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Luthen shifted his weight from one hip to the other, then back again. He didn't appreciate the games Saw Gerrera played with him. He'd been escorted into the tent right away this time, at least, but then left to rot, listening to the scream of the jungle creatures outside, feeling the trickle of sweat down his back.
He considered the girl standing at the flap, with a gun as big as her arm balanced on her shoulder. "Saw know I'm here?" he said.
"Yes," she said.
She sounded like Kleya when she was annoyed at him. He slapped at a bug that had taken a sizeable bite out of his ear. "How old are you?"
Her lip curled, just a little. She rolled her eyes. Very subtly, but she rolled them.
Oh, that disdain. Nothing like a teenage girl for disdain that could strip your skin off your bones.
"Fourteen?" he guessed. "Thirteen?"
He only saw it because he was watching for it: the indignant stiffening of her shoulders. He smiled to himself. Fifteen then. At least. Or sixteen. Small for her age and annoyed about it.
He heaved himself to his feet. "Easy," he said, as her head whipped around. "Just stretching my legs. I've been sitting awhile," he added to remind her.
She gazed at him with the contemptuous boredom of a girl forced to put up with an idiot old man.
He strolled around the tent a few times, clocking how she stood looking at nothing, apparently bored, but still seemed to know where he was at all times.
"I know a young lady about your age," he said idly, meandering along the perimeter of the tent. Kleya would have killed him for implying she was still a teenager, but she wouldn't know. "You might get along. Shall I bring her next time?"
"For a playdate?" she sneered. "Some soft Core girl?" She swung the enormous gun down from her shoulder, took aim, and fired a smoking hole in the dirt six inches from his boot. As he jolted back, she smirked. "Pass."
At his feet, the poisonous-yellow lizard that had been scuttling around flopped onto its back, headless.
It had crawled into the shade of the tent a few minutes ago. He let his hand shift away from the blaster hidden in his pocket and kicked the headless corpse away from himself.
"Strong words for a girl with a Core accent yourself," he noted.
Her lip curled again. So she'd gotten some grief over that. She must find it useful. Or Saw found it useful.
Was that why she'd been set to watch him?
The tent flap rustled, and Saw came in. "Has he been behaving himself?" he said to the girl.
"She shot at me," Luthen complained.
Saw laughed, big and full and proud, and a tiny, vicious grin flashed over the girl's face like summer lightning. "Well done, child," he said, setting his hand on her shoulder for a moment.
Child, Luthen noted. His child. Very clearly.
"Go on and teach that new recruit a thing or two," Saw said in the tones of someone offering up a great treat.
She propped the gun on her shoulder again and ducked out the flap.
Luthen briefly debated making some kind of comment, but he didn't feel like letting Saw know that he'd noticed her other than as his guard dog. Anyway, they had other things to discuss, which quickly turned into one of their increasingly frequent fights, which turned into him being marched back to his ship.
The girl watched from a tree stump, playing with a knife as long as her forearm, smirking ever so slightly.
When he met with Saw again, six months later, on another planet, the girl was nowhere to be seen.
"She's probably dead," Kleya said.
"She's not dead," Luthen said.
"How long a life expectancy does any lieutenant of Saw Gerrera's have? He probably shot her between the eyes himself."
"If he had, he would have told me that."
"What did he say?"
"Just that she was no longer with them."
"Which is what he would say if he shot her and left her corpse to rot there on Tamsye Prime."
Luthen shook his head. Stars knew Saw was capable of it, and yet, and yet . . .
And yet.
He paced around the darkened gallery. "We should find her."
"Are you looking to replace me?" Kleya said acidly.
He shot her a glance. "How could I replace you?"
It was said in his most sardonic voice, and he meant every word.
A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. "You couldn't," she said. She glanced back at the comm set she was upgrading and adjusted a wire. "Why do you want her?"
"One day we're going to need a lever against Saw, and she might be it."
"Not if he dumped her somewhere."
You would be a lever against me, he thought. I wonder if you know it. "Levers work in all kinds of ways," he said aloud.
Kleya spent days in the depths of the Tamsye system's records, armed only with a very loose description. She sent Luthen scandoc holo ("No. No. Not that one. No.") after scandoc holo ("No. No. That's not even close"). She gave serious thought to mocking up a morgue entry for the mysterious girl, until she finally found the one that made Luthen say, "That's her." He nodded once and returned to some star maps he was studying. "Keep an eye on her."
Kleya scowled at the back of head and resisted the temptation to throw the tiny hand-held holoprojector at it.
The girl was Kestrel Dawn, eighteen. Human. Female. Hair, brown. Eyes, green. Hard-eyed and scowling in her scandoc holo, perhaps to distract from cheeks that were still soft and hair that still frizzed. Birthplace, Tamsye Prime.
Smart girl. Aged herself up so no bored and disgusting Imperial official would snag her under the guise of "minor protection." Kleya herself had done the same at that age.
Kestrel had left the planet on a public transport two weeks after Luthen's last visit to Saw's camp. Kleya set an alert on the name and a loose description, and was occasionally rewarded with pings here and there, from the grimy dregs of the galaxy.
Personally, she thought that Saw had forgotten about her entirely. But Luthen insisted she could still be used against the anarchist, and he'd been right about less likely things before, so Kleya rolled her eyes and kept the file.
"Blamish Station," Kleya reported to him a couple of years after she first started keeping track. "But the name's dissolved from the records. Probably took up another ID. Or she might be dead."
"Hmmm," Luthen said. "Andor's in that sector. Tell him to take a look."
"You tell him," Kleya growled. "They're updating the security settings on the metro tower next door. You know the one we've spliced into? I need to rewrite my code or nobody's going to be telling anybody anything."
Cassian had brought Bix with him to act as cover for a job during a local festival on Cerbrintail VII. A man alone at an event like that invited questions, whereas a young newlywed couple told their own story. They got the job done quicker than expected. Luthen acknowledged receipt of the intel (you're welcome, Cassian thought, although he couldn't remember the last time Luthen had thanked him) and asked for something else.
He disconnected the call and told Bix, "Luthen wants us to see if we can pick up some girl's trail. He tracked her to a station a couple systems over, but she's lying low. He wants more detail."
Bix looked up from the weapon she was cleaning of carbon scoring. "Why? Who is this girl?"
"Someone connected to Saw. Or she was. He's been keeping track." He pulled out a datapad and opened her file, including a recent booking holo.
He looked at it critically. Those booking holos were always terrible. He'd looked half feral in his own, years ago. So did this girl. Her glaring eyes snagged something in him. He didn't know what.
Bix leaned over, and he passed her the 'pad to get away from those gimlet eyes. She took in the holo and the brief description. "Poor kid. All on her own."
"Look at all those warrants," Cassian told her. "Hardly a kid even if she hasn't got many years."
Bix shrugged, then shut off the datapad. "I'll do it."
"I can do it."
She patted his cheek. "You're cute and everything. But if you came up to me, a grown man asking about a teenage girl, I never would have heard of her in my life. Even if I'd just talked to her."
He wanted to start with the local watering holes on Blamish Station, but Bix steered them toward the weekly market. "Seriously," she said. "Let me handle this."
He opened his mouth to protest, but she peeled his arm off her waist and was across the street the next moment, playing with a shawl on display in a fiber artist's stall.
He sighed and contented himself with scanning the street for a glimpse of knife-edged greenish-gold eyes.
Bix returned to him at the end of the street, as he bought a serving of fried tubers in a flimsi cone from a street vendor. "Going by the name Tanith," she said, sliding into place next to him and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before stealing one of the tubers. "Tanith Ponta. Has a place in that building on the right."
A run-down set of apartments, Cassian noted. The green might have been paint but it looked more like mold and lichen that had taken hold in the ugly duracrete. He could tell the kind of place it was. Probably subdivided until the rooms fit a bed and not much else. Pay extra for a cooker, even more for a private 'fresher, yet more for a window. Would she have paid any of the extra?
Bix went on. "She'll forge scandocs in under an hour, real neat and pretty. I got to see one. Good work," she noted with professional admiration. "Is that why Luthen wants her?"
"Who knows why Luthen wants anything," he said, chewing on tubers.
"Don't pout," she said.
"I'm not," he said, trying to fix his face. Bix had gotten it done, just like she'd told him. And she'd been right; he'd run into his fair share of roadblocks and suspicious eyes when he'd been still looking for Kerri. For a fleeting moment, he wondered - but no, that way lay madness.
He put an arm around Bix's waist. "Thanks. You probably did get more intel then I would have."
"Of course I did." She hummed. "We're looking for your sister, by the way. You're very concerned."
He shot her a look. "You told them she was my sister?"
"Please," Bix said, stealing another tuber. "No. I said, was her name Ladanna, and they said, no, no, this girl goes by Tanith. Dark brown eyes? More green. Oh, curly black hair? No, straight and brown. Little scar right here? No scars on her face, no. Plenty on her knuckles. Hell of a fighter, Tanith. Oh, no, no, couldn't be Ladanna, she wouldn't hurt a fly." She took some more tubers and raised a brow at him. "Are we making contact?"
He handed her the cone. He'd had all he wanted, anyway. "Just keeping track," he said, and noted down the address of the shitty building in the file Luthen had shared with him.
Maybe Bix hadn't been as subtle as she thought, because the next time Cassian checked the records for Blamish Station, Tanith Ponta was gone. Evaporated. No records of her scandocs departing the station.
Dead?
But of course, she could put together a set of scandocs "real neat and pretty" in under an hour. They could be the kind that looked good enough to fool an Imperial patrol, or they might be good enough to take her traveling. He was leaning toward the second. Saw was crazy, but he was also thorough, and his girl would have been taught the same.
He tapped his fingers on the table, then impulsively checked the records for the station's departures. It took some patient slicing, because it was supposedly private. But in the end, he had a list of the various ships that had left Blamish in the week since he'd been there asking about Tanith Ponta. Private transport, pleasure travelers, import/export. He considered which one Tanith Ponta would gravitate towards.
Import/export felt right, or more accurately, smugglers. He knew some smugglers in that sector. Had worked with a few here and there. He sent out feelers.
It came back - a small crew that flew out of Leunastic IV had a new hitter. Tough little bitch named Tanith Hallik. Could slice some, too.
He noted it in the file for Luthen.
It went that way for years. Kestrel, Tanith, Lyra, Liana, Jyn, Nari. A whole assortment of last names to go along with the first names, mix and match and match and mix. Hard to say which of them were her real name, if any of them were.
Half of them wound up attached to Imperial warrants. In fact, the warrants were the primary way-markers on the trail Cassian followed, increasingly out of his own curiosity. Though Luthen still checked the file; he could tell from the metadata stamps.
Shipjacking, slicing, aggravated assault, so much "contact with undesirables" that she became one herself. She drifted from group to group, seemingly without any ties. A lot of time she spent simply on her own, doing what she could to keep body and soul together.
Sometimes she dropped out of sight. He would think, well, that's it, she's dead. But for some reason, he never locked the file or deleted it from his datapad. Then she would turn up again under one of her many names, and he would feel something like relief.
The night after Bix left him, he stayed up for hours, trawling the Imperial warrants so he wouldn't replay her words on a neverending reel in his mind. When he found Saw's girl, living as Liana Hallik on Corulag, he pasted the information into her file, turned off the datapad, and passed out at the kitchen table.
About six months later, he got a ping that Liana Hallik had been booked on charges and sentenced to Wobani.
"Wobani is a high security prison," Kay said when he mentioned it. "A prison break is inadvisable, to say the least."
"Nobody said anything about a prison break," Cassian said, although it had crossed his mind. He'd heard stories of Wobani himself. "I just keep track of her."
"Well, now you know where she'll be for the foreseeable future," Kay said.
From the table, Melshi added, "At least until someone shanks her in the food line."
"Mmmm," Cassian murmured, making a mental note to set a ping on the Wobani database if Saw's girl died. "How would you do a prison break from Wobani? If you had to."
"From Wobani?" Melshi asked in disbelief.
"I told you," Kay said. "It's inadvisable. Anyway, what use do you have for a petty criminal?"
"I guess I don't," he said, and flipped the skewers on the cooker.
Hyperspace was long and boring, particularly between Coruscant and Yavin. They passed it by making Kleya comfortable and talking through the bits of information she'd carried.
Jedha, kyber, Erso.
"Saw's on Jedha," Kleya rasped.
The bruises on her face were coming in, purple and lurid. Melshi had given her what bacta treatments he could out of the U-wing's medkit, but he'd quietly reported to Cassian that she needed more medical assistance than that.
"What does Saw have to do with this?" Cassian asked.
She winced as she shifted herself on the unforgiving bench. "I don't know," she grumbled. "Maybe nothing. Maybe coincidence."
Luthen said - used to say - there was no such thing as coincidence.
Maybe she was remembering it too. She had to blink hard a few times and turn her face toward the bulkhead. Cassian and Melshi did her the kindness of pretending not to notice.
It was strange to see her out of the gallery. She'd always been so viciously confident there, so in her element. Luthen's right hand. Maybe his right foot, too, administering kicks in the ass when needed.
She thought she had no place at Yavin. Cassian thought she was wrong, but . . .
"Jedha," Kay said. "Mmmm." He plugged a digit into the display and pulled up a description of the planet.
Kleya tried to get up to look and Melshi nudged her back down with one finger. "You have a concussion," he told her. "Screens are no good for you right now."
She glared at him. He kept his finger on her shoulder until she dropped against the bench again.
Cassian studied the planet's data. A desert planet, with eons of Jedi history but not much going on at the moment. He reported as much to the others. "There is a note here that the Empire has ramped up mining the kyberite in the planet's crust," he added.
"Like Ghorman?" Kleya said quietly.
They traded looks.
"Wait," Melshi said. "Erso. Is that the same Erso who wrote Industrial Utilization of Senth-series Minerals and Broad-Spectrum Energy Applications?"
They both turned to stare at him.
"Well, is it?"
"No idea," Cassian said. "What else has he written?"
Melshi produced his datapad and tapped a query. Kleya reached for it.
"Hey," Melshi said, holding it away from her. "No."
She scowled, then winced and put a hand to her head.
"I told you. Screens will fuck you right up at the moment." He read the titles aloud. "Harnessing Stardust from the Kyber Crystal Lattices: A Novel Approach to Power Generation. Mmm, oh this one was good. Thermodynamic Stability and Electrochemical Properties of Kyber Crystals: Implications for High-Efficiency Energy Systems. And the follow-up, Nonlinear Optical Dynamics and Photon-Electron Interactions in Kyber Crystal Structures for Advanced High Yield Energy Applications. And there's Magneto-Optical Effects and Energy Modulation in Kyber Crystals: Bridging Quantum Mechanics and Engineering Applications. This was his last one. Several years ago. Computational Modeling for Energy Yields and Stability in Kyber Crystal-Enhanced Power Grids."
"Why do you have all these?" Kleya said, still holding her head.
Melshi shrugged. "Hyperspace is long. Man likes somethin' to read."
Well used to Melshi's auto-didact tendencies, Cassian said, "His last paper was some time ago?"
He checked the date. "Yeah, looks like sixteen, seventeen years. His bio says he was working for Zerpen Industries." He shook his head. "They've been defunct for a decade."
"What happened to him sixteen years ago?"
"Disappeared, as far as I can tell. I figured the Empire had him killed, but - maybe not."
Cassian took the datapad from him and re-read the titles. "Definitely sounds like the kind of man who'd be on a superweapon masquerading as an energy project."
When they got a landing party of brandished weaponry and a deeply annoyed Draven, Kleya shot Cassian a withering look that said, I told you so.
He tried to shoot her one back that said, Once they hear the intel you're carrying, they'll come around.
He wasn't sure he was successful.
He didn't fight the trip to Kafrene, because Tivik was one of their best sources for what was going on with the Partisans, and just how far and fast Saw was spiraling.
Well.
He had been.
Cassian swallowed back bile and went to the comm set to report back to Yavin.
After reporting the bare facts, including the cooling corpse he'd left on the plascrete, he added, "Tivik's information tracks with what Marki brought us from Coruscant." It couldn't hurt to remind Draven, and by extension the council, that Kleya had been incredibly useful to them. "He called it a planet killer."
The panic that had leapt from Tivik to him buzzed up the back of his neck. Cassian breathed hard through his nose and swallowed it back like the bile.
"Exaggeration?" Draven was saying.
"Possible," he allowed, because Tivik had always been a twitchy, nervy kind of contact - one of the reasons he'd been able to manipulate the man into reporting on Saw. "But I want to know by how much."
"Yes," Draven muttered. "We need to get that Imperial defector. Get further information from him. If Saw hasn't left him for dead in the desert by now."
"Is there anyone we can send?"
"After the way Paak left the Partisans? I'm worried he'll shoot our operatives on sight." Draven leveled a look on him through the holo. "I'm open to suggestion."
He didn't actually mean it, Cassian could tell. But then again - "There's a girl - woman - " Woman, now. None of her various scandocs had ever agreed on a specific birth year, but she had to be in her early twenties. "Anyway, she was a Partisan for years. She could get us in."
"How?"
Shit. This was going to be tricky. "They were close, she and Saw. Luthen witnessed it himself. Marki can corroborate."
Draven scowled, but thoughtfully. "You've made contact?"
"Not directly. I've been tracking her movements for years. We have confirmation of her current location."
"Which is?"
"Wobani," Cassian said quietly.
Draven stared at his ceiling, lips moving in what could have been a prayer to his gods or a recitation of all the things he intended to do to Cassian when he got back to Yavin.
"If you send Melshi and Kay, they can retrieve her. We've discussed it." He tried to make it sound like it had been a much more extensive discussion than it had been. But, Kay being Kay, he would have gamed out a whole flowchart of possibilities and their relative chances of success. Melshi could take that flowchart and put together an operation like this in an hour, and still have time for a nap and one of his incomprehensible science papers in hyperspace. "And odds are she'll be so grateful to us for springing her that she'll agree to help."
Draven must have been much more desperate than he seemed, because he said, "Very well. This had better work, Andor."
Melshi had shared Galen Erso's papers to Cassian's datapad before he left for the Kafrene system, and he tried to read them. But they were thick with technical language, his head was foggy from not sleeping, and the swirl of hyperspace outside kept distracting him. He skipped over the papers themselves and read the brief bios attached, which were mostly about the various scholastic and industry recognition that Erso had garnered. This prize and that scholarly award and that industrial employer. At the very end of one bio, it mentioned that he lived on Coruscant with his wife and daughter - the only nod toward a personal life.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and set the datapad down. He should get some sleep.
He eased the pilot's chair back into a sleep configuration and tried to drop into a doze, but his brain wouldn't shut down. The scattered pieces of the puzzle nagged at him. It was hard to tell what mattered and what didn't.
Galen Erso lives on Coruscant with his wife and daughter.
Why did that keep bumping against the insides of his skull?
When he had to drop into realspace to switch hyperlanes, he got a data dump to his 'pad of everything Intelligence holonet crawlers had scraped up on Galen Erso, with instructions to read and report. A lot of it was quite old. It reiterated what the bios had told him - Erso was a genius. A brilliant man.
Too bad he was using that genius to create a planet killer.
Cassian had to take a moment to breathe, counting in and out. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought, Focus on what's in front of you.
He opened the Erso file again and swiped to the personal life and data section.
The personal section started with a set of last known scandoc records. In his holo, Galen Erso had lank blondish-brown hair and a drooping face, and the uniform of the Imperial Science division. His wife was Lyra -
Tanith, Lyra, Liana . . .
He shook his head and focused.
Lyra Nallick, later Erso.
Rallick, Hallick . . .
He shook his head again. A rhyme, and a common name. The galaxy was huge, and Saw's girl had nothing to do with a scientist's wife from the Core. He must be more tired than he thought. It really had been a hell of a couple of days.
Galen and Lyra and a daughter named Jyn.
Jyn.
Lyra, Liana, Jyn.
He sat up, the back of his neck prickling. Ridiculous, he told himself. Too much of a coincidence to be credible. The daughter was probably dead by now.
Little girls died in the Empire all the time.
Yes, it was a name Saw's girl had used, but it was just a name. And yes, the age was about right, but it was a big galaxy. Billions of human women were the right age to be Jyn Erso. Trillions.
He called up the daughter's picture.
Children that age got their scandocs updated yearly, so this had to have been pretty recent when the Ersos disappeared. She had soft, chubby cheeks and light brown hair that sprang in a cloud of frizz out of two little braids, and -
Greenish-gold eyes.
Wide and innocent, not hard and staring, but the color -
He closed the whole file and opened the one on Saw's girl. Her eyes, the ones that had skewered him and hooked him and haunted him for years through scandoc holos and mugshots, were that same greenish-gold color.
Not that he'd needed to look at the file to know that.
He flipped back to the parents' scandocs and stared at them. The mother's chin had a stubborn tilt to it. The father's hair fell over his forehead the same way.
Kestrel, Tanith, Lyra, Liana, Jyn, Nari. Dawn, McVee, Rallick, Hallick, Ponta . . .
Erso.
He had to set the file down and stare into the middle distance.
Was it possible Saw Gerrera had taken Galen and Lyra Erso's daughter? To keep her safe?
No such thing as coincidence, Luthen rasped at him, from wherever people went when they died.
He frowned, drummed his fingers on the table. He was getting ahead of himself. Tivik had been so nervy and off-kilter -
Some friend of Saw's.
Confirm the connection, Andor.
He picked up the file again.
Galen Erso's history was as clean as a whistle. Reasonable for a governmental scientist. Almost too clean. Like some things had been papered over. Cassian considered, but shook his head. No time to dig deeper, not unless he came up empty on the wife.
Lyra Erso's was similarly snowy white. Also as expected.
Kestrel, Tanith, Lyra, Liana, Jyn, Nari, avoiding warrants for years with mix-and-match names and docs.
He went simple to start and searched up Lyra Nallick - nothing.
Lyra Krallick.
And there she was, charged at seventeen in a protest on Onderon. When he checked the same dataset, Saw had been arrested and charged at the same one.
It was a tenuous connection, but so were all the others. Get enough of those and you could weave a very strong web.
Or fool yourself.
More searches turned up writing and presence at protests and all the other kinds of things he would have expected of a woman who'd learned to skim just under the edge of trouble. Most of it petered out around the time she married her husband.
Maybe he'd begged her to behave herself. Maybe he'd helped her cover her tracks better.
Some friend of Saw's, Tivik said to him with corpse-blue lips.
A longtime anarchist and an Imperial weapons scientist? Really?
If the weapons scientist had been a pacifist in his younger days, and married to a firebrand like the wife seemed to be, maybe there had been a friendship. Hell, perhaps the friendship had been between the wife and the anarchist first.
And how would Tivik have made that up?
He wondered for a moment if Lyra had gone with the girl. If the mother had been involved in the Partisans at all, she must be dead now. Or she'd let her daughter go off on her own into a cold and uncaring galaxy at the age of sixteen, just as Galen Erso had let go of his wife and daughter to serve the Empire.
He looked at the picture of little Jyn Erso, and thought of Tanith/Liana/Nari/Kestrel, and wondered if Melshi was bringing him the grown Jyn Erso from Wobani.
When he dropped out of hyperspace close to Yavin, he called ahead, too impatient to wait even to land. "The retrieval from Wobani, sir," he said. "Did that succeed?"
On the screen, Draven looked like a wet paper bag. "Yes," he growled. "The girl proved - obstreperous. But she was detained and is on her way here."
Cassian blinked. Clearly he was going to have to ask Melshi what had happened. "You think she'll cooperate?"
"I don't dare to hope," Draven sighed. "It seems we'll need leverage. You've been keeping her file. Does she have any arrest warrants besides the one that sent her to Wobani?"
"Quite a few," he said. "Under multiple names. But I have something better. Her real name is Jyn Erso."
Draven's brows drew together. "What relation to Galen Erso?"
"His daughter."
"You're sure."
He hesitated for a split second. Kay's voice rang in his ears, reeling off the statistical likelihood of such a coincidence -
No such thing as coincidence.
"Yes, sir."
He stood well back in the shadows, heart thudding in his chest, as the woman was brought in. She was heavily cuffed and maintaining stony silence. She glared daggers at Draven as he reeled off her rap sheet from the datapad Cassian had put into his hands ten minutes ago. Apparently, she'd kicked Melshi in the crotch and beat him and half of Bravo Team with a shovel before Kay subdued her.
Melshi would forgive him.
She sat still and unmoving before Draven and Mon Mothma and Dodonna, the light of the star maps reflected up into her face. But it was the stillness of an animal catching its breath before hurling itself against the bars of its cage again.
It was strange to see her in the flesh, after years of tracking her through the galaxy, seeing her only in mugshots and surveillance footage. It didn't look like quite the same woman. He tried to see her parents in her.
The firebrand mother, certainly. That stubborn chin.
The brilliant father, a little, in the intelligence behind her eyes.
Doubts crawled up Cassian's neck and whispered in his ears. Was he just seeing what he wanted to see?
Mostly what he saw in her was Saw Gerrera. All that tightly coiled anger and - from Kay's account - explosive violence. It matched up with a number of her warrants.
What if she'd never been Jyn Erso? What if he'd leapt to conclusions when all there was were coincidences?
Draven was too savvy to betray any of his own doubts as he said, "Imagine if the Imperial authorities found out who you really were, Jyn Erso."
Her eyes flared, and Cassian's doubts fell to ash.
Ah. Found you.
Her eyes flicked toward the corner where he waited, and his breath snagged in his chest. With a tight knot of certainty, he realized she was nothing like her mugshots or surveillance footage at all. She was something much, much more.
FINIS