Kaiden didn't understand why his father was so angry. After the first dream, Darth Vader had taken Kaiden back to his room and left, after comforting him, and hadn't been seen since.
Kaiden knew it was something to do with his dream, but he couldn't understand what was so important that his father hadn't told him.
Even when Kaiden had dreamt again of the boy the next night, Vader had not opened the door.
After two nights of not much sleep, Kaiden was tired. He went to bed the second the Coruscanti sun disappeared over the horizon, hoping desperately that the Force would allow him to rest.
Two boys were running down a long corridor, with fear evident on their faces. A door opened as they walk past, and a man walked out holding a long, blood soaked whip. He looked down at the boys, surprised.
'Trying to escape, are you? Well, I'll show you what happens to little brats that try to escape,' he said, before laughing and cracking the whip.
The younger boy moved in front of the older one.
'Pyro, run,' he yelled. 'Tell the others to get ready, I'll catch up, but if I'm not there in ten minutes, go.'
The older boy hesitated. The younger one glared at him. A huge gust of wind picked the older boy up and put him down a few metres away. He took one last look back, and then ran.
Kaiden woke up and sighed. The dream was nothing compared to the one from the previous night, when he had seen the boy being tortured and half killed, just to see how much he could take before he collapsed. It did seem to take an extraordinary time for the pain to get to the boy, though, which was probably a result of whatever else had happened to him, even though he couldn't have been any older than Kaiden.
Kaiden wondered what was going to happen to the boy. The guy who attacked him had a whip, and Kaiden had seen what a whip could do to people through the previous night's dream.
Kaiden thought for a second that the Emperor might be sending the dreams to test him somehow, and maybe his father was injured from fighting him again.
Then his father walked into his room, completely unharmed, and looked at Kaiden expectantly.
Do you want to see the dream again? Kaiden thought.
Vader nodded.
Kaiden sighed and lowered his mental shields.
Emperor Palpatine was quite possibly in the best mood that he had been in for five years. So, when Lord Vader came to speak with him about the cloned brat having nightmares, he was actually willing to listen.
When Vader described the dream to him, however, his bright mood was soon spoiled.
"I will look into it, Lord Vader," Palpatine promised, smiling. He meant it, too. He just didn't believe that Lord Vader would agree with his methods.
"Thank you, my Master," Vader said. He bowed and turned to leave.
"Lord Vader?" The Emperor called after him.
"Yes, Master?" Vader answered, turning around.
"Do you know anything of the project that I have started on Canthion?" he asked.
"Not much, Master," Vader said, clearly wondering where Palpatine was going with this sudden question.
"What do you know?" Palpatine asked.
"The project was begun just after the formation of the Empire and it was researching ways to speed up the human evolution process. Children were gathered from orphanages and sent to the planet Canthion, where experiments were performed on them. About five years ago, almost two hundred children escaped and are now roaming the galaxy by themselves," Vader recited mechanically.
It was obvious from his tone that he did not agree with what had been done to the children.
"Good. Now, about fifty of the escapees have been recaptured or killed, but there are still more than hundred and fifty of them at large. They are dangerous and most are mentally unstable. I am putting you in charge of finding them, and if possible, recapturing. If not, just kill them," The Emperor said.
Vader bowed.
"As you wish, my master, he said.
Palpatine got off his throne to give Vader a datapad.
"You are dismissed," he said.
Vader bowed once more and left. Palpatine cackled maliciously.
Pyro and Emerald glanced up from their game of Dejarik to see Lucifer walking across the room.
"Lucy, how are you?" Pyro greeted his Captain.
Lucifer looked at Pyro, causing him to back away quickly.
Emerald said nothing.
Pyro looked at Quartz's door, which had remained locked for the past few hours and which right now appeared to be the misfortunate cause of Lucifer's all too apparent anger.
Lucifer resumed walking towards the door as soon as he saw that Pyro wasn't going to say anything else that was unbelievably stupid. Quartz happened to walk out of the room at that exact moment and when he saw Lucifer, he tried to run, though how he was planning to get anywhere by running past people on a spaceship with small rooms and narrow hallways, no one knew.
Lucifer grabbed Quartz as the smaller boy ran past, threw him against the wall and began to choke him.
Emerald stood up, knocking the Dejarik board over. Pyro looked at it and whimpered sadly.
"Lucifer," she shouted, enraged.
Lucifer ignored her and started going through Quartz's pockets until he found a datapad, which he threw to Pyro.
After Pyro, who hadn't quite managed to catch the datapad, had picked it up off the floor, he turned it on and read it.
Pyro looked at Quartz with an expression of rage on his face that had previously been associated with only Lucifer.
"You traitorous, ungrateful little bastard," Pyro snarled.
Suddenly, they all felt the ship come out of Hyperspace.
Quartz grinned and suddenly became transparent. He disappeared through the wall. Lucifer cursed and ran into Quartz's room to find a blaster pointed at him.
"Why bother killing me, Lucy, I already told them," said Quartz in a superior tone that Lucifer had never heard the smaller boy use before.
"Maybe I won't kill you, you're exactly the same as all the rest of us, they'll do it for me," he said.
"They aren't gonna kill you, they'll just take us back to Canthion, with all the rest of them."
"We spent six years trying to leave, why do you want to go back?" Lucifer asked.
"I'm not going back, I told the Empire the locations of Kieran and his entire gang, Harrison, Aaron… the list goes on and on. I must have saved them years of searching, they wouldn't send me back there," Quartz answered.
"Quartz, before tonight, I didn't believe anyone could be that stupid, not even Pyro," Lucifer said.
The aforementioned Pyromaniac's voice came over the intercom.
"Lucifer, they're here, what the kreth am I supposed to do, oh, Force, is that the Executor? We're all gonna die, we're all gonna die!"