Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 14}

JYN FELT READY IN A way she hadn’t for as long as she could remember. She sped toward Yavin 4 with a purpose; and not simply a purpose, but a plan, flimsy and delicate as a petal. She had emerged from the shuttle’s engine compartment with only a single answer, and she had found it was enough.

Her anger and resentment toward the Rebellion remained. But left unstoked, they diminished. They were both as real and as irrelevant as her old anger toward Saw Gerrera and his people.

Besides, she needed the Rebellion for what came next.

She would tell them all the truth. It can be destroyed. Someone has to destroy it.

As she stepped off the shuttle, Jyn was struck again by Yavin 4’s oppressive perfume of mildew and rotting vegetation. She was near the back of the group of her shipmates, close beside Bodhi and behind the Guardians of the Whills; Cassian had taken the lead, hurrying ahead to consult with a cluster of Intelligence officers waiting inside the hangar. K-2SO observed them all from the rear, as if he expected everyone but his master to attempt an escape.

During their landing, they’d seen other starships thundering through the atmosphere toward the ziggurat. “They’re bringing in everyone for an Alliance council meeting,” Cassian had warned them—brusquely, eyes averted. Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze were to be interviewed by Alliance Intelligence while Cassian and Jyn spoke to the council directly. Baze had shown his teeth, but Chirrut had said something about showing courtesy as guests in the rebels’ home.

Now armed rebel soldiers hustled ornately dressed aristocrats off the tarmac and toward the temple interior. Bodhi looked overwhelmed, craning his neck to watch each ship come in to land. “That’s a Firefeather starcutter,” he murmured, pointing to a black dot in the blue-gray sky. “You can tell by the whistling sound. They’re really rare—someone important must be aboard.”

“You don’t get on the council without money, guns, or influence,” Jyn answered.

Bodhi laughed nervously. After a moment, he scraped the sole of his boot against the stone and turned halfway to Jyn. “I’m sorry about Galen,” he said.

It took Jyn by surprise, though she couldn’t say why. “Thanks,” she returned.

Bodhi shrugged. “I liked him a lot. Not that I knew him very well, but I did like him—”

“You probably knew him better than me.”

Bodhi’s smile was smaller now, but there was no nervousness to it. “I don’t think so.”

Jyn was starting to sweat in the heat. She shifted uncomfortably and watched an astromech droid drift from one starship to the next without apparent purpose. Bodhi seemed to be trying to keep silent—for her benefit, probably, given his usual habit of running on.

Jyn took pity on him and gestured at his Imperial flight suit. “Bet you’ll be glad to get out of that. Got to be a change of clothes somewhere here.”

“What?” Bodhi glanced down at his arms, eyed the Imperial emblems on his shoulders. “No. No, I—I’m thinking I’ll keep it. As a reminder.”

“A reminder of what?” she asked.

Bodhi leaned in, as if embarrassed to be heard. “That I volunteered for all this. You know?”

Jyn was saved from answering by a yell from the cluster of Intelligence officers. The rebels rapidly arranged themselves around Baze, Chirrut, and Bodhi. “I’ll see you around,” Jyn called as a lieutenant gently led Bodhi away.

Cassian signaled Jyn to follow him, and they joined the stream of life flowing deep inside the ziggurat. “Come on,” Cassian said. “They’re about to start.”

The briefing room was as crude as the rest of the rebel base. Stone walls wept moisture onto bolted pipes and cabling that led between consoles and a central holoprojector. The chairs arrayed inside were far too few for the crowd: Admirals and generals in boldly stenciled uniforms stood shoulder-to-shoulder with guerrillas in piecemeal armor; nobles and civilian bureaucrats (dressed in simple clothes made of more expensive fabric than Jyn had ever owned) huddled in compact cliques. Jyn overheard murmurs suggesting some of the councilors present were Imperial senators; if she’d bothered to follow politics, she might have recognized them.

She let the bulk of an Ithorian militia commander wedge her into a corner and lost sight of Cassian. A short while later, Mon Mothma—the grave, robed woman Jyn had met days and a lifetime ago—stepped up to the holoprojector and drew the mob’s attention.

“I want to thank you all,” Mothma said, “for coming on short notice. Many of you undertook journeys whose dangers I cannot begin to appreciate. You risked exposure, crossing Imperial lines because you believe in our Alliance. Because you believed what you were told when we informed you of an unprecedented crisis.

“I wish I could say the crisis isn’t real. I wish I could say you came all this way for nothing.” Mothma offered a ghost of a smile. Someone in the audience laughed gruffly and tried to hide it in a cough.

“But the evidence we will present is not speculative. It is secretive, yes—and by showing it here, we must reveal certain sources and methods used by Alliance Intelligence; sources and methods we cannot take to the public or the Senate. You will hear testimony from both trusted rebel operatives and newfound allies. If you doubt their word, remember that all of them are marked for death by the Empire.” There were murmurs in the crowd, shuffling feet and skeptical faces. “I would ask all of you to refrain from speculation until the end of the briefing. At that time, we may discuss what we have all seen and determine the future of our organization and our galaxy together.”

Mothma hesitated. Jyn spotted General Draven shouldering his way toward the center, but he stilled when Mothma spoke again. “What we face,” she said, “is the natural culmination of all the Emperor’s evils.”

Jyn recognized the words, amended from her first encounter with Mothma. You’ve been working on this speech awhile, she thought.

“It is a weapon designed to murder planets,” Mothma went on. “To turn thriving worlds and billions-strong populations to dust. You will see today that it is not intended for use solely against military outposts, but as a weapon of absolute destruction and absolute fear.

“We believe the Empire has code-named it Death Star.”

Now Mothma did step aside. Draven took her place and began the briefing proper. Jyn tuned out his voice, the series of reports about kyber crystal mining and Imperial research credit trails, and observed the councilors instead. With few exceptions, the military officers were rapt—they had faith in Draven, for whatever reason, and they took his words as truth. The politicians maintained, as a whole, an air of neutrality, as if they’d spent their lives learning how to look open-minded.

Mon Mothma was speaking in a hushed voice with the councilors in her immediate vicinity. The woman kept busy.

Soon Draven turned the briefing over to a series of Alliance Intelligence officers. Bodhi was brought in for terse questioning about Galen Erso and the construction he’d personally witnessed. Cassian came next, every bit the professional, reporting the story of “Operation Fracture.” It was a story whose broad strokes—an attempt to contact Saw Gerrera regarding an Imperial defector, an attack on the Holy City by the Death Star itself—resembled the truth Jyn knew. The holoprojector showed the crater and the dust storm left behind on Jedha.

“The Empire is saying it was a mining accident,” a man muttered, two rows ahead of Jyn. “They’re not ready to go public, either.”

Then Cassian was lying about Eadu, calling it an aborted attempt to extract Galen. The councilors started interrupting, asking for specifics about the Empire’s plans that Cassian couldn’t provide. Jyn looked away in disgust and almost jumped when she saw that Mon Mothma had crept to her side. In the packed crowd, she felt intimately close.

“Am I up next?” Jyn asked. She laughed caustically as she guessed why Mothma had approached. “You here to prompt me?”

There had to be versions of Jyn’s story that Mon Mothma, chief of state of the Rebel Alliance, wanted told—and others she wanted silenced.

But Mothma shook her head. “No. I wanted to say…” Her gaze held on Jyn’s face as she searched for words. Jyn thought through all the trite, meaningless statements the woman might make: I’m sorry for your loss. The Rebellion is proud of you. Good luck with the crowd.

“I won’t forget what we did to you,” Mothma said.

Jyn stared and tried to comprehend the sadness in her voice.

She might have asked a question, but then Jyn heard her name being called and a gloved hand was escorting her to the front. She squared her shoulders and readied herself. She knew what she’d come to say.

Jyn told her story as concisely, as bluntly, as honestly as she was able. She recited all she could recall of Galen’s message, though the words had continued disappearing from her mind one by one. She suffered the questioning of a red-shirted senator (someone called him Rebel Finance Minister Jebel, which struck her as a title rich in potential for mockery) who seized on her extraction from Wobani; he asked whether she’d been bribed with freedom to serve as a witness, and she snapped “Yes” before spotting a grimacing Bodhi in the crowd and amending her answer. Admiral Raddus—a Mon Calamari with skin mottled like storm clouds and unblinking amber eyes—sternly asked her about her initial parting from Saw Gerrera; she made up a lie about her discomfort with Saw’s methods that seemed to satisfy him.

She spoke too softly one moment and too loud the next, unsure how well her voice carried in the briefing room. Her eyes skimmed the crowd, never landing anywhere for long. Over the course of an hour, then two, then three, she saw the councilors grow restless. Cassian and Bodhi slipped out into the depths of the ziggurat. Jyn finished by telling what had transpired on Eadu and repeating her father’s dying words.

“It can be destroyed,” she said. “It was the last thing he thought. It was the most important thing in his life.”

She felt a huskiness in her throat and stepped away from the projector before anyone could shout another question. Vague disappointment settled onto her; a sense that her words should have carried more weight, or that she should have felt the same rush from testimony as she did firing a blaster.

No one stepped up to take her place. The briefing was over.

“Senator Tynnra Pamlo of Taris.” A woman in an ivory hood and a ceremonial medallion announced herself and seized the floor, despite soft murmuring within a dozen subgroups intent on their own discussions. “It seems clear that Senator Mothma’s description of this situation as a crisis was an underexaggeration by half. General Draven and his people make a convincing case: This Death Star is an existential threat not only to our Alliance but to all life as we know it.”

New voices rose in affirmation and dispute. Pamlo was undaunted. “I say this with sincere regret and moral certainty: We cannot in good conscience risk entire worlds for our cause. The Death Star’s existence is an ultimatum we cannot refuse. Until we know that the Empire will not use it on a populated planet, we must scatter the fleet and disband our military units. We have no recourse but to surrender—”

The gathering’s pretense of civility evaporated like water droplets on an engine block. Arguments and murmuring erupted into bedlam. At once, twenty grand speeches began and rabid voices competed to be heard. Generals loosed rhetorical volleys they’d been preparing since the briefing had begun.

Jyn stood openmouthed, uncomprehending. She found herself awaiting the end of Pamlo’s speech, as if it might pivot and become a rallying cry.

She caught fragments of fervent inquiries and proclamations:

“Are we really talking about disbanding something that we’ve worked so hard to create?”

“We can’t just give in—”

One of the civilians and Admiral Raddus, their fury immediately matched and countered by a haughty man in a heavy blue cape:

“We joined an Alliance, not a suicide pact!”

Jyn swore—aloud or silent, she wasn’t sure—and spun hard enough to jostle her closest neighbor as she sought to see and absorb the will of the mob. Of all the outcomes she’d anticipated, all the ways she’d expected the Rebellion to be useless, surrender hadn’t been one of them.

“We’ve only now managed to gather our forces,” Raddus’s civilian ally—a middle-aged man entirely in brown, who seemed to command attention disproportionate to his simple garb—was saying. “If we coordinate at last—”

Finance Minister Jebel interrupted and made no attempt to hide his mockery. “Gather our forces? General Draven’s already blown up an Imperial base! I thought the Alliance was disavowing Gerrera’s tactics—”

“A decision needed to be made,” Draven snarled from across the room. “You know how this works. By the time we finish talking today there’ll be nothing left to defend!”

Jyn’s breaths became rapid hisses through clenched teeth. The briefing room was too small. The sweaty mob was crushing her. The darkness that had been the cave was creeping in at the edges of her vision, compressing her, compressing everything.

Pamlo reentered the fray. “The blood of all Taris will not be on my hands. If it’s war you want, you’ll fight alone!”

“If that’s the way it’s going, why have an Alliance at all?” asked the haughty man in blue.

“If she’s telling the truth, we need to act now!”

If.

And that from Admiral Raddus, one of the councilors Jyn had thought was listening.

What had she done wrong? What had she said wrong?

“Councilors, please!” Mon Mothma was trying to regain control. “We are all troubled by our situation, but I beg you to open yourselves to solutions from your colleagues instead of—”

Mothma’s effort did nothing. More shouting, more arguments:

“It is simple,” a general in a flight suit declared. “The Empire has the means of mass destruction. The Rebellion does not.”

“The Death Star,” Jebel sneered. “This is nonsense.”

If she’s telling the truth.

Jyn was shouting before she realized it, shoving her way back toward the projector. “What reason would my father have to lie? What benefit would it bring him?” She was mimicking the cadence, the language of the senators. She sounded awkward to herself, but she saw Mon Mothma—the woman who’d been practicing her speech for a week—nod surreptitiously in her direction.

“Your father,” Draven said, steady and hard, “may have been an Imperial or a fool until the end. Everything he said could have been bait, knowingly or not, to lure our forces into a final battle. To destroy us once and for all.”

Jyn fumbled for a reply. “That’s insane,” she snapped. She’d lost her senatorial poise already. “You know the Death Star exists—”

But Draven was ready. “We know a dangerous battle station exists, able to destroy a city. We have no confirmation of its full capabilities or weaknesses. This is how the Emperor has always operated, back to the time of the Republic—the gun is less threatening than the lie.”

The man in blue ignored Jyn altogether, stalking toward Admiral Raddus. “You want us to risk everything—based on what? The testimony of a criminal? The dying words of her father—an Imperial scientist?”

Jebel laughed in anger and frustration. “Don’t forget the Imperial pilot.”

Jyn sought Bodhi and found him, back in the room again and forlorn against the wall. He didn’t speak up, didn’t defend himself. Jyn might have screamed at him if he’d been closer. If the darkness hadn’t been closing in so fast.

She squeezed her eyes shut and thought of the girl in her arms from the Holy Quarter. She thought of the broken temple and the Guardians of the Whills and her mother’s whispers.

She had delivered her father’s message, and it wasn’t enough.

“My father,” Jyn said, “gave his life so that we might have a chance to defeat this.”

“So you’ve told us,” a deep, steady voice replied. She saw the white-haired general she’d met her first time on Yavin; the man who hadn’t said a thing.

He seemed to be prompting her.

She wasn’t just Galen’s daughter. This wasn’t just his mission.

“If the Empire has this kind of power,” Senator Pamlo called, “what chance do we have?”

“What chance do we have?” Jyn echoed. She wanted to scream, Who the hell cares? But she needed a better answer. “The question is What choice? You want to run? Hide? Plead for mercy? Scatter your forces?” Her breathing was too fast and loud. Her skin felt hot. The councilors were falling silent one by one. Mon Mothma watched her, lips parted as if she could feed Jyn the right words.

She heard Saw Gerrera instead. You can stand to see the Imperial flag reign across the galaxy?

She didn’t stop speaking, wrapped herself in her own momentum and found the senators’ language again, backed it with ferocity. “You give way to an enemy this evil with this much power and you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of submission. The Empire doesn’t care if you surrender. The Empire doesn’t care if you’re hopeless. I’ve given up before, and it doesn’t help. It doesn’t stop. I’ve seen people lose everything because they happened to be in the way.

“The time to fight is now, while we’re still alive to try. Every moment you waste is another step closer to the ashes of Jedha.”

There were new voices rising in the room. She saw none of the speakers, recognized no one:

“What is she proposing?”

“Just let the girl speak!”

So Jyn spoke. “Send your best troops to Scarif.” The crowd was an undifferentiated blur behind a veil of sweat or tears. “Send the whole rebel fleet if you have to. We need to capture the Death Star plans if there is any hope of destroying it.”

She strained to breathe again. As she did, a smeared ivory figure parted the crowd and approached. Through the blur, Jyn recognized her voice as belonging to Senator Pamlo.

Pamlo was very nearly pleading. “You’re asking us to invade an Imperial installation based on nothing but hope?”

Jyn shrugged, unable to feign a senator’s diction any longer. “Rebellions are built on hope.”

“There is no hope,” the man in blue said, like a preacher pronouncing an omen.

With that, the arguing began anew. Calls to fight and calls to surrender filled the chamber. The movement of dozens of bodies struggling for a place near the projector pushed Jyn back and she limply permitted it. The momentum was gone and her strength with it. She waited for the darkness to return.

She’d tried.

“I’m sorry, Jyn.” Mon Mothma touched her upper arm, turned her gently. “Without the full support of the council, the odds are too great.”

I won’t forget what we did to you.

Jyn said nothing and walked out of the briefing room.

Jyn spotted Bodhi hurrying after her in the dank maze of hallways beyond the briefing room. She was trying to retrace her path out of the ziggurat—not really sure of her ultimate destination, but set on putting distance between herself and the council. Maybe she’d keep walking into the jungle; if Bodhi wanted to follow, she wouldn’t argue. She’d kept worse company.

She thought about apologizing to him. She’d blamed him for not speaking up during the chaos, which on reflection hardly seemed fair. He wouldn’t have changed anything.

They stepped into the hangar bay before she could decide whether to say anything. Jyn shielded her face from a shower of sparks as a technician and her astromech welded armor plating onto a nearby X-wing. When she lowered her arm she saw Chirrut and Baze standing before her.

“They didn’t lock you up?” she asked. “The debrief really was just a debrief?” She tried to force levity into her voice. It came out bitter.

“You don’t look happy,” Baze said.

Jyn shrugged. “They prefer to surrender.” It wasn’t true—not for every councilor—but it was close enough.

“And you?” Baze was as somber as ever.

Chirrut gestured toward Jyn with his staff. “She wants to fight.”

It’s all I’ve ever done, she thought. It’s the only answer I have.

Only this time, she believed it was the right one.

“So do I,” Bodhi said, stepping around to her side. “We all do.”

“The Force is strong,” Chirrut said, and it sounded like a promise.

She looked at the blind man, the killer, and the coward in front of her in wonder and confusion.

She didn’t know them—not really, not when they’d barely spoken outside of shouting matches aboard the U-wing. She’d half expected to never see them again after the briefing.

But in front of the councilors, she had wrestled with the words to convey the horrors of the past days. Tried to express all that had happened, all the Empire had taken, without exposing her wounds to the rebels’ eyes—without revealing the shame of her most pitiable, contemptible moments, when she’d been shaken by loss and trapped in her own fears.

Bodhi and the Guardians already knew the horrors and her shame. They’d fought and nearly died together. They’d seen Jyn fall and claw her way back. And they were still with her.

They looked willing to take on the galaxy, no matter that they didn’t have a chance. She couldn’t help but smile, small and sad and sincere.

“I’m not sure four of us is quite enough,” she said.

Baze grunted dismissively and looked to Bodhi. “How many do we need?”

“What are you talking about?” Jyn asked.

Baze jutted a finger, pointing behind Jyn. When she turned around, she saw more than a dozen rebel soldiers marching down the corridor, pouring out into the hangar and blocking the entrance to the ziggurat. She recognized Melshi, the rebel she’d hit with a shovel on Wobani; the others were strangers, young and old men dressed in sandy combat fatigues too patchwork to be called uniforms. Their weapons gleamed with well-oiled care. An amphibious Drabatan with skin worn and gray as baked leather showed a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth; a bald-headed man with bright, dangerous eyes offered a nod. Towering in the back was K-2SO; emerging at the fore came Cassian, chin high and back straight.

He looked like he was ready to arrest her.

“They were never going to believe you,” Cassian said. “Not the council. Not today.”

“I appreciate the support,” she said. Her voice was frigid. Her hands balled into fists. She was surprised how little she wanted this fight.

She positioned herself between Bodhi and Cassian. After what the pilot and the Guardians had said, she was ready to do what was necessary to save them from the Alliance’s goons.

“But I do,” Cassian said. “I believe you.”

Her eyes flickered from Cassian to the soldiers. They were armed, but their postures were relaxed. Their weapons were down. A few even looked amused.

“We’d like to volunteer,” Cassian said.

She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anything the galaxy could throw at her. “Why?”

He smiled, and it died on his face. “Some of us—” He hesitated, waited until Jyn’s gaze had met his. “—most of us, we’ve done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if it were the most obvious truth in the world. “We’re spies. Saboteurs. Assassins.”

Jyn spared another glance at the soldiers. They were looking at her, one and all, as if awaiting judgment.

Was this a confession?

“Everything I did,” Cassian said, “I did for the Rebellion. And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it.” He was almost stumbling over his sentences, forcing each out before he lost his nerve. Like a man wrenching a dislocated limb into place, one agonizing pull at a time.

He went on: “Without that—without a cause—we’re lost. Everything we’ve done would have been for nothing. I couldn’t face myself if I gave up now. None of us could.”

Don’t do this, she wanted to say. I can’t give you absolution.

Instead she looked at the band he’d assembled and whispered with a sort of awe, “How did you find them?”

“It’s been a busy day,” he said, too dry to be devoid of humor. “I didn’t need to see the whole briefing to know where it was going.”

“I can’t—” she started. I can’t give you a cause. But she stepped back unsteadily and saw the ferocity, the need in Cassian’s eyes mirrored in each of the soldiers. Whatever they’d seized on, it was no longer hers to give. She could no more refuse them than Cassian could have refused her after Jedha.

She gave a curt nod. Someone in the group laughed.

“It won’t be comfortable.” Bodhi was speaking behind her, looking between the soldiers and the tarmac where the cargo shuttle sat. “It’ll be a bit cramped, but we’ll all fit. We could go.”

“Okay,” Cassian said. The emotion was gone from his voice, the confession done. He turned to the soldiers. “Gear up. Grab anything that’s not nailed down—we don’t know what we’ll find on Scarif and we don’t have long to prep. Go!”

The soldiers scattered, moving with purpose and surety. Bodhi and the Guardians joined them. Only Cassian and K-2 remained. The droid looked down at her. “Jyn,” he said. “I’ll be there for you. Cassian said I had to.”

She held back a laugh and looked to Cassian. The man who’d betrayed her. The man who’d admitted his guilt and decided to fight for her. He saw her staring and looked back at her quizzically.

It wasn’t how betrayals were supposed to go.

And she remembered that while Cassian—and Bodhi and the Guardians—had seen her at her worst, she had seen them broken, too. Bodhi, who had been tortured; the Guardians, who had lost their home; and Cassian, who had betrayed himself as easily as he had Jyn. They all had their shame.

With one another, at least, they had no vulnerabilities left.

She thought of Wobani again, when she’d been alone among a thousand other prisoners.

“I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad,” she said, by way of explanation.

She didn’t know if Cassian really understood, but he said, “Welcome home,” and she knew she was.

Twenty minutes later, weighed down with weapons and duffels full of stolen gear, Jyn and Cassian stepped out of the bright Yavin sunlight and into the cabin of the cargo shuttle. There were, Jyn thought, even more faces than before, more scarred and sweaty and determined soldiers than she’d seen in the hangar. She realized with a pang that she likely wouldn’t have time to learn their names before they arrived on Scarif—that soon they’d all be fighting for their lives together on a mission that was very likely to fail.

Jyn spotted Baze and Chirrut among the rebels. Chirrut’s head was turned toward her, and he raised his staff like a salute or a toast. She remembered a saying from her days with Saw Gerrera and spoke loud enough to be heard through the shuffling of the unit.

“May the Force be with us.”

“Cargo shuttle, we have a pushback request here. Read back, please: Request denied. You are not cleared for takeoff.”

Bodhi winced at the comm and peered out the viewport at the tarmac. The flight droids had already tugged the shuttle away from the ziggurat hangar; that gave him room to initiate a vertical liftoff without worrying about igniting an inconveniently placed fuel tank.

“Yes, yes we are cleared,” he said. “Affirmative. Requesting a recheck.”

It was a bad plan. It had all been a bad plan, of course, starting with Galen’s message and ending with this unauthorized raid on Scarif. Now he was, what—defecting from his defection? If he survived, he’d be an Imperial traitor and a rebel mutineer. He’d be lucky to see the inside of a Yavin prison cell.

He wondered if there was a Bor Gullet on Yavin, too. He doubted it. He could take comfort in that.

“I’m not seeing this request here,” the comm said.

He thought about his passengers. Like him, they were going rogue, courting treason by defying the Alliance council. They’d already pilfered enough Alliance weapons and gear to supply an army; and Bodhi had seen enough of the operation on Yavin to know equipment was in short supply.

He wasn’t sure if that made the personnel on-base more or less likely to shoot the shuttle down. They’d want to recover the stolen gear, at least…

“Are you sure everything’s been processed?” Bodhi tried. “Someone should’ve authorized it by now.”

He flipped a series of toggles and checked for warning lights. The mass–volume ratio was confusing the computer—a packed cargo pod normally meant forty tons of ore, not a ship full of soldiers—but it wouldn’t do any harm.

He thought about all the bad bets he’d made in his life—the times he’d sunk everything on a long shot in order to win back what he’d lost, only to end up with nothing. Was that all he was doing now with Jyn and the others? Doubling a bad bet?

It didn’t feel like that. There was none of the heady uncertainty, the mix of hope and despair. When he thought about what he was doing, he was almost calm.

“What’s your call sign?” the voice on the comm asked.

“Yes, we have it…” Just take off! “It’s, ah—”

Think, Bodhi. Give them something. Give them anything.

If you give them something, they might not shoot.

“—call sign Rogue. Rogue One.”

He transferred power to the thrusters, felt the familiar wobble of a cargo shuttle taking off under his control. The officer on the other end of the comm was squawking at him. Bodhi ignored it.

“Rogue One,” he declared, “pulling away!”

At the age of fifteen, during the winter when she’d discovered smashball, romance, and her parents’ profound imperfections, Mon Mothma had decided to devote her life to studying history; decided to turn her back on her family’s political dynasty and to spend her days in a cramped study reading thousand-year-old diaries and letters and cargo manifests until her eyes burned. She would be detective, coroner, and philosopher all at once, examining means and motive and cause of death for entire civilizations.

She hadn’t become a historian, of course. By the next summer, Mon’s moment of rebellion had been forgotten. Inertia and family pressures and a genuine love of governance had returned her to the road to politics. She’d gone on to become a senator (far too young, she thought now) and scrabbled for votes and smiled and kept her head above water until she’d learned how to play the game for real.

She’d campaigned for an end to one war and now—with evenhanded hypocrisy—had built an army while trying to prevent another. She’d fled her home and a life to become the Empire’s most wanted woman and leader of a revolution. And she couldn’t help but wonder what her fifteen-year-old self would have said about the Rebel Alliance, looking back on it from some distant future:

For all their self-importance, the rebel leaders lacked the courage to transform their network of paramilitary cells and sympathetic politicians into more than a curiosity. Their inability to commit to a course of action ensured the Empire’s growth and the delegitimization of any future protest movements…

Mon was accustomed to failure and self-judgment. But the thought still stung.

The briefing room was nearly empty now. Voices worn from screaming had gone silent, and men and women who’d traveled across the galaxy to reach Yavin had retired to their ships or to more private consultations. There had been no consensus or formal vote, and Mon was grateful for that much. Given the tenor of the discussions, a swift decision could only have ended badly.

Mon would not sleep tonight. She planned to spend the hours until the council reconvened in discussion with her peers and reaching out to allies who might salvage something from the situation. And while she wasn’t yet sure what there was to salvage, she knew who to start with.

Bail Organa, the former senator from Alderaan, seemed to be waiting for her near the briefing room door. “You spoke well,” he said as she approached, with funereal gravity.

She smiled wanly and wondered if she looked as exhausted as he did. She had considered Bail a partner since the day they’d first discussed opposing Palpatine’s rise to power. In all the years since—throughout all the arguments over Bail’s charitable interventions and her covert dealings—she couldn’t remember the lines in his face ever seeming so deep.

“Despite what the others say, war is inevitable,” she mused with a sigh. “Senator Pamlo has noble instincts, but she’s wrong: If the Empire used the weapon at Jedha, it will use it again. We can’t prevent these genocides, but only resist them.”

Bail nodded, the motion so small it seemed like all he could muster. “I agree. I must return to Alderaan to inform my people that there will be no peace.” Mon heard his pain at that admission and wondered what it would cost him. “We will need every advantage,” he added grimly.

It took Mon a moment to comprehend. Then she glanced to the closest other councilors and lowered her voice. “Your friend,” she said. “The Jedi.”

Bail nodded again. “He served me well during the Clone Wars and has lived in hiding since the Emperor’s purge.” He appeared to wait for Mon’s verdict, but she had nothing to offer. At last he finished, “Yes, I will send for him.”

A Jedi, returning to fight against the Empire. It seemed an impossible thought, so Mon focused on what was not. “Captain Antilles’s ship is docked with the Profundity for repairs, but it’s nearly ready to go. The extraction should be simple; if it’s not, his skills will be an asset.”

“My assessment as well,” Bail said.

“Whoever makes contact with the Jedi will have a terrible responsibility.” Mon knew who Bail had in mind—it was clear in the tired lines of his face; in the fear of a man who had never previously feared the Emperor’s blackest vengeance. She was reluctant to doubt his decisions, but she needed to be certain. “You’ll need someone you can trust.”

“I would trust her with my life,” he said.

You’ll need to trust her with more, Mon thought, but he was already on his way out the door. And for all her reservations about Bail’s agent (the girl was so young, no matter anything else), she could think of no one better.

The matter was resolved, then.

Mon Mothma squeezed the exhaustion out of her eyes and considered who to speak with next.