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The story does not change as much as we wish it did, but there is this: Bodhi’s mother does not wait to give her a knife. She learns how to cut vegetable stalks at eight, how to hide the flash of steel in her sleeve at nine, and how to aim for the joints of three different species by ten.
Her mother even sits her down in the kitchen and teaches her the weak spots in a Stormtrooper’s armor. “But they’re here to help us!” Bodhi protests. “And they have the coolest ships.”
“And what if they do not help?” her mother says tartly, adjusting Bodhi’s flailing grip. “And what if you do not have a ship? What then?”
Bodhi grins, gap-toothed from the time she tripped over her own feet watching the sky, and waves the knife in the air. “I will always have a ship.”
This is the truth; in any world, Bodhi Rook is the pilot. But in this one she eventually ducks her head and memorizes the chinks in the Stormtrooper armor, because she has grown up small and pretty and dark-eyed, and she already knows the value of getting away.
That same year Bodhi gets caught in a neighbor’s yard by a group of boys. They’d jumped the fence, same as her, snickering and daring each other to fly the speeder parked there.
Bodhi opens her mouth, starts to ask to join. Her mother has raised her to be good but this is a speeder.
The boys shout at her, the question fizzles like gas fumes, and she scatters into the streets of Jedha, knife in shaking hand.
The boys land themselves in a heap of trouble with the law, and crash the speeder besides. Bodhi sighs when she hears; if she’d been there she could have at least saved the speeder.
At twelve, Bodhi finds her mother weeping over a stack of bills at the kitchen table. She’d just wanted a drink of water, but she slips back to bed with something juddering like a warping speeder in her chest. Her hands tremble. (Her hands have always trembled, ever since she was a child, but this is different.)
The next day Bodhi cuts her hair and gets a job sweeping steps. The hulking man who hires her—taciturn, with a lump of a left shoulder that rises much higher than his right—doesn’t realize she’s a girl until after they shake on it, and by then a promise is a promise. “Huh,” he says. “Didn’t need to hide it from me.”
“Sorry,” Bodhi blurts, though she’s not. A girl with a high, thready voice and shaking hands would draw too much attention, or the wrong kind of it. Easier to pretend she’s a boy who will grow out of such things, who will become a man. “I can still sweep.”
“You better,” the man grunts. “‘S’what I hired you for.”
Maru—that’s the name he gives—pays her exactly what they agreed upon, under the counter of the fruit stall. Bodhi’s mother inhales like she’s been stabbed when Bodhi brings it home.
“What is this?”
“The pay’ll be better soon,” Bodhi shrugs. “Once I get into the service academy—won’t even have to fight. They pay cargo pilots well, in the Empire.” She can’t help it then: “And I’ll have a ship.”
Her mother’s face shutters, then softens. Later Bodhi will think about her mother watching the flood of soldiers into the Holy City, staying, raising her daughter and praying that the Empire would not dig her home’s heart out. Later the weapon Bodhi had ferried parts for will burn that heart up. She will think of this look on her mother’s face then.
But not now. Now, Bodhi’s mother places her palm over the credits Bodhi’d spent six hours sweeping steps for and looks terribly, wonderfully proud.
Bodhi gets into the Terrabe Sector Service Academy with alright marks and a well-meaning word of recommendation from Maru (“Kid’s got work ethic. Doesn’t slack off on the sweeping.”) Maru’s real gift sits in her sleeve: the scanner-proof lining she’d used to sneak her knife in. Call it sentiment. Call it a means of getting away.
(Later, a tired man in Imperial white will call it rebellion.)
The other kids seem nice enough, if loud. Most jockey for position and make bets on who will wipe out first. A couple seem as quiet and disoriented as Bodhi, but slink to the back of the mess before she can talk to them, uninterested in making friends.
Ships are better than friends, though, and Bodhi gets by well enough. She excels in the flight simulations, but has middling grades and aim that jukes wildly in every direction. She had grown up holding a knife, but she’d wanted to be a pilot, not a soldier.
The instructors bark at her, and she pulls her grades up in a burst of terrified necessity. Small, pretty, dark-eyed girl. Trembling hands. She thinks the worst they will do is kick her out, and that is bad enough.
She spends night after night trying to cram down her anxiety, willing herself steady. It doesn’t work. But a month in, one of the other girls in the program—there are three, maybe four of them—finds her wedged between the bunks and the wall crying, and teaches her grounding exercises from her planet.
“It won’t fix it,” she whispers, “but you’re not broken, so.”
Bodhi wheezes out a thank you. The other girl reaches down and pats her wrist, where the skin is only a little clammy.
Isa is the girl’s name. She smiles crooked, shows them all up in marksmanship training, and cheats blatantly at board games. She makes Bodhi tremble all over, warmth swooping in her chest like a crashing speeder.
Bodhi calls her mother—of course she does. Over the carefully-surveilled Imperial line, her mother tells Bodhi she loves her, then laughs and laughs and laughs.
The program intensifies, starts to break people. Some drop out—big, sweet Joruus, who stashed candy under his bed for his friends; and Arhul, who has seven little brothers back on Patriim and a long, long thread of patience close to snapping.
The rest of them, though, band together like units under fire.
There are the kids who postured and bet on who would wipe out first; they get stronger, colder, crueler. And there are the misfits, Bodhi’s circle: mischievous Gai and silent Nejaa and brilliant, awkward Isa.
They are good at flying but bad at war, at striking down Rebel fighters and spitting at the remains, at executing downed opponents. They had wanted to be pilots, not soldiers. The Stormtroopers sneer at them. They will do far worse than kick someone out, it seems, but they might still do that.
“You think it’s worth it?” Isa asks them over the mess table, lips angled away from the watching Stormtroopers.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet,” says Gai.
“No,” says Isa, which calms whatever’s starting to roar in Bodhi’s ears. She makes a conscious effort not to tap her fingers on the table. “Just, all of this, this is what we wanted?”
Gai throws out a sardonic smile. “It is our honor to serve the Empire.”
“Bantha-shit,” says Isa, and Bodhi jerks her head toward her, terror turning itself over like a stalled engine in her stomach. The handle of her knife presses against her forearm, itching. That’s not—they can’t—
“You can’t say that,” Gai hisses. “What, are you insane?”
“I just needed the protection,” Isa continues, uncaring. “Needed to get off that stinking rock. Now I’m thinking—maybe I’ve traded one cesspool for another.” She turns to Bodhi, her eyes bright and hard in her face. It reminds Bodhi of stars, of the kyber her home is made of. It reminds her of her mother sitting at the kitchen table, asking, and what if they do not help?
“You can’t have wanted this,” Isa says.
“I did,” says Bodhi, numbly. “I wanted—I wanted the ships.”
(It had been easier to accept Stormtroopers not helping than a life without a ship. Bodhi Rook is the pilot, after all, in any world.)
Isa fixes her with a glacial stare. “And is it worth it?”
She downs the rest of her tasteless rations and stalks off. Bodhi doesn’t follow; she knows the value of getting away. And she has gotten away without giving an answer, for now.
Even if it’s cowardly.
One month from the end of the program, the sergeant calls Isa into his office. An hour later, she comes out, pale, trembling like Bodhi on her bad days, her mouth pinched tight.
Bodhi takes her into the barracks and curls up with her behind the bunks, exactly where they had met. “What did he do?” she whispers. The knife in her sleeve is cold, hard, waiting. She learned the chinks in Stormtrooper armor at ten. She would make her hands steady, for this. “Just say the word, and I’ll—I’ll kill him.”
Isa shakes her head. “Don’t,” she says. “I just—I told him I wanted to leave. And he didn’t take no for an answer.” She tucks her head into Bodhi’s shoulder. “He said at least I was pretty.”
She shivers like she’s cold. Bodhi curls against her in the dark, crammed between hard walls and harder steel, helpless.
Isa runs in the middle of the night.
They hear three blaster shots, and the next day the sergeant makes an announcement. Defection by any member of the Empire is the highest treason, punishable by death.
They’re never allowed to see her body. (Even at the end, burning up to her very heart, Bodhi hopes.)
Still, when she hears it, Bodhi’s lip trembles, and she holds onto those grounding exercises with her kriffing fists. If she’d been there she’d have brought a ship. She’d have flown them both out, till there was no Empire, no war, no one and nothing but starlight.
Bodhi earns her cargo pilot license. She’d scraped together good enough grades to be accepted into the starfighter program, but she thinks of her mother in the Holy City, Isa lost to the marbled dirt of Terrabe, and declines with finality.
She runs missions with crates and boxes instead, dossiers full of freshly-stamped letters. She couriers packages between far-flung moons. She makes time to call her mother, about every other week, or when she can swallow the anxiety and nightmares long enough to make small talk for ten minutes.
(She never mentions Isa. Maybe her mother thinks she rejected her in the academy. Maybe she knows, and is giving Bodhi space for her grief.)
Other pilots invite her to races; a ruddy-faced kid named Qui waves a bookie’s notes at her and tells her there’s money to be made. “Good fun, too.” Their face quavers a little as they add, “If you wanna get your mind off—things.”
It tempts Bodhi; between her own expenses and the chunk she’s sending home, a few extra credits wouldn’t hurt. And forgetting—well, don't they all want that? But she remembers Isa discreetly flicking pieces off the cesa board when she thought no one was looking, Isa with three blaster shots in her proud back, and wincing, she shakes her head. Not worth the risk.
“Suit yourself,” Qui says. Three months later the Rebels shoot them down over Jelucan, their body lost in all the mountains’ skeletons.
Bodhi flies, but it doesn’t feel like flying. It feels like she’s still trapped behind the bunks, running from the boys in the neighbor’s yard, her fingers shaking around her knife. A small, pretty, dark-eyed girl, cutting her hair so she doesn’t draw attention.
When she has the energy for selfishness, it feels unfair. Bodhi Rook has always been the pilot. But there is nowhere to fly now that the Empire will not reach her.
She meets Galen Erso on Eadu, delivering parts for his planet-killer. In another world, he might have reminded her of her father. Or at least, who her father might have been: gentle and kind and utterly finished with war.
Galen would have shared food with her. He would have seen himself in her, a second chance to do something right. What, exactly, sits in the belly of your shuttle? he would have asked her. What sits in your heart? All those long hours in space, and you don’t know what you carry? What if it’s a weight you can’t bear?
In this world, when a stranger brings her food, Bodhi eyes it and politely declines. This man can’t remind her of her father; her father is just stories, and not many of them. Bodhi has always admired her mother more, sharp and real and crying over bills in the kitchen.
Galen looks into her eyes and finds (as in any world) a desire to do the right thing. A spark of hope. But this Imperial pilot has already shattered her dream of the Empire; it died with a young recruit shivering behind a bunk. She knows what she carries in her shuttle—a heavy, awful thing—and she can do it.
The value of getting away, and all.
So Galen smiles at wary, tight-fisted Bodhi. And instead of telling her about himself, he tells her about his Stardust.
Months of this. Bodhi goes back and forth from Eadu, picking up new stories of Stardust each time. Her fierce desire to climb their vaporator on Lah’mu, and how she had tumbled screaming from it. The way she listened to her father’s scientific discoveries, solemn as a convor. How she had clutched her mother’s crystal in tiny hands, not because it carried the Force, but because it carried a part of her mother, always.
How she would be Bodhi’s age now. How Galen would never know the stories of her scars, or her first kiss, or if she had ever learned to climb a vaporator.
“Maybe she hasn’t,” Galen says, with a kind of faux-casualness that makes Bodhi sigh internally. “Maybe she’s gone.”
“Wouldn’t you have felt it?” Bodhi asks. Her mother says that, sometimes: You are my daughter. I would feel you, if you left this world.
“Even if I did, she would be there. And I would still be right here.”
“We all are,” says Bodhi tightly. The knife in her sleeve cannot break the Empire’s chain. If she runs, she dies.
Galen cocks a brow, as calm as though he’s suggesting teatime. “Are we?” he retorts. “You have a ship.”
He says, “You can still do the right thing.”
This is the truth; in any world, Bodhi Rook is the pilot. She takes the message out of hope and regret to Saw Gerrera, and then to the Rebellion.
But in this world, she does not do it for Galen Erso. The sheen of hero never fully descends on him; to her he will always be a fervent, exhausted, slightly patronizing man desperate to make his gambit mean something.
No, in this world, Bodhi goes back to her ship and thinks about Isa, face angled carefully in the mess so that only three others can catch her. (Bodhi never found out what happened to Gai or Nejaa, and she never will.)
Is it worth it? Isa had asked.
Bodhi knows the value of getting away. If she does this, she will never get away again. She will run and run and the Empire will find her at the end of its chain, all of the power that dissolved planets turned toward her.
Is it worth it?
Bodhi’s hands white-knuckle the controls. She will make her hands steady, for this.
(In this world, Bodhi does not fly to Saw for Galen Erso. She flies for Isa, and for Stardust, and for herself—these small, pretty girls whose hearts the Empire dug out.)
There’s no time to do it smart, so Bodhi goes for speed. She rockets toward Jedha with a recklessness that leaves the alarms ringing and the cockpit smelling of scorched thruster pads. Then she disconnects every system, every nerve, every thin and pulsing vein that once bound her to the body of the Empire.
A small dot blinks off a radar screen. Bodhi Rook, Imperial cargo pilot, dies a silent death in the vacuum of space.
It will buy her a day or two. Maybe.
Bodhi Rook, defector, flicks on the autopilot and lurches back into the ‘fresher to have a panic attack.
When she lands on her home planet (familiar, strange, scarred in new places), she has a message in her boot and an old knife up her sleeve. Partisans still surround her outside the city. This story does not change as much as we wish it did.
Bodhi sizes up the soldiers, as masked as Stormtroopers, and surrenders.
“I have a message!” she tries, exactly once. Maybe in another life she would have kept pleading; Galen Erso had said she could trust Saw. But Bodhi hardly trusts Galen, so when that doesn’t work, she goes quiet, looking for exits, trying not to choke on the heart in her throat.
“This is the pilot?” one of the soldiers grunts. He twists her arm, snarling. “Look how weak. Trembling.”
“Not even grown,” another says. “A boy still.”
Bodhi squeezes her eyes shut behind the canvas of the bag and tries not to laugh. Maybe she is still, a little bit. She remembers being eleven years old: garden shears making a mess of her hair, sunshine on the streets of Jedha, a massive man counting out credits under a fruit stand. Didn’t need to hide it from me. She’d gotten lucky then.
She supposes this counts for luck now: the soldiers find the message, but not the knife. They dump her like an unwanted sack in the center of Saw’s underground base, and soon, the man himself peers down at her.
“Lies,” he rasps. “Deception!”
“Galen Erso sent me. You have his message—”
Saw turns away. “Bor Gullet!” he cries.
Galen had said she could trust Saw, but Saw trusts no one. For a moment hot betrayal courses through her; wild despair. She imagines the information on this drive decaying a room away from the wasting body of Saw Gerrera. She imagines Galen’s wan, disappointed face, wasting too, like bone sucked dry under the facility lights.
When Bor Gullet emerges, all of that vanishes. Everything does. Even breath. Perhaps Isa had shivered, back then, because of this: feeling cauterized by the threat of unimaginable violence.
This story does not change as much as we wish it did.
But somewhere in the midst of it, Bodhi’s knife is in her hand. She twists it left, exposed and blind, and drives it deep into Bor Gullet’s flesh. The thing screams. Memories flash like starbursts behind Bodhi’s eyes—her mother making soup, the routes through Jedha’s alleys, Isa laughing and laughing—and though Bor Gullet has dragged those memories out, they belong to Bodhi. They give her strength. They offer her faith. She remembers.
Her knife comes down again, and she slices through the tentacles binding her wrists. Again and again. Blood slicks the handle of her old blade, but someone is holding her hands steady, and her blows strike true. (Bodhi will never know the Force like Chirrut or Baze or Jyn. But she knows how to trust, and there are some people she would trust blind, bound, beyond death.
Isa always had better aim.)
Eventually, the Partisans restrain her. They take her knife and her message and her mind and throw her in the hold with what’s left. Her hands start shaking again, and she fumbles for something—a hope, a memory, a candle in the dark.
Isa. Stardust. Wasn't there someone she was doing this for?
Bodhi sits in the cell, trembling, and wishes dimly for her mother.
“You are the pilot?” asks the Rebel spy.
Bodhi stumbles, and she knows it better than her own name. “Yes,” she rasps. “I—I am the pilot.”
(She knows, maybe, that there is more: she was her mother’s daughter and Isa’s friend and a step-sweeper on the streets of Jedha. But every world will remember Bodhi Rook as the pilot. Maybe it’s enough.)
Jedha cracks beneath them, and the spy drags her from her cell. Her vision has not stopped blurring, and her thoughts do not quite feel like her own, but she goes; Bodhi still knows the value of getting away. The blind monk and his soldier come with them. For a moment, it feels like the training academy again: sick and terrifying and surrounded by a circle of misfits.
They burst into the main room, and Bodhi recognizes Stardust instantly. Jyn. Even sunk to her knees in grief, she outshines all the stories: brighter than a blaster shot in the dark, brighter than starlight. She stares at the message drive with stricken eyes.
Bodhi breathes a tiny sigh of relief: she has done it. This one thing. This, at least.
“We have to go!” the spy is roaring—or maybe Galen Erso’s Death Star is roaring, a crueler message reaching across the stars. “Jyn, come on!”
He pulls her to her feet. Saw, too, makes it a few steps with them, then stops.
His eyes soften the way Galen’s had once, and his hand tips toward Jyn. Jyn catches it—Bodhi does, too—but for as much anger has coiled up at the base of her spine, Jyn doesn’t strike. Perhaps there are some chinks she cannot exploit; perhaps this, now, is some measure of love.
Instead, Jyn reaches like a child toward him. “Come with us!” she says.
“You were my best,” Saw says, as tenderly as he can. Then: “I will run no longer.”
He pleads with them to save the Rebellion, save the dream, and they leave him in his crumbling base. Bodhi does not grieve for him. She has enough in her to snag her knife as they scramble out, and that is the only thing she had wanted to save from this place.
They can save nothing else, not of Saw’s camp or Jedha. They make it to one of Saw’s shuttles, and Bodhi’s vision zooms in on a pinprick of dark sky past a wave of earth. She cannot look back at Maru’s fruit stand, gone up in a torrent of golden sand. She cannot think about the kitchen or the steps or the neighbor’s yard. Once she had kissed a boy behind a fence, and a temple guardian had smacked her hand with a stick; she cannot think about them. There isn’t time.
They hurtle past the edge of immolation like a comet set for Eadu, but Bodhi doesn’t feel it, not really. Not until the Rebel spy has leaned over her and gently eased the thrusters back down. Not until the droid has complained about her getting blood all over the console. Not until the monk has let out a feather-light breath and murmured, The whole city?
All of it, the soldier says.
(In the heart of the Empire, a small dot blinks off a radar screen.)
Bodhi clenches her jaw when she hears it. A sense of grief big enough to hold all of it doesn’t exist—but at least she’d been there, in the end. The story didn’t change, but she was there.
She never will be again.
(Though, her mother was right. Bodhi did feel it, when she left this world.
For a moment, in the terror, there was a hand on her shoulder and a memory of a warm kitchen. The smell of speeder oil and vegetable stalks. A laugh over a long, fragile line.
And then nothing.)
It takes two days to get to Eadu, and Bodhi barely remembers them. She sleeps, dreams, wakes screaming. She learns her team’s names—Chirrut and Baze and K-2SO and Cassian Andor—all of whom remind her graciously when she forgets.
Bodhi forgets some of Isa’s breathing exercises, too, but there is no one living to remind her. When Chirrut finds her hyperventilating in her quarters, he talks of Jedha instead. “The temples,” he says. “They were beautiful.”
“They were dusty,” Bodhi chokes. “Even going in, um, you would—you would cough up a lung.”
“So you went in?” Chirrut says gleefully. “Pity, I never saw you visit.”
“I didn’t. I was working.”
Bodhi tells Chirrut of Maru, then, and of her mother. Chirrut listens and offers her tales of bakers with the best cinnamon buns, of holy festivals that still drew crowds on occupied streets, of the time Baze “accidentally” knocked the butt of his blaster into a Stormtrooper’s shoulder to distract him from a thief.
Bodhi’s breathing softens. She thinks suddenly of Galen on Eadu, telling her story after story of a girl he no longer knew, who he had had to leave behind. She had always felt sorry for him, but now a strand of understanding settles in her chest. This is how they remember. This is how they survive.
Another night, Jyn finds Bodhi in the cockpit. She tilts her head when she sees her, looking vaguely surprised and then not at all. Perhaps she had been looking for Cassian.
She slides into the co-captain’s seat and brings her hand up to her kyber crystal. Bodhi’s hand settles on the hilt of her knife. Jyn did not share a home in Jedha, but she shares this.
If Bodhi had ever met Lyra Erso, would she have seen the woman in Jyn? Maybe. In another life Bodhi might have seen the ghost of Galen, the echoes of a little girl who listened to her father but tumbled off of vaporators.
In this one Bodhi looks at her, hard and sullen and utterly resolute in the face of a thousand dim stars, and only sees Jyn. Jyn, herself, brighter than ghosts.
They crashland on Eadu, and Cassian, then Jyn, work their way up through the mud to reach Galen Erso. Bodhi does not follow. She feels wrung-out and half-dead, and besides, her part has always been to deliver the message. To trust the others to take it the rest of the way.
When Jyn and Cassian return without Galen, crackling with fury at each other, Bodhi works out the story: they did reach Galen. Cassian refused to kill him, but the Rebel fleet did not. Jyn’s father died in fire with his head on Jyn’s lap.
Bodhi feels a tiny spasm of sadness for the man, all the grief she can spare after Jedha. She had not come here for Galen Erso—in this life, he would always be a fervent, exhausted, slightly patronizing man. But he had helped her choose what was right, and he had been Jyn’s father.
Bodhi finds Jyn, after, curled up against a shuddering baseboard with a face like ice. She frowns when Bodhi settles down next to her, but does not move away. Her hands tug roughly at her necklace.
“He was down there,” she says.
“I know,” says Bodhi. She had been four streets over from her mother, when Jedha crumbled.
Jyn scrubs at her cheeks, and Bodhi sees the soldier’s hardness come out. “My father had a plan—he paid for it with his life. It would stop this. But the Alliance won’t listen.”
Bodhi hums, does not argue. Jyn is strong and bold and terrifying, a girl carved out of kyber, but she is still a girl. Small, pretty, dark-eyed. Out of everyone on this ship, Bodhi understands what that means.
Instead, she presses her shoulder into Jyn’s and says, “You could find others.”
“Who?” Jyn snorts.
“Chirrut, Baze. K-2, I think. And Cassian.” Jyn does not argue; Bodhi thinks of knowing someone so well you would carry them with you forever, even if you never forgave them. “And—and me. I would follow you, Jyn.”
Jyn slants her a look, and Bodhi rubs the leather of her boot, remembering the feeling of the drive there. She has lost faces, time; she can’t quite recall the color of Isa’s eyes. But she has not forgotten why she came. “Galen, um. He told me about you. You're Stardust.” Jyn sucks in a breath, her hand falling from her necklace. She’s trembling, too.
Bodhi swallows and tries to find the right words: You gave me strength. You offered me faith. You made me remember. I did it for you, and I would follow you, and it would be worth it.
Jyn looks at her with a face full of careful hope, in the dark of the shuttle. “He told me I could still do right,” says Bodhi, “if I listened to what was in my heart.”
The Council does not listen.
“What chance do we have? The question is what choice." Jyn speaks like fists pounded on the table, like a supernova in the dark room. She speaks the truth, though the dozen men and women scoff to hear it. “Run, hide, plead for mercy, scatter your forces—you give way to an enemy this evil, with this much power, and you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of submission. The time to fight is now!”
(Jyn was Saw’s best, and Bodhi can hear the ghost of him shouting through her: Save the Rebellion! Save the dream!)
But maybe they cannot. For all of Jyn’s fire, the Council’s vision of rebellion has turned to ash. They mill and bicker, fear for their families, wonder about treaties. There is no treating with evil, but they cannot admit that. The Empire has dug their hearts out.
Jyn’s eyes find hers, stubborn and shining, and Bodhi’s heart thunders in her chest. Jyn, it says. Jyn.
Bodhi listens. When Jyn goes, Bodhi follows.
The Council does not listen, but the rebels do.
Cassian brings a squadron of men who’d heard Jyn’s speech and felt it in their bones—some who ache for redemption, some who hunger for justice. Bodhi sees a soldier there with the symbol of Jedha around his neck, draped in mourning colors.
Chirrut and Baze join, too, Baze glowering whenever someone jostles his partner. Cassian whispers something to Jyn and climbs aboard. K-2 has to hunch over double to make space, but he won’t leave Cassian behind.
And Bodhi takes her place in the cockpit. She still hates being a soldier—but in any world, she is the pilot.
When Jyn joins her there, she shoots Bodhi a crooked smile before kneeling to sort out her equipment. It makes Bodhi’s chest swoop with more than the terror of insubordination and looming death, and she quickly looks away. Cassian. And anyway, there isn’t time. “Um,” she says.
“Ready?” Jyn asks, searching.
“Yes—just” —Bodhi squeezes her eyes shut— “I’ll be on the ground, right? Cassian is going with you, and, and K-2.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Then I want you to have—this,” Bodhi says. She lets her knife slip out of her sleeve and into her hand, and offers it hilt-first to Jyn.
Jyn pops to her feet and crosses the cockpit in two quick steps. Her eyes are already assessing the blade, mouth parted a little in confusion. “You’re giving that to me? I thought—” She touches the kyber crystal on her neck, edges worn smooth from years of holding on.
“Yes,” Bodhi says, faintly embarrassed. But she doesn’t retract her offer. There is no getting away from this now, and Jyn has fought for her, raging at the Council like the retribution of Jedha. Jyn is their strength and their hope, and this last time, for as long as she can, Bodhi is putting all of hers in Jyn.
Jyn takes the blade. And for a moment, even with a war to fight and a dozen men at their backs, their eyes hold each other, dark and sad and steady.
“What’s your call sign, pilot?”
“Uh—Rogue,” Bodhi blurts. “Rogue One.”
This story does not change as much as we wish it did. Scarif still explodes in a rush of bombs and blaster fire, and Jyn and Cassian and K-2 still start their desperate race toward Citadel Tower. Men shout, shoot, fall. Sand and blood fly into Bodhi’s eyes, and she coughs, moving forward anyway.
(There are some people she would trust blind, bound, beyond death. Jyn will do it, and she will carry all of them with her.)
The battlefield shifts with the towering AT-ATs, then with the crack of Rebel air support. They’ve come a little late but the ground forces still shine brighter for it; the Empire has not dug their hearts out. The Rebellion fights on.
The Empire does not yield easily, though, and the Shield Gate cages them in. Chirrut dies flipping the master switch, two dozen shots whizzing past. Baze takes out the Stormtrooper who killed him and goes in a blast of fire, like his holy city, like the other half of his heart. Perhaps their faith protected them until it could no longer. Perhaps, like Bodhi, they put all their faith in whoever came next.
Bodhi runs the wire to the ship. Her hands tremble and she cannot make them steady, not even for this—but then, she was never broken. She doesn’t need steady hands to do something brave, something right.
She speaks quickly and desperately to the admiral above—“You have to take down the Shield Gate. It’s the only way they’re gonna get them through!”—and for a moment feels such ecstatic relief that she slumps. She has piloted the ship, delivered the message, given her answer. Is that enough? Has she done enough?
She thinks of her mother, crying over bills in the kitchen, and Isa, tearing away from the Stormtroopers in the dark; and, at the top of the tower, Jyn Erso, sending out the plans like a starburst to the rest of the galaxy. In this world, Bodhi Rook did not fly for Galen.
This is for all of you.
When the grenade clatters against the shuttle floor, Bodhi dives out of the ship.
Bodhi finds a downed speeder somewhere in the thick of bodies and burning aircraft. It jerks and shudders like a dying thing, but it flies. Maybe it’s Bodhi’s gift—she is the pilot, after all—or maybe it’s someone’s hand on the thruster, guiding her this last part of the way.
And what if they do not help? her mother had asked. And what if you do not have a ship?
I will always have a ship, Bodhi had said. At that time, she had probably thought too: I will always have you.
She can’t get enough altitude to ascend the tower, not knowing that Jyn has already ended the fight there. Cassian Andor lay broken at the bottom of the data vault, and Krennic cornered her on the wrong end of a blaster, but Jyn had Bodhi’s knife in her sleeve and a whole lifetime of fighting to survive. She had launched herself at him and buried that blade in his throat. He hadn’t even worn armor.
Krennic’s shot swung wide and hit her shoulder, where Lyra Erso had once marked him, that fateful day on Lah’mu. He had brought the war to her, and she had promised him he would lose. And he did.
Bodhi’s engines hold out long enough to make it to the beach, where Jyn has stumbled out. Her shoulder drips with blood, and her face is filled with dust and grief, but she has survived. Bodhi lets the thrusters die, scrambles out to meet her.
“Did it—” she asks her, heart in her throat. Jyn nods.
“I saw it. They have it.”
(On a Rebel ship above them, small dots blink on a screen. Transmission received. It is a fragile, wild, bloody hope. It is everything.)
Bodhi lets Jyn sling an arm around her, and they stumble to the edge of the sea. Beyond them, on the water, a small sun boils. They were never going to get away from this.
But they had known that when they came, and when they collapse in the sand, it feels like the first moment of peace Bodhi’s had in years. Jyn’s expression goes slack. Maybe she feels it, too: the thing they’ve fought for, at the end of it all.
Jyn doesn’t ask about the others, and Bodhi doesn’t ask about Cassian. They don’t have the time. But Jyn does slide her hand into Bodhi’s, their fingers lacing together, both of them trembling. It feels good at least to tremble together.
“Your father would have been proud of you, Jyn,” Bodhi offers. It is the truth, and Jyn gives her a terribly proud, exhausted smile for it. “And I think—I think it will be worth it.”
Jyn nods and squeezes her hand, then throws her arms around her. Bodhi breathes her in. The story does not change as much as we wish it did, and they do not have time.
But there is this: Jyn’s kyber crystal presses into Bodhi’s heart. Bodhi’s knife, safe in Jyn’s sleeve, rests against her spine. And for a moment it feels so impossibly gentle that no war can reach them at all—like sunlight on the streets of Jedha, like Jyn’s father’s star bathing them in gold, like a message, in the last seconds, received.