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Azen has been inside Guard Headquarters for eleven minutes when he realizes nobody told him the clones would be his age.
Not all of them.
Most of the officers moving through the main corridor look older than sixteen, especially the ones with scars, command markings, and the exhausted expressions of people who have personally argued with the Senate.
Some don't.
A pair of troopers passes carrying supply crates between them. One has black hair clipped close to his scalp. The other is a blonde girl with a medic’s insignia painted on one shoulder. Neither looks much older than Azen.
The medic catches him staring.
“Something on my face?”
Azen immediately looks away. “No.”
“Then I still have time to add something.”
Her brother snorts. “Ink’ll charge you for using her supplies.”
“I’ll tell her it’s tactical.”
“You said that about the glitter.”
“That was tactical.”
They disappear around the corner.
Azen glances at Fox.
Fox walks beside him in black armor with his helmet tucked beneath one arm. The red markings make him stand out even in a building full of red-and-white plastoid, though everyone seems to notice the three Guard-red command stripes on his shoulder before anything else.
The tour is supposed to last forty minutes.
Riyo approved one hour.
Fox reduced it because the War Room contains classified deployments, Medical contains classified patients, Intelligence contains classified everything, and Hound apparently files the cafeteria’s weekly menu under restricted logistics.
Uma is with Riyo in the Senate Dome, where she promised to behave, avoid touching pod controls, and not ask Senator Burtoni whether the Kaminoans also grew her in a tube.
Azen wishes he could see that.
Instead, he gets to see Guard Headquarters.
He's wanted to come here since meeting Fox.
Fox had seemed vaguely alarmed by this interest. Azen doesn't understand why. The place has armored security doors, massiff units, starfighters in the lower hangar, and enough surveillance equipment to spy on a moon.
It's objectively fascinating.
“Are they cadets?” Azen asks.
Fox’s eyes follow the two young troopers.
“No.”
“They looked sixteen.”
“They probably are.”
Azen nearly stops walking.
Fox catches the back of his jacket before he can block the corridor and steers him toward the wall.
“They’re deployed?”
“Yes.”
“Into battles?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re my age.”
Fox studies him.
“That's generally how matching ages work.”
Azen narrows his eyes. “You know what I mean.”
Fox’s mouth doesn't smile, but his eyes do.
“I do.”
A group of Guardsmen passes them on the way toward the outer patrol doors. The youngest looks exactly Azen’s age. Maybe younger. He's checking the seal on his helmet while an older sister adjusts the shoulder plate he missed.
The gesture looks so normal that it takes Azen a second to remember they are preparing to patrol a city where people regularly throw objects at them for existing.
“How young are the youngest troopers here?” Azen asks.
“Outside Kamino?”
“Yes.”
Fox looks toward the patrol group.
“Sixteen, usually.”
“Usually?”
“Emergency deployments have happened earlier.”
Azen waits for Fox to say he is joking.
Fox does not joke about that sort of thing.
The tour continues through Logistics, where Myth is losing an argument with six manifests and winning an argument with a civilian quartermaster. They pass Medical, where Lex waves from behind a glass partition and Scalper points at a sign forbidding visitors from entering sterile areas.
Azen waves anyway.
Scalper gives him a single approving nod.
They reach the investigations corridor when Fox’s comm activates.
“Chief,” Thorn says, voice emerging through the private channel loudly enough for Azen to hear. “The Senate Appropriations Office rejected the militia transport request.”
“They approved it yesterday.”
“They’ve decided approval was contingent on a budget review.”
“The transports leave in six hours.”
“I’m aware.”
Fox closes his eyes briefly.
Azen recognizes the expression. Riyo makes the same one when someone in the Pantoran Assembly says something so ridiculous that explaining it would require charts.
Fox looks toward Commander Thire, who just emerged from an evidence room.
“Can you supervise Azen for ten minutes?”
Thire looks at Azen.
Azen smiles.
Thire looks back at Fox. “Is he armed?”
“No.”
“Does he know how to access the ventilation system?”
“No.”
“Then probably.”
Fox points at Azen. “Stay with Thire. Do not enter any room marked restricted, secure, sterile, classified, dangerous, pressurized, or condemned.”
“That seems like most of the building.”
“It is.”
Fox walks away while answering Thorn’s call.
Thire watches him go.
“Your sister has trained him remarkably well.”
Azen grins. “Fox thinks he’s training her.”
“That tracks.”
Thire resumes the tour with the air of a man who has not volunteered but has accepted his fate. He shows Azen the investigations offices, the evidence-processing room, and the restricted door leading to SpecOps.
“What’s behind there?” Azen asks.
“Nothing.”
“There's six locks.”
“We're very protective of nothing.”
Before Azen can ask another question, something crashes inside the adjacent supply closet.
Thire draws his sidearm.
Azen steps behind him.
The closet door opens.
A small boy tumbles out carrying three ration packs, a coil of wire, and a disassembled blaster component.
He lands on one knee, recovers instantly, and points a compact pistol at Thire.
Thire does not react.
“Boba.”
The boy lowers the weapon.
“Thire.”
Azen stares.
The child has dark hair, brown skin, and a face that looks disturbingly similar to half the people in the building. He is small enough that the pistol seems oversized in his hand, though he holds it like he knows exactly how to use it.
Azen looks at Thire.
Then at the boy.
Then back at Thire.
“Fox said the youngest deployed were sixteen.”
Boba’s face twists.
“I’m not deployed.”
“You’re eleven.”
“I know how old I am.”
“You have a blaster.”
“So do you, probably.”
“I don’t.”
Boba looks personally disappointed in him.
Thire pinches the bridge of his nose. “Why were you in the supply closet?”
“I needed wire.”
“For what?”
“A project.”
“What project?”
“A private one.”
“That sentence has never ended well in this building.”
Boba folds his arms around the stolen supplies.
Azen studies him.
He looks like a clone.
Not exactly. His hair is longer, his expression more openly defiant, and something about the way he stands is different. Still, the resemblance is impossible to miss.
“Are you a cadet?” Azen asks.
Boba looks offended enough to start a war.
“No.”
“A shiny?”
“I’m Mandalorian.”
Azen glances at Thire. “Is that a rank?”
Boba makes a noise of pure disgust.
Thire’s mouth twitches.
“He’s Boba Fett.”
The name lands a second later.
Azen heard it before. Jango Fett’s son. The child who attacked Jedi, got arrested, and somehow ended up under the Chief Medical Officer’s special custody instead of in an adult prison.
“You’re the bounty hunter kid.”
“I’m a bounty hunter.”
“You’re eleven.”
Boba steps closer.
Azen is taller by more than a head, but Boba has the unsettling confidence of someone who has already considered exactly where to stab him.
“You keep saying that like it changes anything.”
“It changes whether you’re allowed to reach the top shelf.”
Boba’s eyes narrow.
Thire places one hand between them.
“No fighting in Investigations.”
“Why?” Azen asks.
“Paperwork.”
Boba nods as though that is perfectly reasonable.
Azen points at the ration packs. “Did you steal those?”
“They belong to the Guard.”
“You’re not Guard.”
“I live here.”
“That doesn’t mean everything here is yours.”
Boba looks toward Thire.
“Tell him.”
“I’m not participating in this.”
“Coward.”
“Correct.”
Azen tries not to laugh.
He fails.
Boba stares at him for a moment, then reluctantly smiles.
It is quick and crooked and gone almost immediately.
Azen begins to understand why Riyo says clones collect anything vaguely young. Boba isn’t a clone, but Headquarters still absorbed him. He knows where supplies are kept. He speaks to commanders without fear. Nobody treats him like a fragile child, but nobody lets him disappear either.
Scalper’s voice rasps through the corridor.
“Boba.”
Boba goes still.
She stands at the far end with her arms folded.
Thire looks at the ration packs.
Scalper looks at the ration packs.
Boba hands them to Azen.
Azen nearly drops them.
“Traitor,” he whispers.
“You’re new.”
Scalper approaches, takes the wire and blaster component from Boba, then points toward Medical.
Boba sighs.
“I was going there.”
She points again.
He starts walking, then looks back at Azen.
“Do you know how to fly?”
“No.”
Boba seems disappointed for the second time in five minutes.
“I can teach you.”
Thire immediately says, “No.”
Azen smiles. “Maybe.”
Scalper catches Boba by the back of his shirt before he can respond and steers him toward Medical.
Azen watches them leave.
“Does he actually live here?”
“More or less.”
“And nobody thinks having an armed eleven-year-old wandering around a military headquarters is strange?”
Thire looks down the corridor where three sixteen-year-old troopers are preparing to deploy, Ghost has just appeared without making a sound, and Hound is arguing with Grizzer over a stolen boot.
“This building’s scale for strange is... damaged.”
Fox returns at the end of the corridor, expression suggesting the transport request has survived but several civilians have not enjoyed the process.
Azen looks at him.
“You have an eleven-year-old bounty hunter living here.”
Fox stops.
“Who showed you Boba?”
“He fell out of a closet.”
Fox looks at Thire.
Thire lifts both hands. “The closet was not part of the tour.”
Azen shifts the stolen ration packs in his arms.
Fox looks at those next.
“Why are you holding Guard supplies?”
“Boba framed me.”
Fox’s eyes smile again.
“Now you’ve had the full Headquarters experience.”