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The stormtroopers here were clearly very bored.
They were always at the same corner, engaged in the idle chitchat that passed as nightly patrol around here. Some days they saw her, some days they didn’t. She’d been catcalled twice so far but managed to slip away both times. She really ought to take a different route, but kriffing Imperial curfews left no time for her to take the long way home.
Tonight her shift was late getting out. She habitually rubbed the metal pin on her shirt as she glanced anxiously at the chrono on the wall. Skrag. Ten minutes to get home. She slung her satchel over her shoulder and started running.
She’d walked the path to her flat so many times that navigating it in the dark shouldn’t have been a problem, but speed made everything blur together. She didn’t realize exactly which street she was on until she heard the voice call behind her. “Citizen!”
Skrag. Double skrag.
She skidded to a halt and turned, panting. There they were, the two Imps. “Why are you running?” It was the one with an oily voice that made her skin crawl.
Without thinking, she shot back, “Because your stupid curfew doesn’t make allowances for people working the late shift.” As soon as the quip left her mouth she wished she could kick herself. The stormtroopers shifted, their lax postures growing tense.
“Let’s see some identification.”
Reluctantly, she approached them and handed over her chain code. “Naomi Att-Vang, nineteen, of Raxus,” the other trooper read aloud in his squeaky voice. “Nice pin, Naomi Att-Vang.”
Naomi’s hand flew to the little brooch clasped right below her collarbone. Triple skrag.
Squeaky pointed to it, elbowing his partner. “Isn’t that an old Confederacy pin?”
Greasy leaned in uncomfortably close, studying the hexagonal brooch. “Looks like it. You said she’s from Raxus, right?” With a swipe of his hand, he snatched the pin, ripped it off her blouse, and tossed it to Squeaky. “Looks like we’re bringing in a rebel.”
Naomi felt like her heart had just been torn from her chest. “Hey! That was my sister’s! I’m not a rebel! I’m not a Separatist!”
“Then why are you wearing a Separatist pin? Suspicious behavior, rebel symbols; I say you’ve got ‘guilty’ written all over you.” Greasy raised his blaster threateningly, and Naomi thought to herself that “skrag” was really not a sufficient curse for this situation.
“KARABAST!”
That was more like it, but Naomi never got a chance to say so, because the man who had shouted the swear barreled into Squeaky at full force and knocked him flat. Squeaky hit the ground, spitting out an equally fitting obscenity as he did. The man jumped back, rubbing his head. “Sorry! Sorry!”
Greasy turned his blaster on the newcomer. “Watch it! What the kriff are you doing?”
“Curfew’s in one minute!” the man sputtered breathlessly, already scrambling to continue on his way.
His voice was very familiar, but Naomi couldn’t place it. “You really need to set it later.”
“What did you just say to me, clone?”
Clone? That would explain his voice. Greasy spat the word like it was an insult, but the man’s spine straightened proudly. He came to a halt and turned back to face the stormtroopers. “I said that your force-forsaken curfew is too early. And another thing—you call this a patrol? Running your mouths and picking on people?”
Naomi couldn’t see Greasy’s face under his helmet, but if the spluttering sounds were any indication, he was having an apoplectic fit. “We’re—we’re doing very important things!”
“Doubt that.”
“Shows what you know! We’ve just apprehended a Separatist rebel!”
The clone seemed to notice Naomi for the first time. He eyed her dubiously. “What? Her? I’ve fought Separatists. A lot of ‘em. She’s just a kid.”
Squeaky was up on his feet again now, brandishing Naomi’s pin. His high-pitched voice exceptionally smug, he threw back, “Then why does she have this?”
The clone raised an eyebrow at the pin. “You mean an old ‘Party on Coruscant’ button? I dunno, maybe she went to a festival? Like any other kid?”
Now it was Squeaky’s turn to sputter as he gaped at the button in his hand. Sure enough, it wasn’t Naomi’s pin, but a rusty round promotional button that she’d never seen before in her life.
The clone frowned impatiently as the two stormtroopers continued to stare at the button, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe you two were my replacements. Now, are you going to let this nice girl get home, or are you going to keep harassing her?”
The beeping of a comm kept them from answering. The two stormtroopers pressed the sides of their helmets, listening to instructions that Naomi only perceived as garbled chatter. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Roger that.”
Greasy turned his attention back to the clone. “You’re lucky you aren’t worth our time. Stay out of our way, both of you.” He turned to leave and Squeaky followed him, but not before shoving the clone with a snide, “Thanks for your service, lab rat.”
And with that, it was just Naomi and the clone.
“Think fast.” She barely had time to react before a little hexagon of metal landed in her open palm. Amara’s pin. Naomi stared at it for a moment, then looked up and eyed the man who’d tossed it to her suspiciously.
“You saw that whole thing. You bumped into him on purpose!”
The clone shrugged but didn’t deny it. “They were picking on you. Now you’d better get home. There is a curfew in place, you know.”
Naomi was speechless. Of course, he was right. But her brain still whirled at why in the Mid Rim he would help her. He was a Republic soldier. He’d said it himself: he’d fought Separatists. He’d probably killed them. Force, droids had probably killed his friends. What must he think of her?
“I’m not a Separatist.”
She blurted the words dumbly and immediately cringed. “I mean—I was—kind of. My sister—” she trailed off before she spilled her entire life story to a stranger. “Honestly, I don’t know what I am any more.”
He laughed a bit, a rough chuckle. “Neither do I.”
She remembered asking Amara about the war as a child. Her older sister had always had an opinion, much more than either of their parents. Naomi had always viewed the war through her eyes.
“Mari?”
“Huh?”
“I was wondering… we have droids, but the Republic has people. Isn’t it bad that people are dying?”
Amara chewed a strand of hair thoughtfully before replying, “You know, I don’t think the clones are really people at all. All the stories say they’re programmed, like droids. Don’t even think they feel pain.” She habitually fingered the hexagonal Confederacy of Independent Systems pin on the brim of her hat. “But if they are, the Republic makes them fight knowing full well that we have an inexhaustible supply of droids, so wouldn’t you say it’s the Republic’s fault that they’re all dying meaningless deaths when they could just leave us alone?”
Naomi considered her sister’s confident words. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Now, as she watched the clone rub his shoulder that had collided with Squeaky, she decided that the sister she idolized had been wrong. The war, the stupid politics she’d never taken the time to study for herself, always mirroring Amara’s beliefs—if they’d been wrong about the clones, what else had been false? She didn’t know, but she was certain of one thing: the old divides and the enemies that used to be didn’t have to matter. A new sort of battle was stirring—not Confederacy versus Republic, but hatred versus humanity. The Empire was a crushing force that no rebel remnants, Republic or Separatist, could stand against.
Not by themselves.
Maybe mending the rifts of the past was the first step to a better future for all of them.
She shoved the pin in her pocket. “You didn’t have to do that, especially not for a stranger. But you did… so thank you.”
He smiled. Neither one needed to say more.