“Trust me, it’ll be easy.”

Kierra should have known then that she was making a mistake. But Giru had sounded so confident, so sure. It wasn’t until they were halfway up the rock face that she realized that he always sounded that way. In fact, Giru was a bit of a boaster and prone to exaggeration, particularly where his own cleverness and abilities were concerned. In this way, Giru wasn’t so different from the scads of other pilots who had passed through her father’s cantina on Jelucan, their ships sagging with spice, arms or who knows what en route to the Core Worlds. Each of them had a tale wilder than the last—a tale in which they alone fought off dozens of Stormtroopers or outsmarted the most advanced scanning droids at the Imperial cargo inspection points. A hefty ego was definitely the rule, rather than the exception, at the Waypoint Tavern. The one thing about Giru that was definitely different was that he was actually doing something to help the people of Jelucan, people oppressed for years now by the Empire. Or at least, he was trying. And so was she. And that’s exactly why they were hanging above Celest Canyon with nothing but 1000 meters of atmosphere between them and the knife-like projections of sharlot rock below.