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"You're falling now. You're swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing."
— Richard Siken, Crush
ON MORE THAN one occasion, Sabine had dragged Zoya into one of her diabolical schemes and nearly gotten them both killed. Once, after losing a bet during a game of Sabacc, she'd taunted Zoya into infiltrating one of the imperial strongholds on Lothal—just an officer's compound, with little more to offer in the way of reward than reports of construction expanding out into the fields and drafts of political statements for the higher-ups who couldn't be bothered to do it themselves—while Sabine would sneak around the back into the barracks and steal the helmet of one of the troopers as the bet required.
"A single helmet?" Sabine had asked, incredulous.
"A single helmet," Zeb affirmed, eyes glinting mischievously.
Sabine looked at Zoya, who shrugged. "Shouldn't be too hard."
What neither Zoya nor Sabine had counted on was the Imperial inspection taking place that night, those very same higher-ups coming down to the lower ranks to make sure that the well-oiled machine they could have cared less about running wasn't in shambles. It had been less than a year since Inusagi, and Zoya was still learning to be quiet and slip out of reach when someone grabbed for her. She was still learning how to stay light on her toes, not flat-footed, how to melt into the shadows of the room rather than run and hide.
Later, Zoya supposed that was what got her caught—that chink in the armor that she'd begun building around herself, that missing piece that had turned out to be quite crucial to what she'd been planning to do.
Only an idiot walked into enemy territory without training. Which, obviously, Zoya had. So what did that make her?
She'd heard the door opening down the hallway, hands frozen on the keyboard that she'd managed to hack into, and ducked under the table barely seconds before the door slid open and clipped footsteps echoed through the chamber.
Zoya and Sabine had not prepared for the scenario where the Imperials found them out; they'd been too busy giggling at the way Zeb flopped around in his (slightly) tipsy sleep, at the way Kanan had been mooning over the way Hera looked in the dress she kept in the back of her closet for special occasions, at the twinkling stars and clueless officers who had no idea that two teenage girls with a bad habit of taking on risks they couldn't understand planned to steal a single trooper's helmet from their barracks. They hadn't known—hadn't cared—what might happen if their little expedition ("Adventure!" Sabine kept saying, repeating it like a mantra the closer to the camp they got) if something went wrong.
