Echoes

by inwardtransience

The Jedi thought that, by turning their greatest enemy into an unwitting assassin, they could grasp victory from the jaws of defeat, and safeguard the Republic, the democratic and egalitarian principles at its foundation, for future generations. Really, they should have just killed her.

10. Taris — V

Hi. O_O

Notes at the end.

---

The girl was here again.

It would be difficult to miss her. Most Jedi, they stood in the force as sieves in a river, the Force flowing through them with no resistance. Oh, the analogy wasn't perfect — they did carry their power with them, glowing to her senses like an overcharged battery, but the impression she got was one overwhelmingly passive. Jedi, for the most part, were a sort of being fundamentally excised of will, allowing themselves to be touched or to be moved, not through any motivation of their own, but by the nebulous will of the Force.

Which was, of course, delusional. It astounded Kreia, still after all these years, how firmly people believed something like the Force was even capable of having a will of its own. They were listening to an echo, searching for meaning outside of themselves, the likelihood that they were hearing their own voices somehow never occurring to them.

But young Lesami was different. She was powerful, yes, it would be impossible to not notice. So hot Kreia could feel her from near the opposite end of the library, burning so bright, only a handful of Jedi she'd ever met could compare. She was powerful, but that wasn't what made her different, no. Most Jedi were passive, their presence in the Force smooth, soft. This girl, very distinctive, she was focused, sharp, an intensity about her that was impossible to miss, a low-boiling passion thick through every inch of her soul.

She'd been this way when she'd first come to Coruscant — must be five years now, Kreia lost track so easily — and she hadn't changed. Most children, when they came to the Temple their edges were gradually worn away, focus blunted and will softened, until they were as passive and empty as the majority of their Order. Some few exceptions, this girl among them, something in them rejected the influence of their teachings, became only harder, sharpening to a keen intensity none in their presence could ignore. It was an itch on the mind, a tingle on the skin, instinct to look, something here deserved attention.

A subtle sense of danger, most would say. She believed it was somewhat more complex than that.

Kreia had noticed her, sitting alone in the library, quite often of late. She'd noticed, because Jedi her age only rarely spent this much time reading alone, their attentions were often elsewhere. And on today of all days...

Well. Kreia found herself curious.

By the time she was finished typing out her report on the condition of this week's batch of holocrons, the girl was still sitting there. Deciding there was nothing particularly pressing to occupy her time, Kreia crossed the length of the empty library, coming to hover over the girl's shoulder. "I'm surprised to find you here, Apprentice."

Lesami twitched, turning to glance over her shoulder. "Should I not be?"

"I'm sure I couldn't say. 'Should' implies obligation, and I am not in a position to be familiar with your obligations. I expected you to be elsewhere — 'should' has nothing to do with it."

For a brief moment, the girl stared up at her, that sharply-honed focus tuned on her with all the intensity of a lightsaber in her face. "You're Kreia, aren't you? The blind Archivist."

Kreia huffed, her shoulders twitching with her breath. Slipping around to sit at the opposite side of the table, she said, "Is that what they call me these days? I can't say I'm surprised that I've been reduced to my profession and my disability, but I would think, with all the effort we put into educating them, Jedi would have more creativity than that."

Her lips twitched, the air singing with her amusement. Painfully precise upper-class Basic twisting with a sarcastic drawl, "They also say you're mad, if that makes you feel better."

"I'm not surprised by that either." A thin smile pulling at her lips, Kreia leaned a little over the table. "I've found, especially in our circles, that madness is used less as a descriptor and more a pejorative. People who you do not understand, people who make you think, who make you question the foundations of what you believe you know. People who make you uncomfortable, these people are mad. No, I'm not at all surprised they say I'm mad."

Lesami said nothing for a moment, simply staring back at her, something deep in that brilliant abyss of her mind churning away. "How do you get around, anyway? I've always wondered about that."

"Are you saying you couldn't find your way around the Temple with your eyes closed?"

"Well, yes, I suppose I could. How do you read, though? I'm sure I couldn't do that."

She smiled. "Oh, it's not complicated, I'm sure you'll figure it out. But I didn't come here to talk about me. Believe me, I've had quite enough of talking about me some decades ago." The lectures she'd gotten back in her twenties were quite simply innumerable — she hadn't dealt with the reality of her rapidly-fading sight well at all, at the time, she'd had a few difficult years. Even now, decades later, she tried to avoid the other Masters whenever possible.

More than on her face — fine contours like that were very hard to pick up, Kreia never had gotten the hang of it — she felt Lesami close off, her sense of her almost seeming to contract, focusing inward. "I don't much feel like talking about me either."

"That's a curious assumption to make. I am an Archivist. Why should anything but your reading material be any of my concern?"

"I honestly have no idea, but the first thing you said to me was that you're surprised to find me here. That implies something else." Lesami paused, just for a second. "Besides, you're not a general Archivist. You manage the restricted holocrons, which I'm not even allowed to touch. I doubt you have any idea what I've been reading."

Kreia shrugged — all of that was correct. "Regardless, you're in my domain right now, Apprentice. You can either submit to my curiosity, or you can get out of my library."

"As you say, Master." There was a hint of sarcasm on the title, a tinge of bitterness.

She felt herself smiling again. "Correct me if I'm wrong — as much of my days as I spend communing with holocrons, I find I lose track of time quite easily. But I was under the impression there's a Proving today."

Lesami turned somehow sharper, a dark edge threading through her. "I didn't want to participate."

"At your age? I find that hard to believe." Lesami twitched, moved to respond, but Kreia cut out ahead of her. "As much as Jedi may think we can strip ourselves of all of our irrational impulses, the drive toward competition is instinctual to most sapient species. Especially among adolescents, it's unavoidable. And that is not the only reason your age is a factor. How many initiates are there left in your peer group?"

"Not many." The words were tense, thick, ground out from between clenched teeth.

"No, I wouldn't imagine there are. An initiate only has so long to attract a master before Reassignment begins to wonder about their future, and most your age have already moved on. The entire purpose of the Provings is to arrange for Jedi to encounter potential padawans. One would think an initiate of your age would be taking every opportunity available to her."

"I am taking every opportunity available to me."

"I'm afraid I don't see how."

For long moments, Lesami didn't answer. She simply sat there, her breath thick and heavy, tingling waves of irritation cresting against Kreia's face. Finally, she calmed somewhat, her voice consciously flat. "Our instructors have already been trying to brace me for failure. They don't come out and say what they're saying, of course, but they're not as subtle as they think they are. I'm not going to get picked, everyone knows it.

"The Jedi Archives is the greatest single concentration of knowledge in the entire bloody galaxy. The way I see it, there is no better use for the little time here I have left."

"Hmm." Kreia let that hang for a moment, her fingers idly tapping at the table. "Members of the Service Corps are permitted access to our library."

"I don't plan on staying. They don't pay as much attention to them as they do proper Jedi. Once I've washed out, I'm going back home."

"That's a curious thing to be admitting to a Master of the Order."

Lesami snorted. "Like you care. Besides, it doesn't matter. The second they send me off Coruscant there's nothing the Order can do to stop me from walking away."

The girl wasn't wrong about that — or, at least, mostly. The Jedi did keep watch over their own members, out of a questionable sense of duty to the rest of the galaxy. It was a constant low-level dread among the leaders of their Order, that one of the many beings they'd trained might turn their backs, fall to the Dark, and carve a swath of death and chaos through the galaxy before they could be stopped. It wasn't unheard of for a Jedi to leave, and be allowed to leave, though the Order always kept an eye on them when they did, usually for the rest of their lives, often did their best to get them to change their mind.

The more volatile cases, those the Order feared were already too close to the Dark Side, those were captured and brought back to the Temple, where they were essentially imprisoned until the Council felt they were no longer a danger. Some were held for the rest of their natural lives.

The Jedi did not have a perfectly clean record when it came to managing their own dissenters.

It was true, however, that the Service Corps was watched much less closely. The vast majority of the former initiates there were ones that hadn't the ability to finish their training. There were a few who simply hadn't the temperament, but for the most part they were considered a lesser potential danger. While it was very rare for a Jedi to walk away from the Order proper, the Service Corps bled former initiates at a non-negligible rate.

Considering how obviously powerful Lesami was, Kreia was certain she would be more tightly managed than most. But, given her family's influence and her personal inclinations, she didn't doubt Lesami would be gone in a matter of weeks.

And that would be quite unfortunate.

"And why do you think that is?"

There was a short pause, Lesami too disoriented by the subject change to answer immediately. "I... What?"

"You are quite certain nobody will want you for a padawan. Why is that?"

The girl's mouth worked in near-silence for a moment. "Ah, well, I'm right, aren't I?"

"That's not an answer."

"It doesn't matter why. I'm not wrong."

"Now, now, Apprentice," Kreia said, her lips tilting into a smirk, "I know you don't believe that."

Kreia couldn't see such things, of course, but she felt rather confident in her assumption that Lesami was rolling her eyes. "I would make a terrible Jedi. Everybody says so. No Knight or Master has even showed the barest hint of interest for very long at all, I've been told multiple times to prepare myself for disappointment. Even the other initiates know I'm not going anywhere."

"Why?"

"You're going to have to be more specific than that."

"Why do you think you'd make a terrible Jedi?"

"Well, I..." The girl cut off, a shiver of irritation rippling through her. "Isn't that bloody obvious?"

"I don't see that it is."

"Do you really think that, or are you messing with me on purpose?"

"Are those mutually exclusive?"

"You're bloody irritating, you know that?"

Kreia smiled. "You're not the first to say so. I am curious, though. What is it that makes you think you'd make a terrible Jedi?"

"Well, I just..." Lesami trailed off, shifting in her seat a little, her mind stuttering. "I'm just, I'm not very much like... Why are you even asking me this anyway, what do you care?"

"I'm just curious."

The girl forced out a frustrated scoff. But, after a moment muttering under her breath in a language Kreia didn't recognize, she did answer. "I just can't... I've tried to, to take all this... I don't know what the right word is. It just doesn't...click, for me. All this Jedi stuff. I've tried — believe me, I've tried — but none of it, really, sits right, for me. I can't be what they want me to be, I, I just can't. And I can't fake it well enough to slip by, either.

"I mean, most of the actual...Force, stuff, that I can do. Some of it was hard at first — my swordsmanship still isn't quite up to par — but almost anything to do with the Force directly comes easy to me, it always has. Shite, I've been using it here and there since I was toddler, it's not difficult. I didn't even have to be taught how to do most sense and control abilities, and the rest is easy too.

"It's everything else that's the problem. If being a Jedi were just a matter of picking up a bunch of magic powers, there wouldn't even be a question, would there?"

No, there wouldn't. Even Kreia, who had very little contact with the other Masters, and even less with the initiates, knew a fair bit about Lesami Revas. She doubted the girl realized how much she was talked about behind closed doors. There were always the less flattering comments about her temperament and her dedication, of course, but, among her generation, she was almost universally believed to be the single most powerful in the Force.

An impression Kreia couldn't disagree with. It could be hard to tell for certain at rest — one's ability to manipulate the Force highly depended on focus and clarity of mind — but even just sitting this close to the girl was...well, interesting. It was a feeling on the air, a sharp yet subtle heat, like a warm mist that set her lungs tingling, energy spreading through her veins with each breath, tickling at her skin. She wasn't the only being Kreia had ever met to have such an effect on her environment, but Lesami certainly was special. Not unique, but precious all the same.

Of course, most powerful Jedi lost this...intensity of presence, as they trained. Jedi were bred to be passive, to fold into their environment, until nearly all semblance of individuality, of personality was washed away into the ether. This girl, however, only seemed to be growing more willful.

It was...interesting.

"What does it mean to be a Jedi, then? The part that you feel you're so bad at."

"Please don't make me recite the bloody Code again."

"Which part do you mean? The Code has been expanded and amended so many times over the millennia, if I were to have you recite the whole thing we might be here for a while. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a compelling use of my time."

She didn't make a sound, but Kreia caught the shiver of amusement echoing across the table.

"But, why not, let's look at the Code for a moment. You're familiar with the Three Pillars, I'm sure."

Kreia couldn't be sure, but from the way the girl droned, "Yes," she had the feeling Lesami was rolling her eyes. "Self-discipline, Responsibility, and Service."

"Yes. You've had the various strictures forced into your head all too well over the years, I'm sure, we needn't get into those details. But, tell me, in your analysis of the governing ethics of our Order, have you noticed any...say, contradictions?"

There was a hard burst of surprise, hitting like a slap to the face. "Well, yes. They're everywhere, if you know how to look."

"Like what?"

Lesami let out a sigh, a hand coming up to run through her hair. "Okay, the obvious one that always gets me, the call to Deny Arrogance. People fail that one all the time. For one thing, it's mutually exclusive with the call to Deny Curiosity. That one's usually explained as, don't use the Force to get into people's heads and steal their secrets just because. But, if that's what they'd wanted to say, they could have said something about respecting a being's privacy, or something like that, but that's not what they say. They say, Deny Curiosity. On the surface, it makes sense why they might use those words — curiosity is an emotion of a sort, even a passionate one. There are many people who are driven by curiosity, their desire to learn, to know, directs their entire lives. If we are to reject passion of all sorts, it would make sense to also reject curiosity.

"But there's an inherent problem with that: in denying curiosity one embraces arrogance. There is an implication that pursuing further understanding of whatever situation you're confronted with is not necessary, that your current understanding of society and how it functions is sufficient. In dictating that Jedi remain passive, not investigate, the Code is implying that a Jedi always knows everything they need to know already. I cannot imagine anything more arrogant than that.

"And, furthermore, we're told to Honour the Council. The leadership of the Order, they are to be respected and, more to the point, obeyed, at all times, without question. Sure, from the perspective of your average, individual Jedi, this could be considered part of Denying Arrogance. But what about the Masters on the Council? Are they Denying Arrogance? No, this law is essentially claiming that the High Council is infallible! Are those twelve Masters somehow different than the rest of us, somehow enlightened in a way we simple mortals can't comprehend? The very idea is ridiculous! They're just people, like everyone else!

"And one of the calls to Service, we are commanded to Defend the Weak. This is at the core of what a Jedi is, you could argue — I've read past Jedi making that very argument over and over, one way or another. But, at the same time, we are told to serve the Republic, and to respect its laws. As though the Republic isn't a fallible institution led by corruptible beings. Okay, I knew these people, growing up — my homeworld's Senator is my...third cousin, or something like that, his daughter and I were often forced together for one reason or another. Oh, not the current Senator, I mean the previous— Whatever, it doesn't matter, I actually know this one too. All the powerful families on Shawken know each other, really, high society works like that on most Republic worlds.

"Anyway, I'm not saying there aren't any good people at the top. There are, there's a long tradition of selfless public service in the Republic. But most of them? The Senate is filled with self-interested cronies and corporate sycophants, a corrupt, incestuous cesspool of the wealthy and the privileged, the vast majority care nothing for the common people. Oh, they toss out enough scraps to keep the machine running, to make sure the plebs are content to remain in their place, but beyond that? No, so long as their own power and their own wealth is maintained, the ruling elite of the Republic, the people who make the actual decisions as to how this galaxy is run, they don't care, they don't care about the common citizenry, not even a little bit. That they should hardly even occurs to them.

"Serving the Republic, Honouring its Laws, these are directly opposed to our call to Defend the Weak. It's also arrogant, when you think about it..."

Well, that was a rather longer, more impassioned rant than Kreia had expected. Lesami's voice had gotten rather heated by the end — Kreia recognized the way she pulled away as a breathing exercise, the girl belatedly trying to calm herself. Surprising, that she had gotten carried away like that, few initiates could stay here for more than a year or two without having greater self-control imposed on them.

She knew any other Master would chastise the girl for that display. But Kreia felt herself smiling, her throat tight with ecstatic laughter she forced herself to hold. The girl's righteous frustration had had her burning even brighter, with an intensity that was almost deafening, but that wasn't it, not really. It was something at once far simper and far more significant.

Lesami cared. How long had it been, since Kreia had spoken with any Jedi who actually cared? About anything, really — Jedi were told not to care, that to have any investment in nearly anything at all was an early step on the path to the Dark Side. It made them empty, soulless things, they might as well be droids. It was the issue at the heart of the very faults Lesami had just pointed out. After all, if one didn't care, it was easy to pass off the injustices of the Republic, the hypocrisies and failures of the Order. If one didn't care, it didn't matter, nothing truly mattered.

It was an empty life, to be a Jedi, almost pathologically nihilist in the denial of any purpose, any meaning. Honestly, she even had trouble understanding it sometimes.

Finding a Jedi, even one still only an initiate, who still cared, who refused to let herself be made empty... Well, it was refreshing. She'd thought the Order had changed, over these last few decades, that Jedi like herself were increasingly a thing of the past. It was something of a relief, to see the new generation hadn't been entirely brainwashed. Even if it were just a handful, that was still something.

"I assume you are familiar with the works of Entari Suvash." The girl was Shawkenese, after all, and well-educated, she'd certainly at least heard the name before.

Lesami twitched. "Ah, yes. And, kun si, by the way, Entari kun si Suvasha. If you use both names, you have to say the whole thing. And you have to put the name of the House in the attributive, when speaking of a person. It's, er, Late Alsakani. It's sounds weird if you don't include it."

Perhaps to a native of Shawken — Kreia honestly had trouble keeping straight if she were supposed to be using si, or lai, or however many possibilities there were, she didn't actually know. For that matter, she'd been under the impression only the ancient, vestigial nobility on a tiny handful of worlds still observed the 'proper' form anyway. But that didn't really matter right now. "Have you read The Hubris of Dogma?"

"No."

Her lips pulling into a smile, Kreia said, "Perhaps you should. It might lend a certain understanding of why I believe you will be, in fact, the exact sort of Jedi we need. I, for one, will be quite glad to have you. Unless you have any objection, I shall arrange to say as much to the Council as soon as possible."

It took a handful of seconds for the girl to put together exactly what Kreia meant by that. Not too surprising — Lesami had, after all, been quite thoroughly convinced no Master would ever take her.

But then, Kreia was hardly an ordinary Jedi Master.

---

"I still think this is a terrible idea."

Cina shot the irritating Jedi a look. She choked back the first rude response that came to mind, then the second, and ultimately ended up not saying anything at all.

They were holed up in one of the kids' hideouts, watching the bank of display screens plastering the walls in a corner of the room. (Mission and Zaalbar really had managed to salvage or steal an impressive wealth of equipment.) A few of them were filled with lines of code, scrolling by far quicker than Cina could read, most of the rest false-colour video feeds, piped in from cameras in the upper city maintained by local law enforcement, a system Mission had apparently cracked when her age had still been in the single digits. One in the middle was in natural colour — but low resolution and distorted, the disorienting, twisted view from a fisheye lens — the feed from a hidden camera Kandosa was wearing, transmitted back to them through his com. Kandosa was approaching the Sith military building even now, the security officers at the towering durasteel entrance hardly even giving him a second look.

While Cina had some incentive to not antagonise Shan more than she had to, Mission didn't have the same inhibition. "Well," she said, her voice sliding into a venomous drawl, "I guess it's lucky you're not the one calling the shots, ain't it?"

Cina sighed. "Could we maybe not get into an argument in the middle of an op?"

"Hey, I'm not the one coming off like—"

Kandosa's voice, hissing slightly with artifacts from Mission's encryption, cut in. "Ad'ika, I'd sooner have you watching the skies for me. We can argue with the Jedi later."

"Yeah, fine, whatever." She said it in a low, mutinous groan, but Mission focused on the flood of data flicking past just the same.

With another glance at Shan, Cina nodded to herself. Kandosa, Mission, and Asyr had everything handled — this was as good a time as any. "Okay, I have to take care of something else. Mission, tell Asyr she's up. Shan," she said, nodding toward the opposite end of the single-room flat, "can I have a minute?"

A reluctant sort of grimace crossed Shan's face, but she nodded. Casting a last furtive, disapproving glance over the bank of displays, she turned smartly around on her heel and stalked away. Trailing behind her, Cina was brought up short when Shan abruptly spun back around. Nearly ran into her, probably would have knocked her right over — there was something stiff and brittle about the Jedi's posture, clearly anxious about something. "If this is to be another smug lecture, I can tell you now I am not in the mood."

Cina couldn't help a little smirk. "That's my line."

That was almost real heat on that glare — odd, she'd been under the impression Jedi weren't permitted anger. There is no emotion, and all that.

"Anyway, no, this isn't another lecture. We need to talk about something else."

"Whatever it is, I'm sure it can wait for a moment less—"

"I know what the Order did to my mind."

That shut the Jedi up. Shan cut off instantly, her mouth frozen in mid-syllable. Held preternaturally still, she didn't even seem to be breathing, the little colour she did have in her face slowly draining away.

At least she was taking this bloody seriously. That was almost gratifying, to be honest, even Carth had ceased treating this...issue of hers as the existential crisis it was. (Granted, she tried to ignore it most of the time herself, not the point.) "I know I'm not Cianen Hayal, she probably never existed. I've figured out I was a Jedi. And I'm pretty sure you know exactly who I used to be."

A crack shot through Shan's statuesque stillness, a narrow frown creasing her brow. She twitched, her mouth working silently for a second, finally finding her voice. "You don't..." She cleared her throat. "How much do you remember?"

Cina shrugged. "Virtually nothing. I know I was born to a wealthy Shawkenese family. I vaguely remember causing a stir one vacation, accidentally threw my cousin across the room. I was...eight or nine at the time, something like that. I have the feeling I didn't stay very long after that, I was sent away to the Jedi around then, but I don't remember anything about any of it. It's mostly just...impressions, feelings. I don't even know my own name. You know, though, I'm certain you do."

"There's no way you could possibly know that for certain."

Withholding the urge to roll her eyes, she said, "You're not nearly as subtle as you think you are, Master Jedi. I can tell when someone's afraid of me."

Shan winced, eyes turning from Cina's. She was still another moment, brow heavy, face faintly twitching with some internal argument. "I cannot give you the answers you seek." Cina opened her mouth to argue, but before she could get anything out Shan raised her voice a little, cutting over her. "I cannot. The Masters of the Council on Dantooine have sworn me to secrecy on certain matters. There are things I cannot tell you without their permission."

It took some effort to keep her reaction off her face, enough she probably failed. The Jedi impulse toward secrecy was one anyone who paid attention to galactic affairs at all was well familiar with — having it directed at something that affected her so intimately was... Well, 'irritating' fell short. "That's a crock of shite if I ever heard one."

"I'm not—"

"Oh, I believe you. I just think it's fucking idiotic." Cina pushed out a long sigh, trying to force out as much of the frustration tightening her throat as she could. It didn't work very well, but her voice came out level, at least. "I don't suppose there's anything you can tell me. For starters, what the fuck are the Jedi doing mucking about with their own people's heads? That's a bit much even for them."

Shan hesitated a long moment, eyes bouncing between Cina and the wall at her side. "It's something of an...experiment."

"An experiment? Oh, you better be bloody joking, because if the Jedi rewrote my entire personality as a fucking experiment..."

"Do let me finish. Not that kind of experiment." Her eyes falling closed, Shan paused another few seconds, clearly picking over her words. Cina bit her lip to stop herself from saying anything, trying to force back the fury clawing at her chest.

(It was sort of working — she hadn't punched Shan in the face yet, she thought she was demonstrating an impressive degree of self-control here.)

"It is a common belief among the Jedi," Shan started, slowly, cautiously, her eyes still shut, "that once a person has touched the Dark Side there is no turning back from it. That it... It's a corruptive influence, that once one has surrendered to it it will haunt them forever. Over the millennia, there have been dozens of attempts to redeem fallen Jedi, most of which ended in tragic failure. Even the best cases were...mixed.

"You presented a unique opportunity." Shan took a long, slow breath, shivering a little through the exhale. "You were a Jedi, once. But, years ago now, you left the Order, and ultimately joined the Sith."

Cina felt a single eyebrow start wandering up her forehead.

"During a battle against Republic forces, you were injured, by friendly fire. Severely injured. You were taken into Jedi custody, but it was...undetermined, whether you would ever wake up. There was some significant brain damage, we... The Council elected to... Who you had been was lost anyway, it was believed. Perhaps, if a new identity was constructed from scratch, and implanted into your ruined mind, you would wake up, you would have a second chance. And it worked, obviously."

Pretty story, that. Too bad Shan was lying.

Well, to be entirely fair to the prissy chit, it was possible she was telling what she believed to be the truth — or at least a heavily redacted version of the truth, with the classified bits edited out. Cina couldn't tell one way or the other. It was very clear Shan was dissembling, she was having trouble even getting a full sentence out, but that could be because she was simply trying to explain as much as she could without permission from her damn Council. It was theoretically possible Shan was being as honest as she could possibly be in the situation.

Personally, Cina doubted it, but she would have to work with this woman, at least through the next few days. She was willing to give her as much of the benefit of the doubt as she reasonably could for the time being.

But the story was, quite simply, nonsense. That wasn't how brain damage worked. If a person was brain dead, they were brain dead — the Force might be magic, but she was pretty sure circumventing catastrophic, irreversible neural death by, just...rearranging them, no, that wasn't a thing. Even as far as medical developments in other fields had gotten in recent centuries, playing with a being's brain was still a very complicated proposition. Peripheral neural regeneration was a problem that had been solved millennia ago — pre-spaceflight, in fact — but the structure of the central nervous system was just too finely detailed to reproduce effectively.

Any attempt was as likely to result in an irreversible coma as just leaving the person alone. Best case scenario, the subject would wake up, but would have been made completely insane. And even pulling it off that well would be a bloody miracle.

Perhaps the Jedi could lean on the Force to cheat, but Cina thought that was giving them a bit too much credit. Jedi were magic, not gods.

Not to mention, there were quite obvious holes in the story. If she'd had brain damage severe enough who she'd been was completely irrecoverable, why did she suddenly remember that time she'd magically thrown Desa across the library? Okay, fine, she'd be willing to allow the possibility of an explicit memory here or there surviving, but there was something far more damning: her implicit memory.

Most people who hadn't studied the subject made the mistake of assuming all memory was, just, recollection of events in a person's own life, but it was far more complex than that. A person's skills, knowledge or processes they'd practised to proficiency, those were encoded in the brain in virtually the same way experiential memories were. If brain damage is severe enough to significantly disrupt a person's memory of their own life, it also hits their implicit memory. Patients forget individual words or even entire languages, how to use the most basic technology, even things like how to walk or dress themselves. Rehabilitation from severe head injuries focuses on relearning whatever fundamental life skills have been lost, that's why they usually have such long recovery windows.

But, as far as she could tell, her implicit memory was still intact. The languages she'd never studied, how to use a blaster, history and xenosociology she couldn't remember learning, her unsettling knowledge of organised crime. Granted, she often didn't know she knew these things, but that wasn't counter-evidence. In fact, she felt it might be proof the story was false — there was no reason for Cianen Hayal to know these things, so she didn't know she knew them; but, once some external prompting cued this hidden knowledge, it was recovered in its entirety. That meant the knowledge was still there, the ability to access it was simply repressed.

That implied her old neural structure — which, fundamentally, was the person she'd once been — was still there.

If she'd still needed more proof, there were the...un-Cianen feelings and opinions she had sometimes. There was this little thing called neuroplasticity — the critical consequence of the concept was that a person's brain, at a physical, microscopic level, was gradually shaped by their experiences. A person's cognitive biases and emotional prejudices were hardwired, increasingly as they were relied upon. It wasn't a matter of choice, or self-control, or whatever, one's personality was physically determined by the structure of their brain, which was itself shaped by the experiences that personality led to, in a self-reinforcing cycle that couldn't truly be escaped.

If she had had such catastrophic brain damage, if everything she'd been had been destroyed, that underlying structure would have been destroyed too, everything would have had to have been rebuilt from the ground up. But, she had feelings that didn't match Cianen Hayal's experiences. The intense, near overwhelming hatred for slavery. The...she didn't know what to call it, the peculiar combination of depression and affection Mission's eccentric, sunny cheerfulness often struck her with. That depression itself, a mind-numbing despair that crept up on her when she least expected it, in those quiet moments she had too much time to think. Her disdain for the Republic and the Jedi — sure, Cianen had always been rather political, but something about it was just...wrong, it felt too... It was almost personal, in a way, less a removed frustration with their shortcomings and their corruption, as she should expect, and more an immediate sense of...of disillusionment, of betrayal...

She took herself aback, sometimes, with the strength of feelings she didn't expect to have. It was rather disorienting.

(Though, her opinions on the Republic and the Jedi suddenly made a lot of sense. A certain famous Jedi had been Shawkenese nobility, and they were about the same age — it was quite possible she and Revan had known each other as children, and even more likely their time at the Temple mostly overlapped. Cina would bet her mysterious fortune that she'd been one of the original Revanchists. That bitterness made perfect sense in context.)

Not to mention, she didn't at all act like Cianen Hayal, what she remembered of herself. For all that she did have a bit of a mouth about her — she was somewhat infamous among the grad students attached to her department for her acerbic, sarcastic lectures — she'd always been rather passive when it came to actually doing things. She meant, yes, other people's idiocy would often annoy her, and she wasn't shy about saying so, but it never really occurred to her to take the initiative to remedy their stupid mistakes. She'd never had much interest in doing anything more than puttering about campus, researching and writing and torturing poor, defenceless undergrads. But...

Well, just look at everything she'd done since arriving on Taris. Shan had clearly been horrified Cina had taken charge of their little band of misfits — probably worried she was slowly reverting to her old self, come to think of it. Because it was very much out of character for Cianen, looking back part of her was shocked she'd had the stones to pull off half the shite she'd done. But at the time, it'd...

Dragging Carth around by the nose, charging straight into blasterfire like a crazy person, picking up local strays, plotting to spark a gang war or break a blockade, barking out orders in the middle of a battle even as she formulated alterations to the strategy on the fly, it all... It, it felt natural, like...like she'd been doing this forever, this sort of insanity was just what she did.

The person she'd once been was still in here. She'd just been suffocated under Cianen Hayal, a false personality imposed on her against her will.

By the Jedi.

The Jedi had suppressed everything she had been and replaced it with an identity that suited their needs.

Knowingly.

There was no other explanation. The Jedi had to know neurology better than she did — they did like to claim they were primarily scholars, after all, and it wasn't exactly a subject she'd studied very thoroughly. (She didn't think she had, anyway.) And they had an advantage, they could read minds, they would be able to confirm for a fact there was still someone in here.

Yet they'd forced Cianen Hayal on her anyway.

Those long interviews on Coruscant hadn't been to vet her for an archaeological project they were overseeing. No, they'd been confirming their brainwashing had stuck.

That was assuming there even was an archaeological project they wanted her for — she'd noticed way back on the Spire, before she'd even begun to suspect her own memories were fictional, that there were massive holes in the logic of their story. Chances were that had been a front to deflect her suspicions.

Dantooine, Shan had said it was the Council on Dantooine that had sworn her to secrecy. It'd happened there, she knew it — fuck, it was all too likely certain Jedi on the Council were the very same people who had mind-raped the person she'd once been into oblivion!

Whatever they wanted her for, whatever plans they'd had in mind when they'd attempted to brainwash her, it was to start on Dantooine.

That's why they wanted her on Dantooine. That's why they'd wanted a sizable Jedi escort to get her there — Shan was terrified of her, Cina must have been quite impressive in her time. That's why Shan was still insisting, despite how completely insane everything had gotten, that they head straight there once they were offworld.

The Jedi altered her with a purpose. And whatever it was, it would start on Dantooine.

"Hayal? Are you..."

Cina blinked, focused on Shan again. Shan looked...not scared, no, that word was a little too strong. Wary? Staring at Cina, a shade of anxiety behind her eyes, as though waiting for Cina to explode on her, waiting for...well, something to happen. Cina must have gone a bit blank for a moment, too focused on her own thoughts to pay proper attention to the outside world.

Or, perhaps, Shan was using that Jedi mind-reading of hers, and knew exactly what Cina was thinking. Though, if she were, she'd think Shan should look rather more worried than she did. She was still processing the revelation she'd just gotten, but once the shock wore off, well...

She did need to go to Dantooine. But not for the same reasons Shan needed her to. After all, the Jedi might not be explicitly threatening her, but it would be wise to figure out what they wanted at the very least.

Cina had the very clear feeling that trusting the Jedi ever again would be complete lunacy.

"I'm fine. I just..." Cina trailed off, mulled over what exactly she should say for a moment. Jedi did have that mind-reading thing of theirs, but even when they weren't messing with people's heads actively, it was widely believed that they could evaluate a person's sincerity passively. (That was just folklore, but it didn't feel wrong, which meant her unconscious Jedi instincts were probably on board with that one.) So, it would be a bad idea to lie, but... "It's... This is a lot to take in, all at once. I just need a few moments to process it, is all."

Shan's face softened, any obvious trace of suspicion draining away. "I understand. I shall leave you to your thoughts, if that's what you wish." With a hint of disdain, "I should check back in, make sure everything is going according to plan."

Cina nodded. "If Kandosa gets made, call me over. I have a couple contingencies."

"I will." Shan said it rather reluctantly — again, it was quite obvious any sign of Cina's previous personality resurfacing made her extremely uneasy. But at least she seemed to understand she needed Cina for the moment. That was something. As the Jedi glided her way back across the room, Cina stared at her back, brow twitching with a half-hidden frown.

Honestly, she hadn't thought that conversation would make everything more complicated. She couldn't catch a fucking break these days.

---

"Status."

The synthesized voice sent a chill running up Saul's spine, his posture unconsciously stiffening, enough that one spot above his hip twinged. Automatically, he slid into the mental exercise he'd been taught long ago — thoughts sharpened on a razor focus, no tangents allowed, no extraneous observations or even feeling at all, giving nothing away. He turned away from the curve of the Taris skyline over his head, heels of his boots clicking together, precise and formal. "There are no further updates, my lord. We have heard whisperings that Shan may have been spotted deep in the lower city, but there's been no independent confirmation yet, and we have no leads on her whereabouts."

Alek didn't respond at first, hardly even seemed to blink. Which was, as usual, subtly unnerving. Alek had always been an imposing man, tall and broad-shouldered, rather more bulky than the average Jedi, his focus on the more athletic side of their Order's skills obvious in limbs and chest. He'd only gotten more intimidating over the years, skin turning a sickly white, hairless pate set to an almost eerie glow under the stark white lights of the bridge, the harsh metal that had replaced his jaw cold and gleaming. Just, standing there, staring, still and imposing.

Saul tried not to think about the times he'd seen Alek kill people with a wave of his hand. Letting one's thoughts wander around the more unstable Jedi was generally inadvisable.

Finally, he spoke. It was always vaguely unsettling, his false voice requiring no movement from his half-ruined face, like a statue inexplicably talking at him. "Is that all you have to report?" It could be hard to tell, the synthesizer not quite up to properly emulating human expression, but Saul thought he might have heard a suggestive note.

Trying to ignore his throat slowly going dry, he said, shaking his head slightly, "No, my lord, nothing relevant occurs to me."

"Nothing. Relevant." The movement slow, with conscious weight to it — Alek always had been a melodramatic bastard, hadn't he — he reached into a pocket in those absurdly overdone black and red Sith robes of his, pulled out a datapad. Proffering it, in a low, flat whisper, "Does this seem relevant to you?"

A single glance at the image on-screen and Saul's heart quite nearly jumped out of his chest. Lesami. Looking absurdly like a down-on-her-luck spacer, in worn clothes of cheap synthetic fabrics, hardly even looked like her, save for the way she held herself, sauntering through the bank like she owned the place. Not just a image of Lesami, but the image, the same one Saul had seen before, the one Kanyr had showed him, the angle was the same and—

With a sudden, sharp pain at his temple, the train of thought cut off, Saul wincing before he could stop himself. And Alek was still staring at him, he'd hardly seemed to blink. A sense of dread sinking into his stomach, Saul realized what had just happened.

He knows.

"Sergeant." One of the troopers at Alek's back snapped to attention. "Bring Major Kanyr Sheq to me."

Before Saul could think of a thing to say, the small squad had already left, stomping out of the bridge. He turned back to Alek, internally girding himself. "My lord, if anyone is to be punished for this, it is me. Major Sheq simply did as I ordered her to, there is no reason to—"

"I assure you, Admiral, her fate will be left entirely up to you."

Something about the way the Sith Lord said it struck him with a shiver of unease.

"Notify the fleet to prepare firing solutions."

Saul blinked. "Of course, my lord. The target?"

"Taris."

On instinct, following the rhythm of the conversation, Saul's mouth had already been open when the implication hit. It dropped silently closed again.

He couldn't have heard that right. Saying simply Taris, instead of on Taris, implied he meant to conduct an indiscriminate orbital bombardment. But, but there was no reason to do that! Passing over the horrifying scale of the atrocity he was suggesting they commit — tens of billions of people lived down there — the locals had been nothing but accommodating since they'd arrived. The gangs that plagued the lower city had been a nuisance, of course, but the legitimate government had done everything requested of them to the best of their abilities. This wasn't an occupied Republic world, Taris was a full voting member of the Empire, they couldn't—

"Your Excellency, I beg you to reconsider." It made him feel a little ill using that address — Alek might have forced himself into Lesami's place, but the title had to be confirmed by a full vote of the Assembly, he hadn't bothered — but he did it anyway, hoping it might make Alek more likely to listen. "Neither the planetary administration nor the people of Taris have done anything to provoke such an extreme response."

"Their actions are irrelevant. They cannot escape, either of them. I will have the entire city and everyone in it burned to ash before I risk those two be set loose into the galaxy once again."

"Consider the consequences, Your Excellency, the precedent. Taris is an Imperial world, a full member with a voting delegation to the Assembly. If we do this to one of our own—"

"—the rest will get the message, I'm sure."

Saul's mouth worked in silence for the moment, struck numb by idiotic short-sightedness. "Your Excellency, I—"

"Do you intend to fool me, calling me that?" Alek's eyes had turned sharper, more dangerous, hot with a threat of violence that had Saul choking on his own words. "I'm not so simple as you believe me to be, Admiral. You may be looking at me as you say those words, but it is her I see in your heart."

There was nothing Saul could say to that. It was true: he wasn't Alek's man, never had been. So long as his mind was his own he never would be.

"We'll have to see about that, won't we?"

Despite the potentially mortal danger he knew he was in, Saul felt his own eyes narrow into a glare. "Stop reading my mind."

His face softening slightly, as though with amusement, Alek said, "Prove I can trust you, and maybe I will." Saul didn't like the way he said that much either.

He wouldn't be able to convince Alek to spare Taris, he knew that much already — in any other situation, Alek might listen to reason, but with Lesami down there, no, Alek couldn't let her get away, there was nothing he could do. But, maybe... "Give me a day, my lord. We have thousands of men on the surface, many assigned to this very ship. We need time to recall them."

"No."

"The hit to morale alone would—"

"I want this pathetic excuse for a planet wiped off the face of the galaxy, Admiral. I will accept no delays or half-measures. If you refuse to cooperate, I'll be forced to find someone who will. But—" Just then the squad from before returned, stepping through the doors into the bridge, Kanyr bracketed in the middle, looking rather nervous (as she should). "—perhaps I can be convinced to permit a delay of an hour."

"That is not nearly enough time, my lord. At least twelve hours would—"

"One. Hour. Admiral." Alek's eyes burned, almost seeming to glow with a harsh internal light, stealing Saul's words from his tongue. "And I require something in return."

The squad approached, Kanyr was forced to her knees at Alek's feet. He spared her a quick glance, one side of his hairless brow twitching with restrained rage. He held one hand out to the sergeant; the man wordlessly drew his sidearm, handed over the blaster.

Alek, just as silently, offered it to Saul in turn.

---

Everything ended up going to shite pretty much instantly. Though, that wasn't entirely unexpected — Cina had made sure they were all well armed for a reason.

Davik Kang had put himself up in a luxury apartment building not far from the capitol district. They'd been apartments once, in any case, but he'd since transformed the top twenty levels or so into his own personal palace. Supposedly, the place had all kinds of over-the-top defenses, from energy shields to surface-to-air weaponry.

At least they didn't have to worry about the approach: Kandosa got on the com to announce he was coming in with some friends, they made it to the fifth floor landing pad without issues. The security staff gave them a few weird looks at the size of their group, enough they'd had to come in on three separate aircraft.

(It wasn't nearly as comfortable of a ride as the proper airspeeder, but she'd decided to cling on behind Asyr on the bike anyway — she really didn't want to be cooped up with Shan in an enclosed space if she could avoid it. Mission had flown with Kandosa, probably for the same reason.)

They didn't even make it all the way through security before the subtle option went up in flames. Most of their little party had been processed — the grunts had tried to insist they hand over their weapons, a glare from Kandosa put a stop to that — but it hung up when they got to Mission. These blokes obviously knew a slicer when they saw one, and they wanted her to hand over all her equipment before letting her inside. That didn't go over well.

One of the thugs started reaching to restrain her, but his hands had barely made it halfway when Kandosa, smoothly and without a blink, put a shot in his back. In a handful of seconds, Cina, Kandosa, and Carth had taken out all the guards, Asyr and Shan stunning the handful of techs, most down before they'd even fired off a shot. Luckily, the blast doors hadn't been slammed shut on them — Shan had put the bloke in the sealed-off control room to sleep somehow, Cina had seen him drop unconscious under the window.

Swapping out the power cell in his rifle, with the sort of absent ease only acquired through endless repetition, Kandosa sneered down at one of the steaming corpses. "Consider this my resignation."

Cina's hand snapped up over her mouth, smothering her laughter a second too late.

Though, that scandalised disapproval on Shan's face was sort of hilarious, maybe she shouldn't have bothered.

The halls just inside were empty, and unexpectedly ascetic, plain tannish metal — she'd never met him, but by what she'd heard Cina had pegged Kang as the hedonistic type. Kandosa had explained this level was mostly intended for certain favored underlings, the top four levels would be far more in line with her expectations, reserved for Kang and his... Well, his "women" was how Kandosa had put it, but Cina would bet "slaves" was a more accurate word.

For a mad few seconds, as they stormed down the halls, Cina almost insisted they rescue them all. But they didn't have the time to track them down, Kang could call in reinforcements or just fly off on the very ship they were trying to steal. So she swallowed back her rage, trying to ignore how much it tasted like self-hatred.

After a few turns through the plain halls, they peeled back into an open atrium of some kind, occupied with a few chairs here and there, an occasional low planter, a bank of lifts set into the far wall. And, of course, a couple dozen Exchange thugs. "Shan, cover Mission." The first volley dropped several of them, but the air was soon alight with screaming plasma, sending everyone diving for cover.

This fight didn't end up lasting very long either. Apparently, the first batch at the door hadn't had enough time to raise the alarm, they'd managed to get the drop on them. Not to mention this particular group seemed a little green: they were almost visibly panicky, their aim a little too wide for professionals. Careful shots around sparking benches and melting chairs, it only took two minutes or so before they were all dead.

Cina could have done without the concussion grenade Kandosa had tossed into the middle of the pack, though — just the noise of the blasters was bad enough, setting that off indoors gave her a bloody horrendous headache. He just grinned back at her chastising glare.

That man did like explosions.

At some point during their staring contest, Mission had ended up at the control panel for the lifts. "Shit, they locked them down." The girl's hands were a little shaky, poking around, but she was holding together, at least. "I could maybe crack it, but I'd need to reroute—"

"Where's the lock?"

Mission jumped, blinked up at her for a second. "Ah...this model?" She stared at the door of the nearest lift, running a hand over the ceramic surface, gave it a hard tap in the middle. "Right here. It's a maglock, but it'll have a deadswitch, we'll have to—"

Rotating her rifle out of the way, Cina tugged open the long pouch belted into her waist. She pulled out the dead Jedi's lightsaber, the blue blade snapping into life with the softest touch of her thumb, the air heavy with a deep hum as she rotated the hilt around in her hand with a flourish. Bracing the pommel against her other hand, she drove the tip into the center of the door, burning easily through the weak point at the seam. Sparks flung from the glowing, superheated metal pinching at her skin, she dragged the blade a few inches down, then a bit further up, the blade catching here and there as it met the inner workings of the lock. Finally she felt it give way, shut the lightsaber off and returned it to its pouch. It took a moment to wedge her fingers into the seam, but once she had a good grip the doors opened easily, exposing the smooth, dark, empty depths of the lift shaft. "We climb. Top floor."

"Ah," Mission started, shaky with nerves, "I don't know about you guys, but I don't think I can..."

"Zaalbar."

"What do you— Oh, okay, good idea." The two of them appeared at Cina's shoulder a moment later, Mission clinging to Zaalbar's back, small enough she was almost entirely hidden in his shaggy fur. Zaalbar leapt into the shaft to meet the wall at the opposite side, claws throwing sparks for a second before they caught. He soon climbed out of sight, scaling the smooth metal with unnerving ease.

"Damn. Remind me to not piss him off." Asyr, who'd stepped up to her side at some point, nodded into the shaft. "You'll need to cut it open at the top too. There should be a ladder next to the door."

"Right." That was going to be a bloody pain — there wasn't really enough of a ledge on the other side of these doors to stand on. Not to mention there'd probably be more people with guns up there, just waiting to shoot her the instant she had the doors open. Oh well, figure that out when she got there. Fingers hooked around the frame, she leaned out into the shaft, very consciously not looking down. There was a ladder, right next to the doors on the left, close enough it was an easy step out onto the rungs.

Cina had barely climbed five feet when she heard the last person she wanted to deal with right now calling up from just beneath her, voice gone a little snappish. "You didn't tell me you had a lightsaber."

"I didn't see how it was your business."

Shan let out a huff, low enough Cina might not have heard it without the lift shaft carrying it up to her. "I am not experienced in the use of blasters. I would be far more useful in this endeavor with a familiar weapon in hand."

"That sounds like your problem." Honestly, with surprise on their side, they had more than enough firepower to deal with these morons. They didn't need the extra advantage.

"It is quite unreasonable to allow your personal dislike of me to interfere with—"

"Annas put it in my hand, Shan, told me to keep it with her dying breath. It's mine. Piss off."

That, at least, got Shan to shut the hell up. Too bad it'd probably only work this once.

("Go back," Annas had said, "you must, everything, everything dep—" Go back where? Everything depends on what?)

The rest of the climb passed in a strange combination of silence and echoing noise. Security having managed to react in time to get a lockdown in place, the inner workings of the lift had gone completely inert, the subtle hums and sharp clicking one would expect entirely absent. (Not that Cina had realised she knew what the inside of a lift shaft should sound like.) But the walls were solid enough, the double-wide shaft tall enough, every little noise bounced around, lingering far longer in the air than they should. The pattering of their feet and hands on the rungs, the clinking of blasters and packs against their belts, the thin passing of their breath, they all felt somehow larger, amplified, heard once before returning a couple seconds later, thinner and softer, the sounds thick around her pressing inward, her skin tingling with in inexplicable sense of unease, her stomach rising into her throat.

And Zaalbar's claws screeching against the metal of the shaft, echoing back and forth over and over, and over and over and over, was really starting to give her a headache. A headache focused toward the left side of her head, just over her ear, dull and hot.

"—stand listening to that noise. It's bloody painful."

"This isn't the best I've heard, but it's not bad. Just not comfortable to human ears — I can transform it down a bit if you want to hear what it sounds like to us."

"I think I'll take a pass on that, thanks. Even while it's drilling holes in my skull, I can still tell I'd find it repetitive and boring."

"This coming from the woman who listens to terrible synth dance music from the grimmiest corners of Hutt space."

"Hey, there are all kinds of things in Hutt space that are just fascinating, xenosocio—"

"Hayal? Hayal, what's wrong?"

The memory faded away, the lift shaft around her slipping fitfully back into place. Cina had barely managed to cling to the ladder while her head had been drifting, her hands all too loose and shaky, her knees just steady enough to hold her weight. She leaned forward a bit, bringing her forehead to rest against one of the rungs, the cool metal sharp against the muggy heat clinging to her skin. Actually, she was sweating rather a lot all of a sudden, but not from exertion — she hadn't really thought of it before, but she was far more fit than Cianen Hayal should be. No, this was something else, a heat flushed through her, sickening and unsettling, her stomach roiling up her throat, her fingers twitching, skin writhing. She took a few long, unsteady breaths, trying to force back the remains of the odd episode that had almost just gotten her killed.

She remembered another name, from her past. Not her own, of course, but another Jedi she'd known from her youth, a Verpine named Ac̳ika. Cianen had even heard of Ac̳ika, he'd been one of the original Revanchists. (Well, he or she, Verpine were a single-sex species, they weren't usually particular about the pronouns people used to refer to them in Basic.) She knew — vaguely, like something she'd read once long ago — that she'd learned Ac̳ika's native language (so well as humans could pronounce it) when they'd still been rather young, one of her earlier adventures in learning exotic tongues. So, of course, she'd become one of his favourite people to talk to, since she was essentially the only one among their age group who could even pronounce his name (mostly) correctly, could actually hold a conversation without the need of translation tech, Verpine being physically incapable of speaking Basic and most others unwilling to put in the effort to understand them.

They'd apparently had innumerable inane arguments about all kinds of insignificant things on their downtime, during the war with the Mandalorians. Not malicious arguments, no, just...friends bickering.

He'd been one of the original Revanchists to die in the war, she knew.

Cina could barely even remember Ac̳ika, but the thought still had that dreadful black pit opening up beneath her again, a seductive whisper at the back of her thoughts enticing her to just...

A short moment of concentration, focusing only on the passing of air in and out of her lungs, again, again, and the feverish sickness slowly loosened its hold on her, that inexplicable well of despair following her around pushed back for now. Finally in control of herself again, Cina muttered, "Sorry." Her echoing voice sounded thin, scratchy. "Brain moment." Thankfully, nobody seemed to feel the need to comment on that. She started climbing again, the first few rungs coming awkwardly, precariously teetering, but the repetitive moments gradually smoothed out, and she was (mostly) fine again.

She very studiously ignored best she could the screeching echoes battering her head.

In time they came to the top of the shaft, Cina placing herself just next to the sealed door. And she frowned, biting at the curses on her tongue — the lip on this side of the door was far too narrow, just a couple millimeters, she couldn't possibly stand on that to cut the blasted thing open. They could maybe rig up a harness with a little effort, between herself and Kandosa she was sure they had the necessary supplies, but it would take a bit of finagling, they didn't have that much time. Maybe she could just cut straight through— No, she could pass the lightsaber to Zaalbar, and he could carve through the wall, since he could manage a much firmer hold than she could, but that would probably require getting Mission off him, which could be tricky. Maybe they could—

"Cina." She started, glancing down between herself and the wall — she wasn't sure she'd ever heard Shan use the nickname Mission had given her (which she'd since adopted entirely, calling herself by a name she knew to be fake felt peculiar), but that had definitely been the prissy little Jedi's voice. Shan was staring up at her, looking more...open, perhaps was the word, more open than she had since they'd met, her gaze steady and uncharacteristically frank. "I can do it."

Somehow, she held in an exasperated sigh. Bloody Jedi and their bloody magic powers. "You might as well, I can't think of a better way out of here."

Shan nodded. Before Cina could even reach for the thing, the younger woman tensed, just for the shortest instant, before flinging herself into the air. She rose faster and further than a human should possibly be able to manage from a full stop, meeting the opposite wall of the shaft inches under the bottoms of Zaalbar's feet, planted for a blink before pushing off again, coming to rest against the door, her feet slipping down to find the ledge.

It was rather odd to look at, actually. Only the very tips of Shan's boots were on the ledge, she shouldn't be able to support herself there — not to mention, standing the way she was, her centre of gravity was far out over the shaft, she should just topple right off.

But, well, bloody Jedi and their bloody magic powers.

Cina pulled out her borrowed lightsaber, flicked it on, the shaft suddenly cast in soft blue light and harsh shadow. Measuring the dimensions of the door with her eyes, she reached over and carefully marked the frame at the height she was almost certain the lock should be. Switching it off again, she flipped it around in her hand, held it out toward Shan. "That's about the spot you want."

Somewhat to her surprise, Shan accepted the lightsaber with an oddly solemn nod. That was...peculiar. Did Shan suddenly not hate her anymore? Weird and random, but convenient, she guessed.

Watching Shan drive the glowing blade into the seam, impossibly balanced on thin air, Cina found herself distracted by a comparatively minor detail: her grip on the handle. Reversed in her off hand, her primary hand pushing against the pommel, turned to lock about the base of her thumb, to hold herself from slipping. It was exactly what Cina had done, unthinkingly, opening the previous one. Really, she shouldn't be surprised — she couldn't remember it, but they had been trained by the same people.

It was still very strange, the thought that she'd been a Jedi. The few Jedi she'd met had been... Well, she didn't really seem much like a Jedi, did she? It didn't feel quite real, somehow.

Finally Shan cut through, the doors snapping away into the walls on either side with a dismissive wave of her fingers. And the air was immediately filled with blasterfire. Zaalbar loosened his grip on the wall, sliding down out of the way with a bone shivering scream of protesting metal, but only a tiny percentage of the plasma thrown at Shan actually got past her. She'd taken a single step out onto solid ground, planted there as firm and unbending as stone, lightsaber moving so quickly it formed an arc of static blue light in front of her, as impenetrable as a ray shield.

If watching her practically float on the air had been peculiar, watching this was downright eerie. It was, quite simply, impossible for the human body to move that bloody fast. It was hard to convince her brain it was happening at all, honestly, some instinctive part of her dismissing it, that had to be a solid energy shield around her, her arms weren't actually moving that fast, see how they stopped here and here, she was imagining it. (She was pretty sure she was imagining Shan's arms stopping anywhere at all, with how thick the blasterfire was coming down she'd be dead if she lingered for an instant.)

It was an impressive display, but Shan wouldn't be able to keep it up forever. Over her shoulder, Cina called, "Kandosa, plasma grenades." It took a couple short moments for Kandosa to pass one of his belts of grenades up to Asyr, and then for Asyr to pass it up to Cina. A quick glance at the gleaming metal orbs fixed to the strip of leather confirmed Cina knew how this particular model worked (inexplicably, but that was normal these days). "Shan, coming through on your left." The Jedi didn't acknowledge her directly, but she did drift a bit to the right, in awkward shuffling steps, leaving a narrow gap between metal and lightsaber.

It wasn't quite enough for her to fit through, but she'd just have to trust Shan to not cut her in half.

Cina climbed up a few more rungs, paused a moment to take a last, heavy breath. Then she threw herself to the side, out into empty air, but just for a second, the lip of the frame above the lift doors came upon her quickly, she grabbed at it as it went by, her momentum brought her swinging forward, she let go, and she was falling feet-first. Her arse hit the floor about even with Shan's feet, and the tile was slick enough she kept sliding, letting herself fall backward as she went, the heavy thrum of the lightsaber as it passed over her head who knew how many times a second hardly audible over the high screaming from the constant deluge of blasterfire. Cina planted a foot, turned, rolled, in a second slamming into hard ceramic. Good, there was another long, low planter here — she'd been assuming the floor plan would be more or less the same between levels, the gamble had paid off with her not dying immediately.

A quick peek over the edge, glancing around the room for two or three seconds before fire started tracking toward her, ducked back down again. There were a whole bloody lot of them, but the room wasn't big enough for them to spread out and have enough cover, gathered in clumps partially behind pillars, furniture here and there. Which left no holes in the onslaught, stopping to reload in turns, but it also made them vulnerable. Cina unclipped four of the grenades, pinched off the triggers one by one. She didn't straighten to look, awkwardly tossing the things from flat on her back, aiming by memory.

At the least these plasma grenades, even outnumbering the single concussion one Kandosa had used a few minutes ago, were far quieter. Instead of a sharp, deafening boom, the sound contained by the walls making her skull rattle, there was a quick succession of heavy whoompfs, followed with a thick roar of flame. The agonised keening that followed the initial blast was far louder than the explosions themselves.

Swinging her rifle back around, Cina propped herself up against the planter, peeking over. Her aim had been good, and many of the Exchange men hadn't had time enough to get out of the blast radii — where the clumps of men had once stood were now corpses torn to pieces and scorched a glassy black, those unlucky few not close enough to be killed instantly touched with oily, crawling green and red fire, slapping helplessly at it as it climbed, screaming and flailing. Cina put them out of their misery first, executing the ones she had a good angle on in rapid succession.

(Largely, if she were being completely honest with herself, because their screams were distracting.)

There were perhaps only a dozen who had survived the grenade volley intact. That might seem like a lot — Cina and her team were still outnumbered, and she and Shan were even the only ones in the fight — but they'd been forced out of cover, the atrium might as well be a shooting gallery. Not to mention, the men were making a serious tactical error: they were still focusing on Shan.

That did make a kind of sense, to be fair, Jedi being famously hard to kill and infamously deadly and all, but in this case it was completely idiotic. Cina's grenades had cut their numbers down enough that Shan had the space to aim properly. The bolts that shot by over Cina's head immediately shot back the other direction, right where they'd come from. Her aim wasn't perfect — most of them splashed against floor and walls near the idiots, only finding a couple of them — but the turnabout was enough to make the already panicky men hesitate a little.

Which made them easy pickings for Cina. She managed to down another seven of them with quick shots to the chest before the survivors even seemed to remember she was there. Finally finding their way back to cover, their return fire finally started to track toward her, a couple shots even cutting into the planter, chips of scorching hot ceramic pelting her face and hands. Cina ducked down again, a second before a pair of shots burned through the air where her head had been just before.

But, as tended to happen in these sorts of situations, their attention turning to Cina gave Shan an opportunity to move. By the time Cina felt it as safe to look up again, Shan was standing in the middle of the room, a freshly dismembered corpse sloughing to the ground at her feet. Cina scanned the room for a short moment, but pushed herself up to her feet — they were all dead.

Not that she was entirely surprised: the atrium looked like a bloody war zone. It had been a rather pretty place before, a wide, open space with walls covered in polished wood panels, the floors gleaming ceramic tile, the high ceiling mostly glass, angled panes casting a web of thin shadows across little trees and bushes and flowers from a dozen worlds, a few pillars here and there carved into twisting, curving patterns. Now the floor was half-hidden with four huge blackened circles, pockmarks here and there from uncountable dozens of blaster hits, many of the plants — and, near the epicenter of the plasma explosions, even the ceramic tile itself — were aflame, the air swiftly filling with smoke turned harsh and metallic with industrial chemicals and blood. It was a horror not even counting the bodies, which were a good few steps more awful. A dozen stitched with oozing blaster burns, a few more sliced into pieces with ruthless Jedi precision, but most consumed by grenade fire, the least damaged wet and bloody, the rest almost looking more like glass sculptures than beings, contorted and torn apart, all fluids boiled away, the remains burned so thoroughly long organic chemical chains had broken apart and reformed, the structure turned reflective, almost seeming to gleam under the increasingly muffled sunlight from above.

A part of her, that small, quiet part that was still Cianen Hayal, was sickened, completely horrified. The larger part of her, though, had absolutely no pity for them. In fact, though it did come with a faint sense of guilt, she was taken with a bloody glee — as far as she was concerned, slavers deserved no better than this. They could all burn.

There was a reason, after all, she'd immediately jumped at Kandosa's idea of stealing Kang's ship. If she had to kill someone to get off this festering sinkhole of a planet, they might as well be Exchange thugs.

She heard a low whistle, immediately to her right. Kandosa was standing there, taking in the mayhem with wide eyes, a curious sort of stillness about him. Glancing toward her, his eyebrows cocked, he said, "You work fast, don't you?" He almost sounded — dare she say it? — impressed. Which was something, Mandoade war leaders weren't easily impressed as a rule.

Cina smirked back, reflexively matching his Mandoa. "How selfish of me, I'll try to leave a few for you next time."

Shaking his head to himself, Kandosa let out a low guffaw, his face twisted with a crooked smile.

While Cina was distracted, Shan had walked up to her. Something in her bearing feeling almost...formal, overly respectful, she held Annas's lightsaber back out to her, head dipped and shoulders lowered in a shallow bow.

Cina hesitated, for a brief instant. Shan hadn't been lying: she was a lot more effective with a lightsaber than a blaster. Letting her keep it would make tactical sense. It wasn't like Cina could use it to the full, and it wasn't like it was even hers, not really. But she... She wasn't sure of the words for it, she felt...

Before the decision had even become fully conscious, Cina reached to take it, instinctively mirroring Shan's little bow. She slipped the thing back into its spot on her belt, patting it once to ensure it was hitched firm.

She couldn't explain exactly what it was. She just felt more comfortable with it. More of her old self must be bubbling to the surface than she'd thought.

All of them finally gathered again, they were just about to set off when Shan stuttered to a halt only a handful of steps after starting up. Cina turned to her, saw her face had gone shockingly pale, mouth dropping open and eyes wide. Her head was turned a bit to the west, staring unfocused out into the distance.

"Shan? What are—" Cina's own voice cut off with a sharp gasp, drawn by the sudden shiver, starting low in her back and running its way up, the back of her neck tingling. Her breath had turned harsh and thin in an instant, her hands shaking hard enough her rifle rattled. "Okay, what the fuck was—"

It struck again, but where the last twinged this one burned. The fire shot up her spine in an instant, forced itself into her head, bursting against the back of her eyes in splashes of bright, sickening colour. The atrium swirled around her, she would have fallen without Zaalbar appearing at her side to prop her up, and her head just got hotter and hotter, that spot over her left ear throbbing, the incomprehensible swirl of foreign colour pushed harder, overwhelming—

—blared and displays filled with static, the fighter bucked and rolled, she fought to pull it straight again, fought to remain conscious, the tide of terror and agony and cold washing over her, it almost took her down with her, she didn't need to see the surface of Serocco to know what—

She would kill him for this. She should kill him for this, he'd—

It came as an instant flash of agonising heat, just an instant, so short there wasn't even time to be surprised, just fire and pain and fear, then nothing, cold endless nothing, a thousand times, a thousand thousand—

Cina! Focus, Cina!

—shook with the percussion of one air burst after another, fire and shrapnel creating a cacophony she couldn't even hear herself think through, where the fuck was their air support, she—

—she felt the ship breaking apart tear through her, the force of fifty thousand voices going silent deafening, hitting hard enough she staggered, hitching against the holoprojector, she thought she might be sick, but she fought it, pretended Saul wasn't watching, focused on the battle out—

Yes, focus! Pull yourself away, you can't get—

—down at the surface of Telos, the planet marred with innumerable scars black and brown, so large they were visible from space, a sickly, orange cast to the acidified atmosphere, and she tasted lightning on her tongue, she felt thick and heavy with fury warring against despair, this was all wrong, she hadn't—

—hit her during dinner, she felt it, she knew, and the others knew, she'd felt them recoil, and she lifted her mug, toasted the Second Fleet, and the jira tasted like blood—

—chewed across their position, and she tried not to wince at the chill of death washing past her, cast it aside—

Something else forced itself along the tide of fire and death, something steadier, something more solid. Something reached out to her, interspersing itself between Cina's own mind and something outside of it. She hadn't been conscious of her mind as a thing, a discrete object, until something was inserted between it and something else, and yet when the realisation struck it was natural, she hardly had to wonder about it at all. Somehow, without knowing exactly how she knew, she knew this something was another mind, forgotten instinct telling her it was human, one she'd—

—not like this, not like this, she wouldn't allow it to end, not like this—

—been in contact with before. The tide hadn't retreated entirely, it was still there, the echoing fires of agony and the bone-chilling draw of oblivion filtered through the mind surrounding hers, weaker. The internal echoes, suppressed memory yanked to the surface, those grew quieter as well, fuzzy and indistinct. Her sense of herself faded back, she knew strong, fuzzy hands under her arms were holding her up, two softer hands cupping her cheeks, fingers dug into her hair, much as the familiar mind encircled her own.

Shan's face was inches away, hard, brown eyes staring steadily into hers. "You must hold yourself together for at least a few minutes more. Focus on the moment, Cina, push it all away from you."

Another line of fire raced up her spine, a chill wind from nowhere cutting to the bone, the floor bucking under her feet, but it didn't penetrate as it had before, the shield about her (Shan, that was Shan) keeping away the worst. "The Sith, they're bombarding the city."

"Not yet. But they will."

"How long?"

Something passed across Shan's face, something pained, shamed, just an instant before vanishing again. "Two, three minutes. We have to keep going, Cina. Focus."

Right. She could do that. Cina took a deep breath, and dug in her heels (metaphorically), staring back at Shan, trying to see her, to know nothing else but what was right in front of her, keep out the...

The Force. That's what that had to be. Premonitions of events about to pass, echoing through the fabric of the galaxy and into her.

Despite herself, she couldn't help a brief moment of shock. She'd already known she'd been a Jedi, before, but it was still... It was just surreal, a little.

(And yet, somehow, natural, as though she'd always known she had magic bloody powers.)

Once she'd shook that thought of, she shook it all off, the world narrowing, slowly, to the here and now. And she saw Shan, and only Shan, but she didn't just see her. She... It was like she could feel her, a tactile awareness of the shape of her face, of her body, the heat leaching out into the air, and not just Shan, but Zaalbar behind her, Mission anxiously hovering at her shoulder, Asyr, Carth, and Kandosa a short space away, eyes on the entrances, fitfully fidgeting, and not just them, but all the room, the floor and the plants and the furniture and the corpses, as though it were all pressed against her skin, soft and sharp and cold and hot and—

Cina drew in a shuddering breath, forced a modicum of strength into her quivering knees. Her nerves still burned, her head over her left ear still throbbed, but she could stand on her own at least. As Zaalbar released her, Shan's mind pulled away. The heat flared, she winced at the sharp pain in her head, but the tide of fate and memory was held back, so thin it was as a faint buzzing in her ears.

She nodded. "Right." Her own voice sounded thin, dry. "Let's get out of here." Shrugging her rifle back into place, she turned for the exit heading north, started off.

She tried not to notice how everyone was staring at her.

From there on, the corridors were remarkably empty. Empty by a certain definition, at least — every few metres there were potted plants, some varieties she didn't even recognise, paintings and sculptures made by artists of a dozen varied species. The glitzy halls were so full in places it was almost hard to get through, their party having to turn to squeeze through single file.

It was mostly barren of people, though. A couple of times, they'd stumble on more Exchange thugs, no more than three at a time. They weren't at all hard to deal with — Cina's unnerving new awareness of her surroundings had her feeling them before she could see them, snapping off shots at their faces even as they came around corners. There were less guards than she would have expected, but perhaps they'd simply thrown most of their people at the defence at the lifts, hadn't had time yet for reinforcements to come in. Whatever the reason, they were hardly slowed at all on the way to the hanger, Cina and Kandosa easily cutting down what pathetic resistance they did run into.

Even if Cina hadn't memorised the floorplan of the place, she still would have recognised the doors into the hanger: they were wider and taller than the others along the hall, expensive, polished wood replaced with reinforced durasteel, treated to resist the wake from space-capable ion engines. (At speeds safe in atmo, anyway, exposed to ion propulsion at full tilt these doors would be incinerated in an instant.) They were, of course, closed, and apparently sealed, since hitting the open key on the control panel didn't do anything. She could cut through it, but this was some seriously high-quality metal, it'd take far, far longer than the much flimsier elevator doors had.

But the direct approach wasn't always the best one. This sort of problem was exactly what slicers were for. Before Cina had even said anything Mission had sidled up, already prying the panel open with that skinny little vibroblade of hers. The rest of them settled in to wait, Asyr and Carth and Kandosa marking out a weak perimeter — Kandosa, with bull-headed industriousness characteristic of Mandoade, knocked over a nearby sculpture, the closest thing to cover they could expect in the middle of a hallway.

Cina watched Mission work, but she really didn't have the expertise to know how it was going. She'd spliced herself into the security system easily enough, hooking the thing at the end of the cable dangling from her datapad into the circuits under the panel, seemingly picking a place at random. (At least, it hadn't seemed distinctive to Cina.) The holoprojector Mission wore on her wrist had flickered into life, a three-dimensional shape composed of what looked like lines of code floating in front of her, twisting and turning and peeling away and inverting at gestures of her fingers, when she wasn't manipulating that tapping away at her datapad in an almost constant rhythm.

So that's what that holoprojector was for. Not that she really had any fucking clue at all what was going on here, but it was clear this was helpful somehow. She'd wondered why the girl carried that around all the time.

There was a single blaster shot, the heavier, lower groan of Kandosa's clunky disruptor. A quick glance up, there was another guard that direction, already slumping to the ground, a significant portion of his head and neck atomised. "How's it look, Mission?"

"The ship is still there, but the bay doors are open." Her voice was higher than usual, stuttering a little, but she was doing an impressive job holding together for her age. (Though age was relative, the lower city likely hadn't allowed Mission much of a childhood.) "Which means Kang's probably on the way to his ship, if he's not there already."

"The lock?"

"Give me a few seconds, sheesh, the security on this isn't anything to—"

Something forced its way into her again, but not the fiery agony of countless beings suffering, the chill of them dying. Instead of running up her spine in a wave it seemed to strike all at once, a peculiar alertness coming alive, a vibrating tension, like glass ringing from an impact, hard enough it hurt—

The lightsaber appeared in her hand, she didn't remember reaching for it, the blade sprang into life. An instant later, blue plasma was struck with orange, roughly two-thirds of the way up the blade, the blaster bolt spanging off to burn into the ceiling. The force of the hit was as a sudden weight settling on her hand, nearly turning her wrist back, but she, somehow, held it perfectly in place. If it had been pushed back, after all, the blade would have sheared right through the back of Mission's head.

That blaster shot, if it hadn't been stopped, would have hit Mission in the back of the head. Cina had stopped it, she hadn't meant to, she'd hardly even been aware of—

Mission should be dead right now.

More bolts were flying from more blasters, but Cina hardly noticed. She was too distracted by that simple, horrifying thought — that piece of trash, right there down the hall, shooting at them with a couple of his friends, Mission would be dead because of him. Rage hit all at once, harsh and overwhelming and cold. But it didn't keep to itself, it mixed with that low heat at the small of her back she'd been trying to push away, and they rose together, jagged fire climbing up her throat, and her blood sparked and sang with it, lightning on her tongue, she felt abruptly too big for her own body, the roiling flames and slashing ice too much to fit inside her skull, and it built and built, until she thought she would burst like an overripe fruit, and then it built more, and more, and more, and—

Her augmented fury leapt out of her, sudden and hard, with a sharp jerk. And it rushed away, down the hall, the air rippling with a shock wave inaudible and (mostly) invisible. In a blink, it reached the Exchange slime.

A blink later, and the four of them were plastered against the wall, looking more like some obscene work of art than living beings, just another painting along the garish hall.

Huh. Lucky she hadn't shoved Desa quite that hard, that time in the library. If she was going to accidentally kill someone, she would much rather it be a few Exchange thugs than her (mostly forgotten) cousin.

Cina tore her eyes away, turning back to Mission. "Sooner would be better." Her own voice came out shaky, thin, as though she were out of breath, as though she'd been running for miles. And it wasn't the only thing, she felt suddenly weak, muscles twitching with exhaustion, and she was slowly losing control, she could feel it, like sand slipping through her fingers grain by grain. Pain and despair and screaming not her own was boiling under the surface, stronger with every second, shadowy flickers from the life of a woman whose name she still didn't know rising in the wake, and she didn't know how much longer she could keep it down.

To her credit, Mission only stared at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, for a couple more seconds before getting right back to it.

She wasn't looking that direction, couldn't actually see her, but she still felt Shan inch up behind her, the air about her thick with wariness a shade away from terror. Her voice in a low whisper, "Cina? Are you all right?"

Cina worked her tongue against the roof of her mouth for a moment, forcing the dryness away best she could. (When had that happened, she hadn't noticed.) "As soon as we get on the ship, I'm knocking myself out with a sedative."

"That...might be a good idea."

Despite herself, she couldn't help a snort of black laughter. Might? She could feel it, the bombardment had started, waves of agony and death crashing against her, so much more intense than the premonition of it had been in the atrium. The force of it had her teetering on her heels, it was all she could do to just remain standing, took all the will she had just to focus on the present moment. And it would only get worse, they'd just started in on it. If she had more outbursts like that one just now...

She wouldn't be surprised if she somehow unintentionally blew up the ship before they even got into orbit. It would be safer for everyone if she was unconscious.

Luckily, she didn't have to wait very long. Only a few short moments of peculiar, uncomfortable staring later, and the door was sliding open. Cina was walking out into the hangar before Mission had gotten her equipment disentangled. The hanger was a perfectly ordinary single-ship landing bay, she was sure, but in the moment she hardly even saw it, nor the ship inside it.

Instead, her awareness focused entirely on two figures, approaching the boarding ramp. One was a middle-aged man, with greying hair and heavy jowls, in gleaming armor too fancy to truly be effective, carrying a blaster rifle with awkwardness enough to imply he hadn't actually touched one in years. The second was younger, shorter and slimmer, wearing a long blue and orange leather coat and, absurdly, bulging black goggles over his eyes. Cina measured the distance with her eyes, they were too close, they'd be inside and have the door sealed before she could catch up. She could maybe shoot them from this range, but with one of the landing struts in the way, it wasn't a sure thing.

Kang and his henchman were going to make it.

No. No, they weren't.

Cina was hardly conscious of it, it didn't feel quite real, like she were flying, gliding over the floor instead of walking upon it. The hanger whipped by her so fast she could hardly even see it herself, her vision narrowing, her surroundings blurring. The peculiarly-dressed henchman was quick, had both of his blasters drawn and aimed in a blink, two bursts of yellow-orange plasma crawling across the air towards her, slow enough it was easy to put the blade of her lightsaber between them — she hadn't realised she'd turned the thing on again — the first shot pinging against the underside of the ship, the second turning back to strike the man in the shoulder, sending him reeling back.

The tip of the blade went down, and then back up, Cina planted her toes, coming to a stop, the blade coming down again.

Kang and his flamboyant henchman fell to the ground, both of them neatly bisected.

The flames coursing through her veins quickly drained away, slipping away from her with each breath. (It tasted like blood, like a summer storm.) She'd hardly realised it was there, but its sudden absence left her feeling tired, somehow...smaller, than she'd been before. Smaller and emptier. Some part of her, something wild and instinctive, wanted to fill herself with it again, wanted to reach for it, wanted to pull that fire into herself, so much of it her blood sang and her nerves burned, it didn't matter if she took in too much, she wanted it, she needed it to feel—

Cina forced the downward spiral out of her head with a sharp sigh. She blinked, the hanger around her swimming more into proper shape with each blink. The rest of them were still over by the door, some twenty metres away, still and staring.

Not that Cina could blame them — she had just pulled magic powers out of her arse. If she could allow herself a moment to process what was happening she'd probably be freaking out too.

"Well? Are you coming or not?"

---

With a flicker of pseudomotion hardly visible at this angle, the tiny freighter winked out of existence. Saul let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

Though perhaps that was a little premature. Alek was standing only a few steps away, looming over him, gaze fixed out the viewport toward where the ship had been. He was still, unnaturally still, looking more statue than man. But while he seemed less than alive, something about the air around him was not — a heavy charge on the air, something thick and cold, lightning a breath from striking. He was furious, obviously, there was no doubt about that.

And Saul knew exactly why. When Alek had ordered they focus everything they could on that one, seemingly insignificant freighter, one ship among many fleeing the planet, he'd known. There'd been an uncharacteristic note of urgency on his voice, he'd seemed so, so desperate, as Saul hadn't heard him in years, what felt like a lifetime ago, when they'd both still fought for the Republic. Saul knew exactly who was on that ship.

She'd made it out. She was alive.

She's alive.

Alek turned, just his head, the rest of his body still solid and unmoving. He directed a heavy glower down at Saul — though the word "glower" might be underselling it a bit. It was a look that communicated with its every inch utmost hatred, promised death, a death more painful than mortal imagination could possibly comprehend. It was hard, and cold, and merciless, and were they any other people in any other situation Saul might even be intimidated.

But the feeling didn't come. (She's alive.) Alek might be a few narrow steps short of total madness at this point, but he knew as well as Saul did that their failure to bring down the freighter wasn't their fault, not his. It was, in fact Alek's. He'd ordered them to direct all their resources, everything they had in orbit, toward atomizing the city, leveling the entire planet. Whoever was flying the freighter knew what he was doing: he'd picked a vector that put him as far from their guns as possible. None of their capital ships could reorient themselves in time to take the shot, there wasn't enough time for them to assign fighters to pursue. By the time Alek had given the order, it was already most likely impossible to fulfill.

Even were this failure truly his, Alek couldn't kill him for it. Saul was the best admiral they had — the only reason he hadn't been made Supreme Commander was because the Assembly felt his talents were most useful on the front lines. Alek's incompetent, amateur bungling of the campaign would have done a lot more damage if Saul weren't around to clean up his messes as much as was possible.

(The impetuous idiot only had to follow Lesami's strategy to the letter. If he'd just gone ahead with her plan, the Republic should have been on the edge of defeat by now. But of course he couldn't control himself. Even when he'd still been a conventional Jedi, Alek hadn't been the most temperate man he'd ever met.)

But, that wasn't the only reason Saul was irreplaceable. He wasn't just the Sith's most effective military leader — he was also their first military leader. (Excluding Lesami herself, of course.) A significant portion of the men of their fleet native to Republic space held, he knew, no small degree of personal loyalty to him. In the early days of the Empire, he'd been one of the symbols the fledgling state had rallied around — to his aggravation, Lesami had finally gotten her revenge for springing that promotion on her years ago — enough he was just as much an institution in their new nation as Lesami, or Nisotsa, or Alek himself.

With Lesami's death (she's alive), with Nisotsa forced out of office on a transparently vacuous pretense, with Alek and his cronies' own excesses, the Empire was already starting to fracture. Alek was one wrong move from sparking a civil war. Saul wasn't certain killing him in a rage would be that wrong move, but he was certain it was possible.

Alek couldn't kill him. Not now, and possibly not ever. Saul knew that.

More importantly, Alek surely knew it too.

Shakily, with the stiff, unsteady gait of a droid overdue for essential maintenance, Alek turned on his heel and shuffled across the bridge. He was usually a very imposing man, but the way he was moving now, something indefinable was missing from his normal ethos, the Sith Lord appearing somehow less than he usually did. In a few brief seconds he was gone, taking the oppressive sense of danger with him.

Saul, with no real conscious decision on his part, found his eyes falling down to Kanyr's.

She hadn't protested, when she'd realized what was about to happen. Not for an instant. She hadn't even known why, why he'd had to do it. She'd just... She'd just stared up at him, grim but calm. She'd met his eyes, and there was no fear there, just a rueful sort of acceptance, and...trust. Kanyr trusted him, believed in him, knew there had to be a reason, a good reason, if Saul chose to do it it must be the correct choice. She trusted him, completely.

And he'd shot her in the head.

He thought, morbidly, that he wished he'd aimed a little lower. Her eyes were intact, still staring back at him, filled with accusation, with hatred, that was more his own than it was hers.

"Admiral?" That would be Rahn, wondering if Saul had any further orders. (He refused to consider the possibility that the Captain was concerned for him.) Saul properly should turn to face him, but he didn't. He knew he would find in his eyes that trust, that same unyielding faith that Kanyr had shown him in her last moments.

Sometimes, Saul wished they would stop looking at him like that. Sometimes, he thought his spine might shatter from the weight.

Before Rahn could get any ideas, Saul said, "Continue the bombardment, Captain." He hesitated for a moment — oh, hell, it wasn't like Alek was even here anymore. "Inform the fleet their performance during this particular engagement shall not be considered during any future evaluation of their effectiveness or their loyalty."

A very brief pause. "Understood, sir." And he did understand, Saul could hear it on his voice.

Saul couldn't directly halt the bombardment, not without disobeying an explicit order from Alek, which would give the lunatic the perfect excuse should he ever decide to do away with him one day. But he could give his people leeway to sabotage it themselves on the sly. They couldn't refuse to fire entirely, no, Alek would notice that. But, if a review of the "battle" later showed their gunners fired unusually slowly, and with pitiful accuracy not displayed during any other engagement in their careers, well, Saul was sure that would just be an unfortunate coincidence. There was a glitch in the targeting systems, all the caf had been brewed too weak, the sun was in their eyes. He needn't bother coming up with a plausible excuse, he doubted Alek would even look into it. He couldn't stop the assault on Taris, but he would soften it as much as his position allowed.

He knew his people would take the suggestion. He'd given similar orders before, and he doubted they relished the exercise of executing billions of Imperial citizens for absolutely no reason at all any more than he did.

"Get to it, then."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." And Rahn left him, the sharp clicks of his boots steadily drawing a straight line toward coms.

There wasn't anything that particularly needed his involvement at the moment, so Saul had no particular reason to move. Instead he just stood there, staring down at Kanyr. Her death was his fault, of course — if he hadn't recruited her to humor his desperate hopes, she would still be alive — but hers was hardly the first. He tried not to think about just much blood there was on his hands. It was overwhelming when he did, he had to...

Lesami had said, long ago, that sometimes one had to die for more, and sometimes more had to die for many. Sometimes hundreds of thousands had to die for all the uncounted trillions. The Jedi had found her honesty on the topic abhorrent, which was really more confusing than anything. The concept was natural to Saul, to virtually every career soldier he'd ever met. Lesami had simply put words to the unvoiced idea at the very core of their profession. After all, they had willingly made of themselves those who might die so others might not. What the Jedi and many civilians in the Republic thought was horrifying tragedy they thought was simple math.

All too often lately — and today especially, with Taris burning behind him and Kanyr dead at his feet — Saul wasn't certain the math worked out as it should.

She's alive. That was worth it. It would be worth it, it had to be.

It had to be.

---

Proving — A series of events held at the Temple on Coruscant every four months, intended to allow initiates (who've passed their trials or otherwise gotten approval) to attract masters to continue their training. Analogous to canonical Exhibition Day and the Apprentice Tournament.

Reassignment — The Council of Reassignment, one of the lower ruling councils of the Jedi Order overseeing the Service Corps. For those not in the know, Jedi initiates who aren't up to snuff or are never chosen as an apprentice(/padawan) are shuffled into the Service Corps, sort of half-Jedi who provide various services for the Republic. It's usually the Council of Reassignment who makes the final call on whether an initiate should be pulled out.

Ac̳ika — I debated for a while how to represent that first consonant before deciding on a diacritic that could easily be ignored (assuming it deigns to display properly). In IPA, this would be approximated /ɐ.ǂi.kʰa/. "Approximated" because alien phonology isn't necessarily perfectly transcribable with a script meant to represent human language, but close enough. That first consonant is a palatal click, which irl only exists in a handful of Khoisan languages. People who have no idea how to make those sounds can just pronounce this name "uh-kee-kah", I used the simplest characters possible to make it easier to read on purpose.

Pseudomotion — For those unaware, this is the term used in the books for the optical effects seen when ships enter/exit hyperspace.

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Not at all sure if much of this chapter works the way I tried to make it work, but it is what it is.

Oh, yeah, so... This is still a thing? After two months? Whoops?

Long story short, I've been distracted by the collab fic I'm doing with LeighaGreene and very irritating medical problems. Especially irritating because I've gotten an exhaustive suite of tests over the last couple months and they have no fucking clue what's causing it. Good fun. Basically, medical issues cutting down the energy available for writing, and what little I have ends up directed toward All According to Plan to (futilely) try to keep up with Leigha's output. So this fic ended up being shafted for a bit there. Oops.

There has been a marginal improvement lately — or maybe I'm just getting better at powering through it, who knows — so updates will hopefully go back to being more frequent. We'll have to see.

This (and AAtP) might be my last major fanfic ever, actually. I've started making the transition toward original fiction. I've even stopped reading fanfic entirely now. So...there's that. I do still plan to finish this fic (at least through the end of KotOR I, but preferably the whole thing), because it entertains me and I'm irritated with leaving fics half-finished, but that'll likely be it.

~Wings