Vyakti Nau

Now took the brunt of Cinderwalker's attention from the moment the doors opened, armoring up, swinging her blade, and finally going down hard, thrown clear and unconscious as the floor caught fire around her. But the fight wasn't the thing that hit her. When ND-E read the salvaged name off the corrupted server — Heishi Kyu — she went still and then said it plainly, for the first time, in front of everyone: that's her real name, Now was a name she took to disappear, and someone dangerous enough to be worth vanishing for might already be looking.

Now moved south along the wall same as the others, patient, waiting for her moment. The droids barely registered her — whatever they're tuned to notice, it isn't her — and she used that quiet to get further into the room than anyone before the shooting started. When it did, she took her share of arc-welder fire for it, dropped near to the edge herself, and kept fighting anyway. She still doesn't know her own hit points. Nobody does, really.

Pressed for her history, Now gave the others the clean version — smuggling charges, phony military-grade weapons, a bodyguard job for someone important but nameless, caught and alone. She offered nothing more and nothing less, watching how each answer landed before deciding what came next. When the conversation turned to droids and sentience, her only contribution was four words, aimed at Velveteen: you are a meeb. The rest she let sit unspoken. She still wants quiet more than she wants truth, and the longer the others talk, the more that quiet costs her.

Now sat through the commander's accounting the way she sits through most things — present, watchful, unbothered by the fifteen hundred credits hanging over the group. She offered no argument for any of the three paths and no objection either, content to let the louder voices spend themselves arguing cartel against corpo against the quiet option nobody could put a name to. If something comes of the tracking beacon still buried in the shuttle's bones, she'll be ready for it. Until then, she's just watching the room decide.

Now felt the drunk's hand close around a can before she saw it, and she handed Scraps her sword before he even had to ask — she remembered Zabetta's warning about giving H&R a reason. She fought the rest of the brawl unarmed, landing nothing clean, and afterward went straight to reclaim her blade rather than linger over the dead. The slur didn't need answering with words; the fight answered it. She said little the entire session, which is exactly how she prefers it.

Narok Tarr looked at Now's sword and nothing else in the room, and nodded like he'd taken her measure and filed it away. She said nothing back. Vyakti Nau doesn't perform for men sizing her up, and she didn't need Zabetta's warning about the Rustblood Cartel's taste for gear to know what that look was worth. She sat through the negotiation the way she does most things — present, armed, unreadable — and left the workshop with the rest of the crew no better informed about her than they'd been walking in.

There was a weapon on the floor and a man beside it who had stopped being a man. She asked him what had happened here. He hissed. She stepped back with her hands open until he settled, and then she took the sword.

A blade is a question asked once. The three in that room had been asked something else instead, over and over, until they lost the ability to answer at all. Later, in the engineering chair, she moved power to the engines and then back to the shields and found none of it difficult. That is what she is for.

The tortle lists a dozen versions of her and asks which is true. She gives him the one about the blind men and the elephant, because it's the only honest answer: every account is a hand on a different part of the animal. She admits one thing — I made a mistake, that's why I'm here — and lets the rest stand sealed. When the rock falls on Oot she is under it before she decides to be. Later someone puts a baton in her hand that she isn't quite trained for. She takes it. She would rather be sparring with friends. She does not say so twice.