Kier put one hand on her elbow. “The first engineers who scouted the site found a radiation source well beneath the surface—shielded by rock, but that rock’s about to be blasted away so Arreyel can power massive new factories for the Empire. As in, planet-wide factories.”
“They’re giving the populace six weeks to evacuate,” Amilyn added. She no longer looked ridiculous. “No compensation.”
Kier’s dark eyes narrowed in anger. “Apparently Grand Moff Tarkin informed them that they were lucky not to be fined for concealing this from the Empire all along.”
The horror Leia felt didn’t cloud her thinking. If anything, she saw more clearly. “It was a trap,” she whispered. “They suspected the power source. They knew we’d wind up picking Arreyel for the school. Then they’d be able to use that excuse to run the intensive scans they needed to confirm what was under the surface.”
“Probably,” Kier said. “Leia, don’t be upset. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s so not your fault, nobody else would ever blame you,” Amilyn added. “But you will, because that’s how you are.”
“I’m not upset,” Leia said, and it was true. Instead she was furious. She’d been tricked into doing the Empire’s dirty work for them.
Silently she swore, Never again.
By all official metrics, Leia’s first session of the Apprentice Legislature achieved all of its goals. They were commended for their successes…including the identification of Arreyel as a planet of “extraordinary interest.”
But to her, the days slipped by in a kind of haze. She reviewed their informational packets over and over again, yet remained indecisive, desperately looking for more loopholes and traps that might not even exist. The others went on some of Chassellon’s nightlife excursions, even coming to the Organas’ apartments to try to drag Leia along with them, but she always turned the invitations down. It felt wrong to go out and celebrate when she was responsible for the undoing of an entire world.
When she stayed in, Kier Domadi often stayed with her. The first time he lingered behind after everyone else left, she had wanted to be alone so badly that she’d nearly thrown him out. She tried the tactful approach first. “I’m not doing anything but watching a holovid.”
“Sounds good.”
“You don’t even know which holovid.”
He gave her a look. “It’s going to be something that lets you turn your brain off for a while, right?”
“…yes.”
“Sounds perfect.”
Kier had the rare quality of knowing when someone wanted to be quiet, and the even rarer one of accepting that silence. Leia soon felt comfortable with him—and soon after that, truly relaxed. They slipped into the habit of spending time together not as any sort of special occasion, but more as though they’d always belonged in each other’s daily lives. Some sons of various Elder Houses had tried to charm her in the past, thinking of a princess only as a prize to claim, the ultimate conquest to brag about; Kier took her measure as an individual and asked for nothing more but to know her.
So far. Leia was vividly aware of the weight of unspoken words between them, of the way they silently negotiated sitting closer to each other. But Kier never pushed. Although she’d told him nothing of her fears for her parents, her uncertainty about their plans, he seemed to sense that she was working through something confusing and difficult, something she had to figure out on her own.
But he did try to help when he saw she was in pain.
“It’s not your fault,” Kier told her more than once, usually under his breath as they sat together in their legislatorial pod. “They set us all up to support Arreyel. One of us would’ve taken the bait. It could’ve been anybody.”
“It could’ve been. But it was me,” she would whisper back.
Leia went out only once, for Harp Allor’s seventeenth birthday party. Harp’s senator, Winmey Lenz, had personally reserved the venue as a gift—which was how they all wound up in a water park entirely enclosed in an energy-field bubble a hundred meters above the tallest Coruscant skyscrapers. Only a few short months before, Leia would’ve reveled in the chance to slalom through an invisible spiral in the sky, splashing water on her friends, but the entire day, she felt as though she was going through every action, every sentence as mechanically as a droid.
Even Kier’s company only helped so much. Bail Organa’s travels remained mysterious—in particulars if not in purpose—and so when Kier was back on Alderaan, Leia was usually left alone. But she never felt as lonely as when her father was in their Coruscant apartment. Apparently he had yet to forgive her for her trip to Onoam, because for reasons he’d never explain, going to the Naboo system seemed to be the worst, most heinous thing anybody had ever done.
Leia sometimes stopped herself there. She wasn’t too grown-up to sulk, but she’d matured enough to realize when she was doing it. Probably she was overreacting to her father’s moods. Still, the bigger overreaction was his, and she knew it.
Her sour temper returned to Alderaan with her. On her first night back, she couldn’t hide herself away in the library or travel to the Istabith Falls to refresh her soul; no, she had to submit to WA-2V’s ministrations to make her a glamorous princess again, so she could be shown off.
“Another dinner party,” she groused as 2V slid a soft blue wrap around the shoulders of her white gown. “How many has my mom thrown this year? A dozen? Twenty?”
“Fourteen. Now, hold still. These are the old-fashioned pins that can still stick you.” 2V adroitly fastened the wrap in place with two jeweled brooches, one at each shoulder. They sparkled prettily, but Leia couldn’t have cared less. “I think two side buns tonight. Do you agree, Your Highness?”
“Whatever.”
2V tilted her torso forward to study her charge, perhaps thinking such insensitivity to fashion was evidence of an imminent collapse. Leia simply sat down at the vanity to let the droid do her work. As she stared at her reflection in the mirror, she remembered how, as a little girl, she used to look for proof that she resembled her parents in some way. Although Leia had always known herself to be adopted, had realized any shared traits would be only a coincidence, she had still hoped to see a little of her mother’s wisdom and beauty, or some of the kindness she had once found so easily in her father’s eyes.
Now it’s like I hardly know them, she thought as 2V began refashioning her messy topknot into an actual hairstyle. They’re braver than I thought, but maybe more dangerous than I thought, and somehow they still want to throw their idiot banquets—
Wait.
I’m the one being an idiot.
Leia didn’t attend the banquets themselves, since she wasn’t yet invested as heir, but she always put in an appearance at the receptions beforehand. That meant she knew who the guests usually were: Mon Mothma and Winmey Lenz of Chandrila. Pamlo of Taris. Vaspar of the Taldot sector…
Every single one of them was a senator or planetary leader known to oppose Palpatine’s harshest policies.
Leia’s dark eyes widened. These weren’t banquets. They were strategy sessions.