The days were long — about ten hours longer than the days on Lothal — and dusk settled over the planet at around 2200 according to the thirty-three-hour clock Ezra and Thrawn had devised. Ezra preferred to nap halfway through, during the four hours when the sun was highest, but he was fairly sure Thrawn stayed awake the entire time the sun was up.

Maybe even longer, for all he knew.

They sat across each other on opposite sides of a low fire, Ezra with his jacket pulled tight against the chill. Thrawn stared up at the stars, hands resting on his knees and eyes wide, as if he were scanning the sky for signs of an approaching ship. It was something he did every night, and Ezra could never be sure what exactly Thrawn expected to find; it was possible — maybe even likely — that Thrawn just liked picking out constellations.

Of course, out here he'd have to make up his own. Neither of them had found a single familiar pattern in the stars so far.

Across from him, Thrawn stood and disappeared into the new shelter. He returned moments later, pulling a long-sleeved and heavily-mended athletic shirt over his head. Ezra turned his gaze away, staring down at the loose dirt at his feet, trying not to remember the days Thrawn had spent scavenging the wreck of the Chimaera for whatever damaged supplies he could find — extra clothes like that fleece-lined training shirt, food stock, useful tools. He'd abandoned the search after a few days.

Or at least, Ezra thought he had. There were those four hours each day when Ezra slept and he couldn't account for Thrawn's whereabouts; sometimes he suspected Thrawn returned to the wreck. Not looking for survivors — not anymore — but perhaps burying the bodies. Some days when Ezra woke up, he found Thrawn resting near the river with sweat dried onto his face, washing dirt from his hands.

It didn't bear thinking about, really. In the early days he'd staved off guilt over the Chimaera by reminding himself what Thrawn had done to Lothal. Eventually, that had stopped working, and now he was too exhausted to feel guilty about the wreck or angry about his home planet; the whole thing just left him feeling scooped-out, hollow, lonelier than he'd been in years.

Not seeming to notice Ezra's plummeting mood, Thrawn took a seat across from him, pulled the hem of his shirt straight, and said, "Let's begin."

Ezra angled his head up, eyes narrowed as he gazed at Thrawn through the fire. "What?"

Thrawn gestured at his own head. "Attempt to read my mind."

"Now?" Ezra said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm like, two seconds away from falling asleep."

"Then this is a good time to practice," said Thrawn reasonably. "If you begin this journey when you are both physically and mentally exhausted, you will find mind-reading to be effortless in any low- to mid-stakes situation. A battle, for instance."

Ezra let his head hang, shoulders drooping. He couldn't think of a particularly good argument; he was more focused on the fact that Thrawn thought a battle qualified as low- to mid-stakes.

"Fine," he said. "What do I do?"

"Read my mind," said Thrawn, with a tone that seemed to say, Obviously.

"I know that," said Ezra, his patience straining, "but how?"

"I defer to your expertise in this area," said Thrawn with a respectful inclination of the head. Of course, Ezra reflected, it wasn't like Thrawn would know. He wasn't the least bit Force-sensitive.

Sighing, Ezra sat up a little, straightening his spine and relaxing his shoulders. He called the Force to him, feeling it in the crackling wood and the oxygen feeding into the fire, the new grass shooting up between his feet. Gradually — vaguely, like a fuzzy outline or an image in a warped mirror — he felt a channel form between himself and Thrawn and he followed it tentatively, his grip on it loose and unreliable. It was like climbing up an unraveling rope.

And as the rope unraveled, the threads seemed to encircle him, feeding him information he hadn't had before. There was something alien in the air between them: orderly rows of impenetrable ciphers scrolling through Ezra's mind, muted senses and emotions making themselves known, so faint he could barely feel them and definitely couldn't identify them. But they were there — he couldn't read them, but they were 100%, undeniably there.

"I see it," he said, not opening his eyes. Thrawn didn't respond, but in his mind — if this nebulous sensation Ezra was feeling could really be called a mind — there was a flicker of response, something not quite emotion and not quite thought. It was more like a reflex, like someone's knee jerking when struck in just the right place — only more muted, more subtle.

Was that what it felt like to actually see it when someone else heard him talk? Was he looking at the automatic reaction of Thrawn's mind to any sort of auditory stimulus?

Before he could figure it out, the ciphered thoughts twisted and bulged, pressing up physically against Ezra's own mind. He recoiled from it all, unsure what was going on.

"Commander Bridger?" Thrawn said aloud.

Ezra cracked open one eye. Thrawn was still sitting across the fire, composed and unperturbed. Like usual, he wasn't fidgeting at all. "Yeah?" Ezra said.

"I am attempting to communicate with you mentally," Thrawn said. "Do you understand?"

"Oh, hell," Ezra muttered, feeling the ciphers flicker and change again, each line reaching out in an almost tangible sense to brush against Ezra's thoughts. "That's what you call communication? It's completely unreadable."

The orderly layout of Thrawn's mind seemed to wrinkle.

"Oh, wait," Ezra breathed, sitting up straighter. "I think I just figured out how to tell when you're pissed."

"Fascinating," said Thrawn flatly. "Maintain the connection. If you can, describe what you see."

It took Ezra a few minutes before he felt confident in his ability to do both at the same time. His mouth twisted as he mulled it over.

"I can feel you warming your hands against the fire," he said. "Like I can feel the warmth on my own hands, like my hands are near the fire, only…" He held his hands up, showing Thrawn how far they were from the flames. "And I can tell they're not just warm, they're sore from building the shelter today and yesterday. Your thumb is … scraped up, maybe bleeding a little."

"Where?" asked Thrawn. Ezra furrowed his eyebrows, throwing all his concentration down that particular unspooled thread.

"On the pad of the thumb," he said, half-guessing at first but growing more confident in his answer by the time he got all the words out. "Your left hand," he added decisively.

"And how was it injured?" Thrawn asked, barely waiting until Ezra had finished speaking. Ezra frowned, chasing the thread as it twisted away from him. It seemed to evaporate every time he grabbed onto it; there were segments he could catch, but each one was blocked off from him, hidden behind that indecipherable shield all of Thrawn's thoughts seemed to have.

"I can't tell," he said finally. He opened his eyes, letting the connection slide. Across the fire, Thrawn glanced at him once, almost dismissively, and then looked down at his left hand. He didn't hold it up for Ezra to see, and after a moment, Ezra realized he didn't need Thrawn to confirm the scrape — he knew it was there even without seeing it. Somehow, as confusing and distant as Thrawn's mind had been, Ezra was absolutely certain he was right about the injured thumb, the sore hands, the heat of the fire on Thrawn's palms.

"Are you still connected to my mind?" Thrawn asked, meeting Ezra's eyes.

Quickly, Ezra regained his hold on the connection and nodded.

"Describe the structure of it, if you will," Thrawn said.

"What, the cut?" said Ezra, blinking.

"The structure of my mind."

Ezra couldn't think of anything harder to describe than the bewildering architecture of Thrawn's mind. He bit his lip and searched for the right words, reaching out across the channel of the Force between them as if that might help. In a way, doing this felt almost the same as cheating on an exam at school; in another way, it felt completely and utterly useless, like opening your eyes inside a muddy river and trying to describe fish that you assumed were there but couldn't actually see.

"I guess…" he said hesitantly. "I guess I'd say it's — it's really methodical, really clear. Like a map of a well-planned city. But at the same time it's completely impossible to read. It's like the error screen on a datapad, with numbers and letters you don't know scrolling by so fast you don't have time to even try to figure them out."

Through their link came a faint sense of approval. Ezra's eyes shot open in surprise, partially at the approval itself and partially at the fact that he could identify it.

"What else?" said Thrawn, his tone neutral, his face expressionless.

"What else? " Ezra said, baffled. Maybe he hadn't felt approval after all. It was impossible to tell from looking at Thrawn. "That wasn't good enough?"

"You described the basic structure of my thoughts," said Thrawn.

Was that supposed to be an apology or a rebuke? Ezra could feel the Force connection slipping away as he grew more agitated. "Isn't that what you told me to do?" he asked.

"There is more to a person's mind than thoughts alone," Thrawn said. He spoke slowly, as if he didn't trust Ezra to understand — or as if he was still sussing it out himself. "There are memories and the subject's emotional state to consider. There are physical sensations, as well, which you picked up on quickly."

"Oh, great," Ezra said. "I can tell if the enemy has warm hands."

Even with the connection dwindling, he could feel a sense of reproach emanating from Thrawn. It was the strongest emotion he'd sensed since they started.

"Physical sensations can be imminently valuable," Thrawn said. "Imagine if you were tracking a subject through the levels of Coruscant — are you familiar with Coruscant?"

Ezra gave a quick, irritated nod. Everyone was familiar with Coruscant.

"Seeing what your subject sees might give you an exact location, and is guaranteed to give an approximate one. Hearing what your subject hears will help narrow the options when more than one location is possible. Feeling what your subject feels will give you valuable information regarding exhaustion level, injuries, and other weaknesses you can exploit. For example—"

He held up his left hand, allowing Ezra to see the faint, red scrape on his thumb and the blisters on his palm. "Even a minor scrape implies susceptibility to any manner of toxins, particularly those which can be absorbed to an effective degree through broken skin. Such toxins include—"

"I get it, I get it," Ezra said, waving his hands to stop Thrawn before he went on. "Skip the lecture, okay? What do you think we're gonna do — you wanna go scavenging in the woods for plants to turn into poison darts? Whatever toxins you knew about on Coruscant aren't even here."

Silently, Thrawn let his hand fall. He glanced off into the woods for a long moment, not speaking, and Ezra couldn't get a good grasp on his thoughts through the Force.

"It is possible," said Thrawn eventually, quieter than before, "that you find my thoughts difficult to read because I am not thinking in Basic. Your description of an unintelligible computer interface more or less tallies with descriptions I've heard before from other Jedi. Can you sense anything else? Emotions, physical sensations?"

Ezra narrowed his eyes. He could sense ghost images lurking — almost entirely invisible — behind the wall of ciphers that was Thrawn's mind; there was something unfolding there, like a scraggly, half-dead flower still coming into bloom. He only got a glimpse of it for a second, long enough to tentatively identify it as the image of a plant, and then it was gone and the ciphers were, too.

For a brief moment, he considered calling it off for the night; using the Force like this was exhausting, and on top of an already exhausting day, he was almost unbearably tired. But without really thinking about it, he dismissed this option and worked to resume the connection. It had been too long since he trained; there was part of him that hungered for it, that needed to connect with the Force and with other people, that needed to improve his skills the same way he needed food and water to live.

He let his mind cool down and his thoughts drift away, focusing fully on what he could read off of Thrawn. Gradually, the crackle of the fire faded away and his senses seemed to dull, leaving him with the increasingly strong threads of Thrawn's mind.

Ezra inhaled — a long, slow, meditative breath — and held it for a moment before letting it out.

"Your hair is getting longer than you like it," he said eventually, his voice sounding distant to his own ears. "It's been longer, but you like it better short. And it's uncomfortable because it's a little damp right now, too; I can feel that, but I don't know why it's not dry."

"Concentrate," Thrawn said.

"I am concentrating," Ezra muttered with a frown, but there was no ire in his voice. He was too deeply absorbed in his task to really pick a fight. "I think …" he said, then broke off, biting his lip. "I think maybe you don't like that it's getting wavy now? It's not usually wavy like that — it's usually straight, or maybe you used to have some sort of gel or something that straightened it out — but either way, I think you used water from … the river…? to wet it down, to make it more like it used to be."

Thrawn, predictably, had some objections to that.

"I am unsatisfied with my hair because it is long enough to obscure my sight," he said steadily, "yet too short to be tied back. Not out of vanity."

Ezra hesitated, testing this statement against the strange flickers of Thrawn's mind, looking for any indicator that this was true. "So you got it damp so you could keep it out of your eyes," he said.

Across the fire, Thrawn inclined his head in confirmation. Ezra's eyes weren't open, but he could almost see Thrawn nodding nonetheless; he could sort of feel it, like a phantom pain located around his own jaw and neck. Like he was nodding himself.

"What else?" Thrawn asked.

Ezra breathed easier, glad to move on to simpler tasks. "You're really cold," he said, "because your hair is wet and your pullover isn't thick enough, so your arms and chest are freezing. You're cold pretty much everywhere except your legs — those are uncomfortably hot, almost like they're sunburnt. They're too close to the fire. And right between here—" Ezra touched a spot in the center of his collar bone. "—you're warm, I don't know why. But you're still shivering just a little bit, but you … don't want … to get a jacket—?"

"Yes," Thrawn said, apparently uninterested in this line of thought. "Moving on."

Mentally, Ezra switched tracks, searching through the neat and orderly web of Thrawn's thoughts to find the minuscule nodes of information he could actually understand.

"Um, well," he said, eyebrows knotted, "I can tell you're tired."

There was a brief pause. For a moment, Ezra didn't think Thrawn was going to acknowledge him.

"Your evidence?" Thrawn prompted. Ezra almost opened his eyes, but remembered to keep them closed at the last second.

"Evidence?" he asked, squeezing his eyes closed so tightly it almost hurt.

"Yes," said Thrawn. "We are approaching the end of a thirty-three-hour day. How can I be certain you're not making an educated guess?"

Ezra breathed in a sudden (justified) surge of irritation and breathed it out in a long sigh, forcing himself to concentrate on the signals from Thrawn's mind instead of the much stronger signals from his own.

"Okay," he muttered. "Let's see …"

Thrawn waited, giving nothing away.

"Well, your eyes are itchy," Ezra said, frowning. "Like, really dry, and that weird little red line underneath them — whatever that is — feels weird, like sort of bruised and sore. Like you got punched." He took a deep breath, letting the fresh scent of the woods enter his lungs; the sensations came a little easier now. "And your chest and shoulder are aching," he said. "In a superficial way, not like you sprained something; like maybe there are old injuries or old scars that get touchy at the end of the day."

"Which shoulder is that?" Thrawn asked before Ezra could go on. Blindly, Ezra reached out and touched his own right shoulder.

"Your right one," he said.

"You have an excellent sense for physical sensations," Thrawn noted. His tone was impossible to read. "Move away from those for a moment. What else do you see?"

Ezra stretched out to the Force with everything he had. Seconds ticked by, filled with nothing but silence. He held his breath for a long time, holding out hope that this would spark something, but all he felt were the things he'd already described: the scraped hands, the night chill cutting through Thrawn's training shirt, the peculiar bruised feeling underneath his eyes.

"Nothing," Ezra said finally, sitting back with a sigh.

"Emotionally," Thrawn prompted, like Ezra might have forgotten what he was looking for. Ezra opened his eyes and shook his head.

"Nothing," he said again. Across the fire, Thrawn was leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his unblinking eyes scanning Ezra's face. Trying to figure out if Ezra really couldn't sense anything or if he'd just given up, Ezra guessed.

"You show some potential," Thrawn said finally, sitting back.

Ezra let out a weary sound somewhere between a scoff and a sigh. Thrawn didn't seem to hear him. He stood up, brushing the wrinkles out of his shirt and carefully inserting more dry logs into the fire.

"We'll make further attempts tomorrow," Thrawn said.