#ngl i included alderaanian!tagge purely because 'cassio' amused me

[anghraine]

“per ardua ad astra” - chapter fourteen

...wherein my profound ambivalence about EU material continues unabated.

I really hoped to finish 14 and 15 this month (they go together, and I’ll be very busy after... tomorrow, pretty much), but alas, no. Here’s Ch 14, anyway!

last chapter:

Without warning, without explanation, green light lashed towards the planet. The same horrifying light she’d seen as they fled Scarif, but brighter and more poisonously vivid—Jyn and Cassian’s hands did fumble together now, dread choking her—and with a blinding flash, Alderaan exploded into fire.

this chapter:

Worse, again. By impulse, she pressed a hand to the pocket in her trousers, where the kyber crystal was secreted away. All is as the Force wills it. All is as the Force wills it. All is as the Force wills it.

It couldn’t be, could it? Not this.

chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen

Cassian gasped.

Nothing from him, Jyn had thought, could be worse than his scream in the shuttle. But this was. A catch of his breath, barely audible, but out in the open with Imperials clustered all around—

Her own breaths burned, dozens of hot needles stabbing from her lungs to her throat. And though she’d squeezed her eyes shut, Alderaan kept burning, too, the explosion seared against her eyelids.

Papa. Cassian. Papa … the plans, we’ve got to … Force, Cassian.

Did Bodhi know yet? He’d played his tiny part in the construction of this thing, and he was what he was; he would suffer. But not, Jyn hoped, like them.

Perhaps it was a kindness, in a way, that the rest of their team had died. They would never see this, the very thing they’d fought to prevent. They’d hoped to stop it from happening to any planet at all—far less Alderaan, home to so much.

A million languages, she remembered; it had only been a few days ago that she absently scrolled through the databank entry. Some of the languages would survive: the standard Alderaanian that Cassian’s dialect came from, and other tongues preserved by off-planet Alderaanians. But not most, surely. It was nothing to the slaughter of billions, and yet—she thought of the picture she’d seen of the Anduçelos Mountains, of the wreckage of Vaesda, of Aldera. All of it gone, just like that.

Jyn and Cassian had considered the eradication of Aldera a catastrophe. If, by some miracle, she opened her eyes now to only the capital razed, she’d count it a relief. Scarif was nothing to this. Even Jedha was nothing to this.

Not since Saw abandoned her had Jyn felt so desperately alone, swallowed up in a vast, silent isolation. Nothing to compel her to action, no action to take, just a miasma heavy enough to crush her under its mass. The voices around her might as well have been animals or holograms. Even the plating under her feet seemed an illusion, part of this elaborate pretense that she stood firm and upright, unchanged from what she’d been two minutes ago.

Yet she did stand there. She wasn’t alone.

Hesitant, Jyn stilled at the clutch of their gloved fingers—Lyr wouldn’t risk it, would she? Even if she and Willix were lovers, they’d be more careful. But Willix was Alderaanian too, and Cassian’s hand readily curved into hers.

Fuck Lyr, Jyn decided, too tired to make sense of the thought. In the horror of the moment, she could only be Jyn Erso, standing with Cassian Andor.

His comlink buzzed.

It was the long-range com, secured in his jacket, not the short-range one at his wrist. Bodhi wouldn’t need the handheld to contact them.

But he couldn’t know they were so near. Could guess, but in this moment, maybe he hadn’t put it together.

Please let it be Bodhi.

As slowly as before, Cassian withdrew his hand from hers and extracted the comlink.

“Willix,” he said, his vacant tone at odds with the ground roughness of his voice.

“Captain Cassein Willix,” chirped a droid. “Is that your identity? Please confirm.”

For a long, dragging moment, he said nothing. Jyn dared a glance up at him; Cassian was colourless. Even his mouth was, beyond a few streaks of blood drawn by the teeth digging into his lip.

“Yes,” he grated out.

“Your presence is required at a meeting in Quadrant G North, Floor 18, Council Room 11872.”

And worse, again. By impulse, she pressed a hand to the pocket in her trousers, where the kyber crystal was secreted away. All is as the Force wills it. All is as the Force wills it. All is as the Force wills it.

It couldn’t be, could it? Not this.

“According to whom?” said Cassian, in a pale approximation of Willix’s usual arrogance. “I am a captain in his Imperial Majesty’s forces. I cannot be summoned by droid. Who is presumptuous enough to try?”

“Governor Tarkin,” the droid replied, with a distinct note of satisfaction. “The meeting begins in two hours. I suggest you start finding your way, captain.”

It clicked off before Cassian or Jyn could reply. Not that it mattered; they only stared at each other in horrified silence as the seconds ticked past.

“You’re not going to,” she whispered. “You can’t.”

He looked down, and then up again, strained but determined. “I have to obey orders from my superiors. And from Governor Tarkin himself—” Cassian’s voice broke off. After a deep breath, he continued, “You must understand that, for your own sake at least.”

Her own sake. If Willix defied an order from Tarkin himself, it would mean imprisonment at best. Certainly a closer scrutiny of his records, of Jyn herself, perhaps even of Bodhi if they confiscated the comlinks and managed to decode them. It would ruin all hope, instead of merely thinning it.

Jyn swallowed. “I understand, sir.”

“You can retire to our quarters,” added Cassian. “I’ll return when the meeting ends, and … oh, I almost forgot. Your datapad, Lyr.”

He handed over the datapad. His, not hers, full of their memorized notes and codes. If anything happened, and she somehow survived, she would be able to pass the information on.

Of course he would think of that. Her hands trembled under its light weight—but so did his. Despite Willix’s condescendingly pragmatic tone, Cassian looked frightened before all expression closed away.

Gazing back, Jyn could feel the wideness of her eyes, the hot sting behind them. This might well be the last time she ever saw him. And she couldn’t offer any comfort, to him or to herself—couldn’t be seen grasping onto him, kissing him as she’d often wanted to do, embracing him one last time.

It might not be the last. It might … she didn’t know what it might be. No one knew. There was no need to turn alarm into despair just yet.

Jyn mouthed, Be careful.

Solemnly, Cassian nodded.

May the Force be with you.

“Captain Willix?”

Both of them started, turning around to face an ensign, hardly more than a boy. His own comlink hung from a limp hand, his skin ashen and covered in a layer of sweat. After one muddled moment, Jyn managed to recognize the vaguely familiar face. Fiander Zelin, one of the youngest of the Alderaanians moved into the prisons.

“Ensign,” returned Cassian. He straightened into full military posture, hands locking behind his back. Jyn, now standing behind him, eyed the clasped hands. Between one instant and the next, an idea seized her. An impulse, rather. Discreetly, she dropped a hand to her right thigh.

Zelin babbled, “I … do you know about some sort of urgent meeting? For the lower ranks, maybe—a droid just commed me about it, and I’m not sure …”

“It’s real,” Cassian assured him, snapping into full spy mode. “I’ve been invited myself. Governor Tarkin himself ordered it.”

Zelin looked even more sickly. “Governor Tarkin …? But we haven’t—I haven’t done anything!” His voice had gone shrill.

“Mind your tone, ensign,” Cassian said sharply. Then he gentled, a very little. “I imagine it’s to commend us for our loyalty to the Empire. You may accompany me.”

Jyn stepped forward, as close to his back as she could manage without drawing attention. She jostled his hands.

Understanding the hint, his fingers opened. Jyn glanced around; nobody appeared to be paying the slightest attention to them. But she didn’t trust anything. Instead, she stumbled into him and, under the cover of the sudden imbalance, pressed her mother’s crystal into his hand.

Jyn didn’t know what Cassian thought of that, what he believed. If it would mean anything to him at all. But his fingers instantly closed around the crystal, his grip tight enough that the sharp edges must be digging painfully into his palms, his torso expanding with a deep breath. Good enough. She could do nothing else.

Protect him, Mama.

She knew the Force didn’t work that way.

Please.

Few people, in this moment, could appear more suspicious than a known Alderaanian spy walking through the Death Star with kyber in his hands.

Cassian didn’t care. If kyber crystals meant little to him personally, Lyra Erso’s meant a great deal. Jyn had held onto it through all the turmoil of her life, from Saw Gerrera’s prize soldier to the Imperial prisoner who somehow managed to smuggle it into Wobani. She prayed with it on the way to Scarif, and only yesterday, she twitched at the foreign brush of his fingers over the crystal’s edges. Now, it lay within his hand.

He doubted that Jyn cherished any possession more than this one. Yet she gave it to him—a comfort while he lived, irrevocably lost if he died. Had he some relic of Rana’s, would he have gambled with it like this?

For Jyn, perhaps. If he thought it useful. By now, Cassian knew he would balk at very little when it came to helping Jyn. But in all probability, he wouldn’t have thought it helpful, thought that far at all, any more than he would have imagined gaining anything from Jyn’s crystal. In any case, there was nothing left of Rana. Nothing but a child’s bones in a mass grave. No, that was gone, too.

Cassian’s vision blurred. He hadn’t seen it since he was a child himself, perhaps ten or eleven. There’d been little enough to see: cold earth, a wide memorial plaque. It took him a good fifteen minutes to find Llora and Renalia Andor on the long list of names. At the time, he felt little beyond confused repulsion, and he never returned. His mother and sister existed in his memories, not bodies under the ground; the grave meant nothing. Yet something in him shuddered from the truth that it really was nothing, now.

He tightened his grasp on the crystal; through his gloves, it warmed his cool hands. Maybe the lingering warmth of Jyn’s body—even on this march to possible death, he shepherded his thoughts away from that—or maybe something else. He didn’t know. At that, Cassian didn’t know what he believed about the Force at all, beyond the reality of its existence. He reserved his faith for the cause. The dream of liberation, given shape by the Rebellion. And by Jyn. A Jedi could appear before him, and it would matter less than this chunk of rock.

He believed in Jyn. In a way, that mattered more than loving her.

As if from a distant transmission, he could hear the boy beside him chattering on, Willix replying with something of his usual smooth confidence. Cassian couldn’t have reported the conversation for the life of him. Not anything, except that he disliked Willix more than ever. He always had, but in this moment, he seemed less a disagreeable role Cassian was forced to play, and more a person in his own right, stealing Cassian’s skin.

Of course, it was really the other way around.

“Do you—do you know why it happened, sir? Did the queen do something?”

Something? He almost laughed. Breha Organa would have been executed long ago if the Empire had a fraction of Cassian’s knowledge. Yet in the end, it hadn’t been Queen Breha who drew Imperial vengeance to Alderaan, or even Senator Organa. This was retribution against their daughter.

He supposed he could take a scrap of relief from that. The odds of Princess Leia betraying the Rebellion, never high, now hovered about infinitesimal.

“I haven’t heard that she did,” said Cassian. “Calm yourself, ensign. I’m sure the governor will explain everything.”

So far, his feet had carried him with little attention on his part. He forced himself to focus on their surroundings, make sure they headed in the right direction. Yes, remarkably enough.

At the sight of a fresher, he seized opportunity.

“Ah, one moment.”

It was thankfully empty. Cassian slid Jyn’s crystal into one of the pockets hidden in his trousers. He could still feel it, but the chance of failing Jyn and the Rebellion no longer lay in the hands of casual observers. He cared about that, at least.

In the mirror, he checked that the kyber was concealed in the folds of the uniform, then drew near to splash water over his clammy face. Tor was right, he thought distantly. He did look Alderaanian.

He might not have, given an unlucky roll of the genetic dice. His father, he gathered, was some sort of offworlder poverty tourist. But Cassian and Renalia both favoured their mother, Cassian in particular. Everyone said so; one of his uncles (ably aided by Renalia) half-convinced him that he’d come from a cloning factory instead of the hospital, and his grandmother affectionately called him Lloran. He looked what he was: a son of his mother, of Alderaan.

However much he disliked hearing about it over and over—Alderaanian or exotic or interesting-looking or whatever else—he’d never felt anything but pride in that. Now he felt a good deal more than pride. For the first time in a while, his face did him no favours, but … well.

A creak of the door had him washing his face again. And a sniffling moan had him turning about.

“Ensign,” he said tiredly. “Don’t make me report you for unprofessional conduct.”

Cassian had no intention of reporting him, of course. But the ensign might as well paint a target on his back if anyone else saw this. All the more from someone as quiet and obedient as Cassian had found him, until now, and too obscure for any real fallout.

Zelin, Fiander. Ensign. Alderaanian of Vila. Nineteen standard years old.

A boy, he thought once more. Nineteen—but that was Leia’s age. Just a few years younger than Jyn, a few more than Cassian. Old enough to rebel, and old enough to choose the Empire instead.

“I—I—I’m sorry, sir. But I can’t … I don’t understand.” Zelin scrubbed his wet eyes. “We didn’t do anything!”

“We’ll just have to wait for the governor’s explanation,” said Cassian.

Elsewhere, he’d have tried a different tack; Zelin might as well have a giant RECRUIT ME sign hanging about his neck. But if the Rebellion had its way, he would never leave the Death Star. None of them would—Esten, Efrah, the whole lot. Did Jyn realize? She must know, intellectually, but … Force, he hoped so.

Anyway, Zelin might be a spy.

“Alderaan doesn’t have any weapons. Didn’t,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“You have enlisted in his Imperial Majesty’s fleet,” replied Cassian. “That’s all you need to understand.”

He turned on his heel and walked out, certain his sniffling shadow would follow. He’d met hundreds like him. Sure enough, Zelin hurried to catch up, and remained blessedly silent the rest of the way. Maybe he’d caught the warning; maybe he’d given up fishing for treason.

It didn’t matter. In that hour, nothing much did.

In the elevator, Jyn’s heart stopped racing. It had to, eventually. She no longer heard the rapid patter of her pulse in her ears, or sensed it in her neck or wrists. She sensed only her heart, itself—which sounded saccharine and melodramatic, but was entirely true. It felt like metal walls closed in on the literal organ in her chest, slowly warping and crushing it into a gnarled, leaden lump of dead flesh. Over and over, she forced herself to breathe through the seething pain, through the chokehold of her own circulation. More than once, she had to press her closed fist to her mouth, swallow down bile.

Just once, she reached for her mother’s crystal. But no, she’d given it to Cassian. One more thing the Jyn of a few months ago would never have imagined. The crystal lost not by some mischance, nor—at long last—by force, but freely given away, to a Rebel spy. Perhaps a doomed Rebel spy.

No, Jyn thought fiercely. She would give up hope when her fears became certainty, and not a moment earlier. Cassian was alive, down there. Or up, or … or somewhere. After everything they’d been through together, were together, she’d know. Wouldn’t she?

Jyn was pretty sure the Force did work that way, or could. But she wasn’t Chirrut, or even her mother. In the Citadel, after Cassian fell, she hadn’t known that he lived. Rationally speaking, it was just as possible that she wouldn’t know if he died.

Damn rationality. She would.

Her comlink buzzed.

With a jolt of pure fire in her chest, Jyn fumbled to accept the call. “Lyr speaking.”

“It’s me,” said Bodhi, voice breaking over the two words.

For the first time, she felt a wave of raw disappointment at hearing from him. She swallowed it; Bodhi mattered, too.

“Trooper,” she managed to say.

For a few seconds he didn’t speak. Then, breathless and unsteady, he stammered out, “I … I don’t … I’m not sure how …”

“I know about Alderaan,” said Jyn.

“Oh, thank the stars.” Then he gasped. “I didn’t mean—”

She slumped into the corner of the elevator. “I know.”

“You must have heard right away,” Bodhi said, with the sort of hoarse, desperate rapidity she remembered from those first days after the escape from Jedha. “It just happened, didn’t it? I only found out a few minutes ago.”

Jyn thought of trying to shield him, but she was too tired. Tilting her head back, against the wall, she said,

“I didn’t need to. We saw it happen.”

“Saw?” Without seeing him, she could perfectly envision his blur of shock and horrified sympathy. “Both of you? The captain, too?”

“Yes.” There was nothing else to say.

After a long pause, Bodhi muttered, “Fuck.”

Jyn almost—well, she was nowhere near to a laugh, but her face twitched. “Language, trooper.”

“Uh, Force.”

Her brows rose, though nobody could see it. “Blasphemy, trooper.”

“Right, right. Stars. Star. I don’t know. The captain, is he …” Bodhi faltered. “How’s he taking it?”

Against her will, Jyn’s mind cast back to Cassian’s gasp, the grasp of his fingers on hers, in the middle of a crowd of Imperials. Cassian, who had dared no more than the merest brush of her crystal, clutching it as he left to whatever awaited him.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “He—he’s not here.”

It was lucky, in a way, that they’d chosen the stormtrooper disguise for Bodhi. Given the tremor in his voice, Jyn could only imagine how transparent his face must be in this moment. Not that hers was much better. “He’s not? Why? Where is he?”

“He got called to a meeting,” she said, forcing her own tone to something even and controlled. “With Governor Tarkin himself.”

“What?”

She slogged on. “I think all the Alderaanians did. There was an ensign who got the same order.”

For a good twenty seconds, Jyn heard nothing but his occasional ragged breaths, and then nothing. “Trooper? Are you there?”

“Yes,” he choked out. “I’m … yes. What sort of meeting?”

“We don’t know. But the captain thought—he knew open insubordination would be worse for everyone.” Especially me.

“Right,” said Bodhi faintly. “Do you know—”

“I don’t know anything.” She sounded flat, not harsh, but she felt a flicker of guilt nonetheless. Cassian was one thing, Bodhi quite another. “Neither of us do, beyond that. Or we didn’t. I suppose Captain Willix might know what it’s all about at this point.”

After another long hesitation, he said, “I hope so.”

Jyn envied him. She didn’t know what to hope.

Council Room 11872 (Floor 18, Quadrant G-N) was in chaos. The moment that he entered, Cassian met with a cacophony of at least eight languages, only four of which he remotely understood. Apart from three stormtroopers clustered in a corner, helmets in their arms and faces drawn, Alderaanians mingled with little regard to rank or division. Not far away, a corporal demanded answers of a major. On the other side of the room, a private who couldn’t be much more than eighteen had broken into sobs. So had a colonel. Others wandered together without appearing to much notice it, or anything, their eyes dazed and unfocused. Those Cassian could sympathize with, more easily than the furious or grief-stricken.

Or—no. He couldn’t. They were Alderaanians, fellow mourners, but Alderaanians who had joined the Empire. So few did. These ones were traitors who betrayed everything their planet stood for. They grieved not because a world had been destroyed, but because it was their world. Their homes, their memories—

Theirs more than his. Cassian’s head swam. Not just their homes, the places where their memories lived, but their families. He had no family, hadn’t seen his homeworld in years, hadn’t called it home in much longer.—Hadn’t called anything home, except the Rebellion in an ideological way, and Jyn in a much more visceral one. Alderaan was more a legacy than a place he belonged to in any meaningful sense. The horror of seeing the planet of his birth ripped into fire could only be a fraction of what Leia felt, and even these idiots, too.

Didn’t they realize? The Empire had shattered their world before their eyes and herded its people into one chamber and they thought—what? They’d been brought together out of the kindness of the admiralty’s hearts? Given space to breathe and grieve for no other purpose than that? Absurd. There must be another reason. Someone must be watching, somewhere. Waiting for one or all to betray themselves, most likely.

Surreptitiously, Cassian took in the room again, even as waves of anger still washed through him. Just as absurd as theirs, if less dangerous. They were all going to die, regardless of what happened here. Hopefully.

Not like this, he thought. Not like animals going to slaughter.

He supposed some of the mourners might be plants, but he didn’t think so. Even the general seated at one of the tables, the only person who outranked the weeping colonel, had yet to break his blank stare from the wall beside him. By looks, he might or might not be Alderaanian; provisionally, Cassian assumed he was.

Two majors. Both babbling. And—those four seemed his only superiors here. It made a certain amount of sense, actually. Alderaanians had the lowest enlistment rate of any Core planet, and sooner or later, those few generally found ways to get themselves thrown out. Or defected outright. At the best of times, they tended to be amenable to subversion. It didn’t make for long Imperial careers.

And after this, Draven would have him recruiting up one side of the galaxy and down the other. If they ever got out. Perhaps even Jyn, too—

Selfishly, Cassian wished she were here. Not really here, in danger of her life, but with him in some way.

He flattened a hand against his pocket, the rough edges of the crystal tangible even through his trousers and gloves. She’d done her best.

—People were still crying. Force, did they want to die? It was possible.

They were Imperials, he reminded himself. Servants of the Empire, enemies of the Rebellion. They’d kill him without a thought if they knew what he was. Or send him off to be tortured, more probably. If they had the presence of mind for that much.

Perhaps they thought that would protect them, minutes after the Empire wiped out a planet of Imperial subjects. Perhaps they didn’t think at all. They supported tyranny and cruelty on a vast, careless scale, the subjugation of countless peoples on countless worlds, and never imagined that it might be turned against them. This was their world.

They were his people.

No. That was the Rebellion. His surveys of the room finally took in what he’d been looking for. Expecting, at least: a recess high in the wall, no more than a foot on any side, and something black and blocky within. Cassian kept his gaze moving, and his feet, too, searching for a better angle, and let his glance drift past the recess again. Sure enough, he could see a faint gleam from here. A camera.

He knew it.

Voices still clamoured around him.

“—hundreds of years, and—”

“Who cares about your fucking house? My daughters—”

“I can’t believe it. I can’t. It must be a … a trick, or a test, or … it’s not real. It’s not.”

“Someone’s going to pay for this. Whoever it was. We’ll make—”

Thoughts, emotions, suspicions: they all slipped into alignment, the junction as smooth and exact as the pieces of an engine or a droid clicking into place. For the first time in a long, long while, Cassian set the Rebellion aside.

“Diçelà!”

He’d been thrust into leadership before, if never like this. He knew how to make his voice heard.

The room didn’t go entirely silent, as he’d ordered, but fell quiet enough. Withdrawing to the habits of command, he demanded,

“Are we or are we not soldiers of the Empire?” His own language felt strange on his tongue, almost foreign. “Is this how we conduct ourselves?”

“Conduct ourselves?” a lieutenant repeated incredulously. “The Empire has—”

Cassian interrupted before anyone could incriminate themselves further. “The Empire does not tolerate this sort of display, this ... impropriety. If the admiralty were to see you all like this, at this moment, you’d be lucky to end up in the brig. Remember who you are, men. Remember where you are.”

Nobody said anything, which he considered an improvement. Every eye seemed to be fixed on him.

“Governor Tarkin should be arriving soon,” he went on. “We’ll get an explanation then.”

If he doesn’t have us all killed.

“What could possibly explain this?” demanded the colonel.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“I don’t know,” Cassian said. “I don’t know more than any of you. None of us had warning. But many of you are coming very near to open insubordination. How do you imagine the governor, or the admirals, or the Emperor will look upon that? After our people provoked such a response?”

The room was truly silent, now. When the general drew a breath and rose from his chair, the sounds jarred. 

“You heard the captain,” he snapped. “Find some self-control or you’re going to end up in the airlock.”

He made a dismissive gesture, and as the others drifted into more decorous grief, walked straight over to Cassian. Not a scheming type, evidently.

“You’re quite the loyal soldier, captain.”

“Thank you, sir.” Willix, Cassian decided, would be gratified but uneasy. Not something he found difficult to manufacture, given that he felt that exact combination every time he interacted with Draven.

“Who are you?”

“Captain Cassein Willix,” said Cassian. “Sir.”

The general gave a difficult-to-interpret snort. “That so?”

He wouldn’t have thought that his muscles could wind tighter or his brain go on higher alert, but—apparently he’d underestimated himself. Every nerve in his body seemed to fire at the same time, lighting each one into shrieking alarm. His hands were icy under his gloves, his head hot, his feet tingling.

Jyn, he thought desperately, imagining the safety of their quarters. Only safe as long as he lived. For her, and the codes, there was nothing to do but brazen it out.

“Yes, sir.”

The man held out a hand. “General Cassio Tagge.”

Oh.

Allowing himself a cautious smile, Cassian shook the hand and ran through his store of Alderaanian languages. “General. You’re from … Pheled?”

“Xàvilun,” said General Tagge. Cassian had been off by a province. “Serèp for you, Willix?”

“Yes, sir. A small district there—Sereia,” he lied. It was Jyn who had the truth from him: he not only had never seen Serèp, he’d never set foot on its entire continent. Intelligence hadn’t wanted to compromise Willix’s identity, however, so Sereia it was. Cassian dug up as many facts as he could find, and hoped nobody asked for more. Since Willix rarely interacted with any Alderaanians at all, except Leia, he had yet to encounter any particular problems. But now?

Xàvilun, he thought. Not all that close to Serèp, but well out of the mountains. Tagge might know enough to pick up on the discrepancies.

“I haven’t lived there since I was a child, however,” he said. “I barely understand Serepta any more.”

“Well,” said General Tagge, “it’s not likely that you’ll need it, will you?”

As realization struck all over again, they both went pale.

“No,” Cassian said tightly. “I imagine not.”