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The charity gala is, like most Imperial charity galas, not particularly charitable.
You’ve attended enough of them to know the anatomy by now: the luminescent columns of Coruscant marble doing the work of saying wealth so that no one has to say it themselves; the catering staff moving with the particular invisibility of people trained to be furniture; the guests performing generosity at each other while calculating the social yield of every handshake. The cause being celebrated tonight — something to do with infrastructure on a Mid Rim world whose name you’ve already let go — is printed on small cards placed at intervals around the room. No one is reading them.
Your father moves through it like he was born to it.
Because he was.
“You look like you’re already planning your exit,” Barton Puzzo says, not looking at you, lifting a glass of something pale off a passing tray.
“I’m always planning my exit,” you say. “It’s efficient.”
He makes a sound that is almost a laugh. You’ve learned to collect those over the years — they’re rare, and worth considerably more than his actual laughs, which he distributes freely to people he’s working. The almost-laugh is for you specifically, and for your mother, and occasionally for your sister Mira when she’s said something that surprises him. It is not performed. That’s how you know.
Mira isn’t here either. Your mother is with her on Chandrila, where three weeks ago Mira gave birth to the first grandchild of the family — a girl, seven pounds, as yet unnamed because Mira and her husband have apparently decided to conduct the naming as a democratic process open to extensive deliberation. Your mother had looked at the gala invitation and then at the holoimage of the baby and made a choice that required no visible thought whatsoever.
Your father had not contested it. That’s the thing about Barton Puzzo — he understands the hierarchy of things.
“Velten’s been trying to get ten minutes with me for a month,” he says, tilting his glass toward a grey-haired man across the room who carries himself like someone the galaxy has been personally disappointing for sixty years. “I’ll give him five.”
“He’ll be grateful,” you say.
“That’s the point.” He hands you his untouched drink and takes the one he lifted from the tray for himself instead — you’ve never quite tracked how he does that without looking — and moves toward Velten with the unhurried pace of a man who knows exactly how long five minutes is and has never once exceeded it.
You stay where you are. Column, glass, the ambient sound of people saying things that will matter to no one by morning.
You notice the cape before you notice the man wearing it.
It’s white — dress white, officer white, the ceremonial white that appears at formal Imperial occasions with the regularity of liturgy — but the cut is a choice. Not standard. Someone has looked at the regulation and then looked at themselves and made a decision that those two things should not be the same. You catalogue this before you’ve turned your head to find the source, because that’s the reflex your father installed in you early: read the room by its details, and let the details tell you what the people won’t.
Director. The rank is new enough that you can still hear the newness in it. Orson Krennic. Your father had mentioned him once, in the way he mentions things he considers worth a degree of monitoring — not a threat, not a confirmed asset, a variable whose behavior he hasn’t finished charting. The rank itself had been elevated recently enough that there were presumably people in this room who hadn’t yet updated their mental files.
He’s looking at you.
Not the way most men at these events look at you — running the arithmetic of your father’s name against your mother’s family connections and arriving at a figure they’ve decided is acceptable. This is more direct than that. More confident than the math warrants, given that he’s never met you. You give him three seconds before looking away. That’s courtesy. That’s your father’s voice, measured and patient across approximately a decade of conversations: You never gave any of them a chance. You close the door before they’ve shown you the room.
You’d pointed out, once, that two of the rooms you’d been shown had been very small and very poorly furnished.
He’d almost laughed at that one too.
He’s pompous, you’ve already decided. The cape announced it before he crossed the floor. But your father’s voice is specific and persistent, and you’ve made an agreement with yourself — not with him, with yourself, which is the only kind that holds — to run the experiment through to the data before rendering a verdict.
You keep your eyes on the middle distance.
You wait.
——xxxxxx——
Krennic decides to approach at the moment she looks away.
Not because the looking away discourages him. The opposite. She’d held it for exactly three seconds — long enough to be deliberate, short enough to suggest she’d set a limit and honored it — and then withdrawn entirely, which tells him she’s already made a provisional decision and hasn’t committed to it. That’s a door. You don’t make provisional decisions about people you’ve dismissed.
He’s done a reasonable amount of research on the significant names in the room tonight, which is his practice at events like this, because information is what galas are actually for if you’re paying attention. Most of the guests sorted quickly: naval officers with logistics connections, Ministry functionaries, two senators who don’t know each other but should, a vice admiral named Dorvaan who owes him a conversation he’s been deferring for three months.
The woman by the column he’d had to approach empirically, because she wasn’t in his notes. Well-dressed in the way that means the dress isn’t the point. Composure that looks effortless in the way that means it was installed early, not acquired. She’d looked at him with the specific quality of attention that tells you someone has already decided you’re going to disappoint them and is leaving the door fractionally open to being wrong.
He crosses the room.
She doesn’t turn to watch him approach.
He notes that.
“You look,” he says, when he’s beside her, “like the only person here who’s actually read the figures for whatever it is we’re all pretending to fund tonight.”
She turns. Her expression is politely attentive in the way of someone who has allocated one minute and is prepared to be flexible if something earns it. “And you look like the only person who wore that cape on purpose.”
“I did.”
“I know.” A pause, precise as a clean incision. “It suits the rank.”
Not a compliment. Not quite an insult. He finds himself briefly without his next sentence, which is uncommon enough to be worth noticing. “Orson Krennic,” he says. “Director.”
“I know.” The second time she’s said it, and the second time it costs him something small and not entirely named. “You were a Commander when my father mentioned you.”
When my father mentioned you. He doesn’t reach for the noun directly. Her father runs in circles where Krennic’s name is worth mentioning, which narrows the field considerably — but he lets it sit, because appearing to track family connections too quickly is bad form, and because there are more interesting threads in the room to pull first.
He glances across the space. There’s a cluster near the far side of the room that’s been stable for the last twenty minutes — four men, possibly five, the kind of grouping that forms around weight rather than occasion. Motti he recognizes: capable, ambitious in the lateral way of men who’ve realized early that they’re not going to exceed a certain ceiling, socially easy, the kind of person who accumulates moderate influence by being reliably useful to people with more of it. Standing with him are two others whose faces he’s filed as known-quantities-without-immediate-strategic-value, and one — greying, substantial, the posture of someone who doesn’t need to signal authority because the room has already received and processed it — who he hasn’t placed from his notes.
The unplaced one is standing closest to Motti.
He mentally marks Motti and returns his attention to the conversation.
“What does a Director do at a charity gala?” she asks.
“The same thing anyone does, presumably. Appears.”
“You could have appeared anywhere in the room.”
“I chose the most interesting part of it.”
She receives this with the expression of someone who has heard something structurally identical at approximately eleven previous galas and is neither offended nor impressed. He hadn’t expected it to land. He’d said it to see how she caught it, which is a different purpose entirely.
“The project you’re directing,” she says. “My father mentioned that too. Vaguely.”
“Most people who know about it mention it vaguely,” he says. “By design.”
“Is it connected to the Senate appropriations review? There’s been some noise about military allocations that haven’t been adequately explained to the relevant committees.”
He looks at her with slightly more attention than he’d been giving her, which was already more than he gives most rooms. “What kind of noise?”
“The dinner table kind.” Simply. “The kind you don’t retain in any specific form.”
“The kind that stays with you anyway.”
“Sometimes.” Unhurried. She’s not offering anything — he registers that now, as a fact rather than an impression. She’s asking the questions. She’s watching him arrange himself around them. Either she’s a great deal more deliberate than she’s appearing, or she’s genuinely curious and has no idea what she’s adjacent to, and neither answer tells him which approach is correct, which is itself a data point.
“You haven’t told me what you do,” he says, changing axis.
“At galas? Apparently I talk to Directors.” The edge is light enough that it might be an edge or might be nothing at all. “Otherwise I read. I travel when my schedule allows. I accompany my father when my mother has better things to do, which is frequently.”
“What does your father do?”
“Something important,” she says. “He’s usually vague about the specifics.”
That tells him nothing useful and everything atmospheric. She’s either genuinely uninformed about the specifics of her father’s work — possible, if her father is the kind of man who keeps home and occupation carefully separated — or she’s been trained to answer exactly like this, which implies the opposite.
He looks at the group across the room again, briefly. Motti is laughing at something the greying man has said. The body language reads as deferential in Motti’s direction, which confirms what he’d already suspected — Motti is the senior weight in that grouping. The greying one is probably Ministry, or a planetary governor passing through Coruscant, someone with regional rather than central authority.
Motti, then.
An officer of Motti’s standing having a daughter this composed, this careful — it tracks. It also means the field is more manageable than it might have been. Motti is not an enemy. Motti is not an ally of particular use. Motti is, in the architecture of Krennic’s present priorities, essentially neutral territory.
Which means the next twenty minutes can go where he’d like them to go.
“The drinks are reportedly better on the terrace,” he says. “And the noise drops considerably. The kind of quiet where conversations actually go somewhere.”
She looks at him. Then at the terrace doors. Something moves behind her eyes — not calculation exactly, more like a voice she’s consulting, brief and interior, and he doesn’t know what it says but when she looks back at him her expression has shifted by a degree.
“The terrace,” she says.
Something resolves neatly.
“After you,” he says.
——xxxxxx——
Pompous, you’ve confirmed. The cape. The I chose the most interesting part of the room. The way he’d looked at you when you mentioned your father’s name, cataloguing rather than listening.
But there’s something else underneath it that your father’s voice keeps flagging before you can close the file: he’s not performing for you. He’s performing at you, which is different — the performance is the same either way, but the aim is specific. He wants something from this conversation. He knows you can see that he wants something. He hasn’t adjusted tactics because of it. There’s a quality to that — not honesty exactly, but a refusal to pretend at a register he’s decided is beneath him — that is at minimum more interesting than the last three men who’d approached you at events like this with the carefully neutral expression of someone who’d done the arithmetic on your family and arrived at a comfortable figure.
Your father’s voice: give it the room.
You take three steps toward the terrace.
You see your father.
He isn’t searching — he never searches, he simply arrives at the location that requires him — and he’s already looking at you, which means he’s already done the geometry of the room and arrived at an answer that includes Krennic and the direction you were both walking. The expression on his face is the one that contains no expression at all. You’ve learned, over many years, that this is his most communicative face.
You stop.
Krennic registers your stillness a half-second later and turns.
——xxxxxx——
The first thing Krennic notices is that the man approaching them is taller than Motti.
The second thing he notices is that he is not Motti.
The third thing — arriving with the particular quality of information that is technically available in the moment and only becomes knowledge in retrospect — is that the greying man from the group is not with them, and neither are the two others, because they weren’t his orbit. They were in this man’s orbit, which means Motti was standing at the edge of someone else’s gravity without Krennic having registered whose.
Grand Moff Barton Puzzo does not walk so much as conclude that a location requires him and subsequently occupy it. His eyes move from his daughter to Krennic with the quality of a structural assessment, the kind performed by someone who builds things and therefore understands precisely how they fail.
Oh, Krennic’s interior says. It isn’t a word exactly. It’s the sound that precedes the recalculation.
She’d said when my father mentioned you. She’d said it twice. He’d heard it both times and he’d been so focused on the approach, on the evening’s architecture, on the terrace and the conversation that was supposed to happen there, that he’d filed it as context and never chased the name underneath it, and the name underneath it was Barton Puzzo, who could end careers in this building tonight without raising his voice or his heart rate. Who had ended careers. Who was standing directly in front of him and whose daughter Krennic had been thirty seconds from steering toward a private terrace.
He keeps his face arranged into something appropriate.
He is, whatever else he is, very good at that.
“Director.” Puzzo’s voice is pleasant. It is, Krennic understands immediately, always pleasant. The pleasantness is not warmth — it’s something more like weather. It simply is, regardless of what’s happening beneath it. “I see you’ve found the most interesting person in the room.”
“The room made it easy,” Krennic says. It comes out level. He’s proud of that.
Puzzo looks at his daughter for exactly one second — the kind of second that contains a complete conversation, with preamble and conclusion both — and then back at Krennic. “I hope she hasn’t been boring you. She tends to.”
It’s the kind of thing a father says when he’s proud and wants to say it sideways. It’s also an opening. Puzzo is watching to see how he steps through it.
“Not remotely,” Krennic says.
“Good.” The smile doesn’t move. “I noticed you were heading toward the terrace.”
The statement is not a question. Krennic does not treat it as one. “The acoustics in there are better suited for conversation.”
“They are,” Puzzo agrees pleasantly. “My daughter and I use it regularly.” A pause that has the exact weight of a door being held open and then, with no visible effort, closed. “She knows every corner of this particular venue. Don’t you.”
The last two words are directed at her, easy and fond, and she responds with something brief and unrevealing that Krennic doesn’t fully catch because he’s focused on maintaining the precise expression of a man who has nothing to account for.
Puzzo looks at him again. The pleasantness has not shifted by a fraction. That is the most frightening thing about it.
“Walk with me a moment, Director.”
It isn’t a request.
They move a few steps apart from her — not far, Puzzo keeps the distance manageable, which tells Krennic that this conversation will be short and therefore efficient — and Puzzo turns to face him with the expression of a man settling a small administrative matter.
“She’s my favorite person,” Puzzo says. “I want to be precise about that, so there’s no ambiguity in what I’m about to say.”
Krennic waits.
“If anything were to happen to her — anything that could be traced, directly or indirectly, to an interaction that began at this gala — I would consider it a personal project to ensure that your next assignment was cataloguing fasteners at a supply depot somewhere in the Outer Rim.” The pleasantness hasn’t moved. “I wouldn’t rush it. I’d make sure the posting was indefinite. You’d have a great deal of time to reflect.”
A pause.
“I think you’re a capable man, Director. It would be a waste.” Another pause, the same weight, perfectly calibrated. “I’d do it anyway.”
Krennic holds the silence for exactly as long as it takes to demonstrate that he’s receiving this without flinching. “I understand you completely,” he says.
“I thought you might.” Puzzo touches his shoulder once, the way you’d touch furniture to confirm it was where you left it. “Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
——xxxxxx——
He doesn’t watch them leave.
He takes a drink from the nearest passing tray without registering what’s on it and holds it with the practiced ease of a man at a gala who has nowhere in particular to be, because that is the version of himself the room needs to see right now.
Supply depot. Fasteners. The Outer Rim.
Puzzo had said it with the same inflection he’d used for everything else in the conversation, which meant it wasn’t a threat in the conventional sense. It was a statement of future fact delivered in advance, as a courtesy. The distinction mattered. Men who make threats are negotiating. Men who state facts have already made their decisions and are giving you the opportunity to make yours.
Krennic makes his.
He finds Vice Admiral Dorvaan near the drinks table, introduces himself with the warm efficiency of a man who has just remembered exactly where he needs to be, and spends the next forty minutes discussing logistical infrastructure on the Outer Rim with every appearance of finding it the most interesting topic in the building.
He does not look at the terrace doors.
He almost manages not to think about them.
——xxxxxx——
The speeder is quiet in the way Coruscant speeders are only quiet when you’ve closed the partition and the city becomes a moving painting on the other side of the glass.
Your father is looking out the window. His expression has returned to its default configuration — not closed exactly, just at rest, the face he wears when he doesn’t need it to do anything.
“He was going to take you to the terrace,” he says. Not an accusation. An observation.
“I know,” you say.
“For the acoustics.”
“So he said.”
A pause. The city scrolls past. Somewhere below, several hundred meters of traffic is moving in organized streams, and none of it is any of your business.
“Your mother,” your father says, “is never going to let me hear the end of this evening.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“I showed up.”
This is, you know, not a small thing in his accounting.
He’s quiet for another moment, and then he says, without shifting his gaze from the window: “Perhaps your original approach to these situations wasn’t entirely without merit.”
You look at him.
“Disposing of them before the introductions,” he says. “Efficient. Saves everyone time.” The almost-laugh surfaces and resolves. “I may have given you bad advice.”
“You told me to give them a chance,” you say.
“I told you to give suitable men a chance.” He finally turns from the window, and his expression is the fond one, the private one, the one that has never once appeared in a briefing room. “I should have been more specific about the parameters.”
You look at him for a moment. Then: “How much trouble is he in?”
“None, if he’s sensible.” A pause. “He seemed sensible enough.”
“He’s ambitious.”
“Most of them are.” He retrieves his glass from somewhere — you’re never entirely sure when he acquired the things he’s carrying — and turns back to the window. “Ambition and sense aren’t mutually exclusive. They just don’t always arrive together.”
The city moves. The partition holds.
“He had a nice cape,” you say.
Your father makes the almost-laugh.