Private Old habits die hard

[Vess Sadragen]

She sat cross-legged beside a low-mounted antenna array, her portable terminal balanced across her knees. A soft blue glow lit up her face in faint pulses as data scrolled past the screen, lines of code flowing steadily under her fingertips. She worked without haste, without worry, just... focus. This was her rhythm now.

A hooded jacket concealed most of her silhouette, but the weight at her belt was unmistakable. The lightsaber was there, hidden beneath layers of fabric and utility gear.

Vess didn’t think about it often, not anymore. The Hidden Path. The years spent threading through old halls and abandoned temples, listening to grand plans. Hope was a currency there just like fear had been before. But even then, she’d felt it. That quiet undercurrent. Like they were all passengers on a ship no one really knew how to sail.

She didn’t leave angry. Didn’t leave clean, either. Just… drifted. Like always. In some ways she did miss it, but she shook her head it was time to focus.

Her gaze flicked to the vault across the street a low-slung fortress buried into the bones of a repurposed water plant. Not corporate, not government. Private sector, deep net. A data house that traded in secrets too old or ugly to be useful until someone decided they were again.

“Lily, you getting my feed?” she murmured into the comm clipped to her collar, eyes narrowing as fresh telemetry synced across her screen. “Spike should sync once you reach the mainframe node. Slot it and step back. If it sparks, it’s just me slicing.”

The job wasn’t a smash-and-grab. Not exactly. They weren’t after credits or weapons. Tonight’s prize was quieter: archival telemetry, encrypted transaction records, and a full client list from a private broker who specialized in restricted hyperlane maps. Someone had paid a lot to make sure those lanes stayed hidden. Someone else was paying more to make sure they didn’t.

She exhaled slowly, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll keep you clean on cams and floorplan just don’t trip any alarms This rig can spoof heat signatures and mag-locks but not dumb luck.”

A brief flicker on her screen warned her of an incoming signal.

“Oh, and Lily?” Vess leaned slightly forward, smirking as she keyed in a new string. “Try not to get shot. I’m billing extra if I have to remote-fly your corpse out.”

She cracked her knuckles, posture relaxing again as the signal solidified.

Time to work.

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Water seeped into her boots, cold and uncomfortable as she slipped in through the grate. The old waste pipes stank of rust and stale water whose surface shimmered with rot. Lily didn’t pay it too much mind, she’d stepped in and smelt worse. She stepped slowly, careful not to disturb the surface too much as she passed underneath the fortresses walls, crouching low as she reached the tunnel's end and set to work removing bolts with quick and quiet precision as Vess’s voice cracked over the comms in her ears.

“Yeah, I hear you.” she replied with her voice low as she slipped into the fortress, lifting the grate back into place behind her and moving on, hugging the walls and slinking through shadows as Vess reminded her of her task, warning of alarms and traps. Part of her wanted to tell her she’d once broken into the space station owned by the former Head of the Sith Order’s Inquisition without back up, but the fact that she’d ultimately been caught made the brag feel hollow.

Besides, the last person she wanted to think about right now was him.

She tucked into an alcove and held her breath as a patrol moved her way, shadow and silence concealing her as they passed, Vess’s teasing echoing in her ear.

“You know it’s easier to not get shot if you tell me when people are coming.” She hissed once they’d passed, slipping out of her hiding place and moving on. She could have teleported in, but without seeing the lay of the land or knowing what traps might be waiting for them, they’d decided old school was the best way in.

She pressed forward, heading deeper in towards the vault, letting her instinct guide her forward.

 

[Vess Sadragen]

"Working on it," Vess murmured, her voice slipping through Lily's comm with a smooth, unhurried confidence that almost masked the fact she was threading a needle with a frayed wire.

Hazel eyes narrowed on the screen in front of her, the glow painting her features in shifting amber and blue as she traced the lines of code spiraling across her terminal. the low hum of the building's old power grid vibrating faintly beneath her. The air was cool and sharp this high up, the scent of ozone carried in from distant stormbreakers rolling in from the horizon.

"Some of this network's still living in the past," she said, voice low and dry. "Old command subroutines, half-spoofed system checks like it thinks the war's still happening and someone just forgot to turn the lights off."

Her gaze flicked to a camera feed then another. One patrol shimmered into view just long enough to confirm its position. The next blinked out completely.

"You've got a blind spot up ahead, Delta corridor. Twelve seconds, give or take. Stick close to the wall and don't try anything fancy. After that, there's a thermal wire across the stairwell I haven't cracked yet, so if you like your eyebrows, maybe don't test it."

A gust of wind swept across the rooftop, tugging at the long braid tucked beneath her hood and rattling the datapads clipped to her satchel but her hand stayed firmly on the keys. No time for distractions.

She hesitated, just for a moment, watching Lily's vitals flicker across the corner of her screen. Heart rate steady. Movement fluid. A pro.

"I was going to warn you about that last patrol," she added, a hint of a smirk coloring her tone. "But you looked like you had it handled. Some people like when I'm less chatty."

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Lily kept moving, clinging to shadows while Vess explained the complications of slicing into an network that was a mesh of old and new. A lot of it went over her head. Lily could crack a lock, maybe bypass an alarm or two but slicing had never really been of interest, she preferred a more hands on approach. Not only was she could at it, but she liked the thrill it brought.

"Copy that." She said picking up her pace and sliding into Delta corridor, hugging the wall as she moved, the timer counting away the seconds in her head. She crouched at the bottom of the stairwell, scanning for the wire a smile curling her lips when she spotted it. "I like chatty, reminds me I'm not on my own. I spend enough time alone moving from place to place, its nice to have company." She straightened. "Don't waste your time on the wire, I can bypass it."

The force gathered and folded at her command, snapping her from the bottom of the stairs to the top. Lily didn't look back, shifting across the hall back into the shadows she kept moving. The vault was close. "How did you get into this kinda stuff?"

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Vess didn't answer right away. Her hazel eyes tracked Lily's biometrics as they disappeared and reappeared, she blinked a couple of times and tilted her head. Teleportation? Neat trick.

A faint hum of static from the terminal filled the silence, broken only by the quiet click of her fingers as they tapped out another bypass. She wasn't rushing. Lily was in, and so far, nobody was dead. That was progress.

"Into slicing?" she finally replied, tone thoughtful. "Started as necessity. You grow up on the streets of Denon, you pick up a useful skill or you die of hunger. Turns out I was always good with tech and machines."

A smirk tugged at her lips as she rerouted a junction node. A camera feed blinked online and she caught a glimpse of Lily flitting between shadows like a ghost. Clean work.

"Eventually, someone notices. Someone always does. They offer you more credits to do it for them instead of to them. And next thing you know, you're the quiet girl in the corner making other people look brilliant."

There was no bitterness in her voice just a detached, dry amusement. She leaned back slightly, flexing her fingers before her eyes swept over the screen again.

"I didn't set out to be a slicer," she added, softer now. "Didn't set out to be a lot of things. Life's funny that way."

A moment passed before her voice returned.

"What about you, what got you into the life of breaking and entering?"

A new node lit up on her terminal.

"Also good move. I'm officially adding 'show-off' to your file."

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Lily chuckled, the sound low and contained. "I've been called worse."

She knew Denon, not as well as she knew Coruscant but they were shaped the same, they bore the same pressure for a kid with no family and no support. Find a way to make a living or die trying. Denon carried memory for Lily, one that never failed to bring a smile to her face. Its not always you can claim to have stolen a Grandmaster's wallet.

"Coruscant's undercity is where I started out. Picking pockets and scraping by, I picked the wrong pocket and instead of getting my ass beat, I was offered a job, kinda grew from there."

She paused at an intersection, out of habit more than necessity. "I never set out to be anything other than alive. Its made it a lot easier to roll with the punches."

There had been a lot of punches, but the moments between normally made up for it. "Now, I just do jobs because it keeps me out of bigger trouble, if you can believe it." She went quiet, the fight on Jaibrek as the Sith Order tore through the Firefist, eradicating Tof and calling it liberation. the Tof were nasty, that much was certain, but it was like trading one evil for another.

"I can see the mainframe, but I can't tell if I'm clear."

Vess Sadragen

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Vess huffed softly, the sound barely there over the whisper of wind across the rooftop. Her fingers paused for half a second above the keys before resuming, hazel eyes narrowing as she pulled Lily’s feed into a tighter overlay.

“Coruscant,” she said, almost to herself. “Yeah. That tracks.”

A memory surfaced uninvited neon glare bleeding through rain, a pressure in the air she’d mistaken for intent. For about three solid seconds she’d been convinced the woman closing the distance was there to end her. Hand had gone instinctively toward a weapon she didn’t want to use. Turned out she wasn’t being hunted at all. Just… evaluated. Recruited, maybe. Funny how those moments rewired a life.

“Ran into someone one Denon once,” Vess added, voice even. “Thought I it was the end of me. Turns out I’d just picked the wrong night to be clever.” A faint smirk crept in. “Still walked away breathing. Barely. Guess we both learned early that survival counts as a win.”

She dragged a window aside and brought up a schematic of the corridor Lily was standing in, ghosting old infrastructure over newer security like mismatched bones. Parts of it were blind to her dead zones where the mesh didn’t quite reach.

“Alright,” she said, focus snapping back to the present. “You’re not clear-clear. I’ve got blind spots around the mainframe old system never fully integrated. No alarms screaming yet, but I don’t like what I can’t see.”

Her gaze flicked to a secondary readout, jaw tightening just a touch.

“Give me ten seconds. Don’t touch anything shiny, don’t breathe too loud, and if your instincts start yelling listen to them. Underworld kids don’t survive by ignoring that feeling.”

Keys chimed softly under her hands.

“And hey,” she added, lighter now, “I'd like to hear about this life changing wallet one day, for now let’s just make sure we leave this place with something better than a good story.”

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Finding other people who had survived the streets into adulthood normally led to two type of interactions, in Lily's experience. The first was one bound by mistrust, setting aside the need for survival to complete a job, knowing full well the moment it was done you became fair game. Or there was kinship, understanding that both had been through hell, and that going it alone was no longer a necessity. A chance to swap stories definitely felt like the latter.

Lily's voice dropped to a low whisper. "If we pull this off, drinks are on me."

the time for talk fell away, focus taking over. Ten seconds was a long time to hold where she was, to touch nothing and keep quiet, Lily didn't like it, it was long enough for a patrol to move up on her rear and force her forward. So instead she moved slow, creeping along in the shadows with silent steps. feeling her way forward.

The corridor opened into a T-junction, the door to the mainframe set dead centre, a camera on the corner panned and she moved, the force whispering around her as she teleported beneath it, keeping in its blind spot, creeping up to check the corridor.

"Vess..." she hissed "I've got eyes on a droid patrol. I can't hide from them." She doubled back, quietly testing doors. "Think you can get one of these open for me till they pass?"

Vess Sadragen

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Vess didn't answer right away.

Her hazel eyes sharpened on the screen, tracking the camera arc and the faint shimmer that marked Lily's signature within the network overlay. There was a hum building in her terminal a soft stutter in the old security code that meant someone was moving. The droid patrol wasn't on her grid yet, but she trusted Lily's eyes more than she trusted half-wired sensors.

"Copy," she said finally, voice quiet but firm over comms. Her fingers danced across the terminal with a few decisive keystrokes. "I'm working a bypass on that junction now… Old system's fighting me like it knows it's dying."

"Drinks are on you, huh?" she muttered, stalling her own tension with dry humor. "Well, if I don't get you that door open, at least you'll have fewer credits to spend. Though maybe an entirely different set of problems."

She scanned the doors on Lily's side again, found the one closest to her signal, and keyed in a forced override. A spark of green blinked across her screen.

"Far right door. You've got about five seconds before the system catches on and tries to re-lock it. After that, I'm gonna have to burn a spike and risk drawing attention."

There was a pause, then a low murmur just beneath her breath:
"Come on, Lily. Show me some hustle."

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

The steady thump of metallic feet and whir of servo joints drew steadily closer and in the seconds it took Vess to answer, Lily's heart rate climbed ever so slightly as she thought she might be alone in this after all and began calculating exit strategies but before any could fully formulate Vess voice came firm but quiet and Lily exhaled a breath she didn't realise she was holding.

"Hilarious." she muttered in response without a shred of humour. She'd laugh at it later, when fight with a set of tincans wasn't looming over her.

Her head snapped at the soft beep as Vess identified the door. She took a step, the force folding around her again blinking in front of it her hand palming the controls, she pushed in before it was fully open, tapping the control panel inside to slid it shut as a metal foot appeared around the corner. She leaned against the wall just inside the door, listening for the sound of metal feet to keep moving.

But they didn't. The steps came to a halt, the harsh murmur of binary filtering through the door.

"Chit." she breathed.

She was not equipped for droids. People she could sneak around without issue, people could be influenced, made to look elsewhere, but droids?

"This place was an old water plant, right." the room she was in was some kind of storage, nothing to be concerned about, she pushed off the wall, keeping her voice barely above a whisper as she began to check behind boxes on the wall. "Which means decent ventilation."

Shafts hopefully big enough for her to crawl through. "Doesn't have to get me into the mainframe but if it can bypass the droids and I can get that spike in..." She just needed to keep them busy after that, long enough for Vess to do her part.

Getting out was the easy bit.

Vess Sadragen

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Vess let out a slow breath, fingers hovering just above the keys while she listened to the telltale pause in the patrol's movement. The way the droids stopped instead of passing told her exactly how curious they were and how little margin Lily had left.

"Yeah," she said to herself and Lilly, voice low and controlled, all the earlier levity gone. "Old water plant. Decommissioned, repurposed, then half-assed upgraded. Which means the vents are there as well as pipes that run throughout the place but the condition of both are most likely not great."

Her hazel eyes flicked across schematics layered over live sensor data, ghostly blue lines crawling across the display. She pinched and dragged, isolating a section behind Lily's position.

"I'm seeing ventilation shafts running above you, maintenance grade. Not comfortable, but big enough for someone who isn't wearing armor." A brief pause. "That's all you."

She tapped a sequence in, rerouting thermal bleed from a pump two corridors over. The droids' signatures flared just a little.

"The droids, if they buy my fakes that gets you a couple minutes.. Less if they're smart hopefully their droids are about as state of the art as the facility upgrades."

Her jaw tightened.

"Once you're in the vent, don't stop moving. I'll keep the patrol busy with false positives while you line up the spike. You get it in, I take the network. Clean and quiet."

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Two minutes was not a lot of time, as soon as Vess mentioned the vents above her she was moving into the centre of the room, quietly pulling crate with her to set beneath the access point. She lifted herself onto the crate, fingers testing the edge of the vent. It wasn't going to give easily and the idea of teleporting into such a confined space did not fill her with confidence. She reached down to her boot, pulling a small knife free she worked it around the seals edge before pressing it in deeper and leverage it free with a sharp clang.

"Feth." she hissed.

Lily didn't wait around to see if they had heard her, pulling herself up into the vent with ease, the steel of the vent walls cold against her forearms as she began to crawl rapidly away, slowing only when she was certain she was far enough away from the entrance. There was barely enough room for her to roll to her side to check behind her.

"Tell me they took the bait." she said in a low voice, conscious of how it might echo. She passed over another access point, glancing breifly down to check it was clear before carrying on.

Vess Sadragen

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Rain started to fall.


It came in thin, needling sheets across the rooftops, hissing softly against duracrete and pooling around Vess's boots where she sat cross-legged behind the portable terminal. The city below never really slept. Even at this hour, refinery towers pulsed with dull amber light, and cargo skiffs cut slow arcs between platforms. Her hazel eyes didn't leave the screen, she did however spare a hand to reach up and pull a hood over her head to try to keep the rain out of her eyes.

The network overlay shimmered in layers of translucent grids and security feeds. She had partial control now enough to misdirect, not enough to own it. The droid patrol's route flickered as she injected a corrupted diagnostic into their subroutine.

"One second...."

Vess rerouted coolant pressure alarms from an adjacent maintenance wing, spiking false readings just high enough to be annoying, not catastrophic. Then she nudged the patrol's logic tree toward "investigate anomaly."

On her screen, the metallic silhouettes pivoted. "They bought it," she murmured, voice low but steady. "Two tincans just decided they care deeply about imaginary overheating."

She tracked Lily's position via the spike she was carrying The vent grid appeared as a skeletal blueprint overlay.

"You've got a clean corridor for about ninety seconds. After that, their central controller's going to notice three of its tincans wandering off-script."

Her fingers moved again not frantic, precise. She dampened acoustic sensors in Lily's previous corridor by dropping gain thresholds just a fraction. Not enough to flag tampering. Enough to blur sharp noise.

"And try not to redecorate any more ventilation systems," she added, less bite than before. "I can smooth logs, but I can't erase physics." a brief pause before "Okay. Small complication. There's a secondary monitor pinging for routine confirmation on the door leading to the core. I'm feeding it a cached loop, but it'll only hold if nothing visually interesting happens."

She leaned forward slightly, rain sliding off the edge of her hood.

"And, I just looped the feed of the camera pointed at the door, empty hallway for the next little bit for them. You have a good window, get in spike the core then i'll have control of everything. Then we get paid and you can get out of there."

The city hummed below. Above, the rain kept falling. Vess adjusted the feed, ready for the next blind spot to appear.

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Lily exhaled a breath of relief as she passed over another grate but it was about as short lived as the time windows Vess kept giving her. Another whispered swear word passed her lips as she moved for the next grate. "Define visually interesting?" she whispered back, peering through the next grate, spotting the door to the mainframe. This vent at least she could lift easily out of the frame it sat in, sliding it into the cramoed space ahead of her.

Lily slid out of the gap in a manoeuvre that was about as graceful as a hutt auditioning for Coruscant's ballet school. The only difference was that she was at least quiet, darting for the door as soon as she'd figured out which way was up. It slid open when she tapped the access pad, and Lily didn't question it, she put it down to Vess doing her job.

It closed with a soft hiss behind her. The mainframe was a column of dark panels, light and wiring that Lily knew absolutely nothing about. She knew an access port though. And that was all she needed. Pulling the spike from one of her inside pockets, she jammed it into place.

"All yours Vess."

Vess Sadragen

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Rain slid steadily across the rooftop, collecting along the edge of Vess's terminal before spilling over in thin streams. She brushed it aside absently without looking up, hazel eyes locked on the screen as the spike handshake pulsed alive in her overlay. For a fraction of a second the system resisted, then the authentication resolved and the architecture unfolded in clean, obedient layers.

"There you are," she murmured, almost to herself.

What had been fragmented and stubborn moments ago now opened like a map finally turned the right direction. Internal cameras rolled into her control first. She looped clean footage over the mainframe corridor, replaced Lily's entry with an empty stretch of polished floor and static lighting. The droid patrol's route indicators shifted as she injected a priority override into their task queue, nudging them toward a fabricated maintenance anomaly two levels down.

Her posture straightened as the real prize surfaced behind encrypted partitions. Financial ledgers routed through shell entities. Shipping manifests flagged under agricultural exports that definitely were not agricultural. Long-term contracts with names carefully buried beneath subsidiaries. She initiated exfiltration with deliberate precision, compressing the data and routing it through layered ghost relays before sending it to their offsite facility. From there it would fragment again before reaching the client, scrubbed of origin markers and traceable signatures.


"Data's moving" she said evenly. "You've got full camera coverage in your favor. If anyone checks the feed, they're admiring an empty hallway. Time to get out of there. At this point you can basically use the front door."

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

The spike sparked once making Lily flinch but it meant Vess was in and working her magic. She leaned against the wall, waiting patiently for the green light from her counterpart. All things considered, this was definitely one of the smoother jobs she'd worked. It helped that Vess was clearly very good at what she did, instead of some fool posturing as such. Lily had enough tricks up her sleeve in those instances but it really did help working with professionals.

Vess's voice drifted through the comms in her ear, the data was on its way and her route out was clear. "Happy payday." she said softly, pushing off the wall and opening the server room door again.

She didn't bother sticking to the shadows, she just cast her awareness outwards listening for any patrols that might be less droid and more flesh. She trusted Vess had everything electronic neatly in her control.

"I'm feeling swanky hotel, private suite and enough alcohol to drown myself in. You in?"

Vess Sadragen

 

[Vess Sadragen]

Vess watched the exfiltration bar tick past ninety percent as Lily's signal began moving cleanly back through the corridors. No alarms. No spikes in biometric activity beyond elevated adrenaline. For once, things were behaving exactly the way they were supposed to.

"Happy payday" she echoed, her tone quieter now that the tension was easing.

The transfer completed and she severed the spike's active handshake, scrubbing the last few seconds of logs before pushing a false maintenance report into the system's history. By the time anyone competent looked at the mainframe, it would read like a routine diagnostic cycle with a minor voltage irregularity. Annoying, but not suspicious.

She leaned back slightly against the low parapet of the rooftop, rain misting across her hood, and allowed herself the smallest exhale.

"Swanky hotel.." she repeated, considering it. "Private suite. Alcohol you can't pronounce."

Her fingers moved again, but this time the target wasn't industrial security architecture. She pivoted through a local civilian network, ghosting across booking platforms until she found what she wanted: The Celestine Meridian, twenty floors up with glass walls overlooking the industrial district and far enough from the plant to feel removed from it.

Luxury meant tighter firewalls, but not smarter ones.

She slid into the hotel's reservation backend like she was checking her own messages. A minor calendar reshuffle here, a last-minute "VIP cancellation" there. A private suite opened for two, tucked away from the main floor with a view of the storm-lit skyline. She reassigned it to a pair of identities that would withstand a cursory scan and funded it through a credit chain that would dissolve by morning.

Rooms were easier. She upgraded them without asking, because if they were going to be reckless, they might as well commit to it.

"We now have dinner reservations under the names Kira Venn & Lysa Merrow" she said smoothly. "Top floor private suite. Complimentary bottle already billed to someone who won't notice."

A faint smirk curved at the corner of her mouth. She closed the booking interface and wiped her access trail as neatly as she'd done inside the plant.

"I'll meet you at the east side extraction point. Ten minutes."

TAG: Lily Rhodes
​

 

[Lily Rhodes]

Vess wasn't joking when she'd said she could walk out the front door, there wasn't a droid in sight, no alarms blared when she waltzed out the door. She lifted the hood of her jacket against the rain that greeted her and slipped into the shadows of the street out of habit more than necessity. A grin split her features as rain peppered the leather of her jacket at the declaration of their alias's and dinner reservations.

"Now who's a show off." she laughed. "See you in ten."

She reached to pull the comm out of her ear flicking it off and tucking it safely away inside her jacket. she doubled back on herself twice, shifting her route out of habit more than a need to shake any potential tails before coming to rest on the edge of an alleyway that sat opposite a café. She leaned on the wall, lifting one foot to rest against it beneath her and let out a contented sigh.

If only every job was this smooth. The promise of a luxury suite, champagne and hell if she was lucky a long soak in a bath had her feeling lighter than she had in a long time.