"Shoot me. Go ahead. You shot me once."

The gun wavers.

Brentin fights against it. The struggle is plain on his face-like he's battling himself. The pistol shakes violently in his hand as the arm bends at the elbow, slowly pointing the gun...

At his own head.

"No!" Temmin cries, bolting hard across the open space. He leaps, tackling his father as the blaster goes off. The gun clatters against the empty bridge. Brentin stares up at him with empty eyes- No, no, no, don't die- Those eyes blink. The shot missed. Temmin got there in time and now, Brentin is alive.

His father cries out and pistons a fist into Temmin's stomach. He shoves the boy off him and then flees, leaving his son behind gasping for air and sobbing there on the skybridge. Dad...

- The guard with a cresting wave of blond hair and a little scar on the bottom of his chin stands there, staring down. Yupe Tashu, once-adviser to Emperor Palpatine, looks up, his chin slick with his own spit.

"Hello, guard," Tashu says, mush-mouthed.

The guard drops the gate keeping Tashu imprisoned.

"Here to kill me?" Tashu asks, then his words dissolve into mad laughter. His laughter becomes coughing, his body racked with spasms until he's left curled into a ball. He gasps for air and then says: "I heard blasterfire."

"You heard correctly. But you are not a target."

"Then what am I?"

"A free man."

More laughter rises out of him, and more lung-spasms after. "The darkness has saved me. Long have I pleaded with it."

"You may go. There is a ship waiting. Docking Platform E-22."

"And the other guests? Shale and Crassus and Pandion?"

"Pandion died, you fool. And now the others have joined him."

Tashu stands on quaking bird legs. "You murdered them?"

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I was told to. Just as I was told to free you."

"And who told you this, guard?"

"Our new emperor. You are to serve him now."

Tashu's lip quivers. Palpatine was his everything. To serve someone else feels treasonous beyond the pale. The void awaits those who betray Palpatine-that much has always been clear. The void awaits traitors.

"I only serve Palpatine."

"Emperor Rax serves Palpatine, too. Now go."

Tashu nods. "Yes. Yes. It makes sense. It's part of a plan, isn't it? A plan I couldn't see? Sidious always had a plan..."

He cackles one last time, then hurries past the guard lest the strange man change his mind at the last moment. I am free at last.

- Blast it! Norra is lost. The Old Gather-House is a maze. She thought she could cut through the center and come out on the seaside facing the landing platforms, but this is an old building-some of it is new, yes, but much of it was where the first settlers on Chandrila gathered to sleep, to eat, to meet. They lived whole lives here, and this building was not all built at once but rather one strata at a time-and now, Norra is wandering its channels, sure she's doubling back on herself. Didn't she just see that light panel? That crack in the wall? That same painting of the first polis meeting?

She spins around, finds a door-she hasn't tried this one, yet, has she? Norra hits the panel next to it with the heel of her hand- It shushes open.

And Norra nearly runs into somebody.

"You," Norra says.

"You," Admiral Sloane says.

Norra straight punches her in the face.

Sloane is rocked, but recovers quickly even as a line of blood crawls from her nose like a fleeing worm. The admiral licks at the blood, then brings up a blaster rifle, firing it- But Norra rolls to the other side of the door even as the air around her heats up, laser bolts popping craters in the far wall.

This is it. This is her chance. All her anger and fear refines to a laser focus. Because of course Sloane is here. That monster did all of this. What Brentin did on stage was not his own action-it was Sloane. She's the puppet master pulling strings. A sudden sinkhole of regret opens up inside Norra's gut, because if she had just done her job and killed this woman when she had a chance, none of this would've happened.

At least she can finish what she started.

Sloane comes through the door, rifle out. Norra drives her knee under the blaster-and the barrel of it whips back and catches Sloane in the face. The woman blinks, then ducks low and hard charges into Norra. Wham. It's like getting hit by a grav-train. The movement carries her against the far wall and her skull snaps back into the mortar, blasting new fireworks behind her eyes. Again she sees Sloane point the rifle- Norra catches the barrel with her hands and points it away. Pop, pop, pop, more bolts take chunks out of the wall. Dust streams and flecks of stone rain into her hair and her eyes. She has no focus and she feels dizzied, so all she can do is harness her anger and use brute force- A loud, guttural cry is ripped out of her as Norra yanks the rifle from Sloane's grasp-it gives way with such force it falls from her own hands, spinning away on the stone floor. She lunges after it.

But she can't reach it. Sloane catches Norra's collar and pulls her back just as her fingers find the cold steel of the rifle barrel. The Imperial whirls Norra hard into the wall, then drives a flurry of hard punches into her side. One after another after another. Norra tries to fight against it, but she's not practiced at this, not at hand-to-hand, and this woman attacks with the tenacity of an orbital strike.

"I remember you," Sloane seethes. "You should be dead."

"So...should...you," Norra gasps, then whips her head to the side, ratcheting her skull against the other woman's chin. It gives her room to move, room to breathe, room to feel like she's not about to die.

She doesn't rest long.

Norra launches herself bodily at the woman. The Imperial meets her with fists up, absorbing every blow Norra throws, so instead Norra goes for the dirty play-she stabs out with a foot and catches the Imperial admiral in the knee. The leg goes backward and Sloane cries out- Yet even that doesn't end it. Whap. Norra's head rocks and she tastes blood as her lip splits under an assaulting fist. Another hit closes her eye behind fast-swelling bruise-flesh. She throws her own clumsy fist and Sloane ducks it, pumping a return fist into Norra's gut.

Oof. She gags and staggers. Sloane grabs her by a hank of her ashen hair and bangs Norra's head into the wall once, twice, three times. Wham, wham, wham. Every time, she feels her brain rattle in her skull, sharp shocks of light flashing as her teeth clack and her tongue tastes fresh blood- I'm losing. I'm dying. I failed.

"Stop right there!" a voice echoes down the hall. A woman's voice, and then the sound of blasterfire fills her ears. Norra drops, sliding against the wall as Sloane bolts and Senate Guards hurry after, firing their weapons.

- Sloane curses under her breath. She wasted too much time scrapping with that pilot-that woman is meaningless, and yet she stopped to fight her? Why? Anger taunted her. Distracted her. Now she's on the run from guards in a building whose layout is labyrinthine. Her nose might be broken. One of her teeth is loose. Worst of all, she tried snatching the blaster rifle on the way past-but it spun out of her grip as the guards fired on her.

And then, out of the gloom comes one ray of light.

She heads through a door and finds her way forward- A skybridge leads out to the landing platforms. The platforms fill the distance, topping tall towers along the shore. Beneath them wait sand and stone and sea. Leaving this planet won't be easy, and at this point she's sure there will be some kind of blockade in orbit-they'll be combing every mote of stardust for a sign of her. And if they capture her? They'll throw her in a lightless pit. She will never again see her Empire, and Rax will be left to kick it farther into hell. But she has to try. If she leaves now, she may be able to seize on the chaos-they'll still be looking for her here, not there.

She hurries across the skybridge, pulling off her Imperial gray jacket as she runs, revealing the white undershirt beneath. The wind takes the jacket as she reaches the end of the bridge. It flutters away.

A voice, then, carried on the wind.

Someone calls for her.

Adea?

A foolish moment as she turns and looks to see who it is- It's that woman again. The damnable pilot. Norra something-or-other.

Norra has the rifle.

She fires.

Sloane turns to run as the first bolt flashes past her ear-she can hear the hiss-crackle as it goes by. The second digs a furrow out of the ground.

The third blast doesn't miss.

Her back arches as the shot takes her. Sloane spins like a child's top, the clouds above her, then the sea, and then she's falling off the skybridge-her arms out, her fingers searching the sky for something to hold but finding nothing at all. Darkness draws her down, down, down.

Morning comes to Kashyyyk.

Jas sits at the top of the world, her legs dangling off a platform, her feet swinging like a child's as she scoops some kind of goop out of a bowl with her bare hands and into her mouth. A Wookiee breakfast, Solo said. Made of kabatha guts. She asked him just what a "kabatha" was, and his response: Don't ask, just eat. So, she eats.

Jas is used to eating whatever she can get her hands on. The job being the job, it means she can't always get her mouth around a proper meal. Protein cubes, polystarch, veg-meat: Whatever she can eat, she eats. (Once she ate barnacles off the side of a hachi farmer's spelt silo.) Behind her, Wookiees move and work and settle in. They waste no time, those big rugs. They climb the wroshyr like it's no feat at all-they dig their claws into the wood and move like lightning traveling up and down the bark. They jump from branches, they duck in and out of knotholes, they swing from one tree to the next. It's quite a thing to behold.

Once in a while she looks down to remind herself how far up she's come. The ground isn't even visible from here. It's hidden beneath the mist-mist that, right now, blazes with the fire of the morning sun.

She hears Solo-he's talking to Leia, to Chewie, and she considers getting up and joining them. Then someone plunks down next to her: Sinjir.

He scoots to the edge, then pulls back. "Mother of moons, why are you sitting here? And why are you eating...that?"

"Why do you still have that mustache?"

"I quite like it."

"It looks like an animal lay down to die on your lip."

"You're really too blunt for your own good, you know."

She winks, then keeps eating.

The ex-Imperial settles in next to her, though not so close that his legs drape over the edge. "You staying?" he asks her.

"Here? No."

The Wookiees have been liberated from their inhibitor chips, and the three Star Destroyers bombing the planet have been put out of commission-one destroyed utterly-but the Imperials here will still have some fight in them. Dozens of settlements dot the surface, and smaller outposts mark the margins. Even now, Chewbacca is prepping teams of Wookiees to survey the damage and the Imperial holdouts.

"Solo and Leia are staying for a time," Sinjir says.

"They're invested. I'm not. We did the job. Now the job is over."

"We did good, you know."

"I know."

"It feels good to have done good."

"I know that, too."

He leans in, eyes narrowed to suspicious lines. "So why do I get the sense that you're holding back on me?"

"I'm not holding anything back." But his scrutiny picks her apart, like a child plucking the legs off a beetle. "Fine, I'm holding something back."

"Spit it out."

"But I'm eating it," she says around a mouthful of goop.

"Not the food, the secret thing."

"Oh." She swallows. It's like pushing a clot of wet concrete down her throat. Jas smacks her lips a few times before saying: "I'm leaving."

"Leaving what?"

"The team. The crew. Whatever you call us."

"You're breaking up the band." He tsks.

"I am breaking up the band."

He sighs. "I was thinking about doing the same, honestly."

"Why?"

"Oh, you first, Emari."

"I have to get back to work."

"The job calls?"

"My debts call." Not even my debts, she thinks. Sugi's. And the deal with Rynscar haunts her, suddenly. They'll want my head if I don't pay. "I've been away from that for too long. I'll see if the NR has jobs. If not, someone will. It's a zoo out there and someone needs to catch the animals."

"If you'll still work for the NR, why not just stay with Norra?"

Jas shrugs. "She has her husband, her son. I feel like if she keeps doing what she's doing, then it'll be more of this-" She sweeps her arms to encompass not just the planet Kashyyyk but also what they did here: liberation with no cost to anyone but themselves. "And less of the get-paid-for-work business. If the NR won't have me-the scum and villainy of the world is still thick with rivalries. I'll get paid one way or the other."

"I'll miss you."

"Don't be mawkish. It doesn't suit you. Your turn. Why leave?"

"I...feel good about what we did."

"That's an odd answer."