III

The room slid into view as the Zabrak opened his eyes. Pale orange walls, yellow doorframes. A wavering, as if he needed to blink; water on a bedside table at his eye level. He could tell by how heavy his limbs felt that he had been asleep for a long time.

"Ciaràn Surin." Voices he did not recognize, speaking a name he did not know. He opened his eyes once more, glimpsed faces. They meant nothing.

Except for one.

He remembers—he does not know the name. Bright one, teacher-protector-jester. The name of this person is Yoda, and he does not know that, yet he feels its meaning.

Once, when the Zabrak was very young, Yoda sat at the end of his bed, his stubby, clawed hands filled with ribbons…

Yoda flicked his wrist to reveal that the ribbons were a toy, or a simple weapon; a length of supple chain decorated with the waving cloth. The boy reached up, caught the end of the chain in his fist. Connected now to Yoda by the length of ribbon-decked chain, the Zabrak tugged, fascinated by the swaying bands of cloth and the way they concealed, then revealed, the shining metal.

Yoda gave a sort of growl or purr. "No, Ciaràn. Hold too tight do not."

But the want he felt was all the argument he needed, and want did not need to be said because he felt it so insistently. He pulled harder, sinking away from the physical appearance of the ribbon to grasp its molecules and atoms with the Force. So it came as a close shock when the bauble split. The ribbons dropped limp onto the bed, while links of chain burst apart and rang like tiny bells as they struck the walls and floor. The Zabrak's eyes widened.

"Hold too tight do not, young one." Yoda's lantern-eyes glowed as he shook his head. "Attachment, to loss leads."

The young Zabrak closed his eyes.

A new memory, a few years later. A pack of seven-or-eight year-old Padawans sat in a circle around Master Yoda, jostling for space on the mats. He remembered Twi'leks, Rodians, humans, all members of his Clan.

Yoda silenced them with a quiet question. "What is our Temple made of, hmm?"

Answers were hastily volunteered. "Ferrocrete!"

"Steel!"

"The Force!"

Yoda laughed at that last one, a quiet, mirthful sound that did not mock the Initiate that prompted it. "These things the walls are, but the Temple inside the walls is, hmm?"

Another youngling volunteered, "Air?"
"Hmm," Yoda smiled, filling the Zabrak with as much a sense of satisfaction as if he had answered the question correctly himself. Yoda said, "Build we do with matter, but use we do, the nothingness inside."

They meditated then, trying to find the nothingness to use within themselves.

The next memory was the strongest, the most recent and comfortable. Lightsabers flashed, blue and white, in front of him. The pressure of the intersecting fields strained the sinews of his hands. He retreated under his opponent's onslaught, spinning the silver staff lightsaber before him to serve as a shield. His opponents fanned out, Master Jinn breathing hard and Master Drallig flinty-eyed.

The Zabrak is good at this. He associates it with praise; associates his name, Ciaràn, with praise. He slipped aside, placed Master Qui-Gon between himself and the more skillful Master Drallig. But he was standing at the edge of the elevated platform now, unable to move backwards.

Master Drallig held up a hand, a flash of human-pale, sinewy palm. "Enough."

Qui-Gon and Ciaràn turned off their lightsabers, bowed to one another with a swishing of brown cloaks. Ciaràn looked out at the classroom full of younglings whom they had been doing the practice bout in front of. He smiled apologetically down at the boy who he had nearly stepped on, while Drallig told them about fighting multiple opponents, explaining the strategies that Ciaràn had used. They boy's smile in return was fearless.

Throughout his Jedi training, Ciaràn had worked with Drallig almost as much as with Qui-Gon. He trusted them, could recall one thousand times in which they had earned his respect and loyalty.

These memories showed what Ciaràn saw as the qualities of the ideal Jedi; nonattachment; ability to achieve a state of nothingness in mind and therefore more clearly see meaning; and martial skill. He strove for and pondered these. They drove him.

They sent him to sleep at night, and woke him up.

He woke up.

"When wake he does, be there you should," Yoda had said. "As if he is waking from a fever it is."

And so, Qui-Gon stood where he did not want to be, at the door to the room in which the Sith recovered from the Council's digging through his mind. Qui-Gon kept to the doorjam, his hands folded in his sleeves, like a nervous Initiate waiting for a reprimand. He mentally shook himself and approached the bed as the Sith's—Ciaràn's, he told himself, that is his name now, if it hasn't always been—conscious quickly stirred him out of sleep.

His eyes opened. The spidering tattoos following the muscle lines of his face seemed to point to those eyes, the irises ugly with splotches of orange, yellow, and golden-brown. Qui-Gon searched for words. The Council was supposed to have reprogrammed the Sith. He would remember Qui-Gon.

And yet the Jedi wondered whether the conditioning would work.

The Sith sat up, head bowed even as he looked around the room alertly. His eyes locked on Qui-Gon's, and for a moment the Jedi had to wonder whom he meant as he murmured, "Master."

Darth Sidious waited for the droid to show itself. Although it looked like a protocol droid, C-3PX did not sound like one. It walked on soft treads, designed for sneaking up on whomever it had been ordered to assassinate.

The Sith Lord had been tracking the Scimitar since its cloaking device had turned off when it entered the skyways of Corsuscant. He knew that Darth Maul was not aboard. The droid had done the piloting; that was one of its functions.

"Where is your master, C-3PX?" Sidious asked.

The droid shuffled to his side, light gleaming off its golden skull except for where the plate-metal X had been stapled to the finish. This droid did not bandy words, and nor, Sidious knew, could it lie. "Sir, he was captured by the Jedi."

Sidious did not respond, although an angry sigh tried to work its way through his clenched teeth. He did not like to show that circumstances had been unforeseen to him, even in company as prosaic as a droid that he had given to his apprentice long ago. He turned, began to walk up one of the floating hallways which had been installed in the Works since Darth Maul's training began. The droid followed, its otherwise undetectable footsteps sending small white ripples through the lightscreen material of the floor.

"Return to the Infiltrator and conserve your power," Sidious said, dismissing C-3PX. He would need the droid no longer.

Sidious' sphere of influence extended, albeit through third-and-fourth-parties, into the Jedi Temple itself. It was one of the weaknesses of Force users setting themselves up as an organization with many members; they required support from mundane individuals and groups; suppliers of food, of electricity, of transportation of goods. Beings there were easy to bribe and would never trace those bribes back to someone called Sidious.

From them he could gather information about how the Jedi had managed his apprentice. They would not kill Darth Maul, he did not think, and so Maul might kill a few of them before the episode was over, which Sidious could not see as a detriment. It was amusing to think of how twitchy the apprentice would be, set down suddenly onto the killing field he had always dreamed of. (Sidious had fostered those dreams professionally, engrained them into Maul's thoughts since before the Zabrak knew a name to call himself) . Equally interesting was the question of whether the Jedi would stop trying to get information about Sidious and the Sith out of Maul before the apprentice's resilience to either psychic intrusions or torture killed him themselves.

C-3PX turned and moved off, leaving Sidious to continue on himself.

Darth Maul was not, in fact, Sidious' priority, although C-3PX would never have known. It was the boy whose Force presence Maul had described as a "bright beacon" who really interested him; the Jedi had gained a Force user to their party on Tatooine, and Sidious felt with little uncertainty that it was the Chosen One whose life Darth Plageus had set in motion decades ago. The Jedi thought that their Prophecy had brought him to them, and it had been merely the machinations of the dark side.

That boy and Darth Maul were now in relatively close quarters, and this Sidious needed to keep an eye on. If the boy was the Chosen One, such a live wire should not be in his vulnerable presence for long, not if Sidious' schemes for him went as he wished them to.

He had planned all along for the boy to be picked up by the Jedi ; it would have been foolish not to. Statistically, it was one hundred or more to one that Sidious would have found the boy instead of some Jedi Watchman, and even longer odds when the amount of planets in the galaxy were added to the equation. Sidious needed to be on Coruscant for the political part of his rise to power, and so that was where Darth Maul's training took place—and that, the site of the Jedi's Great Temple, was exactly where he wanted the Chosen One to be.

As natural as walking, Sidious sank into the Force.

He knew that it would be of no avail to try to sense the Jedi's activities. The neutral Force flowed around their bastion like fast-flowing water around a rock, and within that split stream, they exuded light. Like a firewall on the HoloNet, the Temple resisted his attempts to gather information from within it. He could not break this shield, but he could counter it with one of his own, the slowly growing cloud of the dark side which he had set into motion long ago. It would sweep the psychic byways of the planet and beyond, striking the Jedi with as much blindness as the nexus their Temple sat on inflicted on him.

But although learning about the Jedi in their Temple was not best done through the Force, he was still tightly bound to his apprentice. He reached along the channels specific to the tie between them, searching—

He found glimmers of familiarity—intent, rage, Maul's sundry signatures in his mind. But they were purposeless, not escalated. It was unlikely that he was in any sort of action. If only Sidious could have seen more clearly he could have known whether the apprentice was asleep or awake.

But he could not, even as he concentrated all of his considerable Force faculties on that simple task. His thoughts slipped away from Maul, and in a moment he realized why. It was as if the apprentice's mind were cut off from his body, were disconnected from the world. Like but unlike unconsciousness.

This needed considering. Sidious eased out of his immersion in the Force as he entered the chamber equipped for secure communication. He was angry, and the being he was going to contact first would be lucky to come away from this contact alive, if there was any imperfection or protest in it.

But Sidious would find out what had happened on Tatooine.