The chaos after the explosion left Leia badly off balance for the better part of an hour. One moment she was staring at the burning chalet, thinking, I was just drinking tea inside there, with a man who’s dead now. The next, a medical droid was hovering around her, scanning for injuries; by the time the droid was done, she had synthplast over the few bad cuts she’d received and a binding field around her ankle, which throbbed menacingly. Then she remembered the masked man who had run away—wondered if he was tied to whatever shadowy group her parents were a part of, whether they’d known this would happen to Quarsh Panaka and anyone who stood near him—and thought of the shamefaced way the miners’ leader had spoken of reaching out for “help”—
“You, there.” The stormtrooper’s metallic voice jolted Leia back into the here and now. He stood over her, smudges of soot marring his white armor. The way the sunlight hit his mask, she could almost see the human eyes within. He gestured with his blaster rifle toward an area where a few shell-shocked, grimy people were being cordoned off by his fellow troopers. “Assemble with the other suspects.”
“Suspects?” Her temper returned to fiery life, but before she could speak, Queen Dalné of Naboo stepped in, already dusted off to a semblance of her former grandeur.
“This is not a suspect,” Dalné said in the deeper, flatter voice that meant she spoke not as an individual, but as monarch. “This is Leia, princess of Alderaan, daughter of their queen and their representative in the Imperial Senate. It would be absurd to accuse her of terrorist activities.”
With a jolt, Leia realized she was closer to the true cause than anyone else nearby.
But Dalné’s explanation worked for the stormtrooper. The strict hierarchies of Imperial service meant the average soldier of the line was quick to defer to authority. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, Your Highness. I wasn’t informed.”
“It’s quite all right,” Leia said as smoothly as she could manage. “I think we’re all shaken up.”
The stormtrooper was clearly torn between wanting to seize that excuse and not wanting to admit he was “shaken up” in front of two teenage girls. Finally he simply waved toward the Polestar, where Ress Batten had been forced to wait.
Leia got to her feet, wincing as she put her weight on her ankle. Upon seeing her discomfort, Dalné quickly took her arm. As they walked toward the royal yacht together, Dalné murmured, “If we hadn’t been who we are, we’d be carted off to detention with the others.”
“What if none of them are guilty?” Leia hadn’t seen the masked man again; he’d timed his getaway well.
Dalné’s scowl creased her thick makeup. “One of them will be, before the local legal officer is through. They’ll want blood for this, and they won’t dare report to their superiors that they couldn’t solve the terrorist murder of a provincial governor. A moff.” She shook her head as if in wonder. “Someone must have known Naboo and Onoam well, to have thought this out so well. There are few other places where a moff would be so unguarded.”
Another pang of fear wrenched Leia’s heart. Her father had mentioned visiting Naboo several times; apparently he’d had friends here in the days of the Clone Wars. Although he’d never gone into any detail about his time on Naboo, he could feasibly have traveled to Onoam. He might know this area well.
Bail Organa could have been in league with whoever planned this attack.
He didn’t set it up for sure—he knew I was coming here—but he didn’t remember what planet Onoam orbited. Maybe he only knew the attack would be on one of Naboo’s moons—
Dalné, apparently unaware of Leia’s disquiet, kept talking. “Soon they’ll put this entire system on lockdown. Your royal status will protect you from arrest, but they could still hold you here.”
“We’ll leave immediately,” Leia promised. The winds had calmed, and the high grasses around them seemed like impenetrable walls of green, the pathway through a maze she hadn’t known they were in. “But you—”
“Yes?”
“If—if they’re going to lock the planet down for a while—that means no other Imperial authority will be able to seize control very soon. For a few days, or even weeks, maybe the queen of Naboo can be a true queen again. You might have the power to help the miners after all.”
Almost as soon as Leia had spoken the words, she realized how risky that direction would be for Dalné. Even a temporary assertion of power by an individual planet might be seen as insurrection. The smoldering building on the horizon had shown her how dangerous, even vicious, a revolution against the Emperor would be, but she needed no such example to demonstrate how cruel the Empire was. She knew that as well as every other citizen of the galaxy.
Dalné had to know it too. Yet instead of refusing or pretending not to hear, she lifted her chin. “Maybe there’s a chance,” she said to Leia. “It’s worth trying, at least for the miners’ sake.”
Leia took her new friend’s hand. “You’ll always have an ally on Alderaan.”
“And you’ll always have one here.”
The return home was tense. For the first time in her life, she dreaded a reunion with her parents. She had to ask them more hard questions, harder than ever before, and this time, she wouldn’t be put off by talk about how she needed to be wiser or more responsible or a corpse halfway in the grave before she’d earned the right to hear the truth. If Leia had nearly lost her life because of her parents’ work—if they had murdered Moff Quarsh Panaka—then she needed to know that.
What if they did? whispered a traitorous voice in her mind. What are you going to do?
She could never report her parents. Never. That was impossible.
But she couldn’t go on as she had before, either. Not if they were guilty.
“Thank the Force you’re alive,” Ress Batten said as they disembarked in the Aldera spaceport. “If I’d had to come back and report to your mother that you’d been killed on our watch, I’d have been reprimanded for sure.” Then she caught herself. “What I mean is that I would’ve been distraught with grief.”
“It’s all fine,” Leia said absently. The buzz of the busy spaceport around her might as well have been mere holograms, flickering and insubstantial, visions of someplace much farther away. “Thanks for everything.”
Batten frowned. “Your Highness, are you sure you’re all right? I could take you to a hospital, or find the nearest medical droid—”
“No, really, it’s nothing. I just need some rest.” With effort, she smiled for the pilot. Batten didn’t look convinced, but contented herself with dropping her off at the palace.
When Leia walked into the private area of the palace, the only one waiting for her was WA-2V, who flung her metal arms open wide. “Your Highness! It’s amazing!”