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There’s a flaw in this space station, her father tells her one night, panicked. A fatal one.
Soon—he’s not sure when, but soon—they will run out of air. He needs her to know the truth, he says. He needs her—his precious daughter, his stardust—to stay safe, he says. He’s going to tell the people, and he knows there will be panic.
They murder him that night, before he has a chance to expose them. They cast him off into space and throw Jyn into prison to keep her quiet, and she screams until she can’t scream anymore.
They decide to empty the prisons, to relieve the demands on the Ark’s oxygen supply, and Jyn doesn’t even care: she’s been trapped in this cell for months, her father’s dying words echoing thunderous in her bleary mind. She’s ready to follow him into the black.
But then she learns the plan is not to kill the prisoners outright, but to send them to Earth: savage, likely uninhabitable Earth. It’s a terrible sentence, to make them lab rats, testing firsthand whether the planet is livable. It should horrify her, but if anything, it steels her, snaps her out of her own head.
She won’t go quietly. She won’t give them that satisfaction.
On the dropship down to Earth, crowded with other young prisoners, there’s a boy with a gun.
He must think he’s hiding it, but she can see the slight glint of black above his hipbone, the way he’s slouched slightly to the side, in case he needs to draw it. As soon as she sees it, she decides that’s her plan: if they survive re-entry and the air on Earth is breathable, she’s going to steal that gun and take to the woods, as far away from all of this as possible. She can figure the rest out later.
She glances back at him, and is surprised to find him staring at her: sharp black eyes and muted frown.
She looks away.
They survive re-entry, and the air on Earth is breathable, but he proves harder to steal from than she’d hoped.
She slips the gun from his bag when he’s not looking, only to find him appear out of nowhere and slam her up against a tree, his forearm pressing at her throat. He’s thin, but surprisingly strong; she can’t wrestle away. If he leaned in, put his weight behind his elbow, he could choke her easily.
(A small part of her almost wishes he would.)
“How did you get a gun?” she growls. If he’s going to kill her, so be it; she’s not going to cower.
He doesn’t respond, just glares down at her, breath heavy. She sees a flash of uncertainty, and she can tell he knows it too: that he could take her life right then and there and none of the rest of the camp would even know.
“What were you going to do with it?” He asks, finally. “The gun.”
“I was going to run.”
“Where?”
She lifts her chin. “As far away as possible.”
For a long moment, he just looks at her: calculating, considering. Then he pulls back, and she can breathe fully again.
“Run if you want,” he says, turning away. “But the gun stays with me.”
That night, she finds him on the edge of camp and rolls out her sleeping bag across from his, the small campfire between them. He looks up at her across the flames.
“If the gun stays with you,” she says, “then I stay with you.”
She can’t tell for sure in the darkness, but she thinks she sees him smile.
The plan doesn’t change: when lets his guard down, she’s taking that gun. Only, Cassian—that’s his name, she learns—never lets his guard down. He prowls the edges of the camp, guarded and cautious, and he sleeps so light he jumps awake at the smallest noise.
She wonders who he used to be, back on the Ark, what kind of life he lead that demanded such vigilance.
She doesn’t ask. They go about their days on the fringes of the camp, scavenging for food and scouting the nearby terrain, in strangely companionable silence. Jyn has always expected this for herself—to live just outside the group, just separate enough that she could slip away unnoticed—but she expected to do it alone. Cassian might not speak much, but he’s always there, generally close enough that she could reach out and grab him if she needed to.
She's not sure when exactly it is that she becomes comfortable around him. When it exactly it is that she starts looking behind her, to make sure he's still in sight.
One night, over mugs of a boy named Bodhi’s moonshine, he tells her everything. How he was about to join the guard, almost finished training, when he was arrested for one count of first-degree murder.
He tells her this without once looking at her, and she realizes he’s guarding himself for her reaction; he’s expecting her to be upset.
“So, you’re here because you killed someone,” she says.
He nods, tight.
“Did they deserve it?” she asks.
“Yes,” he breathes, without hesitation. “I just…yes. He did.”
She thinks about Orson Krennic’s face, his twisted smile as he pushed her father out the airlock. She thinks about what she would do if she ever were face to face with him again.
“Okay,” she says.
He turns to her, surprised. She shrugs.
“I trust you.”
It’s not until she says the words that she realizes they’re true.
They thought the Earth was uninhabited. They were wrong.
The camp falls under attack, and Cassian takes a spear to the leg, and for one heart-stopping moment, Jyn thinks about the gun slung under his waistband: how easy it would be to take, how quickly she could escape amidst the chaos.
Then she throws his arm over her shoulder and drags him, limping, out of the fray. She props him up against a tree; he’s so weak beneath her hands, so suddenly fragile.
“You’re okay,” she mumbles, pulling off her scarf to wrap around his leg. “You’re okay.”
Screams echo in the distance.
“Cassian, I have to—”
She has to go back. The rest of them, they're defenseless, completely unarmed. She has to help them, has to find Bodhi, has to—
Cassian catches her wrist, shoves his gun into her palm.
“Be careful,” he says, through clenched teeth.
“Not worried I’m going to run off with this?” she jokes, trying to mask how frightened she is by his pale, pale face, by his blood on her skin.
Cassian grins up at her. It’s first real smile she’s ever seen from him; her heart hammers in her chest, and it feels like something more than adrenaline.
“I trust you,” he says.