“Leia?” Harp was very nearly screaming. “Leia?”
“Your Highness!” Chassellon had pitched his voice to carry, a surprisingly deep, booming shout. “We’re looking for you! If you can hear us, let us know where you are!”
After a couple of tries, Leia was able to take a deep enough breath to cry back, “Here!”
They ran up to her moments later, each of them so obviously terrified that Leia almost wanted to laugh. “Field generator,” she said, coughing once. “Remember?”
Harp collapsed by Leia’s side. “I forgot all about it.”
“You won’t next time,” Leia pointed out, then had to cough again. Maybe she’d swallowed a little mud at the beginning.
Chassellon pulled himself together almost instantly, and held out his hand to Leia, courtly and formal. “Will you rise, my lady?” Usually she found his emphasis on her royal status irritating, but today it felt comforting, like being wrapped in a familiar blanket. Leia let him pull her to her feet. Although the world tilted oddly at first, she soon regained her balance. Wet mud slithered down her body, and Chassellon put his free hand to his chest. “Your royal robes are stunning, Your Highness. Designer?”
She laughed again. “One of a kind.”
They belatedly made it to the rendezvous point, so late that Chief Pangie and the others had begun assembling a search party. Kier went to Leia immediately, gathering her in his arms. So much for being discreet, she thought, although at the moment she couldn’t care.
Chassellon’s temper had returned, and this time it was directed squarely at the chief. “This is ridiculous! Harp gets injured on Alderaan, Leia and Kier nearly fall to their deaths on Felucia, and now this? Pathfinding’s supposed to be a learning experience, not survival of the fittest!”
Chief Pangie just shook her head. “Field generators, Stevis. You’re supposed to use the field generators so that nobody gets hurt. You have to remember that.”
“Or else what?” Chassellon retorted. “We die?”
“Exactly.” The chief let the word hang in the shocked silence that followed, until she continued in a quieter, more serious tone than Leia had ever heard from her. “Pathfinding can be dangerous. Every single one of you knew that before you began. Every single one of you thought that danger somehow didn’t apply to you, because you’re young and stupid about that kind of thing. You have to learn better, and I’d rather you learned it out here with your field generators to save you, than somewhere else in the galaxy where you get no safety net, no teammates, and no second chances. Pathfinding isn’t just about learning how to find your way around. It’s about learning how to think on your feet. How to deal with real risks. Even how to face the fear of death.”
Did my parents realize this? Leia wondered, before deciding that of course they had.
In the circle of her classmates, everyone remained hushed and subdued—Harp pale and shaky, Sssamm with his head hanging low, Chassellon unexpectedly solemn—except for pink-haired Amilyn Holdo, who grinned and said, “I knew it!”
Originally Leia had planned on returning to Coruscant with the others, but after her tumble through the mudslide, she felt the need to go back home at least for a night or two.
“I could come with you, if you want.” Kier held one of her hands in both of his as they stood at the spaceport. The class’s transport sat a few meters away, their friends already climbing aboard. “Look after you on the way back. Then we could return to Coruscant together.”
“It’s all right. Honestly, I’m exhausted. I just want to sleep.” Which was true—if not the whole truth. Leia wasn’t so shaken by her experience that she’d failed to see an opportunity, one she wasn’t yet ready to share with anybody else, even Kier.
“If you’re sure,” Kier said. When she nodded, he kissed her forehead once, brushed his thumb along her cheek, and headed off to the transport.
Leia didn’t have to wait on her own very long. The Polestar arrived promptly, with Ress Batten alone at the helm. Batten hurried out to greet her, then frowned. “You look fine. I was told you’d been in mortal peril, and this is, what, slightly mussed hair?”
“You should’ve seen me before I washed up.” Even though she’d changed back into her dark blue traveling gown and now looked almost as polished as 2V could wish for, Leia’s skin still itched from the mere memory of mud. “Come on, let’s go.”
They took off from the surface of Chandrila without more than half a dozen extra words exchanged between them. Never had Batten mentioned their voyage to Crait, but Leia could sense the knowledge between them at times, a silence more energizing than intimidating. Although she wasn’t certain how to read Batten’s reaction, it certainly wasn’t disapproval, or fear.
Hopefully it was curiosity.
“So,” Leia began, a few minutes before they would make the jump to hyperspace, “would you say that we’ve—taken some interesting trips together?”
Batten shook her head. “They’ve been pretty dull, really. Average. Everyday. Humdrum.”
“Humdrum. Like that run to Crait.”
“So boring.”
Leia made sure to look down at the console, not at Batten’s face, as she said, “On the way home—I was thinking—if it wouldn’t take too long, maybe we could take another boring trip. Something completely average.”
“Oh, yeah?” The note of pure anticipation in Ress Batten’s voice made Leia look up to see the older woman’s grin. “Turns out I could use a little more humdrum in my life.”
She wants this, Leia thought. She knows this is action against the Empire, and she wants in. How many others must be ready, willing, even eager to join us as soon as we speak the word?
To Batten she said only, “The Paucris Major system. No landings this time—distance observation only. And let’s leave it off the logs.”
“Your Highness, I like the way you think.”
As the Polestar hurtled through the blue shimmer of hyperspace, Leia lay back on one of the long couches. Adrenaline battled with exhaustion and won—barely—as she counted through the possibilities. Batten’s probably a good candidate to join us someday. Chassellon Stevis? Maybe not as bad as he seems at first, but still, he’d report us in a heartbeat. Amilyn Holdo…Leia frowned. By now she genuinely liked Amilyn and believed her to have noble ideals, but that didn’t change the fact that the girl seemed highly unlikely to be useful in a crisis situation.
Thinking of Kier made her smile. Of course Kier would want to play a role. She hadn’t forgotten his concerns about protecting Alderaan, but lots of planets were joining forces now. He loathed the Emperor and was braver about speaking out than most. When they took action, he’d be by their side.