Darkness {4}

Chapter 26

Leia crossed her arms to brace against the coldness of the room and looked at Rezka. "This is her? The criminal?"

"Yes, Chancellor." He replied, locking the door behind them. Leia had altered her appearance to look unrecognizable as they walked through the hall, and had made her successor, Garé, in charge of her duties for the day. She had excused herself on feeling sick, traveling to the Prison Sector as a completely different person.

Leia took a deep breath in and held it. The woman inside the cell looked harmless, but Leia had learned a long time ago not to judge people on their appearance. For all she knew this woman could be an assassin. After all, Kiracel had seemed perfectly harmless as well.

If only out of paranoia, Leia did another quick mental scan of the area just to double check that there were no people around except for her and Rezka. Just like before, she sensed no one. She sighed and stepped into the cell, watching as the woman looked up at her.

Rezka closed the door behind them, and a tense silence ensued as Leia stood there debating her next move. The woman, Gerrymano, looked up at Leia with bemused hazel eyes. "And who are you supposed to be?"

"Someone you're about to wish you'd never met." Leia replied coldly, using the Force to manipulate her heart rate so it would accelerate and give her physical feelings of fear.

"Look, I still don't know why I'm in here." Gerrymano stated angrily, leaning forwards. "All they told me was that I was a suspect in the chancellor's assassination, that's it."

"And you are. How do you explain being one of the only ones inside the alarm sector at night, and the only one by the alarms of the chancellor's suite in enough time for the alarms to still remain shut down by the time the assassin entered Chancellor Mothma's quarters?"

Gerrymano's entire demeanor grew cold, and Leia knew she was onto something. "Coincidence." She spat.

"From my experience there's no such thing as coincidence." Leia countered. "If it was such a coincidence, then why did the tape show you disabling the alarms?"

Gerrymano grew pale, and Leia confirmed her lie by revealing a truth. The fact was that the video cameras had been shut off before then, but Gerrymano's reaction was more than enough to prove her guilty. But how guilty was she?

"Tell you what," Leia began, walking slowly and watching as Gerrymano shrunk instinctively as she grew closer and closer until Leia rested her palms on the table she was at and leaned over her. "If you tell me who hired you, then maybe we can work something out."

Gerrymano looked down in defeat. "I can't. They'll kill me."

"I'd like to see them try." Leia stepped back and sat down, no longer playing the role of the menacing interrogator. Now she was the sympathetic bargainer. "No one can get you while you're in here."

Gerrymano gave a harsh, dry laugh. "You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? They have their ways of getting around, trust me. If I told you who they were I wouldn't last a week."

"You may not last a week anyways if we link you to the murder of an esteemed New Republican leader. That is an execution sentence."

"I'll take my chances." She finished glaring at Leia and looked down at her binders, leaving Leia to frown in contemplation. Whoever had hired Gerrymano had obviously scared her enough that she was willing to die in order to keep their identity a secret or risk being killed by them. The only group Leia could think of that was so brutal was the Kirma, but she highly doubted that they could get into New Republic territory without being noticed.

Then again, they were trained assassin... Leia's frown deepened, and she gently probed Gerrymano's mind to find no shielding technique in place at all. Leia doubted the Kirma would hire someone so mentally weak to do their bidding, but maybe she really didn't know as much as either of them thought. There was only one way to find out.