Rhehan

> "*We're still broke.*"
> ― Rhehan
>
>

**Rhehan** was a former Kel jaihanar who lived before the heptarchate. They appear in the short story The Chameleon's Gloves.

## History

One of the most promising jaihanar cadets produced by the Kel in the last few generations, Rhehan was involved in a training incident where, due to their prioritization of the lives of non-Kel being used as disposable props, two classmates and a Kel instructor died. Due to Rhehan's unusual skills, their gloves were taken and burned and they were stripped of Kel status and exiled instead of facing execution.

As a new exile, Rhehan met Liyeusse, a swindler and thief, and became her partner. Rhehan showed Liyeusse new dustway paths to use in her escapes from angry marks, and her protection kept Rhehan alive during their first year as a non-Kel.

Having little choice, Rhehan used the skills they had learned to survive as a thief. They avoided wearing gloves, finding the awareness of their bare hands distasteful but useful for the added sensation during heists. They discouraged Liyeusse from dealings with the Kel, though the two encountered Kel at times and Rhehan imitated Kel haptics more than once.

Eight years after being exiled, Rhehan was captured in the middle of a heist by Sergeant Kel Anaz and brought before Judge-errant Kel Shiora. Shiora explained that General Kel Kavarion had stolen a prototype superbomb, the Incendiary Heart, and offered Rhehan reinstatement with the Kel in exchange for using their jaihanar skills to retrieve it. Rhehan accepted, both to contain the weapon and to find out what the Kel had done with Liyeusse.

Rhehan was brought back to their ship, *Flarecat*, where they found Liyeusse bound in a passenger seat with a bruised face. Though furious at this poor treatment of their partner, Rhehan was forced to reveal their Kel past, and Anaz accompanied the two thieves on a tense journey to the Fortress of Wheels. On the way, Rhehan studied recordings of General Kavarion's haptics and finally told Liyeusse the full story of their exile, but omitted Shiora's offer to reinstate them.

Disguised as a Kel, Rhehan infiltrated Kavarion's command ship and reproduced her keycode, an extremely difficult passage from a keyboard concerto. However, Kavarion had been waiting for a jaihanar to arrive, and punched Rhehan in the back of the head, forcing them into their quarters. Guessing Rhehan's identity, Kavarion handed them her gun and went to fetch the Incendiary Heart, explaining that she had stolen it to stop it from being sold to the highest bidder, but that it had already been armed and that she had been looking for a jaihanar to disarm it. She showed Rhehan video of a researcher who had tried to disarm it, but there wasn't enough haptic information even for their skills. Kavarion then asked Rhehan to take the bomb farther from civilized areas before it blew so its cone of effect wouldn't take out an inhabited part of the galaxy, promising to hold off the rest of the Kel to cover for them. Rhehan agreed.

On the way back to *Flarecat*, Anaz ambushed Rhehan. After triggering her holographic mask to Kavarion's face, throwing Anaz off her stride by appearing as a higher-ranked Kel, Rhehan shot her and left her alive on Kavarion's command ship. They found Liyeusse unconscious and tied up again, with a bloody welt on her head and two broken ribs, and shook with rage as they revived her, untying her and explaining the situation. Liyeusse used the *Flarecat's* stealth system to slip away from Kavarion's fleet, which had meanwhile been attacked by a waiting Kel fleet. Despite a stealth malfunction and pursuit by a flight of Kel, they made it far enough to launch the Incendiary Heart away in a capsule, where it would destroy a region of stars but no inhabited worlds.

With stealth back up and the battlefield behind them, Rhehan removed the Kel gloves Kavarion had given them, understanding that what they had now mattered more to them than returning to the Kel, and assured Liyeusse that though they hadn't been paid for this job and would be hunted for their part in the Heart's loss, they'd been on the run together before and could do it again.

## Trivia

* Though Rhehan was a cadet at the time of their exile, Shiora called them "Kel Rhehan," indicating that cadets of that time period gained the Kel name before graduating.
* Rhehan hates museums and has no sense of color theory.
* Rhihan and Liyeusse use a private sign language to talk unobserved.