hearts and minds

Lieutenant Meero is trembling. When Syril takes her arm, she doesn’t push him away, and for a few long seconds he holds her there upright until she makes the gesture to move.

Under stress, perception of time will dilate, or contract — the time he’d spent gagged and prone on the permacrete floor with Cassian Andor’s knee digging into his back could only have been fifteen minutes, half an hour at most, and yet he carries it with him like a ten-year sentence. The rioting outside could be measured in minutes, yet it feels like hours. No sign of Andor, meaning the dead woman’s propaganda broadcast was a trap in itself. Whip the rioters into a bloodthirsty frenzy, then wait

The two of them can wait no longer. Here, now, they must make a decision.

Syril hands Lieutenant Meero back her sidearm. For a moment when she takes it from his grip he sees gratitude in her face, but just as quick it turns to something more comfortable, like a warning.

“You don’t tell anyone you saw this,” Lieutenant Meero says. “You don’t tell anyone you were here. You don’t so much as tell your mother.”

Syril has to laugh at that, a desperate joyless sound. “You don’t have to worry about that. Do whatever you need to do. I’m with you. ”

Dedra strips out of her cream-colored uniform coat and rubs her muddied, bloodied hands across her torso — Syril watches in appalled fascination, even as the logic of it reveals itself. Watching her fix herself, watching her alter her outward appearance in all the ways she must have been taught — sufficient to shake off any individual tailing her, to break up the visual continuity. They are in enemy territory now, even if they are locked in a utility closet.

She’s smaller without her uniform, and sharper. Syril tries not to look too much at the shape of her body.

“I’ll catch hell if I lose this,” she says, meaning the coat itself; she’s already stripped it of half a dozen enhancements and functional details, pocketing her code cylinders and passkey. “Carry it with you, under your jacket.”

“Of course,” Syril says.

Outside, the sound of screams.

Imperial troops will sweep the streets, identifying the dead and corraling dissidents for eventual processing. The two of them can’t wait for that. He watches her hand hesitate there at the back of her head — hurt, he thinks, then, hairpins.

Syril takes the cap from his head and presses it out to her. She nods curtly, folds it, and stuffs it in a pocket he never knew she had.

“I need you to hit me,” she says.

“I won’t do that,” Syril says, sudden terror flaring through the dull haze of shock.

“Oh, you will. I am giving you an order, Syril Karn.” This is more like the woman he admires, this is the more familiar view of her — brow furrowing, voice harsh.

Still, Syril hesitates. “Do you think it’s necessary?”

Meero’s lip curls with comforting scorn. “You dragged me in here at gunpoint, didn’t you? Did you do it to give me a scolding? I need blood.”

Not you, Syril Karn, former Pre-Mor employee, but you, the faceless stranger, who frightened me. The man whom the rioters saw drag away an unarmed woman to her uncertain fate. It feels like he must have died too; it feels like none of this can be real.

Syril steps closer to her, feeling momentarily at his own neck. A sliver of shrapnel must have caught him, or the concussive shock of the explosions has torn his eardrum; there’s blood, but no pain.

“Here,” he says, with two fingers washed in blood. Syril touches her cheek with them, bridging the short distance between them and feeling the muscles of her grimace curling beneath his hand — smudging bright red blood from there up to her temple. He’d never have been able to touch her like that at any other time.