One agreeable thing about being taken captive by Sali, she at least put you up in a nicely gilded cage. Ayli wasn’t sure if she was willing to tolerate being in even so luxurious a form captivity for much longer, but Nix seemed to be working an angle and Sali definitely had other plans than turning them in for the bounty so Ayli was willing to let things play out a little longer.

“How was breakfast my dears?” Sali said, strolling into their suite like she owned the place.

Which of course she did, and Ayli had no illusions that the entire place wasn’t bugged with more micro-recorders than she’d find if she searched for a year, but still the illusion of privacy would have been nice. She and Nix had slept in separate rooms in an unspoken agreement to keep Sali from deciding she could use one of them as leverage against the other, and though they’d only spent a grand total of three nights together so far, Ayli found herself missing her fake-wife’s warmth. 

“Chef Marsbel remembered my favorites!” Nix said. “Give him my thanks if you would.”

“You’re quite a valuable asset,” Sali said. “It wouldn’t do to have you die of hunger on us before the Klex Cartel pays out for you.”

“Come on Sali, we both know you’re not doing this for a measly ten thousand credits,” Ayli said, looking up from the datapad where the recent Galactic news was scrolling along. There was a Xenoarchaeology Conference on Coruscant that looked interesting. Too interesting in fact. There were two tracks on ‘Lost Religious Movements from the Late Republic Era” during it. That didn’t mean someone else was looking for Ravas Durla’s temple, but those were the sort of lectures which might plant ideas in the wrong heads. Those being any other head than her own.

“Of course not,” Sali said. “You’re worth at least a million credits, easily.”

“We’re going to be scapegoats, aren’t we?” Nix said, seemingly seizing the idea out of thin air.

“Well, at least one of you will be,” Sali said. “I do still have openings on my staff for someone bright and talented.” 

To her credit, sort of, Sali didn’t seem to be particularly concerned which of her guests she scooped up and which she fed to the space wolves. Ayli knew she would be the easier one to place as the scapegoat if Sali had issues with the Klex cartel and if it came to it, she’d insist that Nix do the sensible thing and take whatever offer Sali put on the table.

“Who are you setting us up against?” Ayli asked.

“I have options,” Sali said, as though she didn’t have her entire plan worked out already.

“You’re going to have us kill Ulno Klex,” Nix said, again as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Not you, Ayli was quite clear on that,” Sali said. “All the messy work will be handled by trained professionals. They’ll simply be disguised as you.”

“Why?” Ayli asked, trying to picture a more convoluted and risky means of going about a simple assassination and coming up with a dozen options off the top of her head.

“She gets to destabilize the Klexs and it’ll run the bounty on us up by a factor of ten, so she can get paid for it too,” Nix said, with a far away look in her eyes.

“By a hundred, like I said, you’re easily worth a million credits,” Sali said.

“Won’t they know you took us in?” Ayli asked.

“Of course not. Why do you think I had you picked up before you left the dock?” Sali said. “Also, I was in a meeting with Bolobla Ool at the time too so, clearly, I could not have been there either.”

“How did you get Bolobla in on this?” Nix asked. “I thought he hated you.”

“He does. Ever since I took the surface cities from him. Or at least that’s the public image he keeps up. In truth he was happy to get rid of them, especially since I’ve doubled his revenue and taken all the paperwork off his flippers. The Klex on the other hand killed his cousin right before their last spawning season, so he’s not terribly fond of them at the moment, especially Ulno.”

“Did you have all this planned before we got her?” Aylia asked.

“Not at all. I expected I’d never seen either of you again. It is a big galaxy after all,” Sali said.

“I’m sorry we didn’t part on better terms,” Nix said.

Ayli did not echo the sentiment. Her previous dealings with Sali hadn’t ended badly but Ayli had always felt like she was dancing on the knife edge of betrayal.

Or that might have been her paranoia from growing up as a Rebellion brat showing.

Current kidnapping aside, she liked Sali too. She just knew better than to trust her. Or date her? What had Nix been thinking?

Apart from the obvious of course.

There was no accounting for taste, even if a quick glance towards Sali suggested that Nix’s taste was, in fact, excellent.

“Why did you two break up?” Ayli asked, the question tumbling out before it occurred to her it was probably an unpleasant topic for both of them.

“She blew up one of my cargo ships and vanished before I could ask her why,” Sali said.

“I didn’t think you’d want to talk much after that,” Nix said.

“At the time, no, I suppose I didn’t,” Sali said.

“Wait, why did you blow up a ship?” Ayli asked.

“It was hauling weapons to the Sundalli, for their offensive on Gartock IV,” Nix said, as though whatever local conflict the Sundalli and Gartocks had been embroiled in had been newsworthy enough that Ayli might have heard of it.

“The Sundalli launched an attack on the Gartockans after the Gartockans won a battle against an Imperial Remnant fleet and lost three quarters of their own in the process,” Nix said on seeing Ayli’s confusion.

“The Sundalli saw an opening and took it, even managed to capture the Gartock capital city,” Sali said. “But they wanted more weapons to expand their front and take the whole world.”

“And that didn’t work out for them, did it.” Nix said, somewhere between knowing the answer and having a solid guess at it.

“Not for them or for anyone who was ‘providing aid or comfort’ to them,” Sali said.

“What happened?” Ayli said.

“Turns out the Gartock Fleetyards are exceptional at repairing damaged ships,” Sali said. “They had their whole fleet back in action in a week. The Sundalli, or the ones who remain, are now enjoying a pre-space flight existence and the people who supplied them with weapons or ships are now mostly clouds of free floating ions.”

“I know that wouldn’t have been you. You could have taken them if it came to a fight,” Nix said. “But the cost wouldn’t have been worth it.”

“You could have told me all that before blowing up my ship,” Sali said.

“Could I have?” Nix asked, not flinching from Sali’s gaze.

They each refused to budge for a moment, until Sali looked away and sighed first.

“I suppose not,” Sali said.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think I could have explained myself well enough to convince you even if you’d been willing to listen,” Nix said. “Sometimes things just make sense without me being able to explain why.”

“You sound like my grandmother,” Sali said. “Mystical old bat was always trying to teach me to meditate and things like that.”

“I thought that was every Mirialan?” Ayli said, though she couldn’t call the handful of Mirialans she knew a necessarily decent sample size for the species. “Don’t you have a whole meditation garden setup somewhere in here?”

“I’ve got three of them,” Sali said. “You should visit them, I hear they’re quite lovely.”

“I thought you liked the gardens?” Nix said.

“I do. It’s very peaceful there. I could spend sun up to sun down in any one of them, with or without company,” Sali said. “And if I did that I’d lose half the cities that are floating on the surface before the first sun set.”

Nix walked over to her and took Sali’s left hand in both of hers.

“You need an exit strategy,” she said. “You can’t keep living like this.”

“Maybe not,” Sali said, pulling her hand away from Nix’s, though slowly, “But I can, and will, certainly die if I give people too many openings, or lose too much of what I have built up here.”

It was Nix’s turn to sigh.

“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.” Nix’s wistfulness said how much she wished she was wrong, and hinted towards the well of fondness she still carried for an ex- she was clearly not compatible with.

“Speaking of those duties, its time for me to go put a stranglehold on some suppliers. You let them update one trade agreement and suddenly the whole planetary food network is on the docket.”

“Before you do,” Nix said. “Have you thought about the Goldrunner?”

Sali paused, confusion playing over her face.

“You’re ship? No, why?”

“You should bring it here, so I can fix it,” Nix said.

Sali snorted a brief laugh out.

“And, why, exactly, would I do that?” she asked. “I believe I already turned down the chance to back another one of this one’s wild expeditions to nowhere.” She gestured towards Ayli who shrugged. She’d had to try to make a pitch even if it was doomed to fail.

“Oh, not for us. For you,” Nix said.

“For me? Do tell me how this will benefit me, please.”

“You’ll get a lot of use out of it!” Nix said, oddly cheerful at the notion. “First of all, if you’re planning to have someone impersonate us, they’ll do a much more convincing job of it if they’re flying our ship.”

Ayli found it amusing that Nix was calling the Goldrunner ‘their ship’. It didn’t feel wrong, only a bit surprising. 

Which was a sign that Ayli had probably lost her mind due to captivity or something since it wasn’t like they were actually married. Only Canto-Blight-married, which was about as binding a pinkie-promise.

“I think we’ve got whatever claim on each other that we chose to have.” Nix had said, and the words were still echoing in Ayli’s ears as a question she either didn’t have the answer to or was “too smart” to accept that she already knew what she wanted her answer to be.

“Also,” Nix said. “If you’re going to turn us in for a million credit bounty, why not cash in on a Wayfarer class freighter too? It’s probably at about a third of its full value at the moment with the deflector array and the engines in the state they’re in. And that’s assuming the rest of the systems weren’t put in backwards too. Given me some time with it in your repair dock and you know it’ll be worth its full value or more.”

From anyone else that would sound like either the worst lie in the world, or the depths of madness speaking. Ayli’s experience with Nix so far however suggested she was being ernest about wanting to repair the Goldrunner, and the kind of improvements she could make to it.

Something about her offer though suggested she was working some other angle too, which was something Sali was usually frighteningly good at picking up on.

“You know what? Sure. Let’s do that,” Sali said. “We’ll call it my gift to you.”

Ayli froze her face to not give away her surprise. It wasn’t that Sali agreeing to fix the Goldrunner was unreasonable, but since when was Sali reasonable about things like that?

Since Nix apparently.

Sali pulled a datapad from her pocket and keyed in what Ayli assumed were the orders to retrieve the Goldrunner from its hidden dock and, as she later discovered, an open purchase request for anything Nix needed to repair it. 

With a smile she then left Ayli and Nix alone in the room once more.

“That went well, I think,” Nix said, looking completely unsurprised by the turn of events. “It’ll take me about a week to get the Goldrunner in proper shape. No, wait, five days. I gotta be able to do a better job than those hacks on Gartock. Think you’ll be ready to leave by then?”