Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(79)

Everything starts to go black.

Her eyelids flutter.

Then she finds it. Her fingers close around cold metal.

It happens fast, but feels slow. She jams the unignited blade against Remi’s temple. His eyes are round and suddenly afraid.

The red blade spears through his skull. His eyelids strain open. The eyes themselves cook and go red before burning to cinder.

He drops.

Kiza stands, adjusting her mask.

Then she lets the anger take her anew, and she resumes her assault. Soon, the outpost falls. Soon, the Acolytes claim triumph.





War is coming.

Leia sits and tries not to think about it. She doesn’t turn on the HoloNet. She doesn’t go to her balcony on Chandrila and look up in the sky to see the fleet gathering in orbit. Instead, she sits on a chair in the room that will very soon serve as the nursery to her son. The cradle sits nearby. Next to it is the sanctuary tree, the one given to her by the little Ewok, Wicket. She’s never been able to feel the tree—the so-called serpent’s puzzle—with the Force, but she can see with her eyes that the burnished golden bark shines with health, and every day the twining branches sport new scarlet leaves.

But her baby boy? Him she can effortlessly feel inside her. Not just the way that all mothers can feel the living creature within, but she can feel him with the invisible hands of the Force: With it she senses the margins of his burgeoning mind, she knows his mood, she can tell that he’s healthy. He is less a human-shaped thing and more a pulsing, living band of light. Light that sometimes dims, that sometimes is thrust through with a vein of darkness. She tells herself that it’s normal—Luke said to her, Leia, we all have that. He explained that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

Right now her son is upset, tumbling inside her as if he can’t get comfortable. His light, flickering with the dark. She centers herself and concentrates. The walls of the room fall away. Everything is white and then it’s black. Then she’s in the calm, airless void. As Leia finds her peace, so does her son. He stops turning…

Then he gets the hiccups.

Hic. Hic. Hic.

She sighs and it brings her out of it. But she laughs, too. Because the hiccups tickle her. They’re like little bubbles inside—a curious effervescence like nothing Leia has ever felt before.

My son is alive. The future is bright.

That bright future casts dark shadows, though, and now war is again on the horizon. Not a new war—no, the same war they’ve been fighting all this time. A war that began as a rebellion and soon transformed into a proper struggle between the Empire and the Republic. Now, she hopes, this will finish it. The future is bright, yes, but only if this goes well. Only if the Empire burns out in a searing flash, gone to ash.

Han comes home not long after, and he finds her there in the room. He tells her only a little about what happened on Nakadia, but it’s enough for her to know that he had a hand in making things right.

“That’s what you’re good at,” she tells him, reaching up to meet him as he stoops down. “Making things right.”

She kisses his cheek. He looks aw-shucks embarrassed.

“It’s happening,” he says. “Jakku.”

“I know.”

“It’s gonna be one helluva battle. It might get bad.”

“I know that, too.”

He chews his lip. “It feels weird, doesn’t it?”

“Not being there, you mean.”

“Yeah. You, me, Luke. Chewie. The Falcon. Those two walking talking garbage cans. It feels weird we’re not part of it.”

“We’ve got our own adventure.” She pats her belly.

“End of an era,” he says.

“And the start of a new one.”

The baby turns inside her again, troubled by something she cannot feel and cannot yet understand.

—

War is coming.

And hopefully soon after, it ends. Sinjir cares little for the vagaries of war—he tells himself he has no investment in whether the New Republic wins or loses even as he feels himself looking forward to the demise of the Empire he once served. Rather, he needs the war because that is the only way he fears he’ll ever get to see Jas and Norra again.

“Ow,” Conder says, wincing. “You’re not paying attention to what you’re doing again.”

“I’m paying attention perfectly,” Sinjir says, screwing a small plug of absorbent fiber-cloth into Conder’s nose. The slicer winces and pulls away.

“Your mind is wandering like a child at a toy market.”

Sinjir shrugs. “Fine, yes, perhaps. Sorry. I’m more used to causing pain than soothing it.” He winds another bit of cloth into the other nostril.

The two of them are back on Chandrila. Solo brought them home. They toyed with staying on Nakadia for a time, but Conder frowned at the notion, saying that the pastoral planet made Chandrila look like Coruscant. It’s all just…crops, he said at the time, and Sinjir was inclined to agree.

Now Sinjir works to mend the slicer’s abused face. Bacta, gauze, fiber-cloth, and a good old-fashioned needle-and-thread. The worst hit was the last one Conder took—the one they heard over the comlink.

“I must commend you again,” Sinjir says. “A transceiver tooth? Genius. And I never knew.” That’s how Conder broadcast to them—using his tongue to slowly, arduously flip to their comlink channel. The broadcast ended when that Herglic thug whapped him in the face.