The Republic is dying, and nobody on Coruscant has noticed yet.
From orbit, the capital never sleeps. Its night side burns gold from pole to pole, a trillion lives laid over one another like the layers of an ancient reef. Warships hang above it in slow, silent rows, the white wedges of the Republic fleet, home between battles. Below them, the atmosphere glitters with traffic.
Down.
Past the skylanes, where speeders stream in rivers of light between towers a kilometre tall. Past the great dome of the Senate, lit like a crown. Past five spires rising from a temple older than the city around it, where a single light burns at the tip, as it has for a thousand years.
Down.
The towers crowd closer. The light thins. Level five hundred. Level eight hundred. Advertising holos flicker for products no one down here can afford. The air thickens with engine heat and old rain.
Down, where the sun has not reached in living memory.
Level twelve hundred. Thirteen hundred. The walkways narrow to rusted catwalks strung across a ventilation shaft so deep that the city above is only a rumour of light. Laundry hangs between them. Something drips.
And at the bottom of the shaft, wedged between a dead power station and a noodle stall, a cantina sign buzzes amber against the dark: THE LOW LANTERN.
Beside its door, a chalkboard.
THE LOW LANTERN · LEVEL 1331 TONIGHT: OPEN STAGE Drinks half-price if you laugh. Full price if you don't. Sign-up at the bar. Five minutes. Six if they like you. No blasters on the tables. No Hutts on the stage. (Again.) — G. Throop, Prop.
(chalked underneath, different hand:) NAMMAS — 3RD
Behind the door, a room full of people, not laughing.
Yet.
I. Table by Table
Namren Nammas had the room at table four, lost it at table seven, and was halfway to getting it back before he realised the dockworker in the grey vest was only pretending to be angry.
That changed everything.
The dockworker had half-risen from his stool, fists on the table, jaw pushed out like the prow of an ore hauler. Big man. Cargo-lifter shoulders. Coolant stains up to the elbow. The whole Low Lantern had gone still around him the way a room does when it's deciding whether to watch a fight. But his friend beside him was grinning into his mug, and the dockworker's left boot was tapping, and nobody who's truly about to hit a comic taps his boot. He wanted to be in it. He wanted to be part of the show.
So Namren gave him the show.
"Sir. Sir." He put a hand up, palm out, the way a traffic droid stops a speeder. "Sit down. You're blocking the fire exit. Which is you. You're the fire exit. If this place burns, we're all climbing over you."
The dock crew howled. The big man sat, pleased, pointing at Namren like they'd rehearsed it. His friends pounded his back. Table seven was his again, and table seven had brought table six along for the ride.
Good. Next.
The Low Lantern was built into the bottom of a ventilation column by people who'd given up on sunlight generations back. Pipes sweated overhead. The bar was an old cargo-lift door laid flat on crates, and the glowpanels were set to amber because amber hid the stains. Above the scrap-plate stage hung one light that buzzed like an insect whenever anybody laughed too hard. Namren loved that light. When it buzzed, he was winning.
He worked the room the way his father walked pilgrims up the old city: in sections, and never all at once.
The dock crew along the right wall wanted to be insulted. That was easy. They'd spent a shift getting shouted at by foremen, and they'd take abuse from a big-shouldered kid with a Chandrilan accent as long as it was funny abuse. It turned the day's humiliation into a game they were winning.
It helped that he had the face for it. Heavy brows, dark eyes set deep, a jaw that looked like it was deciding your sentence. At rest, Namren's face read as judgment. People had been assuming he was angry with them since he was nine. Somewhere around fifteen he'd realised that if a face like that suddenly cracked, broke into a grin, a room would laugh out of pure relief. He'd been cracking it on purpose ever since.
The spice-runners at the corner booth wanted to be left out of it. Four of them, a Rodian and three humans, hunched over something on the table that stopped existing whenever anyone looked at it. You didn't point at the spice-runners. You didn't even look straight at them. You made one small joke near them, about customs inspectors, and let them decide whether it was about them. The Rodian's snout twitched. That was a laugh, for a Rodian doing business. Namren banked it and moved on.
It was all tells. Where a hand went on a cup. Whose eyes went to a friend before they laughed, checking it was allowed. Who laughed early to show they'd got it and who laughed late because they hadn't. A room was a machine, and like any machine it told you what was wrong with it if you listened.
He found the ache in the room and pressed on it, gently.
"My father," he said, and let it hang. A few groans. Everybody had a father. "My father's a pilgrim guide. From Jedha. You know Jedha? Little moon, lots of sand, even more religion. My father's job, back home, was walking believers up to the holy temple. And when we moved here, he just... kept doing it. He walks pilgrims up to the Jedi Temple. Every day. From down here." He pointed at the dripping ceiling. "Twelve hundred levels. Twelve hundred. He takes the stairs."
The room shifted. They were with him. He could feel it, like the moment a stuck repulsor finally catches.
"I said, 'Father, there's a lift.' He said, 'The Force is not a lift.'" He paused, beat, beat. "I said, 'Then why do the Jedi have a private one?'"
The light above him buzzed.
Oreth Nammas would have hated that joke. Namren knew it the way he knew his own left hand. That was partly why it worked.
He rode the wave through two more minutes, air-taxi drivers and Jedhan food ("seasoned with sand whether you asked or not"), and watched the room fill in, table by table, like lights coming on across a dark city.
All except one table. The one he wanted most.
Three clones sat near the bar in fatigues, helmets off and stacked on a spare stool. Off-shift. They had the same face, which was a joke he'd never make, because every comic on Coruscant had tried it and every clone had heard it a thousand times. They'd been smiling. They hadn't been laughing. Every time the room broke, the three of them looked at one another first — a little flick of the eyes, a silent roll call — and by the time they'd decided, the laugh was over.
Namren knew that look. He'd been the new kid in the lower levels once: too Core for the Jedhan expats, too Rim for everybody else. He knew what it was to wait for permission.
He turned to face them straight on.
"Don't worry," he said. "You're allowed to laugh. I checked with your sergeant." He leaned in, confidential. "He said it's fine as long as you all do it at the same time."
For one terrible second, nothing.
Then the clone in the middle, a man with a scar through his eyebrow, snorted. The one on the left broke. The one on the right put his head down on the table, and all three of them were laughing at once, perfectly in unison, which made the rest of the room laugh at them, which made the clones laugh harder, and the light over the stage buzzed like it was about to catch fire.
Namren stood in the middle of it and breathed it in.
That one. That one's mine.
He'd won bigger tables. He'd never won one he was prouder of.
II. The One in the Back
He'd noticed her the whole set.
That was the trouble with reading a room. You couldn't pick which pages you read.
She sat at the back table, the one under the broken glowpanel, where the amber gave up and the shadows took over. Small. Hooded, a traveller's cloak in some colour that had probably been brown once. Under the hood he caught the curve of a Togruta's montrals, white-striped, and a face that was young, younger than his, maybe.
It wasn't that she was pretty, though he supposed she was. It was the set of her face. Purposeful. The look of someone who had somewhere to be and something to do when she got there, and had already decided nothing in this room was going to stop her. Nobody looked like that in the Low Lantern. People came down here to stop deciding things.
But there was something under it, too. He'd seen it when the clones laughed. Her eyes had gone to their table, just once, and stayed a moment too long. Not the look of a stranger. The look of someone who had known faces like those, a lot of them, and wasn't sure she was allowed to anymore. Then it was gone, folded away somewhere. Her right hand kept drifting to her hip, to a belt where nothing hung, and stopping there, like a habit she hadn't finished breaking.
Whatever she'd lost, she'd lost it recently. And she was carrying it by herself.
Her drink sat in front of her, full. He'd checked it three times. It hadn't moved.
She wasn't watching the stage.
She was watching the door.
Not nervously. That was what got him. Nervous people fidgeted and laughed too loud. She sat perfectly still, loose in the shoulders, with the calm of someone who had already counted every exit and knew how long it would take to reach each one. Every time the door hissed open, her eyes went to it and stayed there until whoever came in had sat down and become furniture.
Fine, he thought. A challenge.
He threw a line toward her table, a throwaway about drinks that nobody touches. Nothing. He tried a look, the easy grin that always won him the back tables. Her eyes went past him to the door, as if he were a support pillar.
He should have been insulted. He was fascinated.
He wanted, suddenly and stupidly, to make her laugh. Not the room. Her.
He had a bit he saved, the one honed down to the bone. Being Jedhan on Coruscant: the Core kids who called him sand-boy, the Jedhan aunties who called him Chandrilan like it was a disease. A turn in the middle nobody saw coming. A closer he'd rewritten eleven times.
He pitched it to the back table.
He was doing it great. The dock crew were wheezing. The spice-runners had forgotten themselves enough to laugh out loud. He built it, turned it, felt the room lean toward the closer like a crowd leaning toward a finish line —
And in the middle of it she stood up.
Not bored. Quick. One smooth motion, like a coil released. Something had happened at the door: a figure in the gap, a word, a glance he couldn't see from the stage. She left her drink, left a coin beside it, and was across the room and gone before the door had finished sliding shut behind whoever had come in, or hadn't.
Nobody else noticed. That was the strangest part. A whole room, and nobody saw her leave except him.
He lost his place for half a beat. Only half. The closer was right there on his tongue, and he felt it slip.
"And that," he said, pointing at the empty table, "is a five-star review. She's going to tell all her friends. From very, very far away."
It got a laugh. Not the laugh the closer would've got, but the room didn't know that. He landed the closer anyway, and it was fine, it was good, and the light buzzed, and they clapped him off.
Throop was already calling the next name. Namren stepped down off the platform into the smell of spilled ale and hot circuitry and felt like he'd dropped something.
He sat at the end of the bar with the free drink comics got, a cup of something blue that tasted like a coolant leak, and he couldn't leave it alone.
She hadn't been bored. Bored he could have fixed.
She'd been somewhere else. Somewhere the whole Low Lantern couldn't reach, the jokes and the dock crew and the buzzing light included. He'd stood up there with everything he had, and she'd been listening for something behind it, something bigger and farther off, and when it came, she'd gone to it without a backward look.
He didn't know why that bothered him so much. He decided it was professional pride.
He looked at her drink, still sitting there, still full.
It was professional pride.
Mostly.
III. Paid in Noodles
By close, the dock crew had gone home, the spice-runners had evaporated, and the clones had put their helmets back on and become the Republic again. They nodded to Namren on the way out, all three at once.
Gavven Throop was wiping down the bar with a rag that made it dirtier. A Sullustan, short and round, with heavy jowls and huge dark eyes that made him look soulful. He wasn't. He was a businessman, which on Level 1331 meant a survivor with a till.
"Kid." Throop slid something across the bar. "Good set. The fire exit thing. I liked the fire exit thing."
Namren looked at what he'd been given. Ten credits. And a carton of noodles, still warm, with the lid bent where someone had sat on it.
"This is ten."
"That's ten, yes. You can count. Your mother must be proud."
"You said twenty."
"I said twenty if the room was full." Throop spread his small hands, the very picture of a man wronged by the universe. "The room was full of clones. Clones drink on the Republic's tab, and the Republic pays me in thirty days. Tonight, noodles."
"I brought in that room, Throop. The dock crew came back because of me."
"The dock crew came back because the Blue Bantha on twelve-ninety raised its prices." Throop shrugged. "You brought in atmosphere. Atmosphere, I can't bank."
"Exposure's a currency, Throop."
"So's noodles."
Namren stared at him. Throop stared back with those enormous wet eyes until the corner of Namren's mouth betrayed him.
It was an old dance. Throop liked him the way a man likes a good pair of boots: he'd miss them if they walked off, and he wouldn't pay a credit more than they were worth. There were worse owners in the lower levels. There were owners who paid you in bruises.
"You owe me ten," Namren said.
"I owe you ten," Throop agreed, which was not the same as promising to pay it.
The glowpanels dimmed to a sick brown for three long seconds and came back. Power rationing. The war took the power first, the top of the city took the rest, and whatever trickled down twelve hundred levels arrived tired.
In the corner, the HoloNet set played with the sound off. Gunships crossing an orange sky on some Outer Rim world nobody could pronounce. A crawl of casualty figures. A Senator mouthing something about resolve. Nobody watched. Beside the set, a recruitment poster was peeling off the wall at one corner: a clone in white armour against a Republic banner, and the words YOUR REPUBLIC NEEDS YOU. Someone had drawn a moustache on the clone. Someone else, more recently, had scrubbed it off.
"Take the noodles," Throop said, not unkindly. "Go home. Sleep. You look like a man who's been dumped."
"By a Togruta who didn't laugh."
"Ah." Throop nodded wisely. "The worst kind."
Namren took the noodles.
Outside, the ventilation shaft rose over the street like a chimney a kilometre wide. Hundreds of walkways crossed it in the dark, strung with cables and laundry and the dead eyes of old advertising. Speeders slid along their lanes up there like sparks in a flue. It never rained this far down. Condensation dripped from the upper levels, and people called it rain because it was easier than calling it what it was.
He tipped his head back.
Far, far up, past every walkway and every lane of traffic, there was a light. One small, steady, golden point, at the top of the shaft, so high it was barely a star. When he was fourteen and new to the city, his father had stood beside him on this same street, put a hand on his shoulder, and pointed.
That's the Temple spire, Oreth had said. The Jedi keep a light burning. So people can find their way.
Namren had never checked whether that was true. He'd never wanted to know if it wasn't.
He looked at it for a while. Then he went round the back way, because it was shorter and ten credits didn't buy a taxi anywhere.
IV. Still Recording
The service alley was where the Low Lantern put everything it didn't want: crates, broken stools, bags of refuse no collection droid had come for in weeks. One glowpanel over the kitchen door worked one night in three.
Something in the rubbish sparked. A small blue-white snap, lighting up a curve of metal.
His hands were interested before the rest of him was. They always were. He was crouched and digging before he'd decided to, and there it was.
A droid.
It lay on its side like someone had thrown it. Knee-high, maybe a little more. A white dome head, scorched black down one side, with rust-red panel trim where the paint hadn't burned off. A round white barrel body dented deep enough to put a fist in. Two jointed arms, one folded against its side like a broken wing. Two short, sturdy legs on broad flat feet, one of them twisted at the ankle joint. Someone had dumped it, or it had crawled here to die. It was hard to tell, with droids.
He wiped the grime off its flank with his sleeve and let out a low whistle.
Good plating. Military-grade plating, the kind the Republic didn't waste on anything cheap. Under the scorch marks he could make out stencilling: a Republic crest, and the words REPUBLIC CORRESPONDENT SERVICE in blocky official letters, and a unit number too burnt to read.
Worth something. The thought arrived already doing sums. A Republic unit, restored and wiped, would sell on the right level for more than Throop would pay him in a year of open stages.
Then he saw the lens.
On the front of the dome was a broadcast lens, big and round, the size of his palm, set in a black housing ringed like the rings of a tree. It gave the droid an expression, the way a single wide eye does: permanently startled, or permanently paying attention. It should have been dark. Everything else about this droid said dead. But the lens was glowing a small, steady red, like an ember that refused to go out.
Red meant recording. Anybody who'd ever walked past a HoloNet crew knew that.
"Hey," he said.
Nothing.
He leaned in. The red light sat there, unblinking. Watching him. Or not watching anything at all. Just on.
"You're not recording this," he told it, and it came out louder than he'd meant, and the alley swallowed it.
The droid didn't answer. It didn't whir, or chirp, or move. The light stayed red.
Somewhere under his ribs, the small voice that told him when a room was about to turn told him to leave it.
He ignored it. This wasn't a stage. This was salvage.
He got his arms around the droid and heaved. It was heavier than it looked; everything good was. Its feet scraped and squealed on the duracrete as he dragged it toward the mouth of the alley.
Halfway there, the Lantern's back door hissed open.
Throop stood in the doorway with a bag of empties, silhouetted against the kitchen's amber light. He looked at Namren, and the look was the usual one, half fond and half tired.
Then his eyes went to the droid.
It was nothing. Half a second. Less. But the Sullustan's big dark eyes went still on the scorched dome and the red lens, the way a man's eyes go still when he sees a face in a crowd he thought he wouldn't see again.
Then Throop dropped the bag of empties by the door, turned around without a word, and shut it.
The alley went dark again.
Namren stood there a moment, arms full of warm metal. Then he shrugged it off. Throop was probably just annoyed that someone was hauling off rubbish he could have sold. He shifted his grip and kept dragging, and he didn't think about it again.
It took him the better part of an hour to get it home. Two lifts, one of them out; three flights of stairs, which gave him new respect for his father's knees; a Weequay neighbour who watched him wrestle a half-dead droid past her door and said nothing, because in lower Uscru you didn't ask a man what he was carrying.
His room was a bunk, a workbench, and a window that looked out onto a wall. Every surface was covered in parts, including the gutted shell of a cleaning droid he'd been meaning to finish for three months. He swept a corner clear with his foot and propped the droid in it, dome tilted towards the room.
The lens glowed red.
He sat on his bunk and ate the noodles cold with his fingers, looking at the droid, trying to feel pleased. He'd found something worth money. Three clones had laughed at the same time, and he'd done that.
He kept thinking about a drink on a back table that nobody had touched.
He lay down. The bunk creaked. The city hummed through the walls the way it always did, the great endless engine of it, twelve hundred levels of people living on top of people. He rolled onto his side, facing the wall, and pulled the blanket up.
Behind him, the red light threw a small steady circle onto the ceiling. It stayed there as his breathing slowed. It stayed there as the city shifted from night into the other night that passed for morning this far down.
He fell asleep with his back to it, and the red light didn't blink once.
END OF EPISODE 1
Next: Episode 2: Dead Air