pickledturncoat | Book Excerpts

"I was a loyalty officer. Are you aware of the responsibilities of an Imperial loyalty officer?"

"I confess that I'm not."

"Oh, it's a truly charming role. I was trained to sniff out weakness in my cohorts. I learned how to read body language, how to detect lies, how to use people against one another, all in order to discover where my own people had committed trespasses against the Empire. Anything from small breaches of conduct to outright treachery against the throne. I was the shadow they couldn't shake. You put me in a base or battle station or office and they knew they were on notice. I'd scare up what they'd done like a hunter flushing prey from the brush. And I'd hurt them to earn a confession and correct the errors. Oh, it wasn't just physical pain I caused, though that was certainly a part of it. It was emotional pain.

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Sinjir remains sitting and silent. The knife hilt rolls and turns. Sometimes he looks down and sees blood on his hands. Real, fresh blood: the fingertips wet and greasy with it. He thinks: I cut myself. The blade is out and I am injured. But then the blood is gone again. An illusion. A dream. Real until it's not.

Eventually, Jas moves past the bunkroom, the ammo belt slung over her shoulder, and she reverses and storms up to Sinjir and says, "It was in the kitchen. Why was it in the kitchen?"

He has no answer, so he shrugs, the blade still dancing.

She narrows her eyes. "What's your problem?"

"I have no problem. I am a man unburdened by conflict."

"Sure, and I'm a baby Hutt-slug."

"You're slimy, but not that slimy."

She kicks him in the knee. Not hard.

"Ow."

"No, really, what's your malfunction?"

"For starters, I don't have anything to drink."

She sits down next to him. "Thought you quit drinking."

"Hardly. I quit drinking Kowakian rum, because even though it tastes like the sweet, syrupy glow of pure liquid stardust, it invokes the kind of hangover that makes you feel as if you've been romanced by an irascible rancor. It is the kind of hangover that makes you plead for death while hiding in the darkness under your bedcovers or even under the bed itself. No more Kowakian rum for me." He sniffs. "Everything else is fair game."

"You're doing that thing."

"What thing?"

"That thing where you use mockery, sarcasm, and derision to deflect a sincere question."

"Ah, that thing. It's a very good thing."

"I'm not going to pull teeth. If you don't want to tell me what's going on with you, I won't pry..."

"Takask wallask ti dan," he says. "Do you remember telling me that phrase? On Kashyyyk after our work was done?"

"I didn't just tell it to you. I called you that. A man without a star."

He finally stops moving the blade between his hands and stoops over, rubbing his eyes. "I feel like you were wrong."

"I'm not wrong often, so okay, lay it out for me."

He turns to her. "This is my star. Not this ship, but this life. A life where I threaten people and make them do things. I tell them I will break their hands, kill their mothers, ruin all that they hold dear. I know how to find weakness. I know how to exploit it. And..." His voice drifts and he almost fails to summon the next part. "I think I enjoy it."

"If you enjoyed it, you wouldn't be telling me this."

"Perhaps."

"Besides, you could've actually chosen to hurt Swift. I wouldn't have stood in your way. But you didn't. You did it with words, not violence."

"Words can be violence."

Jas shrugs. "Sinjir, you need to think less. That brain of yours is a whole lot of trouble."

"Now you know why I drink."

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"You were a bad man."

"Still am, maybe, though I'm trying to do better. But that's not why I'm telling you this story. The reason I'm telling you this is that you think you're my enemy, and that's not true, not at all. The Empire is my enemy. The Empire has always been my enemy. I hunted my own kind. I hurt them. I was made to doubt them, to see the weakness in them. And I saw so much weakness and ruination. In them." And in myself. "They were my enemy then and remain my enemy now. I've just scrapped the uniform."

"So, you're with us now? You're a rebel?"

That thought twists inside of him. He is, isn't he? A rebel. He's turned like milk past its time. Gone to the other side. And why? Because he almost died there on Endor? Because looking at all that wreckage jarred him? Changed him? What a curious reason to desert your post. It can't be that simple. It can't be that complete. He tells himself that it's temporary. That this crisis of conscience will one day resolve itself.

He lifts his chin and stares down his nose at her. "I'm not with them, but not with you, either. I'm with me."

"I don't trust people who are only in it for themselves."

He shrugs and offers a sad smile. "Then you shouldn't trust me."

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With that, Sinjir reaches up and plunges the tips of two fingers into the unconscious bounty hunter's nostrils. He tugs upward, hard. Mercurial's eyes jolt open and he sucks in a hissing breath.

"Wakey-wakey," Sinjir says all too cheerfully. "Time to move and time to shake-y." As an aside, he says: "My mother used to say that. Sweet woman. If I didn't get out of bed fast enough, her sweetness turned rather sour, though, and she would whip me with a broom." Now, back to Mercurial: "I don't need to hit you with a broom, do I? Are we awake?"

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She stares holes through him. "What happened that day? On Endor?"

"You know what happened. You were there."

"To you. What happened to you."

"I..." Sinjir puts forth a grim smile, trying not to speak aloud the memories that are tearing him apart. "Fine. You really want to know? You won't stop poking? Let's have it, then." He swirls the honeyed liquid around the bell of the bottle. "So, like I said, I was an Imperial loyalty officer on the base of Endor and-oh look it's Norra!" He nearly drops the bottle when he sees her step into the kitchen.

Her. Norra. Standing right there. Fuming. Chest rising and falling like that of a beast who smells blood on the wind. He should've heard her come up. But with the drinking and the talking...

"An Imperial," she says.

"I'm sure you misheard me," he says. "I said...mImperial?" He frowns and hmmphs. "That's not a word, is it."

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"You all right?"

It's a loaded question. Conder knows that Sinjir is most certainly not all right. Whatever bliss the two of them possessed prior to Liberation Day has dissolved like a sand castle under siege by the sea. Stress has throttled them both. Conder's been off working freelance for the NRSB, doing whatever investigatory slicer work they have around-the work is plenty thanks to a recommendation from Leia herself. It also means they have him as the slicer trying to hack the little controller chips they found in the brain stems of each of the Ashmead's Lock assassins. That in an effort to figure out who made them and how they work. As such, Conder's barely been around. And Sinjir has only been around. Sitting here with naught to do but pace. And ponder. And plot.

So, when Conder asks that question, Sinjir wonders if it's wise to give the real answer. But he's tired of pretending otherwise.

"I am both better now than I was and worse," he says. What he does not say is: I killed a man because he upset my friends. Which only confirms for him what he's long-suspected and irresponsibly denied: Sinjir is not a good person. He is a bad man with a talent for bad things.

Conder comes over and takes Sinjir's hand.

Conder's hands are warm.

Sinjir's are cold.

"It'll be okay," Conder promises, but it is a promise he cannot know. He's sweet and optimistic. Translated: naive as a wandering waif.

Sinjir decides in that moment. He leans forward and kisses Conder hard, and then tells him: "I am not the man for you, Conder Kyl. I am a moral weathervane spinning in this hurricane. You need a nicer breed of man than I." He thinks, I love you, but that doesn't matter, yet those words never make it to his lips. All he does is leave.