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The first time Kleya sees Scarif, she thinks of a museum.
Not the kind tourists visit—she can’t quite imagine the word tourist belonging to this war—but the kind the Empire builds to display itself back to the galaxy: glass and light, engineered palms, a shoreline too perfect to be trusted. Even the air tastes curated, salt threaded with something clean and manufactured, as if the planet has been scrubbed into obedience.
Scarif is a world that looks like peace. A world that exists to feed a machine. And Kleya has long since learned to distrust anything that resembles mercy.
Vel stands beside her in the shuttle’s cramped shadow, helmet under one arm, chin lifted as the ramp yawns open and lets heat spill in. Kleya doesn’t look at Vel directly because she has learned, recently, that looking too long makes something loosen in her chest; something she isn’t sure she can afford. Even so, from the corner of her eye, she can’t help but catch the way the sun hits Vel’s face in a hard, bright line, making her look younger for a heartbeat—like the innocent rich girl who ran from home—until the set of her mouth returns and the illusion burns away.
‘Try not to look like you want to kill everyone,’ Vel murmurs, voice dry.
Kleya almost smiles. The fact that Vel can still joke here—on the edge of extinction—feels reckless.
It also feels like oxygen.
She tries not to dwell on what that means and instead turns her attention back to measuring angles, exits, distances, and the probable path of their death. Because that’s what this is, really. A mission you don’t call a suicide mission because you don’t want to poison it with the word, but everyone tastes it anyway.
They walk down the ramp into a different kind of air; warm, wet, soft as a lie. Kleya has done this a thousand times in different skins: step into danger as if it belongs to her, as if she were born to it, as if she isn’t afraid of being seen. Today, she wears a stolen uniform and a name that isn’t hers. Today, she carries her weapon like it’s an afterthought and keeps her hands steady by force.
Vel moves like she always does when the stakes are absolute: easy, unhurried, charming in that way that lets people underestimate her. A smile that doesn’t show teeth. A glance that says of course when it really means don’t look at me too long.
They are the knife and the mask.
They are also—and Kleya hates that she knows this—each other’s last tether.
She’s not usually one to believe in such romanticism. She believes in exits, contingencies, and burn-after-reading plans. And yet, when Vel moves, some quiet part of her calibrates around it.
Beyond the treeline, the archive tower rises, white and sleek, a spear driven into paradise. Vel draws a steadying breath, nods once at Kleya, and lifts her hand. The command is silent but absolute. They move at once, crossing the beach with disciplined precision, Kleya matching Vel’s pace without thinking. At the base of the Citadel tower, Vel signals again, sharp and unmistakable, and the team splits cleanly as they disappear into the service corridor that leads deeper inside. There are names that aren’t names, signals they’ve memorised, a plan held together by timing, faith, and theft.
Kleya falls into step beside Vel, and for a second, her shoulder brushes Vel’s arm. It’s nothing. It’s accidental. It’s the kind of contact that wouldn’t have registered in the old days, when Kleya was made of the mission and only the mission. Now, it leaves behind a heat that lingers too long, like a fingerprint under the skin.
Vel glances at her—a flicker; a question she doesn’t voice—and Kleya purposefully looks away first, hating herself for the cowardice of it.
They breach the building under the cover of a shift change and a security officer’s boredom. There’s a rhythm to infiltrations like this—Kleya knows it in her bones—a pulse of near-misses that makes your blood feel too large for your veins.
They pass through doors that should be locked. They find a terminal that should be guarded. They reach the heart of the Imperial archive, where the plans sit behind layers of arrogance and encryption and the assumption that no one would dare.
Kleya’s hands move faster than her thoughts. She’s fluent in the language of breaking things open. Not authority—fluency. Not control—access. A kind of intimacy that feels like sin. On the screen, data blooms: file trees and endless code strings; the ugly poetry of Empire.
Vel stands watch by the door, blaster loose at her side, eyes scanning the corridor beyond. She’s still and effortless, but Kleya can read her. The tension in her jaw, and the way she swallows once, hard, when the comm crackles with static and someone says they’ve spotted—
Trouble is coming.
It always does.
‘How long?’ Vel asks, not looking back.
‘Seconds,’ Kleya says, and she doesn’t add if I’m lucky.
Her fingertips stutter once—just once—on the console, and Vel shifts. Not closer, not yet. But her presence thickens behind Kleya like heat; like shelter. A piece of Kleya’s mind, the part that is always cruelly observational even as death approaches, registers the absurdity of it: that in the belly of the Empire’s archive, in a place built to keep the galaxy in chains, Vel’s nearness is the only thing that feels remotely like safety.
The realisation makes Kleya furious with herself.
Wanting is dangerous.
Wanting Vel is catastrophic.
And yet she does.
Oh, how she wants.
The download completes with a soft chime, and Kleya exhales a slow, uneven breath that feels louder than it should.
‘Got it,’ she says.
Vel turns, blue eyes bright with relief that lasts a fraction of a second before it’s replaced by something sharper as the comm hisses again. Someone swears, and then a burst of blaster fire echoes down the corridor like a door slamming shut.
‘We need to go, now,’ Vel says, and she’s already moving.
Kleya yanks the data module free and shoves it into her kit. Her hands don’t shake until she realises Vel has turned back to make sure she’s following. As if Kleya could ever not. They sprint, and the corridor becomes a funnel. The alarms begin to wail—clean, cold, merciless—and Scarif is no longer a museum; it’s a throat closing around them.
They round a corner and nearly collide with a squad of well-armed troopers. Vel fires first instinctively, and two immediately drop while the others fan out in learned formation. Kleya ducks, returns fire, and counts the shots by feel, the way Luthen taught her. Her mind stays unnaturally calm; always still when it’s this bad, as if it has been expecting the worst all along.
She hears Vel’s breathing through the comm—tight, controlled—and it’s the strangest comfort. It’s proof of life. Proof they are still moving.
They make it to the lift with smoke in their wake and the taste of ozone on their tongues, and the doors slide shut just as blaster bolts carve molten scars into the metal. Inside the lift, for half a heartbeat, there is only the sound of their ragged breathing. Vel’s helmet is still clipped to her belt. There’s sweat at her temple. Her eyes are fierce, alive, and something inside Kleya twists like a rope pulled too tight.
Vel looks at her as if to check her for blood. ‘You hit?’ she asks.
Kleya feels the weight of that look like a hand on her spine—anchoring, assessing, caring beyond measure.
She shakes her head. ‘No.’
‘Don’t lie,’ Vel replies with a curl in her lips.
Kleya’s mouth twitches in response, almost a matching wry smile. ‘If I were hit, I’d tell you. I’m not sentimental about injuries.’
Vel snorts, soft, and startled. There’s affection there, buried deep enough to be deniable, but Kleya feels it like an arrow struck straight through her heart.
Then, the lift shudders, the lights flicker, and the comm crackles again: the fleet above, the shield gate, the word blocked thrown like a brick into their plan. Vel’s face goes still, and Kleya immediately recognises that stillness. It’s the shape of decisions made in blood.
The doors open onto a maintenance terrace that overlooks the beach; a slice of impossible blue and sun that would be beautiful if it weren’t soaked in danger. Below, a few rebels are pinned down behind scattered cover. Someone is shouting coordinates. Someone is screaming for a medic. And the air is thick with grit and heat and the staccato of blaster fire.
Vel grabs Kleya’s forearm and pulls her down behind a crate. The touch is firm. Protective. Familiar now in a way it has no right to be, and Kleya’s skin feels too thin under it.
‘We can’t transmit,’ Vel says, voice low, urgent. ‘Not from here. The shield’s up, and the fleet can’t punch through.’
Kleya’s mind races. There are always angles. Always a hidden route. A weakness. A crack in the machinery. But Scarif is built to be seamless. She clutches the data module in her fist until the edges bite into her palm.
‘We have to get it up,’ Kleya says, lifting her eyes higher to the dish above them. ‘Physically.’
She watches Vel’s eyes flick to the sky. The shield gate glitters faintly, a cruel halo. Ships flash and burn beyond it like dying insects.
‘We can’t fly out,’ Vel says.
‘I didn’t say fly,’ Kleya replies.
Vel looks back at her, sharp comprehension blooming. ‘The dish.’
‘The dish,’ Kleya confirms. ‘It’s high enough that it should punch the signal through the shield’s interference to the fleet’s relay.’
Vel’s mouth tightens as she eyes the towering ascent. ‘You’re going to climb up there?’
‘We,’ Kleya says, before she can stop herself.
It lands between them, heavy. Vel’s gaze holds hers for a beat, and then, she smiles and nods once. Decisive. Terrible. Brave.
Beautiful.
‘All right,’ Vel says. ‘We climb.’
They move like ghosts through chaos, slipping from cover to cover across the bridge, timing their sprint between bolts. Kleya tastes metal and salt and adrenaline. Her lungs burn, and her heart keeps trying to climb out of her throat.
Once, Vel’s hand clamps around the back of her vest and yanks her out of the path of a shot, and Kleya stumbles into Vel’s body, chest to chest, for a single breath.
Vel’s eyes go wide, and Kleya feels it—the jolt, the wrongness of how right it is. But there isn’t time. They’re moving again before she can fully process it, and Kleya tells herself—Later. There will be later—Even as some part of her knows later may never arrive.
They reach the service stairwell that spirals up the exterior of the relay tower. It’s exposed, sun-bleached, and lined with railings that will not stop a fall. Wind tears at them. Heat makes the metal hot to the touch, but they begin to climb anyway.
Below them, the beach is a mess of tiny figures and flashes of light. Above them, the sky is impossibly bright. Kleya climbs with grim efficiency, and Vel climbs with furious stamina. Neither of them speaks; there isn’t a breath to spare. Halfway up, stray blaster fire from a passing TIE finds the stairwell, and Vel shoves Kleya down behind the curve of the railing as the bolt hits the metal beside Vel’s shoulder, showering sparks.
Kleya whips around, weapon raised and instantly sees the red smear blooming on Vel’s sleeve.
Vel looks down like she can’t quite believe it. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says immediately.
Kleya’s stomach drops. Vel’s voice is too calm. Too familiar. The same tone people use when they want to keep everyone else from panicking.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Kleya exhales breathlessly.
‘It’s not—’ Vel starts, then winces, and the lie falters.
Kleya reaches for her without thinking. Her hands find Vel’s arm, press above the wound, and abruptly feel the hot slick of blood. Vel sucks in a breath through her teeth, and Kleya’s own breath comes too fast; too loud.
‘I can keep going,’ Vel says, and there’s something almost pleading in it. Not for the mission, but for Kleya’s belief.
Kleya looks at her, then—really looks at her—and is hit with a sudden, searing clarity: she is not prepared to lose Vel. Not like she lost Luthen. Not like Vel lost Cinta. Not like the war has taken everything else.
She is not prepared to watch Vel become a memory.
Her hands tighten on Vel’s sleeve. ‘Don’t you dare,’ Kleya says, voice low, shaking with rage she cannot afford. ‘Don’t you dare leave me here with this.’
This means with the plans. This means with the war. This means with herself.
And then Kleya’s mind does what it always does when something precious is threatened: it begins to inventory loss.
Her parents, bleeding in the dirt so she could run. Luthen, dying by her hand because it was necessary. Faces without names. Names without bodies. Survival as an arithmetic she has never once won—only endured. She has lived because others have not. She has lived because someone always stands between her and the worst of it.
And now Vel is bleeding and still smiling—still trying to make herself expendable.
Kleya feels the old, reflexive instinct rise up—step back, let the loss happen, be the one who carries it instead of the one who causes it. This is how she has survived. This is how she has made herself useful. But the thought of walking away from Vel—of adding her to the long, silent ledger—makes something in Kleya revolt.
She doesn’t want to survive this. Not like that. Not without Vel.
Vel stares at her, and something passes between them; quick, bright, impossible. Her mouth curves, faint and pained. ‘Is that an order, Lieutenant Marki?’
Kleya swallows hard. ‘Yes.’
Vel nods, once. ‘Then I’ll obey.’
Kleya tears a strip of fabric from her own undershirt with her teeth and wraps it tight around the wound. Vel hisses, then steadies as Kleya’s fingers linger on her skin for half a heartbeat too long. She realises with a jolt of terror, then, that this is the difference; this is the moment where survival asks too much. Because wanting Vel alive—not as an idea, not as a memory, but as a future—is a liability. And she wants it anyway.
Vel’s gaze drops to her fingers before returning to her eyes, and then Vel leans in—not like a beginning, but like it’s the only honest thing left.
Their lips meet, and the world narrows to sensation: salt, blood, heat. It isn’t gentle. It isn’t careful. It’s the collision of everything they have refused to name: long days of proximity and restraint, the late-night murmurs, the comforting heat of Vel’s hand on Kleya’s wrist in the hours after Luthen’s death whenever she’d started to unravel, and the way Kleya has started to breathe easier when Vel is near.
Vel’s mouth is urgent, sure, devastating, and Kleya feels something inside her give way, a long-held line finally snapping. She makes a helpless sound into Vel’s mouth that she doesn’t recognise as her own, and Vel’s hand reflexively cups the side of her jaw, steady despite the pain, thumb brushing once over her cheekbone like both solace and apology.
Kleya kisses her back harder in response as if she could mark her. Like this is proof Vel existed, that this moment happened, that something real touched her before the end. And she knows—knows with awful clarity—that love does not save you. But it does make you choose. And right now, Kleya is choosing Vel just as Vel is choosing her.
When Vel finally pulls back, she lets her forehead rest briefly against hers. ‘We survive this,’ she whispers, breath ragged, ‘and then you let me do that again properly.’
Kleya nods because it’s kinder than saying what she already understands: survival is no longer the point… completion is.
Her pulse hammers, and despite the inevitability of it, she forces herself to nod. ‘We survive,’ she echoes, as if saying it can make it true.
Then, they begin to climb again.
At the top, the relay equipment is half-shielded by panels and tangle-wired like a nest, and Kleya swiftly throws herself into the console with shaking hands. The interface is Imperial; ugly, unfriendly, and built to keep outsiders out.
Kleya grins, sharp and humourless as she makes it bend to her will, while Vel stands behind her, weapon trained on the stairwell with blood seeping through the makeshift bandage. Vel’s breathing is tight, but her presence is a tether as she slots the data module in with shaking hands and lets Vel, still alive behind her, be enough to cling to.
The signal spikes, and for one second, the screen flashes: TRANSMISSION READY.
‘Now,’ Kleya says, and her voice breaks.
Vel hits the comm at once, and the dish whirs and tilts. Static. Resistance. Then—like a blade slipping through armour—connection. Kleya watches the upload bar creep across the screen, each percentage a trembling, promising heartbeat.
Below them, the Citadel Tower shudders. Something is happening. Something big. And Kleya thinks of the fleet, of the shield gate, of the way the Empire always believes itself invincible.
The upload completes, and Kleya’s whole body goes loose with relief that is immediately strangled by the sound overhead—a deep, growing roar. She turns and watches as a streak of light cuts across the sky. The shield flares. A ship—too big, too fast—breaks through in a blaze, ramming the gate with the ferocity of a desperate thing.
The shield fractures.
The sky splits.
And Kleya feels it like a physical opening; possibility ripping the galaxy wide.
Vel’s laugh is breathless, disbelieving. ‘They did it!’
Kleya stares, stunned, and for one miraculous moment, it feels like the galaxy is capable of change.
Then the tower shudders again, harder, and the ground beneath their feet trembles.
Vel hastily grabs Kleya’s hand. ‘We have to go,’ she says.
Kleya looks at the ladder—it’s too exposed, too slow. She looks at the sky; falling debris and raining fire. Then, she allows herself to look at Vel—bloodied, smiling like a woman who has nothing left to lose—and realises, with a sick lurch, that the Empire is going to take this tower—this planet—down around them.
Vel sees it on her face, and her grip tightens.
‘Kleya,’ she says softly. ‘Hey. Look at me.’ Kleya does, and Vel’s eyes are bright and steady and full of something that hurts. ‘I’m glad it was you,’ Vel murmurs reverently.
The words carve something permanent into Kleya’s chest, and she knows she will carry them, whatever comes next.
‘Don’t,’ she whispers, feeling her throat close around it. ‘Don’t make it sound like—’
‘Like goodbye?’ Vel finishes gently, and Kleya can’t answer. Vel brings Kleya’s hand to her mouth and kisses her knuckles; brief, reverent, absurdly tender in the midst of screaming alarms. ‘Like love,’ Vel says instead.
Kleya doesn’t bother to deny it. She has run from many things, but this will not be one of them. Instead, her breath breaks and she steps in, closing the last of the space between them, and kisses Vel again—slower this time, deeper, as if she can pour every unsaid thing into Vel’s mouth and make it last beyond the end of the world.
Vel kisses her back like she understands; like she’s known all along and been waiting for Kleya to catch up.
The tower suddenly groans again, harder this time as the air turns sharp with heat, and Kleya presses her forehead to Vel’s. ‘We did it,’ she whispers, as if she needs to hear herself say it.
Vel smiles, fierce and soft all at once. ‘We did.’
And then, Kleya thinks—not for the first time lately—that the Empire will never understand this part: that people don’t give their lives because they want to die, they do it because there is always something—someone—worth fighting for.
Above them, the sky burns brightly, and in this high, impossible place above a fake paradise, Kleya holds Vel like a vow and lets herself feel it—just for a moment—something that isn’t war.
With her forehead still pressed to Vel’s, Kleya lets go—not of fear, but of any fleeting belief that she was ever meant to walk away from this. This is what museums are for, she thinks distantly: not to preserve what survives, but to prove that something real once stood here.
Then the light comes—not like an ending, but like punctuation—and there is no time for anything but that last held breath; a full stop that ends with her and Vel together.