The Five Points space station was designed like a fancy top, the kind Jyn had had when she lived on Coruscant. The wide center revolved around the axis like a gyroscope, and ships docked along the center pillar. After checking in with the droid at the entrance desk, Jyn was given a hundred credits—the worth of her broken ship in scrap metal, minus docking fees.

A giant banner emblazoned with the Imperial logo hung over the main entrance hall. Smaller posters called for volunteers to join the Imperial military, with information on how to reach the recruiter on the station. Jyn stared at the image of a proud stormtrooper bringing peace to the galaxy. She tried to feel…anything. But when she thought of the Empire—when she thought of the rebellion—she just felt numb. Their battle on Skuhl hadn’t involved Akshaya and Hadder…and yet it had killed them.

Jyn wanted to hate the Empire. She could say all the words Saw had taught her, emulate all the old hates, but it was fake. She didn’t hate the Empire. All she felt was nothing. The Empire hadn’t killed Akshaya and Hadder. The Empire plus the rebels had. The damn rebels. If Xosad and his group hadn’t shown up when they had, the Empire never would have knocked on Akshaya’s door. And did it even matter whether the Empire or the rebels had fired the shot that blew up the Ponta One? In the end, Akshaya and Hadder were still dead.

And further back—Tamsye Prime. Would the Empire have destroyed the factories and towns had Saw not gone? Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Senjax had said that the Empire was done with production there, but it attacked because she and Saw had been there, because they were spying on the Empire. It was just as Akshaya had always said. The people of Tamsye Prime had been ants, ants the giants would have ignored. But Saw had made the giant stomp.

Jyn remembered one of the science experiments her mother had given her when she was teaching Jyn on Lah’mu. Lyra had held a bowl of acid and directed Jyn to pour in a chemical base; then they had watched as it fizzed and bubbled. The Empire was the acid; the rebels were the base. Separately, they were fine. When they met, they bubbled over into chaos and destruction and death.

Extremists were the problem. The rebels and the Empire, the people who couldn’t exist without drawing lines and daring others to cross them. Jyn very consciously turned her eyes away from the Imperial banner. She was done with giants. She could be an ant.

She ran over her options as she was carried closer and closer to the top of the space station by the lift just past the entrance desk. A hundred credits. The clothes on her back and a small pack of supplies. At least on the station, she wouldn’t need to worry about environmental hazards or dangerous animals…but beyond that, she couldn’t really consider anything or anyone safe.

She’d heard Saw talk about Five Points before. It was a last-resort sort of place, a den of infamy where the Empire didn’t rule; the gambling lords did. Bounty hunters often met there to pick up new jobs. The black market thrived.

Jyn tucked her hundred credits in a hidden pocket of her pants. They would not last long. She had to find food and a ship out of there. It didn’t matter where.

The lift doors opened, and Jyn stepped into the station’s main hub. Five Points was nothing compared with the city-planet of Coruscant, but it was a hundred times larger than the town on Skuhl had been. With a finite amount of space, the inhabitants of the station occupied every area. Living cubes were built all along the walls, so high that if she stood on top of them, Jyn’s fingers could have brushed the ceiling. Despite that, many of the solar lights embedded in the metal ceilings were burned out—or perhaps just broken—casting the entire city into a perpetual twilight.

Someone bumped Jyn’s shoulder, hard, and she scooted out of the main line of foot traffic. She leaned her back against the wall of a nearby shop, her eyes alert, watching the various types of people walking by.

“So I knew Crawfin was on my tail, yeah?” someone said in a deep voice. A large man with broad hands was talking animatedly to a Twi’lek. The Twi’lek kept her eyes on the ground, not on the man who was clearly trying to impress her. “So what did I do? What’d I do? I took my ship straight into Smuggler’s Run. Knew he couldn’t catch me there. Hid out, caught a hyperspace route, and here I am.” The young man puffed out his chest.

“Uh-huh,” the Twi’lek said, glancing at the comlink strapped to her wrist.

The couple continued down the street, but Jyn bit her lip, thinking. Smuggler’s Run…She could use some of her credits to comm Saw. He owed her.

She snorted at her own stupidity. She could no more contact Saw than she could her father. Both men had proven exactly where their loyalties lay. Her father cared more about his science and the Empire than about her. And Saw cared more about himself.

Jyn scanned the crowd again, though, half wondering if Berk, the man Saw had hired to spy on her, was out there. Her hand went to her hidden pocket, the hundred credits. If Saw knew…

He left me to die, she told herself.

She could still smell Tamsye Prime, burning.

No Saw. This was just Jyn being weak. Her home on Skuhl had been destroyed by the Empire much like her home on Lah’mu had; stormtroopers had invaded like parasitic space ants, eating away at another place she had felt safe. Saw had saved her once. But she would never ask for his salvation again.

She pushed off the wall, heading aimlessly down the street, absorbing Five Points. She chanted in her head with every step the things she needed: food, shelter, a ship off this place. Food. Shelter. Ship.

Saw may not have been the answer to her problems, but at least his training would come in handy. At the heart of every punch and each cold night, he had been teaching her how to survive in this galaxy. Food. Shelter. Ship. Survive.

She needed a job. Anything would do. Well—not anything. Not yet anyway. But definitely something. She could forge Imperial freight route passes—that could work. There had to be a demand for those, considering the new blockades and checkpoints.

She felt the brush of a touch on her hip, near her pocket, where her only credits were. Instinct took over; she snatched the slimy wrist of a Caldanian and twisted it away from her. The Caldanian cried out in pain, a gurgling, low sound, and Jyn tightened her grip.

“Let go of my man,” a Gigoran said. His translator was old and broken, the words barely understandable through the crackle in the speakers, further drowned out by the respirator he wore over his mouth.

What an odd pair, Jyn thought, evaluating them. The Gigoran’s long, fine white fur was matted and dirty but still stuck to the Caldanian’s dark-brown, slimy skin. Tendrils of the Gigoran’s fur clumped around the Caldanian’s elbows and in the hollow spaces that encircled his long neck.

The crowd drifted apart, leaving Jyn, the Caldanian, and the Gigoran in a pocket of space between a wall and a dead-end alley. Jyn could potentially burst past the two and into the crowd, but she was fairly certain that would do her no good. Not there. She couldn’t see them, but there were surely others watching like carrion birds, waiting to see whom they could pick off next.

Jyn cracked her knuckles as the Gigoran and Caldanian grew closer. Fine. She was going to have to rely on Saw’s other lessons on survival.

The Caldanian struck first, which Jyn had been fearing. Caldanians didn’t have bones, just a flexible cartilage that they could change the rigidity of. The surface of their skin was also covered in a tacky mucus that could potentially slow her down. She needed to strike hard and fast, and she couldn’t waste time getting too close.

Jyn pressed her fingertips together against her thumb, forming a hard point with her fingers, reared back with all her strength, and jabbed her hand straight into the Caldanian’s wide left eye. He screamed in pain, dropping back. Jyn’s fingers were coated with sticky mucus, but the Caldanian was too distracted and in pain to fight. The Gigoran shouted as he raced toward her, but Jyn dropped to the ground, kicking out to trip the large furry creature while reaching for her knife in the other boot. When she jumped up, the Gigoran had already spun around to face her, and the Caldanian was standing again, his eye turning blue around the rim.

Jyn flashed her knife blade, shifting it from one hand to the other, hoping it would be enough to scare off her two attackers.

It wasn’t.

They rushed her simultaneously—clearly they’d fought together before—and Jyn slashed wide. She cut the Gigoran’s shirt and fur, but she didn’t see any dark blood splatter across his long white hairs. The Gigoran’s beady eyes narrowed, but Jyn didn’t have time to focus on him; the Caldanian had wrapped a slimy arm around her throat and started squeezing.

The Gigoran laughed at Jyn and pulled out a small blaster.

“We were just going to take your credits,” the Caldanian snarled in Jyn’s ear. “But you poked me in the eye. That was rude. Wasn’t it rude, Bunt?”

“Rude,” the Gigoran agreed.

Jyn didn’t bother replying. She shifted, and thinking that she was trying to escape, the Caldanian tightened his grip around her neck.

Jyn stabbed him in the arm.

The Caldanian let go, howling. The Gigoran, distracted by his friend’s injury, didn’t shift the blaster in time as Jyn lunged for him. Blaster fire scarred the resident cube behind Jyn as she slammed into the Gigoran. She wrapped her left hand in his long white fur, yanking hard enough to jerk his head around. She balled her other hand into a fist and slammed it into the Gigoran’s face, aiming for his beady eye. She felt her knuckles crunch against the Gigoran’s hard skull, but she punched him again, hoping to daze him. She grabbed his wrist, pressing hard and then slamming it against the pavement until the Gigoran’s fist opened and the blaster fell.

Jyn let go of the Gigoran and grabbed for the blaster. As soon as her hands were off him, the Gigoran kicked away, scooting down the alley. He made a run for the crowd, the Caldanian on his heels.

Jyn cursed under her breath. She had liked that knife, and it was still sticking out of the arm of that slimy Caldanian.

At least, she thought, I got a blaster out of the trade.