She tries to flex her fist again. Mon’s connection to her own fingers is soft and distant. As if they belong to someone else.
She erupts suddenly, a fit of forced optimism: “This is all normal. These are the necessary bumps and scratches of a growing democracy. We should not expect politics to be neat and tidy and we are reminded of that today. Enough looking back. Now we look forward.”
“We have to respond,” Auxi says.
“And soon, I fear,” Ackbar adds.
“It seems that even a few hours of sleep are no longer in our equation,” Mon says with a beleaguered sigh. “I shall begin working on my response immediately. Auxi, contact HoloNet News, have them ready for my statement. And Admiral—”
“I will initiate the probe droid and scout immediately,” he says with a brusque nod.
“Good. Let’s remain vigilant. We have a long day ahead of us, and I fear that traitors are afoot.”
Everything moves fast as lightspeed.
Fast until it stops, like a ship plowing into the side of an asteroid.
—
“It wasn’t the chancellor,” Leia tells them, taking a cup of tea from her protocol droid. “Thank you, Elsie.”
Sinjir cocks an eye at her. He’s angry. Irrationally so, perhaps. He likes to keep things cool—he imagines his heart is less an organ beating blood into his body and more a collection of icicles hanging from the chin of some malevolent snow-beast—but he can keep that veneer no longer. He knows full well that running off like a soggy drunk adventurer into the crushing maw of the Empire’s fleet was not a wise decision, and a little part of him is thankful they’re not right now being blasted to bits by a Super Star Destroyer in the space above Jakku. But the rest of him seethes over the fact that Norra and Jas are still down there somewhere. Hopefully alive. And nobody coming for them the way they have come for others.
Lucky perhaps that Temmin isn’t here. Sinjir sent the boy to see the pilot Wedge Antilles. Wedge might know how to get them to Jakku.
“Then it was you,” Sinjir accuses. “You blocked us.”
Leia gives him an incredulous look. “Do you truly believe me so duplicitous, Sinjir?”
“Yes.” He frowns and shakes his head. “No. I don’t know! Someone sent those guards. They didn’t send themselves.”
Han passes behind Sinjir with a cup of caf in his hand. “Mon can be a slippery one,” he says. “But this isn’t like her. Here, drink this.” He thrusts the cup into Sinjir’s hand. “You’re gonna need it.”
“I’m going to need something considerably stronger.”
“That comes later. If we win. Or if it goes the other way.”
Sinjir runs long fingers through his dark muss of hair with one hand while sipping the bitter caf with the other. It’s got a hard afterburner kick to it, like drinking a mug of vaporator sludge. “We need to get to Jakku.”
“That just became a whole lot harder,” Leia says.
“Explain to me again—what exactly happened?”
“Mon’s opponent in the upcoming election, he knew. Wartol knew about the Empire, and worse, he knew that we knew. Our window to get you to Jakku was very small already. And him making that public just closed it.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Han interjects, “this just became officially political. You go zipping off to that dirtworld, it’ll look like an act of war on behalf of the New Republic before the Senate had time to do squat about it.”
“You mean like, oh, say, Kashyyyk?” It’s a barb, Sinjir knows, but he means for it to sting. He grows weary of double standards. As weary as he grows of politics. And of nearly everything at this point.
“Don’t look at me. I say you still go.”
“Han,” Leia cautions.
“I know, I know. But it’s what I’d do. And what you’d do, too.”
Sinjir groans and takes a long, stiff sniff of the caf underneath his nose. “None of this explains who sent those guards to meet us at the platform, does it? And who told the Orishen senator about all this?”
“It wasn’t you, was it?” Leia asks. She’s serious.
He retorts the same way she did: “Do you truly believe me so duplicitous, Princess?” Before she can answer, he cuts in: “Never mind. Don’t answer that. No. Of course not. It was not me, nor was it Temmin.” He declines to remind everyone here that once upon a time, Temmin did betray them at the Akivan palace, and he is young and a bit of a firebrand…but no! That’s impossible. “We had an answer. We had a way to Jakku. There was no need to complicate the solution we already had for our problem.”
Then it hits him.
It wasn’t just that Senator Wartol knew something he shouldn’t. It was that someone knew everything that went on here.
Which means—
Oh, drat.
Sinjir says with a vicious scowl, “The walls have ears.”
“Huh?” Han asks.