Chapter 43 · Ruminations

By midday, Faro had corrected the same ownership line four times and retained none of the words she had typed.

That was when she conceded, with no grace whatsoever, that she was not working.

The office around her continued in its usual rhythm: quiet terminal chimes, distant shipyard vibration through the reinforced floor, someone cursing softly at a claims registry that had crashed for the third time that week, the communal caff machine producing a noise like mechanical grief. The world had not altered because Selra Tann had walked into her office with credentials and a dead man’s name, who wasn’t dead. That seemed rude of it.

Faro saved the file, logged a temporary pause, and went to the staff dining alcove because probation officers, supervisors, and well-meaning reintegration coordinators all became annoying when one skipped too many meals in a row.

She bought a bowl of something warm, gray, and nutritionally defensive. Then she sat in the corner and did not eat it. For six minutes, she watched the steam rise from the bowl and told herself she was not going to send the message.

At seven minutes, she sent it. To Lyra Pyrondi.

“Are you seeing this?“

The reply came back after almost a minute.

“I am dropping the twins at school. If this is about the holonet, give me six minutes and do not throw anything at a screen before I get back.“

Faro stared at the message. Then, despite herself, almost smiled.

“The twins are in school already?“

“The twins are five, Karyn. They have been in school for two years. You know this. You sent them those hideous educational starship puzzles last winter.“

“They were not hideous.“

“They made engine noises at breakfast for nine weeks. Oren still flinches when someone says ‘hyperdrive’ in that metallic voice.“

Faro’s mouth twitched. For the first time since Selra Tann had walked into her office, something inside her loosened by a fraction.

“Tell me when you’re free“, she wrote.

“I am never free. I am a mother of four and Sienar thinks “flexible hours” means “answer procurement questions while packing fruit.” But I will be functionally available in four minutes.“

Faro set the comm down.

The bowl continued steaming.

By the time the comm chimed again, the steam had thinned.

“All right,“ Lyra wrote. “Children deposited under school custody, one lunchbox recovered from under the speeder seat, one argument about whether socks count as authoritarian resolved badly. What am I seeing?“

Faro looked at the message for a long moment. Then typed: “Thrawn. The trial. The holonet turning him into a costume. All of it.“

This time the reply came fast. “Ah. That. Which part? The legal circus, the historical vandalism, or the man on Core Seven who just called the TIE Defender “a niche vanity interceptor”? Because I am composing a murder.“

Faro stared at the message. Then she laughed once, short and startled enough that the Rodian logistics clerk two tables over looked at her with open concern.

She ignored him and typed back. “Hello to you too, Lyra.“

The response indicator pulsed. “No, no, absolutely not, you do not get to “hello” me after sending *are you seeing this* in the middle of a workday. Of course I am seeing this. I have four monitors, three open holonet feeds, one furious husband, and a seven-year-old who asked me this morning whether Grand Admiral Thrawn is “the blue one from Mum’s old stories” because apparently I have failed at operational discretion in my own kitchen.“

Faro closed her eyes.

Lyra Pyrondi had always written the way she spoke: too fast, too bright, every sentence arriving with three more hanging from its sleeves. Senior Lieutenant Pyrondi, weapons officer aboard the *Chimaera*, had once looked as though she might drift away from a conversation halfway through and then return with a firing solution no one else in the room had seen. There had been officers who mistook that vivacity for lack of discipline exactly once.

Usually only once.

Shortly before Faro’s promotion, Pyrondi had been reassigned as liaison officer to Sienar Fleet Systems during the Defender project. Thrawn’s intercession, though no one had called it that loudly where certain admirals could hear. A good posting. A strange posting. A posting that had removed her from the Seventh Fleet before Lothal and, by doing so, spared her both disappearance and the particular postwar machinery that had processed Faro into a person with probation terms.

Now Lyra lived on Lianna, in the Tion Cluster, where Santhe/Sienar Technologies had wrapped shipyards, finance towers, administrative campuses, and enough corporate secrecy around the planet to make old Imperial ministries look almost forthright. She had married a Sienar engineer named Oren Voss, whose idea of romance, according to Lyra, included component diagrams annotated with increasingly indecent jokes. They had four children, possibly because they enjoyed chaos or possibly because no contraceptive system in the galaxy had been designed to survive two people who considered scheduling a hobby and engineering a love language.

Faro typed: “A representative from his defense came to see me.“

This time the reply paused long enough to mean something.

Then: “Oh.“ Another pause. “Are you all right?“

Faro looked at the gray bowl.

No.

Faro typed: I told her to get out.

For once, Lyra did not answer immediately.

The response indicator appeared, vanished, appeared again. “You did what?“

Faro stared at the words. “I told her to get out.“

“Yes, I understood the sentence. I am questioning the tactical architecture of the decision.“

Faro’s mouth tightened. “She works for his defense.“

“Exactly!“

“Lyra.“

“What? I would understand you kicking her out if she worked for the prosecution, but not this!“ Faro could hear her voice in the shape of the message: bright, incredulous, already moving too fast. “They came to you. That means they know your proceeding matters. That means his case is not going to be left entirely to holonet idiots and prosecutors trying to make a clean weapon out of a complicated event. That means someone, however offensively tailored, is trying to put facts in the correct order.“

“They are trying to use me.“

“Of course they are. Everyone is trying to use everyone. That is not new information. The question is whether you let them use your absence instead.“

Faro looked down at the cold bowl. “You sound very sure for someone on Lianna with school lunches.“

“I am never more strategically clear than when surrounded by sticky children and fruit containers. Also, Oren has been ranting about evidence chains since breakfast. It has become contagious.“ Despite herself, Faro almost smiled. She was very precise. “Then she may be useful.“

“She was very annoying.“

“She’s a consultant. Those categories often overlap.“

“Mirialan associate. Selra Tann. Very precise. Annoyingly reasonable.“

“Those are the dangerous ones. The cheerful ones you can distract. The precise ones take notes while bleeding.“

“She wanted to discuss Batonn.“

The response indicator pulsed. Stopped. Pulsed again. "Of course she did."

Faro waited. Lyra did not immediately continue. That, more than any outburst, told Faro she understood.

The dining alcove hummed around her. Someone at the service counter argued over ration credits. A technician dropped a utensil. The shipyards beyond the window carried on dismantling the old galaxy and pretending the new one did not use many of the same parts.

Finally Lyra wrote: “Then it’s sure they are going to use your proceeding.”

“Yes.”

“Can it help him?”

“Probably.”

“And that’s the problem.”

“Yes.”

“Miserable. Efficient. Very legal. I hate it.”

Faro stared at the words. Then typed: “They are making him into whatever they need him to be. The defense needs a man who can be understood. The prosecution needs a monster who can be punished. The Senate needs a symbol it can survive. Nobody is talking about what actually happened.”

Lyra answered immediately. “They never do. What actually happened is inconvenient, badly lit, full of people with names, and requires everyone to admit they were standing somewhere at the time. Holonet panels prefer nouns. Genius. Tyrant. Savior. Criminal. Easier to throw at each other.”

"You sound angry."

"I am incandescent. Plasma hot."

Faro almost smiled again.

Then Lyra continued: "Someone on the office said yesterday that Thrawn only supported the Defender because he wanted “his own pet fighter.” I nearly explained procurement reality at a volume sufficient to alter weather patterns. Oren took away my spoon."

"Your spoon?"

"It was the object in my hand. He knows me."

Faro looked down at her own untouched utensil and understood Oren Voss with sudden clarity. "How is Oren?"

"Furious by marriage. Also professionally offended. He says if one more commentator conflates the Defender prototype line with standard TIE production, he is going to send diagrams to every major network with the subject line YOU ABSOLUTE CRIMINALS."

"That sounds like Oren."

"It does. The children are fine. Mara built a landing gear assembly out of breakfast blocks and then cried because her brother called it “Imperial-looking,” so we are doing wonderfully."

Faro let herself breathe. There it was. The thing she had needed without knowing precisely how to name it: not reassurance, not strategy, not loyalty, but proof that somewhere beyond tribunals and holofeeds and legal sharks moving through old blood, someone else remembered the scale of ordinary life. Children. Bad breakfasts. Engineers with opinions. A woman who had once managed Chimaera’s weapons systems now having to deal with normal life on Lianna.

"Have you tried to contact him?" Faro typed.

The answer came back slower. “No.” Then: “I want to.” Another pause. “I don’t have the means.” Faro read that twice. The next message arrived before she had decided whether to answer. “Contact his lawyers.”

Faro’s fingers hovered over the keys. “That is a terrible idea.”

“Probably.”

“Convincing argument.”

“It is the only one I have.”

Faro stared at the screen. “You want me to walk voluntarily into a legal grinder.”

“I want you to give his defense a witness who knows the difference between Thrawn and the version of Thrawn everyone is going to invent.”

“That is still a legal grinder.”

“Yes.”

Faro made a sharp, humorless sound. At least Pyro was not pretending otherwise. “They will use anything I say.”

“Yes. And so will the prosecution if it leaks.”

“Yes. So will the Senate, the panels, the historians, and every retired officer with a grudge and a microphone.”

“Yes.”

“You are very bad at making this sound appealing.”

“I am trying to make it sound necessary. And I know you are neither a coward nor a wimp.”

Faro looked away from the screen for a moment. Necessary was one of those words people used when they had run out of mercy but still wanted obedience. She had learned to distrust it. She had also learned, unfortunately, that sometimes it was true. “I don’t owe the New Republic a cleaner case.”

“But this is not about the New Republic. It is-.”

Faro’s jaw tightened. “Careful.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Enough to be careful. Not enough to stop. I had a reputation for being careless and a happy trigger sometimes, remember?” Faro almost smiled at that, despite herself. Pyro kept typing. “If you cannot do it because of him, do it because of the Seventh.” Faro did not answer. “Hammerly. Agral. Vanto.”

The names sat there, blunt and unadorned. No ceremony. No softening. Pyro knew better.

Faro read them once and then looked at the wall, because looking at the screen was not going to improve them. “That was low.”

“Sure it was, and I can go dirtier.” Pyro typed. Faro exhaled through her nose and looked back at the screen. “So, don’t make me.”

That, unfortunately, was when Faro knew Pyro had heard the answer she had not typed. Not agreement. Not yet. But the absence of refusal. Another message appeared. “I’ll come with you.”

Faro stared at it. “No.”

“Oh yes, I’m totally coming over. I may not have the means to reach him, but I have the means to sit next to you while you do something stupid and necessary.”

“That is not a legal category.”

“It should be.And you can’t stop me.”

Faro rubbed a hand over her face, then stopped because the gesture felt too close to surrender. “And your kids? And Oren? He will have a fit.”

“Oren has fits professionally.”

“Pyro.”

“He will hate it. Then he will ask how many bags I need. Then he will threaten to sedate me. Then he will realize that if he does not put me on a transport himself, I will spend the whole trial process making everyone’s lives impossible.”

Faro looked at that one longer. “You think so?”

“I know so. He was Navy too, Karyn. Not the same way as us. But enough.”

The room went quiet around her.

Faro leaned back, arms folded, and let the words sit where Pyro had put them. There were people who had served under Thrawn, people who had survived Thrawn, people who had hated him, followed him, feared him, trusted him, misunderstood him, and been understood by him more than was comfortable. None of those categories had ever been clean. The galaxy liked clean categories. That was one of its more persistent failures.

“I’ll contact the firm,” she typed at last.

Pyro did not answer immediately. When she did, there was no triumph in it. Only relief, made brief because neither of them liked leaving soft things exposed. “Good.” Then: “I’ll pack.”

“Not yet. You are coming with me, but only when I get called to Coruscant.”

For once, Pyro did not answer immediately. “I’ll call you tonight, when I have the kids in bed. I have to go to a meeting. I’ve been texting for too long in here and I’ll be late.”

Faro looked at the message for a moment.

There it was again: the galaxy ending in one hand, ordinary life tugging at the other. Children to put to bed. Meetings to attend. Old ghosts waiting in a draft she had not yet written.

“Go,” she typed. “I’ll tell you.”

“You’d better.”

The thread went quiet.

Faro sat with it a few seconds longer, then closed the conversation.

The bowl beside her had gone lukewarm. She looked at it, at the neat line where her spoon had stopped after three bites, and felt the decisive absence of appetite. After a moment, she snapped the lid back on, dropped the whole thing into the disposal chute, and wiped her hands on a napkin she did not need.

Practical. Wasteful. Done.

Then she stood, straightened her jacket, and returned to her station.

The office had not changed while she was away. Of course it had not. Consoles hummed, voices moved low between desks, someone argued with a supply requisition on the far side of the room, and the day continued with the blunt indifference of systems that did not pause for old ghosts.

As she passed the reception desk, she slowed just enough.

“Dina.”

The receptionist glanced up. “Yes?”

“The advocate who came earlier. Tesh. Send me her contact.”

Dina’s expression shifted by a fraction, careful enough to pretend it had not.

“Of course.”

Faro did not stop long enough for the exchange to become anything larger than an instruction.

By the time she reached her desk, the contact file was waiting.