and been touched with violence.
He can see Taramyn’s expression shift, the charged potential of the moment dissipating into something else. ‘Can you walk like a soldier?’ Taramyn asks. He hasn’t moved, is still much too far inside Cassian’s personal space, but his voice is softer, the iron ring of imperial command gone from his voice. He looks Cassian in the face, searchingly.
Cassian stares back, keeps his body ready if he needs it to be. ‘I’ve seen it done.’
Taramyn steps back, nodding, his face softening into what could almost be the beginnings of a smile. ‘Let’s see if you’ve been paying attention. Form up!’