Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 4}

IF JEDHA HAD EVER BEEN more than a barren rock of a moon, some years or centuries past, Jyn couldn’t see it now. There was nothing to see from space—no great oceans, no churning clouds. No glittering cities of metal and glass that spread across continents like mold. Only amber dust and cold desert.

“That’s Jedha,” Cassian announced. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

Winds tore at the U-wing as it breached the atmosphere, rocking the vessel and causing Jyn to sway in the cockpit doorway. It was enough to leave her nauseated—Cassian and the droid seemed unperturbed—and she retreated to the cabin for the landing. Unwanted images of Saw Gerrera, of Galen Erso (My father is alive. My father is a bastard…) crept into her mind, spilling out of the hatch and crawling behind her eyes like parasites.

She couldn’t afford to sit and think. She’d go mad. Ignore the nausea and do something useful, she told herself.

By the time the transport alit on a cracked desert mesa, Jyn had already sorted through everything she might need on the moon’s surface: thermal layering—gloves and jacket and hood—to ward off the chill; a pair of combat truncheons for close-quarters fights; a satchel full of codebreakers and ration packs and maps, because she’d found them on the U-wing and she had an empty satchel to fill. While Cassian and K-2SO were still in the cockpit, she left the ship and found a seat on a boulder like an icy knife.

From there, she looked onto the valley and toward the distant walls of the city—the Holy City, Jedha City, NiJedha, depending on whose data bank you checked. Dust and smoke obscured dully painted spires and palisades, ancient stone plazas and gold-topped manors. From so far away, the settlement looked like a smudged painting of a history Jyn didn’t recognize. All she could make out with certainty were the shuttlecraft drifting like flies near the belly of an Imperial Star Destroyer hovering overhead. Where the city was rough and decayed, the Destroyer was sleek and impermeable.

Cassian and the droid emerged from the U-wing behind her, sending small pebbles tumbling down the side of the mesa.

“What’s with the Destroyer?” she asked.

“The Empire’s been sending those since Saw Gerrera started attacking their cargo shipments,” Cassian said.

That didn’t surprise Jyn. You don’t stop Saw Gerrera with a few extra TIE fighters. She wondered if she was proud or simply resigned to Saw’s doggedness.

“What are they bringing in?” she asked.

“It’s ‘what are they taking out?’ ” Cassian passed a set of quadnocs to Jyn. She raised them to her eyes, scanned the horizon, let the automatic tracking systems fix and zoom in on one of the shuttlecraft. She saw a half dozen cargo crates colored hazard-orange strapped to the undercarriage, but she didn’t spot any markings.

“Kyber crystal,” Cassian went on. “All they can get. We believe the Empire is using it as fuel for the weapon.”

“The planet killer?” She sounded more sardonic than she felt.

“You don’t think it’s real?”

Jyn shrugged and passed back the quadnocs. “Could be. Your boss was right when she said it seems like the sort of thing the Empire would do—”

“The natural culmination of everything the Emperor has done,” Cassian corrected. His lips curled in a wry smile.

“Either way. It’s not surprising the Empire wants a planet killer. It’d just be surprising if it works.”

The droid spoke cheerfully. “It might not. Not much crystal left at this point.”

Jyn glanced at K-2 and found herself eyeing his Imperial markings. “Maybe we should leave target practice here behind.”

“Are you talking about me?” the droid asked.

Cassian straightened and tugged his jacket tighter as the wind picked up. “She’s right,” he said. “We need to blend in. Stay with the ship.”

“I can blend in,” K-2SO returned. It wasn’t so much a protest as a declaration.

Jyn snorted. “With Saw’s forces? Or the Imperials? Half the people here want to reprogram you. The other half want to put a hole in your head.”

“I’m surprised you’re so concerned with my safety.”

Jyn turned back to the city and the valley, trying to guess at the distance they’d need to cover. You overpacked, she decided, and tossed her satchel to K-2SO. “I’m not concerned,” she said. “I’m just worried our enemies might miss you and hit me.”

Cassian had already started walking. Jyn followed. When the droid called, “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she pretended not to hear.

Bodhi Rook couldn’t see the creature in the cave. When he craned his neck, tried to squirm out of his bonds or pull himself away from the chair, the shadows of the cave seemed to crawl—wriggling, like the ocean creatures he’d seen in an aquarium as a child. The shadows writhed and played in long wisps and blunt stubs—but when he tried to focus on them, to bring a single tendril into view out of the dark, he saw nothing. No motion but the flicker of lanterns in his peripheral vision.

“Bor Gullet can feel your thoughts,” said the ghost.

Saw Gerrera was watching. He was outside the cave, the cell that contained Bodhi and the creature. Safe. But watching.

“Don’t do this,” Bodhi said, barely loud enough to hear. “Don’t do this, please.” He mumbled things, incoherent things, pleading things, because it was all he knew how to do.

The sores on his feet, the chill in his fingers, the dehydration and bruises—these were discomforts he could survive. They were discomforts he understood. He’d suffered before, gone through sleep deprivation during pilot training. He was afraid of pain, yes; but the thing in the shadows repelled him, offended him on a level too intimate for words.

“No lie is safe,” Saw Gerrera said.

The shadows were crawling toward Bodhi now, swirling around the base of his chair. They smelled cloying as blooming flowers. He held his breath, tried to shrink back into his seat.

“What have you really brought me, cargo pilot? Bor Gullet will know the truth.”

Bodhi felt a touch on his shoulders, on his neck, feather-light and almost gentle. When he trembled, however, the touch became painful, like his flesh was being pinched in a vise. He thought he was saying, I never lied to you. I never lied! But he couldn’t hear his voice.

The tendrils found his forehead. He felt his hair press tight against his skull as something wrapped about him. He closed his eyes. His body felt cold and clammy with sweat he was too dehydrated to exude, and pinpricks of fire burned at his temples.

These are a few of the things that Bodhi saw:

His mother, her hands over his own, showing him how to cut a vegetable stalk with a knife in the family kitchen. His mother never let Bodhi handle knives, but this time was different because she felt sorry for him and he couldn’t recall why. He was certain the reason would break his heart. There was something he had lost. He would have wept if he had not begun to see—

Misurno, his teacher, his copilot on the Fentersohn run, who would while away the journey talking about his years shooting pirates and rebels and Separatist holdouts in a starfighter; whose breath stank and who joked loudly about how badly he’d treated cadets, but who’d drunkenly called Bodhi his best friend, his only friend.

Galen Erso, who looked not entirely unlike Misurno, telling Bodhi, “There is nothing brave about blind obedience. The simplest droid does what it’s told—never questioning or deciding. If you want to know what we’re building, Bodhi Rook, you could simply ask.” And he hadn’t asked, not then, not yet.

His cargo shuttle in flames, his hands burning as he worked the controls, trying to gain altitude, to keep out of the streams of particle bolts from the ground as the rebels shot at him. Someone was screaming in the aft compartment but he couldn’t do anything, just fly, just hope the stormtroopers or the TIE fighters would intervene…

Bodhi wasn’t sure if these things had happened at all.

He could no longer remember how to breathe, and felt the strain in his lungs.

“The unfortunate side effect,” the ghost voice of Saw Gerrera said, “is that one tends to lose one’s mind.”

From a distance, the city had seemed as silent as the desert—its desolation broken only by the rumble of starships like wind. But up close, the streets were awash with the sounds of daily life in Jedha: the shuffle of foot traffic and the shouts and clatter of merchants, the monotone chanting of pilgrims and the hum of machinery. Threaded among these noises were the sounds of occupation: distorted voices of stormtroopers demanding scandocs at checkpoints, the roar of uncontrolled fires in contested sectors, and the echo of distant, sporadic blaster volleys.

Jyn knew the sounds of occupation well. They were the sounds of home.

“We’ve got a good few hours of daylight left,” Cassian said. Jyn followed him through a curtain and into a pockmarked alley-turned-living room for a colony of Kubaz; the two ignored the long-snouted aliens and picked their way around blankets and sizzling cookpots as they walked. “We’ll probably need them. There’s a curfew at sunset, and I don’t fancy a walk back through the desert after dark.”

“No sightseeing, then?”

“No sightseeing.”

As they turned a corner and exited a second curtain, they passed into a tightly packed crowd constrained by a narrow street. Jyn brushed against a passerby, then felt a jolt as someone shoved her to one side. Her hand went under her jacket, sought her truncheon, as her assailant snarled, “You better watch yourself!”

Spoiling for a fight. Her gaze caught the man’s face—a barely human mien distorted from burns or scarring—and moved to a second individual—Aqualish, all tusks and bulbous black eyes—behind him.

She could take them both. Her heart was suddenly racing. She smiled coldly.

“No, no—” Cassian grasped her arm, tugged her back into the flow of the crowd. “We don’t want any trouble. Sorry.”

The surge of adrenaline left her. Without a distraction at hand her mind returned, unprompted, to an image of her father’s face—a face nearly fifteen years out of date, but still the face of the man who’d abandoned her to serve the Empire. She kicked at the dust, shook her head when Cassian started to speak. “So what now?” she asked.

If he noticed her discomfort, he didn’t show it. Good for him, she thought.

“I had a contact,” he said. “One of Saw’s rebels, but he’s just gone missing. His sister will be looking for him.”

“Sweet family.”

“The temple’s been destroyed but she’ll be there waiting. There’re enough pilgrims around to make it a decent place to hide in plain sight, use as a dead drop. We’ll give her your name and hope that gets us a meeting with Saw.”

“Hope?” She eyed Cassian dubiously. “Is that the best Rebel Intelligence can do?”

Cassian might as well have shrugged. “Rebellions are built on hope,” he said.

The crowd thinned out one street over. Jyn drew up her hood as they passed a squad of stormtroopers knocking on doors and manhandling residents. She didn’t reach for a weapon this time; she’d be too tempted to use it. She tuned out the pleas of the Jedha citizens instead and zeroed in on the words of an Imperial propaganda hologram shimmering nearby. Something about an armed fugitive in a stolen Imperial flight suit.

She waited until they were out of earshot of the troopers and then asked, “Is this all because of your pilot?”

Cassian didn’t bother answering the question. “Wait for me,” he said, and disappeared into the crush of bodies.

Jyn grunted an assent and began a slow orbit of a tight cluster of merchant stalls. She made a show of turning her head to study the contents of the shops—hand-knit fabrics, fruit so brown and spotted that it had to have been grown locally, shards of stone ostensibly from ruined shrines within the wastelands—and avoided eye contact with the hawkers. She could still hear the propaganda hologram in the distance (“goes by the name Bodhi Rook”), but a pilgrim’s chanting rose in volume until it drowned out almost everything else. Over and over, a simple refrain: “May the Force of others be with you.”

She picked up a palm-sized heater that a merchant promptly slapped from her hand. Her mind began to drift and she feared she’d start thinking of Saw again, of Galen Erso, yet the chant resounded inside her skull. It followed her as she walked, until she was sure that the pilgrim responsible had fallen in behind her.

She snapped a glance over her shoulder. The chant ended. At Jyn’s back was an ancient woman with withered hands, currently haggling over the heater Jyn had set down. Not her chanter.

“Would you trade that necklace for a glimpse into your future?”

The voice of the pilgrim. Jyn frowned and took another step forward, trying to locate the source.

“Yes, I’m speaking to you.” Without the monotone sobriety of the chant, the voice seemed touched with gentle humor.

She found the speaker at last, seated on the ground a few steps down the line of stalls. He was dressed simply, in a dark shirt and charcoal robe in the local style, and his smooth skin fought gamely against the years that infected his words. His eyes were milky and unfocused, and at his side lay a sturdy wooden staff in the dust. Are there trees left on Jedha? Jyn wondered.

“Your necklace?” the man repeated.

Jyn felt the crystal against her skin. Her necklace was still hidden, buried under layers of cloth.

And the man was blind.

“I am Chirrut Îmwe,” the man said.

“How did you know I was wearing a necklace?” Jyn asked, and felt like a fool, like a mark, even as she spoke.

Chirrut’s next words only confirmed her instinct. “For that answer you must pay.”

It was the reply of a con artist. Jyn shook her attention from Chirrut to search for his partner (he must have had a partner, one who had spotted her necklace somehow) and immediately found her quarry: a hulk of a man with hair as wild as Chirrut’s was neat, in a filthy civilian flight suit and battered red plastoid armor half concealed under a wearable tarp. On his back was a generator unit connected to the blaster cannon he held casually in one hand. He stood with the stoic confidence of a bodyguard, unafraid of thieves or stormtroopers.

“How did you know I was wearing a necklace?” Jyn asked the second man, who shook his head slowly and snorted. Under other circumstances, she might have admired his weapon. Now she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“What do you know of kyber crystals?” Chirrut asked. His tone was patient, prompting.

She should have turned away. Refused to be lured in. Yet Chirrut’s voice seemed to resonate like his chant and demand an answer.

“My father,” she eventually said, and it tasted less bitter than she expected. “He said they powered the Jedi lightsabers.”

Chirrut nodded approvingly. Jyn half parted her lips, tried to speak before the blind man’s voice could enter her skull again, but another sound broke the spell instead. “Jyn.” Cassian, sharp and low. “Come on.”

She wrenched away from Chirrut, took three strides at Cassian’s side before the pilgrim’s next words found her: “The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.”

Her necklace seemed to burn in the cold.

“Let’s go,” Cassian urged.

She couldn’t help glancing back once at the pilgrim (or the con man) and his partner. But she shrugged off Cassian’s guiding hand and trailed him willingly down the street. “We’re not here to make friends,” he muttered. “Not with those guys.”

“Who are they?”

“The Guardians of the Whills. Protectors of the Temple of the Kyber. But there’s nothing left to protect, so now they’re just causing trouble for everybody.”

She frowned. “What kind of trouble?”

Cassian turned his head in a slow arc as if checking for pursuit. “For the Guardians, anyone who’s not a pilgrim is intruding on holy ground. The Empire calls them strays… used to be domesticated, still beg for scraps, but they’ve really gone feral. Look at them wrong and they’ll bite your hand in a second.”

“You’ll make me like them,” Jyn said. She tried to push their faces, Chirrut’s voice, out of her brain. They probably were con men, even if they’d been zealots once. Beyond that, she didn’t know enough about the local religions to speculate; pilgrims from a hundred faiths came to the moon from across the galaxy, and all of them blurred together into the same pathetic cult, chanting and moaning and squirming under the Empire’s boot.

Cassian didn’t reply. His pace picked up.

“You seem awfully tense all of a sudden,” she said. “What were you doing back there?”

“Spotted an old associate. He didn’t have any better line on Saw Gerrera, but he’s been hearing rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?”

They were drawing closer to the Holy Quarter, and the character of the streets was changing. The roads grew wider—just as ancient, but no longer touched by the centuries of expansion, of the layering of building onto building by residents and merchants. The vendors and their customers were fewer, replaced by pilgrims in bright-red kaftans and hoods and shawls.

“This search for the pilot,” Cassian said. “The door-to-door inspections… there were shootings last night, an elderly couple dead in their home, others civilians rounded up. No one’s sure if they were innocent or if they knew something about the defector, but word is out that Saw Gerrera is planning reprisals.”

“That doesn’t sound like Saw,” Jyn said. Cassian threw her a skeptical look, and she hastily explained, “Not that he wouldn’t arrange revenge attacks, but if he were that easily baited they’d have caught him long ago.”

Cassian frowned in thought and seemed to process the words.

“Could be my associate was wrong,” he said. “Could be it’s one of Saw’s people arranging the attack without oversight from Saw himself. Or it could be Saw thinks the Empire is vulnerable right now—distracted by the search or something else we don’t know about.

“Regardless, we have to hurry. This town—it’s ready to blow.”

They passed a mural, colors long since faded to muddy indecipherability. Jyn saw chips in the stone and a grenade fragment lodged into the wall. She laughed gutturally. “We’re a little late for that,” she said, though she didn’t slow her stride.

They arrived on an upper-level street overlooking a large plaza. The shadow of a descending Imperial cargo shuttle spread over the ground while a squad of stormtroopers rousted sleeping forms out of doorways and shoved them headlong into neighboring streets, waved blaster rifles at pilgrims, and barked orders. Jyn was surprised by the aggression—at close quarters, one squad couldn’t suppress a riot—until she saw the assault tank rumbling around a corner to join the Imperial forces. Its blaster cannons could have leveled a city block. Jyn didn’t doubt its pilots were eager for a challenge.

Secured to the back of the tank were the same orange cargo crates she’d seen while spying on the city from afar. The kyber crystals, mined from the ground or stolen from holy sites.

The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.

She indicated the crates to Cassian with a nod. His attention was elsewhere. He was scanning the rooftops, his gaze flickering back periodically to the civilians lined up along the edge of the plaza. To a person, the onlookers were garbed in thick, bulky cloaks and overcoats.

When Jyn recognized what was happening, she was surprised the stormtroopers hadn’t already opened fire. But the Imperials appeared entirely—almost pitiably—oblivious.

“How far is your contact? The sister of Saw’s man?” she asked, barely louder than a breath.

“Half a dozen blocks over,” Cassian murmured. “But I don’t think she’s going to stick around.”

A wrinkled Duros scampered up the stairs from the lower level and past Jyn and Cassian, red beetle eyes avoiding the now grounded shuttle, the tank, and every living creature nearby.

“Tell me you have a backup plan,” Jyn said. “You want to tap one of these guys on the shoulder, ask if they can spare some advice before the shooting starts?”

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Cassian spoke the words like a curse.

Jyn didn’t see who threw the first grenade. She heard it strike pavement despite the noise of the vehicles, recognized the sound despite the murmuring from the rooftops and the sharp commands of the stormtroopers. A glint of sunlight drew her eye to the metal sphere and she saw it bounce once, roll half a meter in the direction of the tank, then disappear in an eruption of street fragments and smoke and shrapnel. She felt the resonant boom in her teeth. She heard a dozen cloaks and overcoats being shucked in unison, then the dull clack of pistols and rifles being brought to bear.

The air turned bright with the arterial glow of a hundred particle bolts.

Sparks burst off ancient stone walls. The noxious smell of burning plastoid armor and the ozone of vaporized Jedha atmosphere stung Jyn’s nostrils. A volley of blasterfire coursed across the plaza’s upper level—originating from stormtrooper or insurgent, Jyn wasn’t sure—and Jyn reacted instinctively, dashing with Cassian into the flimsy shelter of a doorframe and squeezing tight against him.

“Looks like we found Saw’s rebels,” she said. Her blaster was in her hand. Her finger was on the trigger.

If Cassian replied, Jyn lost the words in the bedlam. She tried to read the battlefield, pinpoint every combatant, and found the chaos overwhelming. This wasn’t her kind of fight anymore; there were too many people on each side deploying tactics she hadn’t thought about in too long. All of Saw’s training, the long months staring at holographic carnage and the years of staging ambushes with his soldiers, churned wildly in her brain. She spied only moments: a stormtrooper shot in the visor while swapping blaster packs; a rebel bleeding on the stairs and desperately searching for cover; the guns of the tank elevating, aiming toward a shop whose rooftop supported a trio of rebel attackers.

Beneath the awning of the shop stood a girl, ten years old at the most. Probably a pilgrim, Jyn thought. The girl was trembling, staring at the battle. Utterly paralyzed.

Jyn left the cover of the doorway and ran for the shop. Cassian called her name, but it meant nothing.

Jyn didn’t see the tank open fire. She grabbed the girl, scooped up her too-light body, and didn’t stop running as stone burst and sparks spattered her back like rain. Fury drove her forward, a sudden revulsion that had lain buried and forgotten under the hatch in her brain: a violent horror at Saw Gerrera and his people, and the cost of his tactics.

Jyn might have kicked the woman who stepped forward to intercept her if the girl she carried hadn’t writhed and twisted, almost leapt into the woman’s outstretched arms. Jyn let the girl go, ignored the woman’s babbling and waved her off.

You cluster together, you die, she thought. The old training was resurfacing after all.

She was too exposed. She knew that. She searched the plaza for cover and for Cassian. She spotted him out of the shelter of the doorframe, stupidly, dangerously near the tank, and realized he’d already seen her. He had his own blaster out and fired a cluster of tight shots above her head. She craned her neck around in time to see Cassian’s target: a rebel stationed on another rooftop behind her.

An instant later Cassian’s target and his rebel comrades disappeared in the fiery bloom of a grenade. Jyn could only guess one of the rebels had been aiming the explosive her way.

Cassian had shot one of Saw’s rebels to save her life. Jyn supposed she should have been anguished, torn at the thought.

She wasn’t.

She sprinted toward Cassian. Clustering would get them killed, but she didn’t plan on staying in the plaza and she didn’t relish the thought of escaping Jedha on her own. She bowled into Cassian as another grenade impacted the tank. She slammed him to the ground and shielded him as metal shredded the air.

Cassian dragged her to her feet and uttered a breathless “Come on!” He didn’t thank her, and Jyn was grateful for it.

They made it fifty meters from the plaza before hitting another stormtrooper squad. Half a dozen soldiers obstructed the alley Jyn and Cassian had turned down, advancing gingerly through the Holy Quarter like they expected the streets to be mined.

Jyn swore to herself. Cassian pivoted around, but the stormtroopers reacted faster, turning their rifles on the man. One might miss; together they’d cut him down in seconds. Jyn called Cassian’s name and barreled forward, pulling her truncheons from her coat.

The fight in the plaza had numbed her senses. Her body had acclimated to the roar of explosions, the glare of particle bolts, the heat of flames, and the blasts of demolished stone across her face. The brief respite from combat had let her feel again, and now her cheeks prickled and her legs throbbed with fatigue. She gripped her truncheons too tight, afraid she’d lose one as she slammed the metal rods into the joints of stormtrooper armor. She targeted throats and behind knees, felt the cushion of bodysuits underneath the troopers’ plating and struck again, again, crushing her own fingernails bloody in the pressure of her grasp. She knocked aside rifles with her shoulders, wedged herself into the fray to deny her opponents the opportunity to aim. She let her strikes determine her balance, moved from blow to blow, and ignored the flat smack of a rifle butt against her rib cage. When her truncheon found air, when no foe stood within reach, she stumbled back against the alley wall and exchanged a truncheon for a blaster.

She fired two shots, dispatched two more troopers bringing their weapons to bear on her. She kicked one of the men she’d left on the ground and turned in time to see Cassian execute their last upright opponent.

She was ready to drop from exhaustion. The blow to her ribs made her want to vomit. But she saw a long, spindly shadow extend down the length of the alley and forced herself to turn. In the stormtroopers’ wake came the black metal body of an Imperial security droid, marching on thin, titanium-strong legs.

She dropped her second truncheon, gripped her blaster in both hands, and felt her aim waver as she fired. Despite her unsteady hands, the shot hit its mark. The droid’s chest sparked and something internal popped. It tumbled to the ground, only to reveal a second, identical droid marching behind it.

The second droid shuffled to a halt. The heat of the blaster barrel warmed Jyn’s cold fingers. She took aim.

The second droid bent his head to study his fallen comrade. “Did you know that wasn’t me?” he asked.

Jyn furiously searched her memory and recognized the voice of K-2SO.

“Of course!” she snapped.

Cassian joined them as she tucked away her blaster and recovered her truncheon. “I thought I told you to stay with the ship,” he growled.

“You did,” K-2SO replied. “But I thought it was boring, and you were in trouble. There are a lot of explosions for two people blending in.”

A series of short, resonant blasts echoed from the direction of the plaza. A new column of smoke, threads of blue mixed in with the black, wafted above the rooftops. Another assault tank? Jyn wondered. Maybe a walker?

“We could find one of Saw’s people,” Cassian said. Jyn noticed he was sweating despite the cold; despite his matter-of-fact tone. “Preferably someone down but still breathing. Maybe he could help us.”

“If you want to drag someone out of that death trap”—Jyn jutted a thumb toward the plaza—“you’re welcome to try. But I’m guessing the rebels here aren’t feeling trusting right now.”

“Just keep an eye out,” Cassian said.

K-2SO turned his head. Jyn couldn’t tell if he was listening to something—concentrating on whatever sorts of frequencies an Imperial security droid might pick up—or looking at Cassian askance.

“The Imperial forces are converging on our present location,” K-2SO said.

The droid’s head jerked again, and Jyn followed the machine’s gaze to the stormtroopers left sprawled on the ground. One trooper had risen to a knee, a small metallic cylinder in his left hand. He threw the grenade limply; before Jyn could move, as she tensed to leap away, K-2 extended an inhumanly long arm and caught the cylinder in one hand. A moment later the grenade retraced its arc perfectly.

Jyn winced and turned away from the explosion. A cold voice inside her said, No more witnesses.

“I suggest we leave immediately,” K-2 declared, and they left.

For the first time since crossing the desert to the Holy City, Cassian noticed the cold. The insulating press of bodies in the street had kept him warm much of the day; then, during the fighting, the chill hadn’t registered at all. Now that sunset was approaching and his undershirt was soaked with sweat, he found himself shivering and watching his breath steam from his lips.

If it was this bad for him, he couldn’t imagine how Jyn was still standing.

The need in her eyes had been subsumed by an almost feral anger, a survival instinct that guided her with frightening surety through the chaos. But while he didn’t doubt her alertness, she was slowing physically. The bruises she’d sustained brawling with the stormtroopers left her wincing with every other step. Cassian wondered, too, if she’d been concussed when she’d saved his life in the plaza—the grenade had gone off with stunning force, and she’d shielded him from the brunt of the blow.

She needed a medical droid. A chance to recuperate. Instead she traveled with Cassian and K-2 through the maze of the Holy Quarter, her head low and her breathing strained.

“We’ll find shelter soon,” he said. He kept his eyes averted and his tone matter-of-fact. He doubted she would respond well to pity.

Even so, she didn’t argue. That struck Cassian as a bad sign.

He tried to focus on practicalities. They had to escape the Holy Quarter before it was cordoned off. They would need to reach Saw Gerrera—and the pilot—without the help of Cassian’s contact. And while Jyn was right that Saw’s people wouldn’t be trusting right now, Cassian couldn’t see any other leads.

Could Saw Gerrera put aside bad blood in the face of a planet killer? It seemed madness to have to ask. But by all accounts, the rift between Saw and the Alliance was profound, nurtured by years of bitterness that had curdled into violence; and Saw Gerrera was not a man who knew how to forgive.

He’d passed that on to his adopted daughter. Or maybe she’d taught it to him.

Jyn blocked Cassian’s path with an outstretched arm. From a passageway too narrow to be called an alley, they watched a dozen stormtroopers pass through an intersection.

Cassian recognized a side street across the way. “That should bring us out of the quarter,” he said.

Jyn waited for the patrol to move on, then promptly sprinted through the crossroads. Cassian and K-2 followed, only to stumble to a halt as Jyn abruptly stopped. Blocking the side street, nested in a pile of rubble, was the dusty wreck of an X-wing starfighter.

Cassian swore. It wouldn’t be difficult to climb across, but it would leave them exposed for precious seconds—

“Halt! Stop right there!”

The trio turned together toward the voice. The stormtroopers who’d passed by were now spread out to block their retreat.

Too many to fight, Cassian thought, and his hand drifted to his blaster anyway. His power pack was almost empty, but there was no point in saving his bolts. Jyn’s shoulders sagged, yet she stared at the stormtroopers like she was eager to enter the fray, glad to have nowhere to run.

The squad leader nodded to K-2SO. “Where are you taking these prisoners?”

Cassian felt something very similar to hope.

The droid stared back at the squad leader as if struggling to process a response. “These are prisoners,” he said.

Cassian winced. The feeling like hope evaporated.

He flicked through a deck of possibilities. Maybe K-2 was trying to access Imperial behavioral programming and coming up short. Maybe overwritten Imperial loyalty protocols were coming back to life, thanks to hardware damage or some personal memory of the squad leader.

Most likely, and worst of all: K-2 was that bad at lying. He always had been, since the reprogram. Relentless honesty was his natural state.

“Yes,” the squad leader said. “Where are you taking the prisoners?”

“I am taking them”—K-2 spoke with stilted care—“to imprison them. In prison.”

Cassian channeled his irritation into a growl of anger—a sound he prayed resembled something a defiant captive might make. “He’s taking us to—”

The droid swung a metal arm into Cassian’s face. “Quiet!” The blow nearly took Cassian off his feet and left his nose and chin throbbing painfully, his lip stinging. K-2 loomed over him. “And there’s a fresh one if you mouth off again!”

“We’ll take them from here.” The squad leader again. Cassian tried to refocus as the stormtroopers approached the trio. They kept their weapons out, maintained a tight formation, demonstrated all the discipline Imperial soldiers were supposed to. As one retrieved two sets of stun cuffs, the others watched Jyn, Cassian, and the droid.

K-2 was babbling now. “That’s okay. If you could just point me in the right direction, I can take them, I’m sure. I’ve taken them this far—”

Jyn looked to Cassian and reached for her truncheons as the trooper with the cuffs approached. Cassian shook his head. Wait for a chance, he mouthed, and Jyn looked ready to bite as the trooper snapped the restraints onto her wrists. A few seconds later Cassian, too, was cuffed.

“Hey,” he murmured. “Hey, droid. Wait a second.”

Whatever the troopers’ suspicions, they clearly didn’t believe K-2 had been subverted. If Cassian could make his intentions known, the droid could locate them in holding, access the Imperial database to free them.

It wasn’t a good plan, but it was a plan.

“Take them away,” the squad leader called. The stormtroopers circled and moved in unison. Cassian felt a rifle muzzle nudge at his back.

“You can’t take them away!” K-2 protested.

“You stay here,” the squad leader said. “We need to check your diagnostics.”

“Diagnostics? I’m capable of running my own diagnostics, thank you very much.”

Don’t argue, Cassian wanted to snap. He gave the droid as intent a look as he dared, but K-2 was too invested in his debate with the squad leader. A stormtrooper shoved Cassian from behind and he stumbled forward.

If they were taken captive and K-2’s reprogramming was discovered, then they truly had no way out. They could claim they were residents of Jedha City, but that would fall apart on a cursory investigation. They could say they were deserters from Saw’s band, but they’d gain no leniency.

You messed up bad, Cassian told himself. This time, you get to pay the price yourself.

Then a voice cried out, steady and commanding, and everyone—stormtroopers, captives, and droid—stopped to look.

“Let them pass in peace!”

Chirrut Îmwe stood in an archway staring at the stormtroopers with blind eyes. Jyn wanted to laugh.

Cassian had called him a Guardian of the Whills, whatever that really meant. He’d played games with Jyn to try to buy her necklace. And now he was, what? Martyring himself?

Maybe he was more zealot than con man after all.

“Let them pass in peace,” he said again, leaning lightly on his staff. The stormtroopers were repositioning themselves, fanning out to defend against Chirrut or another rebel ambush.

Chirrut began chanting, and the words throbbed in Jyn’s aching skull: “The Force is with me, and I am with the Force.” He emerged from the archway, stepped toward the stormtroopers. He was in the middle of the street now, separating most of the squad from Jyn, Cassian, and K-2SO. “And I fear nothing, for all is as the Force wills it.”

“Hey! Stop right there!” The squad leader’s voice was angry. Not used to being ignored by civilians, Jyn thought, and smiled grimly.

“He’s blind,” a second trooper called.

“Is he deaf?” the squad leader asked. “I said: Stop right there!”

Chirrut raised one foot from the pavement, and the squad leader fired a single shot. It was too late to shout a warning, too late for anyone to intervene, and Jyn felt an unexpected ache, a pang of guilt over the death of a man who had tried to save them.

But Chirrut was not dead. The bolt had been aimed with precision, yet Chirrut was not dead. The merest twitch of his head, a glance to one side, had saved him and sent the energy flashing by, toward the captives and over Cassian’s shoulder.

Stormtroopers who had previously hesitated to shoot a blind man adjusted their weapons with nervous hands and a renewed sense of duty. Jyn shifted her wrists in her cuffs, glancing at the two stormtroopers who remained within her reach.

Chirrut was inside the bulk of the squad in two strides. His staff was suddenly in motion, sweeping behind legs and twisting arms back unnaturally. Jyn felt clumsy and graceless—where she had thrown her whole body into every strike with her truncheons, Chirrut dropped stormtroopers with a delicate whirl, a flick of his wrist.

He was mocking them now, in a voice full of gentle mirth. “Is your foot all right?” Like a dancer, he leapt a step to the side as another stormtrooper fired his rifle. The bolt found one of the trooper’s squad mates, and Chirrut only shook his head sadly.

The two stormtroopers by Jyn were staring at the melee, as if debating whether to join their squad. Jyn chose her moment and swung her cuffed hands into the helmet of the trooper nearest. The metal bit fiercely into her wrists as she impacted. Graceless or not, exhausted and cold and hurting or not, she’d do what she could.

She’d caught the stormtrooper by surprise. She took advantage of the man’s shock by throwing her shoulder into his chest, forcing him to his knees. She heard Cassian and K-2SO fighting, too, heard continued shouting from Chirrut’s direction, but she focused on her own opponent. She brought her shackles down on the back of the trooper’s head, pounded at his helmet, drove him low—drove the plastoid against his skull again and again, until he finally slumped to the ground. If she’d been sure of his unconsciousness, Jyn might have stopped there; instead she kicked him fiercely, viciously, three times, until she was certain he couldn’t rise.

Cassian and K-2SO’s opponent was down as well. Chirrut stood calmly over a pile of bodies. Jyn rolled aching shoulders and felt blood on her raw wrists.

But the fight wasn’t over. A second squad of stormtroopers—reinforcements, maybe, or just drawn by the noise—rushed in from the intersection. Chirrut was too far away to intercept them before they could take aim. Jyn scanned for cover, saw none within reach, and prepared to drop flat onto the dust.

She heard the crackling snap of a particle bolt, but none of the stormtroopers had discharged his or her weapon. One collapsed, then another, as sniper fire struck them faster than Jyn would have thought possible. When the last was dead, the shooter emerged from across the way.

Jyn recognized him: Chirrut’s silent partner from the alley, the one with wild hair and red armor. In one hand, he bore his repeating cannon. In the other was an ornate, gold-trimmed bowcaster at odds with his battered and practical gear; this, the man passed to Chirrut.

“You almost shot me,” Chirrut said.

“You’re welcome,” his partner replied. Without looking, he fired a bolt into the back of a stormtrooper crawling nearby.

Then Chirrut’s partner turned toward Jyn and Cassian. He raised his cannon, expression wary but not outright hostile. Chirrut watched with blind eyes. You both saved us, Jyn thought. You won’t kill us now.

“Clear of hostiles!” K-2SO announced, striding forward to survey the remnants of the battle.

Immediately, Chirrut’s partner aimed at the droid. K-2SO halted and amended, “One hostile!”

“He’s with us!” Jyn cried.

“No.” Chirrut spoke to his partner gently. “They’re okay.”

The red-armored man lowered his weapon again. Jyn thought he looked disappointed.

Jyn nursed her scraped wrists and flexed her fingers, glad to be free of the cuffs. She’d spent too much time in restraints, gone to too much trouble to ensure her freedom. Even a few minutes was more than she wanted to endure.

K-2SO was freeing Cassian as Chirrut and his partner looked on. “Go back to the ship,” Cassian told the droid. “Wait for my call.”

“You’re wasting your most valuable resource,” the droid returned, but he strode away obediently. Jyn looked to Cassian for an explanation. They were still in danger, and while the droid brought unwanted attention he’d also proven useful. She didn’t much like K-2; he was still more reliable than their new allies.

Cassian, evidently, had other things on his mind. He watched Chirrut’s partner. “Is he Jedi?” he asked, with the hushed doubt of a man on the verge of a great discovery.

Jyn thought of the spinning staff, of Chirrut’s graceful dance of battle. Was that what Jedi were like? Her mother had told her stories: the mystic warriors and guardians of the Republic in the centuries before the Empire, believers in a Force that guided living creatures.

She’d never really believed in the stories. The Jedi, yes, but not the legend.

“No Jedi anymore,” Chirrut’s partner said. “Only dreamers like this fool.”

Chirrut shrugged mildly. “The Force did protect me.”

“I protected you,” his partner replied.

If Cassian was disappointed by his answer, Jyn couldn’t tell. She was willing to take Chirrut’s partner at his word; easier to believe in what existed now rather than what might have been long ago.

She bit back her next words, savored the sour taste before asking, “Can you get us to Saw Gerrera?”

She’d already committed to the mission. Might as well see it through.

Neither Chirrut nor his partner had the opportunity to reply before someone called: “Hands in the air!”

Rebel fighters emerged from alleys and rooftops. Jyn recognized several from the plaza. She wanted to shout in rage—for hours, it seemed, she’d done nothing but fight, and her body had been sapped of every erg of strength; had turned to nothing but a collection of bruises and aching muscles.

Cassian was the first to drop his weapon. Jyn followed suit. Cassian mouthed something to her: Not the enemy.

“Can’t you see we are no friends of the Empire?” Chirrut asked. He’d set his bowcaster in the dust. Even his partner had relinquished his cannon.

One rebel stepped forward: a thin, skull-faced Tognath in leathers who breathed through a mechanical respirator and spoke in his native dialect. “Tell that to the one who killed our men.”

Jyn looked to Cassian. In her mind’s eye, she saw him fire his blaster in the plaza, felt the grenade explode over her head. She remembered the cold, guiltless sensation that had passed over her then; shame found her now, gripped her heart, and she tore through it with anger.

These were Saw’s people. If Saw was alive, she knew how to deal with them.

“Anyone who kills me or my friends will answer to Saw Gerrera,” she called.

The rebels shuffled, murmured to one another. One of them chuckled hoarsely. The Tognath cocked his head, as if trying to recognize Jyn’s face.

“And why is that?” he asked.

“Because Saw knows me,” she said. “Because I know him. Because I was battling at his side when most of you were still crying in your beds instead of fighting back.” She’d begun by choosing her words carefully, but now they spilled from her lips unwanted. “I’ve seen that man at his worst. I know exactly what he does when he feels betrayed, and I’m still alive.”

The broken hatch made it easy to stumble upon unwanted memories. The battle in the plaza had already dredged up a hundred bloody conflicts she’d barely survived, thirteen or fourteen or fifteen years old and already trusted with a blaster. Now she remembered the looks from her fellow rebels, the whispers behind her back. The things they wondered about her. The things they believed.

“Because,” she finished, “I am the daughter of Galen Erso.”

The Tognath watched her for a long moment. Everyone, friend and foe, was still.

“Take them,” the Tognath said.

Two rebels grappled Jyn. She didn’t fight. Coarse cloth scraped over her nose, and she fought to breathe through the sack that clung to her face. She heard Cassian groan nearby, a growl from Chirrut’s partner, and then Chirrut’s own voice:

“Are you kidding me? I’m blind!”