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Luthen’s still handling their last clients of the day when the radio pings with a connection from the Ghorman hookup. Kleya eyes the gallery through the narrow window and sees the pair of shoppers well-distracted by Luthen’s overenthusiasm, keys open the drawer, and fishes out the earpiece.
“Coruscant Forecast Two-Six-Six-Five, clearing open signal.”
It’ll be Wilmon, of course; part of her hopes though, for Wilmon’s sake and Luthen’s, for all of their sakes, that it will be a different voice that greets her from across the light-years. “I need a weather report,” crackles on the line, clearly Wilmon even through the static. “Tomorrow.”
Specific. “For travel or recreation?”
“Recreation; my friend’s just come for a visit.”
Kleya blows out a slow breath. “How lucky for you.” Spares another long look at Luthen through the window, but he’s turned, gesticulating in vapid exaggeration, fawning over a necklace one of the clients is holding up in front of the other.
Part of her wants to confirm; the rest of her knows it won’t make a difference. The arguments will be the same, for and against. The supervisor is a threat, more so than most at the ISB. They won’t get a better chance than this.
Assassinating an ISB supervisor would invite brutal retaliation in any circumstances. Ghorman’s already on the brink; the Imperial build-up suggests it intends to set the planet alight one way or another, and nothing has yet yielded any clarity as to why.
The conflagration is coming, whether Cassian pulls that trigger or not. That is the one thing of which they are all certain.
She eyes Luthen one last time, hopes that Wilmon has made that fact clear, and tells him briskly, “Clear skies,” and cuts the connection.
All she tells Luthen later, once he’s closed up shop for the day, is, “Cassian’s on-site.”
He freezes briefly, as he’s working off his gloves. Suspended moment in time between one finger and the next. “Did you speak with him?”
Slow shake of her head. “Wilmon.”
“Fine.” The moment breaks and he goes back to peeling away the gloves. “Fine.”
Kleya watches him putter about, stashing the gloves, pulling off the coat and hanging it by the divide. Part of her wants to ask why this one is so much harder, but she already knows the answer and it won’t make him feel better.
They’ve lost agents before, assets. Because they’ve died, or because needs-must and they have to consider the bigger picture. The long game, the endgame.
They lost Vel after a cold, numb mission report, and a matter-of-fact declaration that she was done and planning to take her skills to a proper outfit, with hierarchy and discipline.
They’ve never let one… fade away, not like this, since Cassian’s injuries sustained on Miser. Cutting off contact. Reluctant updates from Wilmon, caught unhappily in the middle.
This isn’t the aftermath of Aldhani; he’s in the wind but not what they’d consider a loose end. And they have no protocol for dealing with that.
But he showed up. For Wilmon, for Bix and all of Ferrix, for them and the whole of the network, it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.
It matters to Luthen.
Not two hours after he retired for the night, Kleya bangs a four-beat rhythm on his door twice, loudly, before smacking the panel to open it. Normally, she’d ping his comm; normally, she’d spare more consideration before barging in on a man who’s been waiting for the ISB to come knocking down his door for the better part of twenty years.
“Luthen?” she calls, hovering at the edge of the doorway in case a shot comes ringing out.
“…Kleya?”
“Get up,” she barks. “Palmo’s burning.”
They’ve got the HoloNews blaring the official line on a datapad while Luthen scans carefully through the public radio broadcasts and Kleya tries once more to raise their fractal hookup, but it’s just pinging into emptiness again and again. Morning in Palmo. Reading between the lines of the Imperial narrative and what they knew from Wilmon on the ground, they opened the plaza that had been restricted for so long.
Opened it up and invited the protestors.
Put them in a box and –
“Anything?” Luthen asks gruffly. Kleya shakes her head and gives up, puts the earpiece back; leaves the console open in the desperate hope that something might come through. “There’re signals being boosted from across the planet. They filled the square, closed it off. Ships dropping mining equipment. What are they after?”
It doesn’t matter. It never mattered, none of it. The end of this story was written a long time ago.
Did Cassian take the shot, she wonders and will not ask.
The story was already written. If he did, he’s not to blame for what came next.
If he didn’t…
“Have we killed them?” Luthen asks overtop the reports sounding out from the datapad. Rebel terrorists and their brutal assault upon the Imperial forces.
Hundreds at least lie dead in the plaza in Palmo. Many times more, surely, ‘ere the day’s end.
Luthen isn’t talking about those nameless faces.
“It’s a war, Luthen,” she reminds him, staring straight ahead at the window through to the gallery and the dark of the city beyond.
She’s never quite been able to figure out why it’s different, for these lost boys from Ferrix.
But it is.
The radio pings; she startles so hard she nearly falls off her stool. “Erskin,” she traces the blinking connection. “Naturally.”
The spend the next two hours juggling the suffocating weight of helplessness on two fronts while the sounds of the Imperial propaganda of a brutal mass slaughter hiss faintly on in the background. It’s still well before dawn when the shop line rings, startling them nearly as much as the radio ping.
There’s no obvious cause for the low simmering dread in her stomach beyond the everything that soon looks to be at risk, she doesn’t like the timing. “Yes?” she grabs it after a few chimes, lacing a suggestion of exhausted irritability into her voice. “Do you know what time it - ?”
“If you have any pieces arriving from Alderaan,” a low voice hisses, fast and frantic, “you should be very careful of forgeries.”
The call cuts before she can even think about formulating a response. Luthen stares at her while she slowly replaces the receiver and, “Well?”
It’s unfathomable, but she knows his voice too well. Another crack in their careful facades, and with a sense of the walls pulling slowly in around them she tells him with vague disbelief: “Lonni.” She takes a minute to work it over, work it through, but all the compounding pieces of their escalating calamity point to one inevitable truth. “We’re done.”
“Kleya?”
Cassian and Wilmon are quite likely dead; the senator’s more like than not going to end the day in ISB custody; Lonni’s just risked an unfathomably severe breach in protocol to warn them off of the senator’s best confidante and hope of escaping after she speaks.
“We need Erskin to buy us an opportunity to speak with the senator,” she says. “And then we need to prepare.”
They’ve had their share of disagreements over the years. More of them of late, as the pressure mounts, but he can read her face and read her tone and knows better than to fight her in this assessment.
It will all have to come down.
A quarter hour hasn’t yet passed since Luthen changed his face and donned his dark cloak meant for drifting amongst the shadows when the door chime sounds out and Kleya freezes, save the hand that reaches for the blaster affixed to the underside of the counter where she’s adding some last minute things to their go-packs.
A number of calculations fly through her head in the span of the next five seconds. It’s not yet 0500 local, it won’t be a customer; the ISB isn’t likely to knock, if Lonni’s cryptic message gave them away. They’re not ready, Luthen’s walking to the Senate offices, if she blows the radio and gets the Fondor, will there be time enough to –
The quick clip of four knocks against the thick transparisteel jolts her out of her equations. She darts her eyes up through the narrow window out to the gallery floor and, “Oh,” explodes out of her, a gasp more than a proper word, and she taps the comm in her ear and breathes, “Luthen,” even as she hurries around the wall to go let him in.
“What now?”
“He’s here,” she says, slapping the button under the desk to spin the door open. “Cassian.”
Cassian slips inside the moment he can squeeze through and wastes no time hurrying towards the workshop without a word spoken. Kleya watches him go and only when he’s disappeared around the dividing wall does Luthen process the news enough to ask, “Should I come back?”
“No; we need to know what the senator intends.” He starts to say something else but, “Go,” she hisses, and then locks it back up and hurries around to meet their wayward thief. He’s leaning against the middle work table, elbows braced, shoulders heaving with overexertion or with quiet sobs, it’s difficult to say with his face turned down and the lights turned dim.
“Cassian,” she says softly. His head whips up and he stares at her, wide and wild-eyed, the gleam of tears and clean streaks tracing down his smudged cheeks. He looks awful, bloodied and bruised and only haphazardly cleaned up en route. “Here,” she steps close, and they don’t have this kind of relationship, at all, more oft than not he’s simply a voice on the comm, there’s hardly enough time for any particular sentiment even if they were so inclined when their paths do cross but she touches a hand to his elbow and –
He turns and lets her wrap her arms around his shaking frame. “Wilmon?” she murmurs.
“Stayed behind,” he mumbles, thick through tears, against her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she says, for that and for the not knowing and for what’s yet to come. “There’s work that needs doing.” He takes ten more seconds and two great, heaving breaths before letting her go and backing away, turning away so she cannot see his face. “Stay here; I’ll be right back.”
Once down below, Kleya takes a precious half a minute to catch her breath, fight through the whiplash of adrenaline from this quarter and that, before touching the comm in her ear. “Luthen.”
“What’s his status?”
Wouldn’t that be nice to know. “He’s here, he’s in one piece, nothing else matters right now.” Except, “…He’s alone.”
She busies herself collecting some water, a couple ration bars, finds a medkit, before Luthen tells her, “Erskin’s maneuvered the senator outside. What do I tell her?”
“Tell her to go with our man instead of Organa’s.” Another stretch of silence falls while she carries her haul back to the lift. “He’ll be there, Luthen.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.” Because they have no choice; it’s what needs doing. Everything depends on it. The door slides open and Cassian whips around from the window, looking lost and aggrieved and she imagines very much like that day on Ferrix in the aftermath of his mother’s funeral when Luthen picked up his weapon and made a different choice. “Because we need him.”
Cassian’s jaw works tersely and he glances away again, expression going flat and eyes glassy at that pronouncement.
~
Luthen’s cleaning some coins when she comes back to the gallery after a grueling day afield. He hates cleaning coins; there’s something almost touching, in the tell it so openly offers. “Sometimes,” she says, stripping out of her heavy cloak and tossing it into a corner, much too exhausted to care, “being useful is being still, and being ready, and being this.”
He pulls away from the magnifying scope and lowers the tools slowly to the table, mouth twisted in a deep, thoughtful frown. “I should have seen them off.”
Which them, he doesn’t clarify, and Kleya does not ask. “Everyone is safe and on their way where they need to be, it’s all that matters.”
“And here we are.” Here indeed, the dim workshop and the scent of the cleaning solution sharp in the air, the go-packs she’d been repacking tossed in the corner by the lift, the gallery in all of its ostentatious glory sitting pristine and awaiting another day’s business. Something almost anticlimactic in it, considering what kind of a day it has been. Except, “You don’t have to be,” Luthen adds, distant and quiet. “We could get on the Fondor right now – get you to Yavin with the rest of them.”
“Luthen.” She leans against the counter and stares at the side of his head, willing him to turn and look at her properly. “Luthen.”
“What are we doing anymore, Kleya? We built the network – it grew, it outgrew us, this. Before you know it, we’ll just be… running a gallery, won’t we?”
“I’ll blow it up myself before this radio’s become that useless,” she deadpans, and at least earns a light huff of laughter. “What’s the matter with you? Did Mothma get inside your head?” But the look he throws her way, just a quick, peeved glance, and of course – “Ah. Cassian. He came through.”
“I wasn’t sure he’d come at all.”
“He witnessed what happened on Ghorman and came running to us, not to Davits Draven.” Luthen throws up a hand, acknowledgement or simply abandoning the lingering frets and frustrations, before turning and heaving himself off the stool with a weary grunt. “What, what did he say?” Except that’s not it, she knows what he said, he’s done, and he’s not stupid, he can read the inevitable in the senator’s flight, can sense those walls closing in even if they’ve managed to delay it for however long. Perhaps more to the point is, “What did you say?”
“Something I shouldn’t have,” he offers quickly enough it’s clear he’s been stewing over it all day, sitting around and cleaning coins out of sheer frustration to feel so useless amidst the calamities unfolding around and within them. “I’m slipping, Kleya.”
“Well.” She sidles over, collects his abandoned tools and wipes them down, cleans up after him just this once while he works his way through whatever crisis of faith or fate or purpose. “You are getting old, old man.”
“We can’t hide forever. But you’d be great on Yavin – commission you right up, terrify the hell out of the new recruits.”
Kleya smiles to herself, slots the tools into their case, switches off the work light, and crosses the room to meet him by the lift, leaning up to press a fleeting kiss against his cheek. “Can’t do; I look awful in khaki.”
“Well,” he laughs, and it’s soft but sincere enough. “If you’re sure.”
She is, and he knows that. And she doesn’t have to remind him –
The end of this story was written a long time ago.