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It’s been five years since the galaxy changed, in one huge, convulsive spasm, with the coming of Zakuul. Now when Theron Shan thinks about those last months and days before the invasion, he imagines himself walking across a frozen lake. The ice beneath his feet groans and cracks, promising freezing darkness waiting below, but he doesn’t hear it, doesn’t see it. He just keeps walking, like it’s any other day.
He’s supposed to be light on his feet, a quick thinker, adaptable. That’s half the work of being an intelligence agent. He’d thought he had a handle on it all, the crazy ancient nonsense they’d all gotten mixed up in since the Sith Emperor’s awakening on Yavin Four, that hothouse jungle moon with its moss-crawled ruins where his Republic and the Sith Empire had felt, almost, for a hot minute, as if they could come together without going for each others’ throats. But then of course they’d ultimately failed, and what had been unleashed had feasted on a planet’s worth of life on Ziost before vanishing. Theron had wanted to believe maybe that was it, at least for his lifetime, or maybe for good. Maybe the mad thing that had been the Sith Emperor had fed to its fill and then fled into the darkness beyond the known galaxy to sleep it off for a millennium or two. Theron had wanted to believe it, but he hadn’t. He’d have been happy to be pleasantly surprised, though.
What had surprised him, in fact, was the unlikely alliance between Satele Shan, Grand Master of the Jedi Order—not to mention Theron’s mother—and the head of the Imperial Ministry of Defence, Darth Marr. And Theron hadn’t hated him, either, from what he’d seen of him on Yavin Four. That enormous, besuited, bespiked creature was capable of perfect civility and surprising pragmatism. So it was mostly Marr and Satele who moved the titanic engines of Empire and Republic into alignment again, this time as a joint expeditionary force of seven ships on the fringes of Wild Space, hunting for the monster that was the Sith Emperor.
And then, from Wild Space, the invasion.
Theron hadn’t been there. He was a spy, not a soldier. Besides that, he’d been stuck on administrative leave since the disaster on Ziost. Even if he hadn’t been responsible for the loss of a whole squad of Sixth Line Jedi on a completely unauthorised mission, and even if that turncoat Kovach hadn’t run his mouth off to Chancellor Saresh about how chummy Theron had seemed with Sith Intelligence, Theron was pretty sure the Chancellor just straight up couldn’t stand him. (Thugs and bullies tended not to like Theron, slippery little shit that he was. This tendency had one notable exception though.)
So while he’d been officially cooling his heels on an extended vacation at a ranch on Dantooine, he’d actually been cultivating a little off-the-books wetwork on Ord Cantrell helping out a contact who’d gotten themself into hot water with local corrupt bureaucracy. He’d been sitting at a tram stop across the street from the local District Requisitions Committee office, playing remote pazaak on a beat-up holo receiver with half his attention, while the other half catalogued doors, windows, trash chutes, looking for points of ingress—when a chime played in his right ear, indicating he’d received an encrypted message to his implanted communicator. Decoded, it wrote across the top left of his field of vision in glowing orange letters: GRANDMOTHER TAKEN ILL // RETURN HOME EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY // BRING COUSINS
Theron’s grandmothers were both long since ashes and his cousins were thousands of lightyears away, but what the message really meant was: something’s wrong, inform any other operatives and get your ass back to Coruscant. In all his years with the SIS, Theron had never received a message like this one. What was more, it read like it wasn’t written just for him. How many field agents had just received the same message he had? Dozens? Hundreds? Or all of them? Underneath Theron’s feet, his world began to shift.
He’d barely even broken atmosphere before the news found him. Not through public channels yet, but leaking out via Theron’s tenuous and protean network of intelligence contacts that spanned the galaxy. Fragmented holovids and databursts that he stitched together into a horrifying picture. He saw the unknown fleet arriving from hyperspace and sending the Republic’s and Empire’s ships into disarray. He saw the effortless destruction those mysterious ships wrought. And he saw the final act of the wounded destroyer the Abiding Strife, driving like a blade straight into the enemy’s capital ship.
The Strife had been Darth Marr’s flagship, and an invaluable Imperial asset. At the time of its destruction, it had been bearing two Dark Council members: Darth Marr himself, and Marr’s ally, the head of the Imperial Sphere of Ancient Knowledge—Darth Nox.
Theron threw it up big and blue on the console of his shuttle and let it play on a loop in front of the hyperspace swirl outside the cockpit windows. The vid cut off before the Strife broke up completely. Theron watched, over and over, as the ship splintered into glittering shards tumbling through the void. By the time he dropped out before Coruscant’s first security checkpoint, he knew the trajectory of every little piece of debris. Theron tried and failed not to picture Darth Nox at the helm. He would have refused to turn away as the bulkheads crumpled and ruptured, as vacuum clawed in and tore everything apart, staring straight down the barrel of his final act.
It was exactly something that asshole would do. That obstinate, amoral, megalomaniacal asshole. That dead asshole.
He was an hour out from landing when he tasted the wet green air of Yavin Four in his mouth again, felt the grating under his boots become mud, and sensed something suddenly gone, like when music stops. Out of nowhere, he thought, the Emperor is dead. Then he thought, how in all the wild worlds would I even know that? But sure enough, much later, he’d find out he was right.
Even as the galaxy he knew fell apart around him, Theron found himself thinking a lot about what it must be like to die alone in the cold dark of space. He wasn’t the only one. As Zakuul—as they learned the strange invading empire called themselves—advanced unstoppably into what had been a galaxy map chopped messily up between Republic and Empire, it swept all before it. The news broadcasts on the holofeeds took on increasingly dire tones, as ship after ship went spinning broken off into the void, spilling their frozen dead.
So then, under Theron’s feet, the ice broke. The Galactic Republic folded, sent negotiators, and begged for mercy. And mercy they were granted—at the cost of paying through the nose, tribute to the Eternal Empire. Not just mercy, either, but the gracious permission to carry on their old war with the Sith Empire. Back to that safe, familiar bloodshed. The Empire capitulated to Zakuul shortly after, of course, because to do otherwise would have meant total destruction at the hands of both enemies.
At least Theron had work to do. Not for the SIS, though, or for the Republic at all for that matter. Not after they’d bought peace just to keep on fighting. He handed in his notice and walked away. But just like everything else, splintering into pieces, there were other games in town now, and he still had his network and his special set of skills. There was a whole galaxy of people out there suffering in new and unexpected ways, and Theron couldn’t think of anywhere he’d rather be than in the middle of it, fighting back.
He found his feet. He didn’t sleep much. He became a blade, driving himself into the soft places of Zakuul, over and over.
One bleary morning, just over a year after the invasion began, when it should have been too early for Theron to have his wits about him yet (except he always had his wits about him, that was how he’d stayed alive so long in his line of work) the communicator that almost never beeped: beeped. It was a message, short and sweet, in a cipher that was familiar to him by now. Decoded, it read: NEW INT // TELL NO ONE // AZURE 0341 // OUR FRIEND LIVES
Azure was one of a set of arbitrary frequencies Theron had established long before the Zakuul invasion, back when he’d needed to be extra careful who he was caught talking to. Rane Kovach, may the void keep the little weasel’s soul, hadn’t been all the way off the mark with what he’d told Saresh about Theron, after all.
At oh three hours and thirty-five minutes, galactic standard time, when Theron couldn’t spend any longer pacing the confines of his little safehouse cell and chewing on his fingernails, he flipped his communicator to azure.
Lana Beniko was already there. He hadn’t seen her in a year; they’d been communicating solely by coded message. She looked pale and haunted. More so than usual, anyhow. He didn’t let her start. ‘What the hell do you mean, our friend lives?’
She couldn’t mean who he thought she meant. He wouldn’t even allow himself to entertain the thought. But they didn’t have any other mutual ‘friends’.
‘Nice to see you alive and intact, Agent Shan.’ She didn’t smile—Lana wasn’t the smiling type at the best of times—but there was something wild and eager about her eyes. He guessed she’d have ripped him a new one for his rudeness if she weren’t so keen to tell him what she knew. She said, ‘I meant exactly that. And don’t—’ She held up a finger, ‘—don’t say his name. Even on this frequency. You never know who is listening, and how.’
‘It’s not my first rancor ride, Beniko. Just tell me what you know.’
There was no tit for tat, no what will you give me in return, none of their old dance. She just told him. New intelligence had found its way to her: it said Darth Marr and Darth Nox had survived the destruction of the Abiding Strife and been taken prisoner aboard the Emperor’s flagship. There, in short order, Marr had been killed by the Emperor, and then the Emperor had fallen to the hand of Darth Nox. That was what Theron had felt, the day of the invasion, on his approach to Coruscant. Everyone who had been at the temple that night on Yavin Four had felt it.
‘But our friend wasn’t killed,’ Lana had continued. ‘For some reason rather than kill him Prince Arcann had him frozen in carbonite. And at last I think I know where he’s being kept.’
Theron folded abruptly and sat down hard on the narrow sleep mat on the floor of his safehouse room. He set the holocommunicator down on the crate that served as a nightstand. He couldn’t guarantee the steadiness of his hands right this second.
This had been, it turned out, Lana’s secret pursuit ever since the Abiding Strife’s destruction. She’d never believed Darth Nox was truly dead. And why should she? Lana was skilled with the Force. She’d believed, Theron saw shining in her face, that she’d have felt it if Nox had died. And she’d been right.
In a maelstrom of possibilities, Theron grabbed for the nearest one. ‘You wanna break him out?’
‘It’s not that simple. Or, it is, but…’ Lana’s mouth knotted up. ‘It’s simple, because yes, of course, you have no idea how much I want to storm in there and break him out this second.’
Theron folded his arms. ‘I think I have a pretty good idea how much, Beniko.’
‘Shut up.’ He couldn’t tell through the holo’s picture, but Theron guessed there might have been a flush of pink on those pale cheeks. For some reason Theron had never been able to guess, Lana found it embarrassing to be seen having normal human feelings. ‘But it’s not simple. It’s sneaking into the nexu den and, worse, back out again.’
‘Back out with a discombobulated, carbonite-sick, potentially enraged, definitively unhinged Sith Lord who’s unpredictable at the best of times, yeah, I got you.’ Laughter threatened to burst out of him, or vomit, or something worse. His heart was dancing double-time inside his ribcage. His armpits, palms, temples were damp. This profound relief, and this stupid, sky-high hope, felt like coming down with the ‘flu. ’But Lana—we’re not gonna not break him out.’
Was that a smile he thought he detected around Lana Beniko’s eyes? Any other day, Theron wouldn’t have hazarded credits on it. But today… ‘You’re right. Not just for us, but for the galaxy. There is no one else I know of who can stand up to Arcann in terms of will and power. But we’ll need to do this properly. We can’t just rush in.’
Like Lana, there was nothing more Theron wanted to do than rush in, blasters hot. This was the first good news he’d had in a year. But what Theron wanted to do and what Theron let himself do were worlds apart.
So they made a plan and went to work. And Theron stopped dreaming about the void of space, and started dreaming about thawing out, coming alive again. He couldn’t lie to himself—unleashing Darth Nox on the galaxy again was no kind of spring, no birds and flowers crap. But the galaxy needed something better than the hopelessness Theron saw every day—in others, in himself—and maybe Nox’s chaos was the best they could hope for. Theron and Lana, they could do a lot. The two of them and Nox back together? They could remake the galaxy.
Back on Yavin Four, when he and Nox had both been younger men and anything had seemed possible, they had haunted those ruins together. Theron and Nox had worked together before, but never aboveboard. With the Republic and the Empire in their fragile coalition, with everyone fraternising, bickering, holding their breath, it had felt like a new world.
In the seeping depths of a ruined temple, they’d fucked on an ancient altar. In the moments that followed, they had just been two men: Theron not a perpetual listening device, Nox not a dark cipher. Then over the sweaty, muddy, bug-bitten weeks they all spent on the moon, they sought out every opportunity to be alone together.
In the midst of it all, he’d been briefing Grand Master Satele Shan—in professional settings he tried to forget she was his mother—on what their scouts had observed of Revanite activity towards the Emperor’s temple, when she’d begun to tell him about the Sith.
Sith, Satele Shan had told him, operated very differently to the Jedi. (No shit, he’d wanted to say, and hadn’t, but guessed she’d sensed it anyway.) Sith didn’t seek peace that they might be guided by the Force. They used their own passion as the engine that drove their abilities. Love, lust, rage, jealousy—any strong emotion was fair game. You didn’t have to be fuelled by hatred to be a powerful Sith. But, simply given the way their Empire worked, surrendering to rage was too easy.
‘You’ve seen the eyes of a true Sith. Darth Mekhis. Darth Karrid. Lana Beniko. Darth Nox. That lambent glow, like firelight, it reflects what is going on within. For all living beings, rage and hate are like a sickness when we let them rule us, eating away at us. For those of us sensitive to the Force, the power of those emotions is multiplied. They burn inside a Sith like a furnace; powering them, yes, but destroying them too. That is why the archetypal image of a Sith Lord is sickly and rotten, dependent on machines to keep breathing. Their hatred eats them alive.’
Satele had stood straight-backed at the console table, lit blue from beneath, not truly looking at him but at the projected charts she was rotating and manipulating as she spoke. Theron had considered telling her to keep her opinions to herself, and that if he’d wanted parental advice it wouldn’t be her he’d be seeking out. He also considered telling her that in his experience what a person looked like on the outside was no indication of what was in their heart, and he’d have thought she’d be less superficial. Instead he just slapped down the datapad he’d been holding onto the console beside her and strode away. He was pretty sure she’d sensed everything important anyway.
That night, Theron lay alone in the dark, staring up at the bug netting, and seeing in his mind Darth Nox’s yellow predator’s eyes burning through the night. ‘Darth Nox is young,’ his mother had said as Theron walked away. ‘In time he will become like all the rest: imprisoned and sickened by an armature of his own rage.’
After the first flower of hope on azure frequency, over the next four years, Theron and Lana’s plan grew like a weed patch, putting up wild sprouts and bursting out all over. Item one, which roughly made out to put together a decentralised network of like-minded allies, somehow turned into create an entire underground resistance movement. While both of them had networks of contacts and favours so mature they could probably each have formed a small government just by themselves, it turned out that by their powers combined they made exactly what the people of the galaxy had been waiting for: a way to channel their anger and desperation into real action.
Then, scope out at least one physical fallback location turned into find a base for our new underground resistance movement. Theron dug the coordinates of a remote world, buried in Wild Space, out of stolen Zakuulan archive data. Odessen—forested, quiet, unvisited—became a kind of home.
Finally, the big one, find and break out our mutual friend-slash-boss-slash-lover as a key ally turned into acquire and install Darth Nox as figurehead of our surprisingly large and fractious underground resistance movement. Just because everybody hated Emperor Arcann didn’t mean that everybody automatically got on with everybody else. They needed a leader, a symbol, something to unite their disparate forces. Nox, the outlander who’d killed the so-called Eternal Emperor, had to play that part. While Theron was personally on the fence about Darth Nox’s ability to unite anything, he very much wanted the chance to be surprised.
He and Lana almost had their Sith Lord break-out scheme halfway to solid when Lana told him on the magenta frequency: ‘I’ve got a little problem.’
Hiding out in his chilly little shuttle on the dark side of a forgotten moon in the Mid-Rim, with his boots up on the command console, Theron took a burning swallow of Corellian whiskey and asked, ‘The kind of little problem I want to know about, or…?’
‘I’m afraid you have to. I’m being followed.’
‘What is this, one of those old Imperial spy holodramas where everybody wears high collars and dark glasses and says things like, “This has been your last mistake, Lieutenant”? What do you mean, you’re being followed? The inimitable Lana Beniko can’t shake ’em?’
The signal was too patchy for him to see her face clearly, but Lana’s tone left him in no doubt that she didn’t appreciate the holodrama reference. ‘If I could shake them, you wouldn’t be hearing about it now. Theron, are you drunk?’
‘Just staying warm. Sorry. Tell me.’
‘Someone’s on my trail, leaving fingerprints on datafiles and shaking up my contacts, and I can’t quite tell if they know what I’m after or if they’re just after what I’ve got. I’ve got to flush them somehow, or this plan of ours will be over before it’s begun.’
‘What do you need me to do?’ Theron had to admit, there was something nice about this new trust between himself and Lana. It’d taken him a little while to let go of his natural suspicion—especially since that business on Rishi that Lana had engineered for him—but now that he had, it felt good to not have to keep her at arm’s length.
Lana’s fuzzy holo silhouette shifted, and Theron thought he saw discomfort in the motion. She said, ‘You’re not going to like it.’
As it turned out, Theron didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. In fact he argued, extensively, repetitively, and, in the end, pointlessly. Because of course Lana Beniko never suggested anything without having thought it through thoroughly first.
Lana’s twitchy Zakuulan contact would only deal directly with her. So it would need to be Lana who snuck into the heart of Zakuul and was smuggled into the Spire. But whoever was following Lana would need to be distracted and led astray by somebody else, somebody with the kind of skills that Lana shared only with one other person in their limited circle of trust: Theron. And that meant that Theron wouldn’t be joining Lana on her mission to retrieve Darth Nox.
The last time Theron had spoken to Nox had been on Ziost. Theron had come crashing right into the middle of a nightmare on the ancient Sith planet. It’d all gone spectacularly wrong before he’d even hit the ground, which he figured was probably some kind of record. There he was—beat up, implants fried, squad of Jedi missing—and all he had was his intel that somewhere in the city of New Adasta was the Sith who almost a year before on Yavin Four Theron had said goodbye to as if they’d never meet again. Darth Nox was here, tangled up in the exact same mess as Theron now was, trying to outface the all-powerful Sith Emperor and the whole population of the planet that now danced like puppets to his tune.
That now included the squad of Sixth Line Jedi Theron had brought. He’d made it worse, he was well aware, but he hadn’t known what was going on before they got there. He hadn’t known the Emperor could just take people easy as moving pieces on a Shah-tezh board, and that all Theron had done was hand him a nice little take-out container of powerful Force users to play with.
So yeah, okay, he’d been feeling pretty bad, and when he’d limped into that Imperial outpost and there was Darth Nox, standing there cool as a dead star, and everything about Nox had sharpened as he turned his attention completely to Theron—that’s going to go to a guy’s head, right? So maybe, just maybe, he could acknowledge that he’d let his guard down.
Where Theron couldn’t match up to his Jedi face-to-face, Nox could. So Theron had asked—nicely, he’d thought—for Nox to let them live, if he could, and return them to the Republic at least mostly intact. And for a moment Theron had thought Nox would oblige him. That moment turned Theron’s world on its head. Civility was one thing. Seduction was another. A Sith Lord doing as he asked, just because he asked? Theron let himself consider, well… things he wouldn’t have let himself consider before.
Later, Theron had cursed himself for the worst kind of idiot for letting those thoughts in. When Nox had ordered Lana to take Master Surro prisoner—to experiment on her, to see what made the Emperor’s control work—Theron had thrown his hands up and walked away, sick fury twisting his gut. If he hadn’t, he was pretty sure he was going to pull out his blaster and create a diplomatic incident—or more likely just get himself turned into a red smear on the wall, which he was sure would have pleased Chancellor Saresh. He hadn’t looked back, not once, not all the way back up out of atmosphere into the black.
He’d cut off contact with Lana too, out of stupid spite. He’d remembered the look she’d thrown him when Nox had given the order and she’d moved to his side to comply: a glance that barely grazed him, immaculate in its deniability, but unmistakeable in meaning. You lose this round, it said, or I win—they were one and the same. As if all this horror was just the backdrop to a game between them that he hadn’t known he was playing. After that, he didn’t hear from Lana directly until after the destruction of the Abiding Strife, when everything had changed and Nox was gone.
So maybe it’s a lack of imagination on Theron’s part that he’s already committed to his mission before it even occurs to him that Lana’s inconvenient tail might all be a set-up to keep him out the way.
He’s on the mined-out asteroid Mek-Sha, winding through narrow alleyways on the lawless station with a deliberately traceable datapad in his jacket, making for a dark corner where waylaying him will be too tempting for anyone following him to resist. His realisation makes his steps falter, and in the missed beat he hears the heavy footfalls behind him. Whether Lana sent them or not, looks like he’s hooked them anyway.
When the jump comes, it’s a relief to be able to stop overthinking it. They’re a trio: a Rodian, a Human, and a Twi’lek, all heavy-footed and too intent. Theron had already clocked they’re all carrying blasters and nasty-looking vibroknucklers.
Theron shoots the Rodian and the Human in the head, and the Twi’lek in the kneecaps. Then he puts the muzzle of his silenced blaster against the survivor’s forehead. ‘Who sent you?’
The Twi’lek is a man, pale blue, and he has the scarred, pugnacious face of a lifelong thug. Tears leak from the corners of his eyes, running down into his ears, but he screws up his face and refuses to answer. Theron reaches down and tears off the man’s neckerchief and stuffs it into his mouth, before he stomps down hard on one of the man’s ruined knees.
The Twi’lek screams, sound muffled and thick, face flushing darker.
‘I don’t want to be here any more than you do,’ Theron growls, ‘but I’m here because of you. Tell me who sent you so I can go take it out on them instead!’
Back on Yavin Four, he and Nox had used to fuck like they were fighting. They tore at one another, pushing and pulling, like there was a winner and a loser to their trysts. Nox, just like his file said, was a bully. He was used to being stronger than anybody he met—not necessarily physically, but both in the Force and in his force of will. Theron had been on the receiving end, ever since Rishi and that first time that Nox had realised Theron’s attraction. Nox thought he’d found Theron’s weak point, and he seized upon it. He’d gone out of his way to get into Theron’s, just so he could get close to him, lean over him, brush against him, and watch Theron react. And he flirted like he did everything else: utterly without mercy.
But this was why Theron was a spy and Nox was just a high-ranking Sith Lord with a reputation for violence. Theron let Nox push his buttons, yielding where Nox probed. He let Nox think that his attraction made Theron into a lame prey animal. He flushed, and laughed awkwardly, and he leaned into Nox’s touch. One of the first things they teach you in spy school: to bait your mark in, you’ve got to give them something of yourself.
Something they don’t teach you in spy school is that it’s hard to remember the evil someone does when you become acquainted with their body, the banal everyday physicality of them. Theron became familiar with the curl of dark hairs on Nox’s inner thighs, his belly, his chest; the history of violence written in scars under his clothes, burns and cuts and slashes imperfectly healed; the improbable softness of his mouth and the way he slightly underpronounced his Rs.
Once, in a loud and steamy twilight, in the lee of a tumbledown ruin, on an ancient mosaic of broken tiles half-obscured by lichen and vines, they’d been lying side by side when Theron, with a cautious fingertip, traced up from Nox’s collarbone to the blurred ring of starburst scars that circled his neck. Nox had gone still. His throat moved under Theron’s touch. For a heartbeat, Theron thought he might stay. But then he rolled away, rising to go and collect his clothes.
Theron knew from Nox’s SIS file that the scars came from prolonged overuse of a shock collar on the subject in childhood. (He didn’t like that overuse very much, and how it implied there was an optimum level of use.) In the Republic, they sometimes saw scars like those in people who had fled the horrors of the Empire. But Nox hadn’t fled. He had clawed his way to the top of the heap instead.
Sometimes when Theron looked at Nox, he saw a creature shaped by betrayal and cruelty and pain who could only respond in kind; a beaten dog who only knew how to bite. Then sometimes he looked at his toes or his nipples or his earlobes—the divot between his eyebrows, his rare smile, the way he tossed Theron his jacket before they parted—and he just saw a man.
Another thing they don’t teach you in spy school: it’s really hard to remember someone’s your enemy after they’ve stepped between you and near death.
The last night on Yavin Four. The joint taskforce fought their way to the dark, hulking structure that was Temple of Sacrifice, where the man who claimed to be Revan meant to resurrect the Sith Emperor. It was a bloody inch-by-inch firefight through the jungle against Revan’s lunatic cultists. Theron had been following in Lana’s bootprints, eyes narrowed against the ruby flash of her lightsaber in the murk under the trees, firing past her with his twin blaster pistols. Then there was a noise to his left, and three Revanites thrashed out of the dense forest. Theron was forced to stumble backwards, fetching up against a tree, to avoid being sliced in half by the fizzing swipe of a light-pike.
Then there was the flash of another lightsaber. It happened too quickly for Theron’s eyes to follow. There was the whine of blaster bolts—the snap and crack of trees hit by super-heated plasma—cries, and sudden silence. And there was a dark shape in front of Theron, the taste of ozone in the air, and the prickling of all the hairs on Theron’s body standing on end.
The Revanites were dead. Darth Nox turned, animal eyes running up and down Theron, and the look on his face was casually proprietorial. Theron belonged to him, that look said. Others would touch him at their peril.
Some secret dark part way down deep inside Theron responded to that like the calling of his name.
Maybe it’s the same part of him that now presses the muzzle of his blaster pistol harder into the Twi’lek’s forehead as the man weeps, with his boot poised to stamp down again on the man’s knee. That same dark part of him that snarls, ‘Tell me!’
The Twi’lek takes a shuddering gulp of air, then another, and finally turns his watery gaze up to Theron. His eyes are the shallow grey of a puddle. The man opens his mouth, and then seems to hesitate. Then he snaps his mouth shut, and grinds his teeth together.
Theron tosses his blaster down and lunges to seize the man’s jaws. He works his fingers into the Twi’lek’s mouth and pries it open. But even as he does, the man’s body shudders and stiffens under him. Theron drops him and steps back as the Twi’lek begins to convulse, pink froth blooming from his lips.
He looks around for something to kick. Then, remembering it, he stoops for his discarded blaster, and puts two bolts into the man’s head. He tells himself it’s for mercy’s sake. He doesn’t have a name to put to whatever else it could be.
Before Lana had gone dark, Theron had passed her a message. ‘It’s our usual cipher,’ he’d said, ‘because I know you’re going to read it anyway. Just, please, make sure he gets it when he wakes up.’
Now, he wonders: would Lana go so far as to engineer a genuine tail, employing thugs with implanted suicide pills, just to keep Theron out of the way so she could win a battle in some weird covert war for her boss’ attention? The thought gives Theron the shivers. Lana, as he sometimes forgets until he sees her in the flesh, is a Sith too. Not just that, but she used to be Sith Intelligence. Just because he likes her so much is no reason to underestimate her.
What is trust between spies? It’s something Theron’s thought a lot about without coming to a satisfactory answer. It’s a case by case judgement, is what he’d answer if somebody put it to him. He trusts Lana not to betray him to the Sith Empire. He doesn’t trust her not to read his messages. He trusts her to protect the resistance efforts against Zakuul. He doesn’t trust her not to personally screw him over if it gets her something she wants.
And Nox?
He trusts Nox’s anger. He trusts Nox’s desire for revenge. These things he’s pretty confident they can count on.
There’s things Theron hopes more than trusts. He hopes that, despite how they parted, even now, if Theron were in trouble Nox would come for him, like he did on Rishi. He hopes that what he saw in Nox in those quiet moments they spent together—the man, instead of the monster—is still alive. He hopes that Nox read his message.
You want to bait your mark in? Oh, Theron does. Everything depends on it.
Nox is a feral creature, accustomed to the dog-eat-dog Empire. But what their new and fragile Alliance needs is trust. So when Theron wrote his message, he sat down to carve out a part of himself, bloody and raw, and hold it out to Nox like an offering. It was a lure. It said hey, trust me. It said, by extension, trust all of us.
I care about you, he had written.
Was it true? It had to be true, or it wouldn’t work.
Theron goes back to Odessen, and by the time he arrives the news of the reactor core explosion on Zakuul is already there. He can’t make sense of the jumbled mess of intel from his sources in the sector. Some say it must be the terrorist Firebrand or her cronies, some say it was High Justice Vaylin herself. Some say a man and a woman were seen fleeing the scene before the explosion. There’s a source that says a ship was shot down outside the city not long after.
After the initial burst of data everything goes quiet for days. Theron paces laps around the installation, plunges himself into any work he can do without leaving the planet, drinks too much caf and catalogues the many reasons there might be for not having heard anything yet, and, subsequently, the much smaller number of things he can do about those reasons. He dispatches pilots to scout for short-range signals as close to the planet Zakuul as he dares. He passes word to contacts embedded there to seek out news as quietly as they can. He drinks more caf, and he doesn’t sleep.
They have contingency plans, of course. Theron and Lana had brainstormed them together days before they both left. Theron could be putting one of them into motion. Should be, probably. The first step in all of them is: assume Lana Beniko has been compromised and cut off her access to Alliance resources and frequencies.
He doesn’t do it, though. He tells himself that he’ll give her another day and reassess tomorrow. Then, when tomorrow comes, he tells himself the same thing.
Then he hears, from a contact amongst the Zakuul Knights, about a firefight and a ship escaping from the Zakuulan swamp. It’s old news, days late. So when he gets the message on his communicator the very same day, he knows to expect it. Decoded, it reads: COMING HOME // NEW SHIP DO NOT FIRE ON US // SEE YOU TOMORROW
Tomorrow, Theron thinks, he might just kiss Lana for the hell of it. Or shoot her. Or both. (As if he’d get the chance to do either before his head was permanently separated from his body, but it’s nice to dream.)
When tomorrow comes, he does his hair nice, like he’s sixteen or something, and then he waits at the dock for whatever the hell they’re flying to turn up. When it does, he can’t help the way his jaw drops. It’s enormous, it looks ancient, and he’s pretty sure those plasma scars are new. It eases up to its bay like it weighs less than a feather, which is how Theron knows it must be Koth at the controls.
He meets Lana in the shadow of the open hatch that leads to the installation’s turbolift, where it’s easy to be overlooked and easier to see when somebody else is lingering around. He doesn’t try to kiss her or shoot her. Everything about her looks taut, drawn, but—and he almost taps his implants to check they’re not messing with his vision—she is smiling.
Did you send me hunting phantoms just to get me out of the way? The question waits right behind his teeth. But he doesn’t say it. On this bright, fresh morning, it’s enough, he decides, to have her back here and alive and—whisper it—happy. Instead he says, ‘You did it, didn’t you?’
She nods. Says, ‘It didn’t exactly go to plan, as you probably guessed. I couldn’t comm you—at first because our equipment was destroyed along with Koth’s ship, then because I couldn’t risk interception. It didn’t matter, though. Arcann caught up with us anyway when we stopped at Asylum. Theron—’ She draws closer. Her mouth makes shapes before words come out, like she can’t find the way to begin. ‘Arcann and Nox fought, and Arcann won. Arcann ran him through.’
Theron isn’t aware of whatever it is that he does right then, but Lana’s hand closes firmly on his elbow. ‘It’s all right,’ she says, impossibly. ‘He’s all right. He’s alive. I don’t know how—’ A shadow passes over her face, ‘—but he’s alive.’
Theron slumps against the wall. He stops just short of pushing a hand through his hair and well and truly messing it up. ‘He’s always saying death doesn’t stick for him. Gotta say, I’m beginning to think he might be right.’
‘Oh, he’s right. Ask him just how he gained his Dark Council seat sometime.’ Lana glances up at his nicely-done hair. He watches her expression do something inscrutable. She says, ‘Theron.’
‘Lana.’
She hesitates before she says, ‘He missed you, I think.’
‘What? I mean… what?’ Stupid, Theron. But he can’t seem to think of any smarter words.
Lana says, all in a rush, ‘Are you aware that he talks in his sleep? Opsec nightmare, of course, so it’s a bloody good job he never sleeps with anyone—literally, I mean, not figuratively, as you well know—but I gather it’s something to do with his particular affinity for cursed ancient things and long dead Sith ghosts and so on, not to mention his unhappy past. And yes, it is my job to know these things, and if you must know I got it out of his first apprentice—too trusting by half, that girl, but that’s what you get with Jedi. But anyway what I’m getting at is that when he was unconscious—when he nearly died—he said your name. I was there, but… it was you he was reaching for.’
Theron’s head is spinning. The floor feels a little like it’s tilted, like the world is finding a new orientation. Some new gravity pulls at him. Out of all the people in the galaxy, Nox had wanted him? Theron reaches out and takes Lana’s shoulder, to steady both himself and her.
Lana looks exhausted, but stiller, more present. For her, Theron realises, today is the culmination of five years of keeping the faith. Now she’d done what she set out to do. She’d stepped irrevocably onto a path of her own choosing.
Theron says, ‘You look like you need a strong drink and a long nap. I’ll take it from here. We’ll debrief tomorrow.’ He squeezes her shoulder. ‘And… thanks.’
As he walks away, Theron thinks that that might just have been the most sensitive information he’s ever gotten out of Lana Beniko at once. And he thinks maybe it’s a gift, by way of an apology.
Darth Nox is standing at the end of a docking jetty, looking out at Odessen. Theron pauses at the foot of it. Nox looks like a man, and he looks like a shadow on a sunny day, dark against the bright sky. He also looks unexpectedly upright for someone who got a brand new hole made in him less than a week ago. Theron feels that pull towards him, that gravity. If he didn’t know past all knowing that he didn’t have a speck of Force sensitivity in him— but maybe this is what destiny feels like? Whether it’s destiny, or just his own chosen path, Theron starts along the jetty.
When he gets close, Nox turns. There’s an unfamiliar stiffness, a carefulness to his movement. Those predator’s eyes rake Theron up and down. A smile turns up the corners of that soft mouth. Nox says, with feeling, ‘Theron Shan.’ And he steps forward to meet him without hesitation.