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The air was cold, and she was falling, falling, falling to her death.
Her skin is clammy and eerily cold as the nerves recognise the silk of her pyjamas and the cotton of her bedsheets. The air on Yavin is a sweltering blanket of tropical suffocation. There are bugs in the air, making loud sawing noises with their legs. The people who stole her away from the ISB tell her the nightmares will end one day. When she hears their screams harmonise with the bugs she is not so sure that they ever will. She stretches out a hand, just one, to the other side of the bed.
In the dip in the mattress is a man people underestimate. It takes guts to approach an ISB supervisor, time and time again. It takes balls to convince said ISB agent to defect to the rebellion, trying in a somewhat futile manner to save Ghorman lives. Syril stirs, only slightly to the gentlest of her touches, though she has been told that her sense of force is skewed. He rolls over, eyes barely open and flips her pillow over. She doesn’t have the energy to argue and lets her cheek fall onto the pillow, the cotton now cold. Syril is back to sleep in the time it takes her to pull the covers tight over her ribs and place his hand on her hip.
She wonders what it would be like in another world, where Syril took the reassignment to Ghorman as her spy. He would spin Imperial webs in Ghorman rebel circles. They would find another way to see each other, only in the secret depths of midnight. He would grow tired of the disapproval from his mother, the anguish of concealment, the helplessness. Perhaps he would resent her, leave her and join the rebels himself. She reminds herself she is a rebel now, a traitor to the Empire that has fed her and housed her and clothed her all her life. Syril tells her that she mustn’t be so othering to herself. They made their choices. She must grow content with her life.
In the morning they eat. Syril reminds her of what he used to say about her, in the early days of their relationship. He tells her about the stray cat he left food out every day for a month. How it came back, not just for the food but to play, how it brought back a dead mouse and his mother called the exterminator. The cat never came back. He tells her that he’s glad his mother can’t call an exterminator on her, and that he cooked so many meals. He worries about his mother, though the people in charge insist that she’s being looked after by his well-meaning Bureau of Standards subordinates. This morning’s breakfast is a grainy but well risen loaf of bread smeared with thick and yellow butter and drizzled with golden honey.
She’s glad for her Imperial education now, she’s found a good place in the greenhouses on Yavin. All those lessons on botany that filled her head with knowledge, all those facts helped shape the way her hands push soil around tiny seedlings. She’s started wearing her hair down, letting it form waves as it likes in the humidity. Syril is in the kitchen, he makes enough glueblue noodles to feed the whole planet every week. Rebels, it turns out, are a hungry bunch. There’s all this talk of becoming self-sufficient. Dedra appreciates this, she knows how fragile a safe haven can be.
She thinks back to Coruscant, to her barely lived in apartment, to the grey landscape. To the conversations she had at the table with Syril, to meeting his domineering mother. How early had he become self-sufficient? How early did he learn to hide things from her? She thinks back to that cat, and wonders why the thought of a stray is haunting her today. She compares herself to the animal. Before him, even during the start of him, she’d survived like a scavenger. Her cupboards remained bare long after she moved into her apartment. She took stim pills religiously. Her coworkers did too, but on reflection they seemed less dependent on them than her. She thinks back to the way she looked, probably half-starved with dark circles under her eye. She looks down at the backs of her hands and to her stomach. She can no longer see bones and tendons, just dark brown soil. Perhaps she is the cat, just as vulnerable and just as afraid.
She thinks back to the flowers. They puzzled her at first, an object with no purpose. She knew that people threw them on stage, a gesture she thought to be hollow and vane. Then he bought the second set, and colour was splashed on half the walls in her monochrome home. She allowed him to encroach a little more each time, a mislaid scarf hanging on the coat stand she’d bought only as a home for her jacket and her hat. A set of bedsheets, a brownish-orange, the colour of the clay on Ferrix. She doesn’t like to think of that colour, not with that connotation. But the orange is one that is a near constant in Syril’s life. She envied how he mourned a coat when they were torn away from their old lives, a necessary pain. The envy triggered something in her, and that night she cried like a baby in their Yavin bed about a plush ash-rabbit the men who arrested her parents left behind. A distant, mostly forgotten memory.
The seedling in her hand is weak. Its leaves are yellow and its stem is half broken. She doesn’t plant it, just reaches into the yellow tray and picks up the next one. She examines the broken one again and places it on the soil, not buried. It won’t take root. She moves her tray along and keeps planting. They’ll be done before long, and then they’ll move onto the other farms, the other plants. She wonders what they’ll do with her when they’ve planted the whole moon. She’s hardly useful as she is. She knows they want her, need her. She knows the ISB inside and out, there’s not a code she doesn’t know, a name she hasn’t heard. She knows Syril has told them she’s off limits, and she is confusingly passive about it. She knows he’s right. She knows he’s better off in the kitchens, being called to look at fuel when they need him, being useful. She knows she’s better off out of the way. Syril calls it healing. She doesn’t know what it is, but sometimes it feels like running.
Syril packed her lunch this morning. It’s quite a trek back to the canteen for lunch, so she and the others she work with carry boxes full of food with them to eat when the midday sun beats down on the tops of their heads. One of her co-workers chats to the empty space between them. She’s from Ghorman, one of the people she was trying to suppress. “Dedra?” She questions, tapping her on her knee. “We were exchanging stories.”
“Oh?”
“We were wondering how you got out?” The girl asks. She doesn’t know her name. It would hurt her too keenly. A name is given to someone. By someone who loves them, this person’s someone is likely dead.
“Lonni Jung.” The girl gasps. His name has been all that was whispered about on the jungle moon for weeks. He was hailed as a hero for his sacrifice, though she knew that his wife had killed herself and his young child has been given to a kinder-block. She hated how he failed, and like the sapling, she thought it made him weak. This made her hate herself, because she had put her life in the hands of a man who couldn’t keep himself alive.
“Isn’t he dead?” Says one of the other girls. She nods. Her throat closes up, and she blinks away a few tears.
“He was, he was a friend.” She says. This elicits an aww of sympathy from the girls she works with, and she wonders how these women are rebels at all. Then she sees beneath the exteriors, carefully painted on in front of refresher mirrors and sees the heart shattering pain and the bravery in even leaving bed that morning.
The grief took so very long to come accustomed to. When it settled, sinking deep into her bones it caused her such pain that she thought she might be dying. She laid on the couch and didn’t move until Syril came back from sourcing food. He took her in his arms, and at his touch any semblance of control was stripped from her. She dressed herself in a uniform of tear stained clothes and bloodshot eyes for a whole week before she was dragged from the bed and fed a small bowl of soup. It’s still there, nested amongst her bone marrow, though every day she feels her body is managing to purge some of it, to flush it from her mind. It took a long time for her to recognise it as grief. She’d never had anything to grieve before.
She decides that evening that it’s time to prove her worth again. The rebellion needs information, and she is a treasure trove. With the data chips sewn into the lining of their old clothes, there’s very little they’ll be clueless to. There’s nothing on the scale of Project Stardust, her involvement with that has been totalled up and squared away. But there’s information on poorly guarded areas, people with known sympathies. People the Empire has plans for. She knows every weakness in Steergard, and exactly how to get away with what they were doing for so long. She tells Syril this and he fetches the scissors from the kitchen drawer
This is a new life, she decides. She still dreams of falling from a rail-less balcony into the depths of a Ghorman spider’s web, but she knows now she needs to do little more than flip her pillow over, and wipe away the bad dreams.