Chapter Eighteen: The Vanishing Point
Predawn in the Works was a smear of grey, the first gleams of sunlight choked by smog and distant skyscrapers before they could hope to reach the street. To the ordinary pedestrian walking down the district's artificial streets, or the speeder traffic hurtling by above their heads, the dun, hazy atmosphere was an annoyance at best and dangerous at worst, lowering visibility to levels that made accidents far more likely.
For Obi-Wan, it was a godsend. Unlike most here, he had a vested interest in not being seen.
Fortunately, at this early hour, even if visibility had been better he wasn't likely to be noticed. Most businesses in the vicinity were still closed, including the one just across the street. The squat, one-story box of a building had no lights on, no sign flashing, no vehicles parked in the tiny lot just to one side. The sputtering streetlight closest to it cast just enough illumination to see the faded letters above the doorway: Starfire Diner.
The Jedi looked carefully in all directions, making sure no one passing by would notice a hooded figure approaching the entrance of a diner that wouldn't be open for another hour. When sight revealed no one, he extended his perceptions only to arrive at the same conclusion. For the moment, he was alone.
In ten long strides, he crossed the street, taking one last furtive look behind him as he passed into the path of the acid-yellow streetlight. The diner's front door was shut, opaque shades draped down the transparent panels. A sign—paper, not a holoscreen—hung in front of them, hand-lettered with an apologetic We're closed—but see you next time!
Obi-Wan raised a fist and rapped his knuckle against the glass. Someone pulled the shades aside just enough to let a crack of light through, to get a glimpse of him—then, with a soft creak, they pulled the door open. The Jedi slid through the crack, door already starting to close as he passed over the threshold.
Before he could say anything, the breath was squeezed out of him from behind. With a whuf, he extricated himself from the embrace as best he could, blinking hard in the sudden light, and turned around to greet Padmé face to face.
He was rewarded by a fierce glare. "You have a lot of explaining to do, Kenobi."
Despite himself, he chuckled. "I don't suppose I'm worthy of an 'I'm glad to see you'?"
"That's what the hug was for." She looked him up and down, the crease between her eyes deepening. "Gods, you look like shit."
It was true—the aggressively cheerful interior lighting, Obi-Wan was sure, was doing no favors for the bedraggled cloak he hadn't washed in several weeks, or the beard he hadn't trimmed in a similar length of time. "Yes, well, I'll get to that as part of the explaining. You look . . ."
"Haggard?" she asked grimly, brushing past him. "Yeah, got a lot on my mind lately, which you're not helping with." Sliding into the nearest booth, she waved him over and then turned her head in the direction of the kitchen. "Dex, he's here."
"In a minute, Obi-Wan!" a voice rumbled from the kitchen—the Jedi could just see a leathery arm wave in greeting through the window behind the dining counter. "How you want your eggs?"
Obi-Wan's stomach made a sudden acrobatic maneuver—the beauty of that word after a diet of scrounged meals and ration packs was almost overwhelming. "Scrambled and plentiful, if you please, Dex," he called back, doing his best not to sound overeager.
Turning back to Padmé, he scanned her up and down as best he could without trying to look it. She hadn't been lying in her self-appraisal; her hair, while never mannered at the best of time, was positively unruly, and the dark marks under her eyes indicated that she'd been sleeping about as well as he had lately. When he reached out to touch her with the Force, there was the surface crackle of irritation that she always had when she was in a bad mood, but a far deeper exhaustion below. "What does Bail have you up to? I would imagine keeping an eye on him at the palace would be less work, not more."
"Ah, ah, ah. Not safe for you to be a part of it, remember?"
Oh dear. "Padmé, I assure you that I didn't mean to hinder—"
She shook her head vehemently. "We're here to talk about you, Kenobi. I'm not important."
Whatever she had going on with Bail—and Obi-Wan had a fairly good idea of what that was—his ducking out of that call wasn't why she was angry. Looking down at her neck, he saw the tiny square of wood that hung there by a leather thread.
"I can live with Anakin being angry with me," he told her, lowering his voice. "But not both of you."
Her hand instantly moved upward toward the pendant, only for her to jerk it back down to her lap. "Wait," she asked, puzzlement blunting the sharpness of her voice, "what do you mean he's—"
"Here we are," said the rumbling voice as its bearer emerged from the kitchen. The diner's Besalisk proprietor wore the same uniform he always did—a white shirt turned yellow with grease, half-heartedly covered by a black apron turned grey by the same. One of his four hands held a pot full of steaming caf, the other a plate covered with eggs and a fried meat that smelled so good Obi-Wan had no intention of asking what animal it came from.
Dex chuckled, the mustache-like filaments above his upper lip rippling with the motion. "I was beginning to think you'd gotten sick of the food, General."
"Trust me," replied the Jedi, beaming, "that couldn't be further from the truth." He let the space of a second pass after the plate was placed in front of him before he ripped a fork free from the tableware at his spot and plunged it into the mix.
"Sure I can't get you anything, Padmé?" Dex asked, bending down to pour caf into her mug. "Not even some toast?"
She shook her head, her face carefully recomposed in the time it had taken the Besalisk to turn his attention to her. "I think I ate something bad yesterday—even smelling this one's breakfast is a bit revolting."
"Suit yourself. You mind sliding over?"
After Dex had worked his bulk into the booth—Padmé, scrunched against the wall, looked longsuffering—he folded all four of his hands and cleared his throat with a great burbling of phlegm. "So, Obi-Wan—you mind telling us what in the hell is going on?"
In between gobbled bites of egg, he told about the summons—carefully leaving out Anakin's reaction. Then the interview itself. Before he'd gotten more than a couple questions in, Dex gave a laugh whose general sentiment could best be described as You goddamn idiot. "You're telling me you got a summons from Palpatine's government, about the battle that ended with a hole in the Senate dome, and you didn't think to talk to a lawyer first?"
Against the Jedi's better judgment, a smidgen of wounded pride worked its way into his answer. "Believe it or not, Dex, Jedi Barrister is not one of the divisions of the Order."
"So just call up Thim! He got me out of that jam a few years back, he's cheap—"
"Dex," Padmé snapped, taking a fortifying swig of caf with one hand and rubbing at her temples with the other. "We've established that attorney-client privilege and Jedi don't mix well together. Let him talk."
As the narrative shifted from Anton Vargot and Ponce Held to Director Tarkin, Padmé frowned—her curiosity seemed to have gradually won over her desire to hold a grudge. "Wait, I've heard that name before. It feels like Bail might have mentioned him."
"He struck me as very . . . motivated. But whatever it is he wants, it isn't about Bail. Not directly, at least."
And then he told them about how the trap had snapped shut.
"Son of a bitch," Padmé hissed.
Dex's normally jovial face had sunk into something more grim, his already beady eyes narrowing. "So what if this prick has photographs of you? They can't prove you're a Jedi just because you were at the scene of some wild story about objects moving around."
"That doesn't matter, Dex," Obi-Wan replied. His stomach had begun to tighten, both from his hastily devoured breakfast and the return to thoughts he'd been brooding over for weeks now. "The fact that he's asking is concern enough. We've known for ages that Palpatine doesn't like the idea of the Jedi. And if the director of an investigation he activated is more interested in trying to pin me to the Order than he is with an attack that almost toppled the capital—"
"—he sure as hell isn't going to stop at just letting you walk," Padmé finished. Color seemed to have drained out of her cheeks—her face was suddenly sallow, and she took a fortifying sip of caf. "So then what?"
Well, that about brings us to the present.
He hadn't been able to go back to his safehouse without being sure he wasn't followed—contacting the Temple was even less of an option. So he'd gone to the place where people the galaxy over went when they didn't want to be found. Renting a room in the Underworld had its advantages in stealth, but the compromise was . . . well, everything.
No shower. A single rad-oven for food, and a cheap mattress on the floor. A door whose four locks featured only two functional bolts. And no window, not that it mattered—down there it was always night.
Most importantly—or at the very least, most embarrassingly—no lightsaber. That was back at this safehouse, which he had to assume was compromised. The Order, even Knights, were trained not to rely on weapons—the Force was the most powerful tool they had, and a Jedi's chief victory was not through attack. But the indignity of its absence had weighed on him all the same. Along with . . . everything else. More often than not, when he'd tried to meditate he'd found his mind churning with thoughts on the same few subjects.
Tarkin. The Order. Bail. Padmé. Anakin.
Palpatine.
"Of course, staying put wasn't going to do me any good very much longer. So I contacted Dex asking to meet." He turned his attention from Padmé to the Besalisk. "You told me that Padmé was on-planet. And here we are."
Dex nodded, stroking at his mustache with one hand while another two drummed on the table absent-mindedly. "You don't think you were followed here, do you?"
The Jedi shook his head, then, reluctantly, took a last bite of breakfast. "I have no way of being sure, but I don't think they'd be expecting to pick up my trail here."
"Well, that's somethin', then." The Besalisk leaned forward, the table creaking ominously under his weight. "But you can't go back home."
Hearing another person say it that plainly filled Obi-Wan with a sudden sorrow, and beneath that almost terror—of course he'd gone over this time and again in his head, but for Dex to plainly state the case was for it to be made real. "Not for a long while, anyway. If I go back to my safehouse it will only be a matter of time before I'm tracked. And if I go back to the Temple . . ."
Padmé clapped her hands down on the table. "Right, well, good thing I'm here then. You can hitch a ride with me back to Alder—"
"I'm afraid I can't."
When she opened her mouth to shout at him that of course he could, Kenobi, the wave of affection that rose up inside him threatened to stop him from interrupting. "This investigation isn't about me. I'm not nearly important enough. It's about the Order. Everyone is implicated—and that doesn't just apply to Jedi, it applies to friends. If Tarkin's people see me in your company while I'm on this planet, you become part of things."
"It's not exactly like we haven't been publicly seen as friends, Kenobi," she retorted, driving an elbow into Dex's side with sudden vigor. As the Besalisk gave a whuf of surprise, she took advantage of the extra few inches of space to draw herself up to her full height. "I'm already an associate of yours."
"But not one who's been seen helping me to evade a Republic investigation. And besides, I can guarantee you that in Palpatine's circles you're not thought of first and foremost as my associate."
She snorted. "I guarantee I'm not 'thought of' in Palpatine's circles at all. I'm Bail's security guard, Obi-Wan."
"Padmé . . . you're Anakin's wife."
For a moment, she just looked at him. Then she sank back into the booth. Through the Force, Obi-Wan could feel her mind form a simple, calm Oh.
He knew what it felt like. Until recently, thinking of Anakin as Palpatine's hadn't come easily to him either.
Padmé had begun her day feeling wretched—the headache and nausea of a killer hangover even though she hadn't had a proper drink in weeks, waking up in the dead of morning, and still dealing with time-lag adjusting from Alderaan to Coruscant. Now, the smell of her own caf was making her sick.
At least she had her side of the booth back to herself. After Anakin's name had come up, Dex had promptly excused himself for a moment to get Obi-Wan's dishes cleaned. "You know," she called to the kitchen, "you have a droid for a reason."
"Eh, her shift doesn't start for another half an hour," came the reply. "Let her get some sleep."
"Droids," she muttered to Obi-Wan. "If I'd started doing stuff for Liz she would have walked all over me."
"Would have?"
A fresh wave of nausea hit her stomach, this one not born out of any physical ailment. "I thought you talked with Anakin. He didn't—?"
The Jedi's face flushed crimson, and he began an intense study of the tabletop beneath him. "I, ah . . . it didn't come up. I imagine he didn't want to talk about it."
Plenty he did want to talk about with you, though, she almost shot back. Instead, she simply inhaled and let it go. "Yeah, well. Everyone lost something during the battle, I guess."
"I'm so sorry. I—I'll miss her, truly. Though I suppose she wouldn't say the same for me."
She managed a half-hearted snort. "She'd come to your funeral. Can't guarantee what she'd say there."
As the two of them sat in awkward silence, Padmé let her eyes wander over the joint in all its kitschy glory—the deco stylings that had been old-fashioned a century ago, all fins and chrome and bright reds. Anakin would have loved it. She could hear him now—Yeah, on the outside it's a boxcar, but inside it's a hot rod. Good food too. He'd swap adventure stories with Dex, tease the droid server, ask if he could be of any help if something in the kitchen broke down. The place had Skywalker written all over it.
She'd never taken him here. Maybe Obi-Wan had, back in the day, when the two men were practically joined at the hip—after all, it had been the Jedi who'd introduced her to the place, their first lunch post-Serenno. But she'd somehow wanted a place where she could just be her. Padmé Amidala, in a haunt all her own.
You're Anakin's wife.
But she'd gotten used to not being that here. Or back on Alderaan. Just like he'd gotten used to being in Palpatine's circles, going to dinners and meetings and liaisons she'd never even hear about.
They'd each formed their own spaces. And the ones where she was his wife and he was her husband had started to curdle.
With a longsuffering groan, Dex reemerged from the kitchen, towel slung over his shoulder. Padmé must have instinctively flinched further into the booth—he chuckled and waved a hand. "Don't worry, Padmé, I'll stand." Placing two hands against his hips, he looked at Obi-Wan and said, "So, Obi-Wan. You're not leaving with her. You can't stay. Where are you going?"
The Jedi threw a reflexive glance over his shoulder, as if to make sure no one was watching through the blackout curtains—it was an oddly funny motion from someone who could sense life forms with his eyes closed. "For now, I plan to find my own way offplanet. I can't just stay holed up in the Underworld forever—if Tarkin is digging into other Jedi, I need to figure out what he's up to. But in future . . . I might need a refresher on the services of that particular tailor you mentioned to me a while ago. Should worse come to worst."
The smile had dwindled from the Besalisk's eyes, but he nodded mock-sagely. "Ahh, I see. Just in case you need a . . . special garment made."
Padmé rolled her eyes as viciously as possible. "Oh for gods' sakes. Stop pretending you're being subtle and just tell me before I ask."
Dex chuckled, though again it didn't reach his eyes. "Well, way back in my Underworld days I fell in with this fella who specializes in . . . vanishing acts, shall we say. Oh, not a magician type—he couldn't cheat at cards, much less do a card trick. And trust me, he tried the first one. No, his field is . . . people."
Ahhh. Memories of Junkfort came rushing back to her—Anakin had told her of a guy he'd met there once, a new arrival. Nobody came to live on Junkfort voluntarily, and he'd been curious as to why this poor son of a bitch had decided to move in.
The possibility hadn't occurred to Padmé before now, but maybe Anakin had unconsciously used some Force persuasion to get the information he wanted. Or maybe the other guy had been desperate and lonely enough that he couldn't keep secrets. Anyway, her husband had told her that his new acquaintance F— actually wasn't named F— at all.
"I know how this goes," she said aloud. "Someone screws up bad enough that they've got bounty hunters or cops hunting for 'em, there's no way to make it right, and they need to start over. So they find a forger and pay him, and he sets them up a whole new identity. New name, new home, enough money to get their feet back under them."
Nodding, the Besalisk said, "Of course I never needed to use him myself—I'm too smart to end up needin' him—but I've referred a friend or two, over the years. And hey, if ever the time comes when the law has it out for Dexter Jettster, he'll know where to go." He paused and stared off into the distance, as if he too were looking through the blackout curtains into the street beyond. "'Course, there are tradeoffs. You back out, you don't get a do-over. And if you do it right, you can't come back."
"Wait, what?"
She was standing without any conscious memory of having risen, staring at her friend, who was once again making a painted study of the tabletop. "Dex," she said, staring not at the Besalisk but at Obi-Wan, "what do you mean can't come back?"
Dex waved his hands back and forth in an I just work here gesture. "Like you said, this isn't someone you go to if you're trying to lay low on a petty larceny charge, Padmé. This is for when starting a new life is the only alternative to losing one."
Obi-Wan spoke up, raising his tired gaze to meet her stare. "It's a last resort, Padmé. Of course I'm not seriously considering it now. But . . . I'm finding it's best to keep one's options open lately."
"Uh huh." She turned to their host. "Dex, give us the room, would ya?"
Mumbling something noncommittal, the Besalisk slunk to the kitchen as quietly as his bulk would allow. A few moments later, a metal panel slid closed across the window.
"What the hell," Padmé said. "I can't—would you look at me, Kenobi?" Because Obi-Wan was once again looking elsewhere—his eyes darting from piece to piece of their surroundings rather than settling on her eyes, a kind of nervous avoidance that was entirely unlike him. It wasn't just embarrassment. He's hiding something.
"Padmé," he finally said softly. "It's not something I'm considering lightly. At this point I'm hardly considering it at all. But better to know about it now than to need it down the road and not be ready."
"Why would you even need it?" she demanded. A whole host of emotions were bubbling just under her skin, things she wanted nothing more than to flash-boil away entirely. She didn't have time for this, gods damn it, she was on Coruscant for a purpose. "What do you think Palpatine's gonna do even if they bring you in? Being a Jedi isn't illegal."
A wistful, bitter smile flitted across his face. "Padmé, you've been the most suspicious of Palpatine of any of us ever since he took power. What do you think he'll do?"
I have no idea, she realized. None at all. Because all this time she'd just kept it in her head that the Jedi would always stay a rumor. A secret. She'd considered Palpatine taking over the government. She'd never considered him going after the Order.
"Palpatine listens to Anakin," she found herself saying. "He's like a son to him. If Anakin puts in a good word, maybe this whole thing can go away—"
"When I spoke to him," the Jedi cut across her. "When I asked him—" His eyes landed on the pendant at her neck, then returned to her face. "I'd already gotten the summons. When I mentioned the investigation to him, he hadn't heard about it."
She started to speak, then forcefully closed her mouth as she realized what she'd been about to say.
That can't be right.
There were two options. Either Palpatine hadn't informed Anakin of the fact that he'd launched an investigation that was heavily interested in his former best friend—or Padmé's protest was correct, and Anakin was lying.
Obi-Wan's eyes, red from tiredness, ached with the same sentiment. Padmé realized he could feel her realizing the same thing he'd had plenty of time to mull over.
"If he didn't know," the Jedi said, "then Palpatine is keeping things from him. And if he did know . . ."
"I can't believe that," she said, putting enough blustering conviction into her voice that she knew it sounded like the most hollow denial possible. "He loves you, Obi-Wan. You know that."
"I do." And the unspoken corollary: But that doesn't mean I know his intentions.
Padmé gripped at her mug of caf, letting the cheap ceramic form a tie between her and the concrete reality of where she sat. The liquid was just warm enough still to affect her hand. "So that's it, then," she said, keeping her eyes locked on him. She wasn't going to do him the favor of blinking. "You don't know if you can trust Anakin. And that means you don't know if you can trust his wife."
"Padmé," he protested, his voice rising in alarm, "this isn't about you—"
"You're right, Kenobi," she replied, rising from the booth. "None of this has been. You ask Anakin to rejoin the Jedi alone, you dodge contact when I ask for your help, and now instead of letting me help you you're considering just going into gods-damned exile if you can't handle things yourself. This is all about you and him."
"It's about the future of the Jedi Order—"
"Yeah, yeah. Well, you try to save them from Palpatine your way, and I'll try to save them mine."
Now Obi-Wan was standing as well, moving to block her path to the door. "Padmé, wait. What are you doing here on Coruscant, what aren't you—"
"We all have our secrets, Kenobi. And evidently we're all keeping them close."
She could see how much she was hurting him. And she knew how bitterly she was going to regret this the moment she left the diner. But damn it, the fact that she had the power to hurt something felt good right now.
"Good luck keeping your head down," she said, and shoved past him.
When she hauled the diner's front door open, early-morning sunlight spilled in. She strode out into it, leaving the Jedi behind.
"You listened to all that, I suppose," Obi-Wan said.
He didn't really hear Dex's protests—his mind was still on the conversation that had just transpired. On Padmé's face before she'd stormed out.
Good luck keeping your head down.
He remembered those days not so long ago when he'd had to sneak out of the Temple to escape Cin Drallig's lockdown. How even now the Jedi were cloistered away from the planet, venturing out only rarely, still suffering from lingering paranoia on all fronts. Barris and her friend asking if the Jedi could blame those who believed in their existence for distrusting them.
How could he blame Padmé now, if all he was going to do was run away?
The fixer was a last resort—he hadn't been lying there. But keeping his head buried in the Underworld wasn't doing any good either. Nor would leaving the planet only to take immediate refuge in another hidey-hole.
You're a Jedi. Your job is to make things better.
Get into some trouble.
He turned to Dex. "Get me the information on the fixer, but what I really need right now is a transport offplanet. Something incognito, reliable."
The Besalisk was already leaning behind the counter to grab a datapad. "Arranging safe travel shouldn't take too long. You might have to bunk in back depending on whether or not the ship has some travel time between its current position and Coruscant."
"Trust me, that will be a luxury compared to what I've been dealing with." He ran a finger through his mustache, laying out his priorities. "Too risky to go back for my lightsaber, I'm sure they'll know my address now if they didn't before. And I'll have to wait to contact the Temple until I've left Coruscant space, but once that's happened I'll need to let them know I'm all right."
A low chuckle. "You mean they couldn't—sense it?"
"Sensing that I'm alive and sensing that I'm all right are two different matters." He'd been doing his best to send out the latter into the Force, but direct communication across the planet was . . . unlikely.
His eyes fell on Padmé's abandoned mug of caf. "Dex, do you know what she's doing here?"
Shaking his head, the diner's proprietor reached down to pick up the mug. "I only knew she was on-planet because she stopped here yesterday for lunch, just after she arrived. Mentioned to her that you'd be comin' through."
Whatever it was, he'd sensed enough to know she was very much on edge about it—and she wouldn't be staying long after her business was concluded. "Whatever it is, I do hope she makes it back to Alderaan safe. If that's even where she's going."
With Padmé, one could never tell.
She shouldn't have gone at all. Now she was late, and she was still feeling sick—the sunlight pounded against her head like something physical.
Her commlink chimed. Growling wordlessly, she flipped it open to see a text-only message from the reason she was here in the first place. Thought you said bright and early.
"Oh screw you," she muttered to herself, then tapped back a response. Got held up in the Works. On my way to the Classical District now.
Don't bother, came through a few moments later. I'll come to you. I have a general sense of where you are.
"Yeah, I'll bet you do, you bastard." Fine. Will stay put.
Well, that wasn't true. She had to get at least a block further down, out of sight of the diner. Wouldn't do to have a secret rendezvous this close to her last one.
You'd better know what you're doing, Amidala, she thought to herself, raising a hand to her face to cut the glare. A speeder whooshed by, ozone reek trailing behind it.
Because Kenobi sure doesn't.
Republic Archives: We Lost Another One
[excerpt from a Corellian Security Force inter-department message, from the desk of Detective Mari Watts]
Look, I know the captain thinks I'm being lazy, inventing excuses so I can quit working on this case and get back in the field. But you have to believe me, I am not making this up. It's not even the first time it's happened.
The suspect just disappeared, Alvar. Gone without a trace. One minute she exists, the next it's like she died. Except she didn't. No death certificate, no record of a hospital visit or a will left with a next of kin. Someone else is living in her house, her stuff is gone . . . I just don't get it. How can two suspects vanish on me like that in the same year?
I know it sounds crazy, but someone has to be helping these people disappear. Setting them up with new papers, slipping them offworld in a shipping container or some shit. I don't know. I thought that kind of stuff only happened in the Outer Rim. I need your help on this one. We're not going to get anywhere tracking down these people. They're like ghosts now. We've gotta find the guy who's actually making them vanish.
Just don't tell the boss, okay?
