Chapter 49 · Terms of Custody

The first problem, Kallus decided, was that Stent did not look enough like a prisoner.

That should not have mattered. In Kallus’s experience, appearance had never been a reliable category of guilt, innocence, danger, or usefulness; the Empire had dressed murderers in white armor and bureaucrats in gray cloth, had put monsters behind clean desks and frightened citizens in detention cells, and had called all of it order with the same soft, administrative conviction with which it had once called whole worlds pacified. He knew better than to trust the surface of a man, or the posture, or the silence, or the apparent ease with which someone accepted restraint.

And still, it mattered.

Stent sat on the edge of the examination table beyond the partition glass, dressed again, hands loosely clasped between his knees, his posture calm enough to look cooperative and still enough to look like a decision. He had permitted himself to be searched twice, scanned three times, and separated from a set of coded fragments whose existence Vorr had immediately described, with the haunted calm of a lawyer watching a legal disaster acquire subclauses, as “not illegal in themselves, which is, regrettably, not the same thing as reassuring.”

Through all of it, Stent had remained almost agreeable.

Not helpful. Kallus had no intention of confusing the two.

Agreeable.

He answered to the name they used, though Kallus doubted it was the only one he possessed. He looked at people when they spoke to him, but not too long. He allowed Doctor Seln to place diagnostic tabs along his throat, ribs, wrist, and temple with a faint expression of long-suffering tolerance that might have belonged to any man enduring institutional procedure after too many hours awake. He used contractions. He said “doctor” instead of “medical officer.” He made one of the younger technicians almost laugh, very briefly, when the bioscanner misread something in his baseline chemistry and accused him of being mildly hypothermic.

“Story of my life,” Stent had said.

The technician had remembered whom he was standing beside before the smile could fully happen.

Kallus hated that most of all.

He had been prepared, or thought he had been prepared, for another version of Thrawn’s weaponized composure: the stillness, the precision, the faintly inhuman patience of someone who treated every room as a structure already half-conquered by observation alone. But Stent did not give him that. Stent gave him a man who looked tired, cooperative, and dryly amused by bureaucracy; a man who had clearly spent enough time in Lesser Space to know exactly how far a human inflection could soften a refusal before anyone noticed it had remained a refusal.

Seln did not give Kallus the report immediately.

That, more than anything, told him there was something in it she disliked.

She stood at the console with the diagnostic summary still open before her, one hand braced against the edge of the display, the other moving through the file with short, irritated gestures, as if the data itself had committed some offense by existing in the wrong order. Beyond the dimmed partition, Stent remained where she had left him, quiet under the sterile lights, his civilian sleeve not quite settled over the old circular scarification around his upper arm.

Kallus watched him for a moment. “He’s cleared?” he asked.

Seln made a sound that was not quite contempt, but had clearly trained near it. “He is fit to be moved, if that is what you mean.”

“That is what I asked.”

“No,” Seln said, without looking at him. “It is what you hoped I would answer.”

Kallus turned his eyes from the glass.

Seln finally closed the file and looked at him over the top of the console, her expression arranged in that familiar configuration of professional severity which suggested that every person in the room had disappointed medicine on a philosophical level.

“He has no acute injury that would prevent transfer,” she said. “No untreated fracture. No active internal bleeding. No neurological impairment that I can detect without better baselines, which, naturally, he does not have, because apparently intelligence operatives consider medical continuity a decorative luxury. He is dehydrated, under-rested, carrying the usual stress load of someone who has been working under sustained risk, and irritatingly functional.”

“Irritatingly.”

“That is a clinical impression.”

Kallus did not smile. “And the rest?”

Seln’s expression shifted. Not much. Enough. “The rest says field operative,” she said. “Not analyst. Not courier in the harmless sense. Field. Repeatedly deployed, repeatedly injured, repeatedly patched well enough to return to work and not well enough to satisfy anyone with professional standards.”

Kallus said nothing.

Seln tapped the summary with one finger.

“Old fractures in the hands. Knuckles, mostly. Some poorly set. Previous rib fractures. Shoulder dislocation. Scar tissue consistent with blaster burns, at least two, possibly more that were revised later. Muscle strain patterns from long-term compensating behavior. He moves well because he has learned exactly which parts of himself not to ask for too much at once.”

Kallus looked back through the glass. Stent had not moved. “Can he fight?”

Seln gave him a look. Kallus accepted that he had earned it. “Director,” she said, “a man does not acquire that collection of healed mistakes by being decorative.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the answer you deserve.”

“Seln.”

“Yes,” she said. “He can fight. How well, I will leave to people who enjoy being proven wrong at high velocity. But nothing I saw suggests he is pretending competence.”

Kallus absorbed that. It was useful. It was expected. It was also not what had made her delay the report. “And?” he asked.

Seln’s mouth tightened. “There is an old brand below his left shoulder blade.”

The word landed with unpleasant precision.

Kallus felt something in him go very still. “Brand.”

“Thermal origin,” Seln said. “Deliberate placement. Later medical revision, incomplete. Whoever worked on it tried to reduce the tissue distortion without erasing the underlying pattern entirely, either because they lacked time, lacked equipment, or because Stent did not allow them to finish.”

“Pattern?”

Seln hesitated. That was worse than the word itself. “I am not an underworld specialist,” she said.

“But?”

“But I have treated refugees out of Karazak routes.”

Kallus looked at her sharply. Seln held his gaze.

“It is close enough,” she said. “Not fresh. Not recent. Not something I would identify in a tribunal without a specialist present and comparative records. But close enough that, if you are asking me whether it looked like a slaver’s mark, the answer is yes.”

For a moment, the medical suite seemed to narrow around him.

Kallus had seen those files.

Not all of them. Enough. Enough to know the shapes people left on other people when ownership needed to be legible at a distance, when a body had to carry its administrative status for buyers, guards, transport crews, frightened intermediaries, and anyone else paid to pretend that sentience could be inventoried if the forms were clean enough. The Empire had condemned slavery when it was diplomatically convenient, absorbed forced labor when it was economically useful, and allowed criminal systems to rot in the spaces between jurisdictions so long as the rot fed the right markets quietly.

Karazak. Or close enough.

He forced himself not to look through the glass again too quickly. Seln noticed anyway.

“Do not do that,” she said.

Kallus’s eyes returned to her. “Do what?”

“Start building a story around it before he gives you one.”

“I need to know what he is.”

“No,” Seln said. “You need to know what he can safely endure in custody and what medical accommodations are required. What he is, Director, is not a diagnosis.”

The rebuke was clean. Worse, it was deserved.

Kallus folded his arms, slowly, because if he moved too fast some old instinct might make the movement look defensive. “Did he explain it?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?”

“I asked origin.”

“And?”

“He said, ‘old work.’”

Kallus stared.

Seln’s expression remained flat, but something colder moved beneath it. “Then he stared at me as if that should be enough to make me stop asking.”

“Did it?”

“No,” she said. “My decision not to turn a medical examination into an interrogation made me stop asking.”

The sentence held.

Kallus looked away first.

Through the dimmed partition, Stent remained a pale, composed shape under medical light, dressed again, unreadable again, almost ordinary if one did not know what the scan had found beneath the cloth. That, Kallus thought, was the danger. Not the scar itself. Not the old fractures. Not even the possibility that he had once passed through slaver hands and emerged as something disciplined enough to sit here without using that fact as plea or shield. The danger was the way every new piece of information made him less simple and therefore harder to handle cleanly.

A criminal would have been easier. A zealot, easier still. A victim was a category the New Republic knew how to protect, at least in theory. An enemy was a category it knew how to contain.

Stent had become, in the space of one medical summary, something far less convenient.

“He does not want treatment?” Kallus asked.

“Not beyond what I can require as baseline care.”

“Pain?”

“He admits to chronic pain only when cornered by direct questions, which places him in the same category as half the military personnel in this building and every intelligence officer I have ever wanted to sedate for my own peace of mind.”

“I am not in your care.”

“Tragic.”

Despite himself, Kallus almost breathed something like a laugh. It did not last.

Seln handed him the sealed summary. “Hydration, rest, follow-up examination within twelve standard hours, no prolonged stress positioning, no sleep interruption unless justified by immediate security threat, and if anyone decides that old injuries make convenient leverage, I will put that in writing in language even Vorr can weaponize.”

Kallus took the file. “You think I need that warning?”

Seln’s eyes did not soften. “I think you know exactly why I gave it.”

For one sharp second, anger rose in him. Then it found nowhere honorable to go.

He looked again through the glass.

Stent turned his head slightly, as if he had felt the attention shift across him, and for a fraction of a second his eyes met Kallus’s through the dimmed partition.

Calm. Tired. Aware. Not asking for anything.

Kallus hated, with a sudden and private violence, that some part of his mind still tried to arrange the information into leverage. Field operative. Old fractures. Blaster burns. Chronic pain. Possible Karazak brand. Prior captivity, or cover, or both. Unknown tolerance. Unknown loyalty structure. Unknown debt.

Pressure points.

He stopped the thought so abruptly that his jaw tightened. Stent’s gaze did not move.

Enough.

Kallus turned away. Only then did Seln close the partition fully, reducing Stent to a blurred outline behind the glass.

“He can remain here under guard until you decide where to put him,” she said. “But decide quickly. My infirmary is not a holding cell.”

“No one seems to know what he is supposed to be held as.”

“That,” Seln said, returning to her console, “sounds like Vorr’s problem.”

“It sounds like mine.”

“No, Director. Yours is what you do before he solves it.”

Kallus did not answer. The medical file felt heavier in his hand than it should have.

Only when he was in the corridor, with the glass dimmed behind him and Stent reduced to a pale uncertainty under Seln’s lights, did Kallus allow himself to breathe badly.

He had been prepared, he realized, for another Chiss problem: irritating, disciplined, legally precise to the point of absurdity, all polished restraint and weaponized procedure, the sort of man who could turn a definition into a barricade and make everyone else look uncivilized for wanting to climb over it. He had been prepared to dislike that. He had been prepared to fight it.

He had not been prepared for this.

For a slaver’s brand under medical light. For old burns and badly set bones offered without appeal, without explanation, without even the decency of being used as an argument. For a man who could joke just enough to seem ordinary until Seln’s scanner found the old mark of ownership no one in that room had been ready to see, and then simply go quiet, as if silence were not a defense but a boundary everyone else had arrived too late to respect.

Leia was waiting at the far end of the hall with Vorr and Ackbar, both of whom looked as though they had come from different fronts of the same war: Vorr with his datapad held too tightly in one hand, Ackbar silent and immovable beside him, his broad presence making the corridor feel less like parliamentary infrastructure and more like the edge of a command deck. Leia’s face was drawn with exhaustion, one hand briefly resting near the side of her abdomen before she seemed to become aware of the gesture and lowered it again.

Kallus noticed because he had been trained to notice small protections of the body. He immediately wished he had not.

“Well?” Leia asked.

Kallus handed Vorr the preliminary medical summary. Vorr read the first page. Then the second. Then his expression changed in the small, inward way of a man discovering that the law had acquired a pulse and several old scars.

“Of course,” he said softly. “Of course that would be the medical report.”

Leia’s eyes sharpened. “Is he fit to be held?”

“Seln says yes,” Kallus said. “With follow-up. No acute injuries. No treatment required unless he consents, beyond hydration and observation.”

“That is not what I asked.” Kallus looked at her. No. It wasn’t.

“He’s fit,” he said. “He’s also a field operative with a long history of old injuries, chronic pain he does not volunteer, and an old slaver’s brand, partially removed.”

Vorr closed the report.

Ackbar’s large eyes remained on Kallus. “Coercive injury?”

Kallus heard the neutral phrasing and disliked it more than he should have.

“At least one unmistakably so.”

Leia looked toward the infirmary doors. Through the dimmed glass, Stent was only a shape now, seated still, head slightly lowered as Seln moved somewhere beyond him. Nothing in his posture asked for sympathy. Nothing in it rejected it either. He had simply become, for the moment, a man whose body had revealed more history than his mouth had.

“That complicates custody,” Vorr said.

Madine, who had arrived in time to hear only the last sentence and still looked as if that had been more than enough, gave him a flat look. “Everything about him complicates custody.”

“No,” Vorr said, with the exhausted precision of a man whose suffering had become linguistic. “This makes the existing complications less deniable.”

Kallus folded his arms. “He is an operative of an unauthorized foreign or para-military intelligence structure that has conducted covert activity on Coruscant, interfered with New Republic security operations, and facilitated the escape of a former Imperial Grand Admiral.”

“Thrawn hasn’t escaped. We allowed to let him go,” Vorr said.

Kallus turned on him.

Vorr did not flinch. He looked too tired to flinch. “Do not glare at me. I am not defending him. I am attempting to prevent the first legally significant act we take after accepting his surrender from becoming indefensible.”

Leia’s mouth tightened.

Vorr continued, consulting his datapad again as though hoping a better category might have appeared in the last twelve seconds. “It is my professional recommendation that we avoid holding Senior Commander Stent in any facility currently designated for criminal detention, military detention, prisoner processing, hostile intelligence containment, or diplomatic guest quarters.”

Madine stared at him. “That leaves a broom closet.”

“Not if it has a lock, General.”

Leia closed her eyes for one second.

Kallus said, “He cannot be placed somewhere unsecured.”

“No one has suggested unsecured,” Leia said.

“He cannot be placed somewhere comfortable.”

Ackbar’s gaze shifted to him. “Why?”

Kallus almost answered too quickly.

Because comfort was leverage denied. Because discomfort produced mistakes. Because men trained to endure pain often betrayed more under uncertainty than under force. Because a room could be made too cold, a meal too late, sleep too interrupted, and none of it would look like coercion if one wrote the paperwork correctly. Because he knew exactly how it was done.

His mouth closed.

Leia saw it. Of course she did. Organa had a way of seeing the sentence one had chosen not to say and filing it more carefully than the one spoken aloud.

Vorr spared him by speaking first.

“The difficulty,” he said, “is that Stent entered custody voluntarily under terms witnessed by authorized New Republic personnel. He is not presently charged. He has not requested asylum, which would create one framework. He has not claimed prisoner-of-war status, which would create another, and, frankly, several ulcers. He has not invoked diplomatic protection, which is kind of him. He has agreed to remain available for questioning but has not agreed to operational disclosure. We may restrict his movement for security reasons. We may not punish him for the inconvenience of being difficult to classify.”

“That is a generous interpretation,” Madine said.

“It is a defensible one,” Vorr replied. “At this hour, I will take what I can get.”

Kallus looked back toward the infirmary glass. Stent had not moved, but Seln had left him alone now, and even through the dimmed panel there was something intolerably composed about the way he waited.

“He planned this,” Kallus said.

“Possibly,” Leia said.

“No,” Vorr said. “Not possibly. He planned enough of it that anything he did not plan now benefits from the structure of what he did. That is worse.”

Ackbar said nothing. That silence had weight. Not Thrawn’s silence, which felt like a blade being placed exactly where one’s next movement would be. Ackbar’s silence was tidal. It did not threaten; it waited for lesser agitation to exhaust itself against something older and deeper than procedure. Finally, he said, “He will remain in my quarters.”

No one spoke.

For a moment, Kallus genuinely wondered whether the translator embedded in the corridor’s security system had failed.

Then Madine said, “Admiral.”

Vorr lowered his datapad very slowly.

Leia turned to Ackbar. “You understand what that means.”

“Yes.”

“With respect,” Kallus said, and heard the strain in his own voice, “that is not custody. That is lodging.”

Ackbar’s eyes settled on him.

Kallus had faced stormtrooper commanders, Inquisitors, rebel leaders prepared to shoot him for good reasons, and Garazeb Orrelios on several occasions before breakfast. He still found himself stopping.

“He came under terms we accepted,” Ackbar said. “He surrendered his weapons. He submitted to examination. He has given no cause, since entering our control, for degradation of treatment. We will not make dishonor retroactive because the arrangement has become inconvenient.”

“He is dangerous.”

“Yes.”

“He may still be in communication with hostile assets.”

Ackbar exhaled, a low, rough sound that made the warning feel several degrees smaller.

“Director Kallus,” he said, “he was almost certainly in communication with Grand Admiral Thrawn while standing within sight of us, under our own security perimeter, and polite enough to let us believe we had noticed the important part. If he has another channel, a cell will not make us clever enough to find it.”

Kallus’s jaw tightened. “Then you admit the risk.”

“I have not denied it.”

“He may attempt escape.”

“No,” Ackbar said.

The certainty in it was so flat that Kallus stopped.

Ackbar’s eyes remained on the dimmed infirmary glass, where Stent sat motionless under Seln’s lights.

“He is not here because he was trapped,” the admiral said. “He is here because he gave terms and entered under them. A man who does that may still be dangerous, deceptive, and strategically hostile. But he does not usually flee before the terms are broken.”

“You’re trusting his honor.”

“I am recognizing its usefulness.”

Kallus’s temper flared. “And if he attempts to kill you?”

Ackbar looked at him then, slowly, with a depth of unimpressed patience that made Kallus feel, abruptly and infuriatingly, like a junior officer who had mistaken volume for insight.

“Do not be ridiculous,” Ackbar said.

Madine blinked. Vorr looked down at his datapad with the expression of a man choosing survival over comment.

Ackbar continued, implacable. “If Senior Commander Stent wished to kill a New Republic officer, he has had better opportunities than my sitting room. If he wishes to die pointlessly, he has also had better opportunities. I am not proposing to leave him with a blade, a transmitter, and my evening schedule. I am proposing not to disgrace ourselves because a difficult prisoner-shaped problem has failed to become a prisoner.”

Leia’s expression changed by a fraction.

Not agreement. Not yet.

Recognition.

Vorr shut his eyes briefly, perhaps in gratitude that someone else had said the part for which no statute existed.

“Trust is not required for honor,” Ackbar said.

The sentence ended the argument, not because everyone agreed with it, but because disagreeing aloud would have required them to name what they preferred instead.

Leia looked tired enough that Kallus almost expected her to object simply out of prudence. Instead she studied the dimmed infirmary glass with an expression he recognized too well: a politician measuring not only a man, but the institution that would be revealed by how it chose to treat him.

“Controlled access,” she said. “No network interface. Continuous external guard. Medical follow-up. Logged interviews only unless otherwise authorized.”

“Agreed,” Ackbar said.

“Vorr?”

Vorr appeared to age. “I will invent the necessary language.”

“Try not to enjoy it.”

“I assure you, Senator, enjoyment is nowhere in the building.”

Kallus looked once more through the glass.

Inside, Stent turned his head slightly, as though he had felt the decision change shape around him despite not having heard a word.

Kallus did not like that either.

“Bring him,” Ackbar said.

The guards opened the infirmary door.

Seln looked up from her console as Kallus, Leia, Vorr, Ackbar, and Madine entered, and the displeasure in her expression suggested that, legal emergency or not, she considered them all one unnecessary footstep away from contaminating something.

Stent rose before anyone told him to. There was no haste in the movement, no theatrical stiffness, no visible attempt to prove that the examination had taken nothing from him. He simply came to his feet beside the examination table in the clean, spare light, civilian sleeves back in place, hands empty, posture respectful without becoming submissive.

It was not Imperial. Not Republic. Not fear. Courtesy, Kallus thought, and distrusted it on principle.

Ackbar’s large eyes rested on him for a long moment.

“Sit if you require it,” the admiral said.

“I don’t,” Stent replied.

“Then stand if you prefer.”

Something nearly unreadable crossed Stent’s face. It might have been respect. It might have been calculation finding an unexpected shape.

Leia stepped forward half a pace.

“Senior Commander Stent,” she said, and the title sounded strange in her voice, neither concession nor accusation, only accuracy forced through reluctance. “Until a formal status is established, you will remain under controlled voluntary custody in Admiral Ackbar’s assigned quarters.”

For the first time since the examination began, Stent looked genuinely surprised. Only a little.

“Admiral Ackbar’s quarters,” he repeated.

“Yes,” Leia said.

His gaze moved to Ackbar, and whatever calculation had been present there settled into something quieter, more formal, and far less easy for Kallus to dismiss.

Stent inclined his head.

“That is an honor, Admiral,” he said. “I understand the weight of it.”

Ackbar regarded him without softness. “Do you?”

“Yes.” Stent’s voice had lost the faint, human ease he had worn through most of the examination; not because the façade had broken, Kallus thought, but because this answer did not belong to the façade. “I will conduct myself accordingly, and make every effort to be worthy of the honor granted and the trust placed in me.”

The word trust did something uncomfortable to the room.

Kallus felt it immediately, the absurdity of it, the danger of letting such a word stand unchallenged when no one there, not Leia, not Vorr, not Ackbar himself, truly trusted the man in front of them.

Ackbar, however, only inclined his broad head by a fraction.

“See that you do.”

“I will.”

Madine stared at both of them as though surrounded by a species of madness he had not been briefed on.

Stent inclined his head. “Then I understand.”

“No weapons,” Ackbar said.

“I will carry none.”

“No private transmissions.”

“I will send none.”

“No attempt to alter your status without formal request.”

“I will not abuse the terms you have granted.”

There was no hesitation in the answer, no cleverness tucked beneath it, no attempt to make the language smaller than the obligation it carried. If Stent heard the absurdity of the arrangement, if he understood exactly how many procedural nerves had been exposed to make room for him under Ackbar’s roof, he gave no sign of taking advantage of it.

That, Kallus thought, was almost worse.

Ackbar regarded him for another long moment. “You are aware that accepting honorable treatment does not make you less accountable.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“And that I will not mistake courtesy for cooperation.”

“Nor would I ask you to.”

The answer was quiet, formal, and irritatingly exact.

Ackbar inclined his head by the smallest degree. “Then we understand each other.”

“I believe we do.”

Kallus watched the exchange with a growing discomfort he did not want to name. Stent had stopped sounding like the man who joked enough under Seln’s scanner to make himself easier to underestimate; this was not the Lesser Space mask, not the dry ease of an infiltrator comfortable among humans, but something older, stricter, and far more difficult to provoke. He had been offered honor by a man whose honor had weight, and, for the moment at least, he was treating it as binding.

Which did not make him safer.

It only made him harder to despise.

Ackbar inclined his head, first to Leia, then to Madine, and finally to Kallus, with the same grave economy he might have used to close a council of war rather than a dispute over where to put a man no one could safely define.

“Senator Organa. General Madine. Director Kallus.”

It was not dismissal, precisely. It was worse. It was conclusion.

Leia accepted it with a small nod, her expression unreadable except for the exhaustion drawn too finely around her eyes. Madine looked as though he still intended to object and had discovered, too late, that the moment in which objection might have been useful had already passed. Kallus said nothing, because every answer available to him would have sounded either petty or afraid, and he refused to offer Stent either satisfaction.

Ackbar turned. “Senior Commander Stent.” Stent straightened by a fraction. “Come with me.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

No hesitation. No theatrical glance toward Kallus, no dry aside, no attempt to turn obedience into commentary. Stent simply moved, falling into step only after Ackbar had begun to walk, leaving enough distance to mark respect without suggesting subordination to a command he had not given. Vorr followed at once, already speaking low into his recorder, the soft, aggravated cadence of invented legal language trailing behind him like a man trying to build a bridge while crossing it.

The guards adjusted around them. Awkwardly, Kallus noted.

Not because they were incompetent, but because none of them knew how to escort a man who was not being led away as a prisoner, not being received as a guest, and not being trusted enough to walk unguarded. They created a perimeter by instinct and then softened it by order, leaving gaps where courtesy had been inserted into security and security had been forced to pretend it was not offended.

Stent did not help them. He did not make it worse either. He merely walked inside the space granted to him, empty-handed, shoulders level, his medical clearance still folded in one hand, and followed Ackbar out of the infirmary as though he understood that, for the moment, the shape of the departure mattered more than the destination.

The doors closed behind them.

For several seconds, the silence remained.

It was not the silence of agreement. Leia had sat through enough councils, evacuations, battlefield briefings, and senatorial disasters disguised as public service to know the difference. This one had edges: Kallus’s anger, Madine’s disbelief, her own tired awareness that Ackbar had just solved a problem by making it morally larger and procedurally worse, which was very like him and also very inconvenient.

Kallus was still looking at the door.

Not at Ackbar’s retreating shape beyond it. Not at Vorr’s vanishing trail of legal misery. At the door itself, as if the surface had personally failed to remain locked in the way doors were supposed to.

Leia let out a slow breath. “Director,” she said.

Kallus did not turn immediately. “Senator.”

“Relax a little.” That brought his eyes to her. Only his eyes. Leia lifted one brow. “That was not a suggestion to become negligent. I know the difference.”

“With respect,” Kallus said, in the tone people used when they were about to offer very little of it, “he is an unidentified senior operative attached to a covert structure loyal to Thrawn, inside the parliamentary complex, under armed but deliberately softened guard, and now installed in Admiral Ackbar’s quarters because none of our legal categories survived first contact with him.”

“Yes,” Leia said. “That is the situation.”

“I find it unreassuring.”

“I would be more concerned if you didn’t.”

Madine rubbed a hand over his beard, watching the sealed door with the expression of a man who had seen mines with more honest warning labels. “For what it’s worth, I’m with him.”

“You usually are when something is likely to explode,” Leia said.

“That is because I have a well-developed sense of self-preservation.”

Kallus’s jaw tightened. “He is still playing us.”

Leia looked at the door again, then at the narrow strip of corridor visible through the side panel, now empty except for a guard pretending not to listen.

“Probably.”

“That does not bother you?”

“It bothers me profoundly,” Leia said. “I am simply trying not to let that become the only thing in the room.”

Kallus looked away first, which told her more than his objection had. He was not wrong. That was the worst part. His instincts had been sharpened in places that had no right to produce useful truth and yet had, because the Empire had always been very good at teaching people to survive by damaging them first. He saw traps because there were traps. He saw pressure points because people had once paid him to find them. He saw how easily honor could be used as cover because he had seen worse words used for worse things by better-dressed men.

Leia understood all of that.

She also understood that if they let fear choose every tool, they would eventually build something very efficient and very familiar.

“Kallus,” she said, softer now.

This time he turned fully.

“You can watch him,” she said. “You can audit every permitted contact. You can make Vorr miserable in twelve legally distinct ways before breakfast if that helps you sleep. But you cannot keep standing there as if Ackbar has personally handed Thrawn a spare capital.”

Madine gave a faint cough that might have been an aborted laugh.

Kallus did not appreciate it. “He knows exactly where to put the knife,” Kallus said quietly.

Leia did not ask whether he meant Stent or Thrawn. “Yes,” she said.

“And Ackbar just gave him a better room from which to do it.”

“Maybe.” Leia folded her arms, careful of herself, careful not to let the gesture become defensive. “Or maybe Ackbar gave us a room in which we have to remain better than the knife.”

Madine looked at her.

“That,” he said after a moment, “sounds like something Mon Mothma would say before denying everyone additional ships.”

Leia’s mouth almost curved. “She would phrase it less kindly.”

“She would phrase it for twenty minutes.”

Kallus let out a breath that was not a laugh, but at least belonged to the same species.

Leia took the victory for what it was: tiny, temporary, and probably insufficient.

“Go get some air, Director,” she said. “Or caff. Or whatever passes for not glaring at architecture.”

“I am not glaring at architecture.”

“No,” Madine said. “You were glaring at the door. Completely different branch of infrastructure.”

Kallus looked at him.

Madine, who had faced worse things than a furious intelligence director and had the scars, classified or otherwise, to prove it, looked back with bland innocence.

Leia shook her head, then glanced once more down the corridor where Ackbar, Vorr, and Stent had vanished into the parliamentary complex’s secure inner wing.

“Well,” Madine said, apparently deciding that if history insisted on becoming absurd it could at least do so with proper timing, “I hope he likes fish.”

Leia turned to him. Kallus blinked.

Madine shrugged, grimly practical. “Because he is going to get very tired of it.”