Forty-nine days. Ezra marked it on his calendar after his mid-day nap; when they'd first arrived, he'd kept track of the passing time by carving the tally marks into a nearby tree, but Thrawn had complained — firstly because it would harm the tree (which was a completely krayt-spit argument, in Ezra's opinion; they'd already harmed plenty of trees building their shelter) and secondly because "It may be advantageous to leave no evidence of our time here."
Or more specifically, Thrawn said, the exact amount of their time spent here. Whatever that meant.
Either way, Ezra hadn't stopped counting the days; he'd only moved the calendar into his own shelter, where Thrawn couldn't see it. With today marked off, he poked his head out the door and found Thrawn himself was nowhere in sight.
"This better not be a test," Ezra muttered. He poked around the clearing for a moment, glancing aimlessly at the woodshed, full to the brim — the traps, set and ready — the finished shelters, the sap collected in a duraplast container.
There was either too much work to do in one day or there was nothing to do at all, Ezra reflected. That was the worst part of being stranded out here — Thrawn was bearable once you got used to him, but you could never get used to the boredom.
Ezra slipped his jacket on, looking around for any sign of Thrawn. It wasn't unusual for him to disappear while Ezra was sleeping, but usually he was back by the time Ezra woke up; the only reason he knew about Thrawn's occasional disappearances at all was because he'd sometimes woken before his four hours were up and found Thrawn gone.
Sighing, Ezra stretched his arms across his chest. The sun was starting to come down from its apex, so he knew for certain he wasn't wrong about the time.
"Kriff, I don't wanna do this," he said.
He forced his mind to relax; in a way, it felt like his brain was melting or uncoiling, each part of it stretching out in search of other living beings. He skimmed over bacteria in the soil and air, insects in the trees, small animals and birds in the forest. But it wasn't until he reached the wreckage of the Chimaera that he caught hold of the faint signal from Thrawn's mind.
Ezra grabbed onto it with everything he had, clawing his way into a connection, ignoring the headache that came with it. Thrawn was too far away for Ezra to get a good reading; he'd have to go to him if they were going to train.
Gradually, Ezra let the connection slip away. But he didn't start for the wreckage; he stood in the center of the clearing, his feet glued to the ground, and tried to convince himself to move.
His mouth twisted. Maybe he didn't have to go. He'd trained every day so far this week, and it wasn't like they were on a schedule here. If he wanted a break, he could take a break. He'd earned it, hadn't he? Wouldn't Kanan have let him take a break?
He stared into the forest in the direction of the Chimaera. He couldn't convince himself to go forward and he couldn't convince himself to turn away. What did Thrawn do out there every day, anyway? Why wait until Ezra was asleep, when they both knew exactly where he was sneaking off to? Did he go out there at night, too — did he even sleep at all?
Groaning, Ezra buried his face in his hands. That bastard knew he wanted answers, but he couldn't think of anything worse than walking to the Chimaera. He stretched out again, this time trying harder to get a good grasp on Thrawn's thoughts — if he could read his mind from way out here, then he wouldn't need to go to the Chimaera at all.
But Thrawn was more elusive than ever before. Inside his mind, Ezra saw only that impenetrable wall of ciphers, the symbols flashing from one to the next so quickly there was no hope of even recognizing one. Ezra traversed the spindly architecture of Thrawn's mind as best he could; he felt like a blind man climbing up a cliff without anyone to guide him. It simply didn't seem like there were any memories for him to access; it was like standing in a big, empty chamber and having someone tell him to start opening doors — only there weren't any doors. Not a single one.
Sighing, he started off for the Chimaera. He kept the link open, allowing Thrawn's mind and the swirl of numbers and ciphers therein to guide him — and distract him from the reality of where he was going.
Two kilometers later, he could smell the wreckage, even though he couldn't see it yet through the woods. His connection with Thrawn's mind fluctuated on and off, sometimes seeming to disappear entirely — and since he couldn't distract himself any longer, not with the smell of death all around him, Ezra let the connection go. He walked the last few yards through the forest, emerging into a clearing full of fallen, splintered trunks and flattened plants.
The Star Destroyer was twisted and misshapen, recognizable only by its size. A single dead purrgil was crushed beneath it, one tentacle outstretched. It was turning black from exposure and rot, parts of it bursting open; Ezra averted his eyes, scouting around the clearing for any sign of Thrawn.
He walked past orderly piles of debris which Thrawn must have removed from the ship on one of his visits here, probably trying to get deeper into the wreck. He circled around a large patch of upturned ground, refusing to think about who might be buried there, and how recently they might have been pulled from the Chimaera and interred in the ground.
"Thrawn?" Ezra called. He almost gagged as he said it, covering his mouth and nose. The smell of decay made his eyes water; he told himself it was coming from the purrgil — and it was, to an extent — but this didn't really help.
Quickly, he paced away from the wreck, moving north into the woods. The smell faded a little, allowing him to open up his mind again and search for Thrawn. But now, for whatever reason, the connection simply wasn't there. He wandered farther, confused and lost, trying to use the Force to locate Thrawn. It was like using a faulty navigation system; he couldn't seem to find anything, and the signal kept going in and out.
Then, abruptly — another kilometer north from the crash — he found Thrawn sitting with his legs stretched out before him on a low branch of a tree. His arms were crossed; he was craning his neck to look down at the soil beneath him, an expression of utter concentration on his face. There was a knife holstered on his hip and beside him, hanging from a branch higher up, was the woven back creel they used when they went out hunting. There was something large, furry, and very dead in it, but Ezra couldn't tell what.
"Take care," Thrawn said tonelessly as Ezra approached. "There's an animal burrowing through."
Ezra froze, one foot inches above the ground. For a moment, his eyes shot to the basket, expecting the killed animal to move, but then he realized Thrawn was talking about something in the ground. He reached out to the Force to make the long jump from where he stood to a branch near Thrawn's—
—and fell on his face in the dirt instead.
"Careful," Thrawn admonished him. Ezra scrambled to his feet, intimately aware of the earth pulsing beneath him, and hurried up onto the other branch. His mind raced, jumping from one topic (the failed jump; what the kriff was that? Since when could he not jump?) to the other (the earth was pulsing).
Thrawn didn't even glance his way as Ezra perched on the branch. His eyes were firmly on the soil beneath them.
"You think it's an animal?" Ezra asked, eyeing the ground suspiciously. The dirt here was loosely packed and covered in debris from the forest floor. As he watched, something below ground — something small — pushed up against the dirt and debris, lifting it up an inch or so but failing to break through.
"I certainly don't think it's a person," Thrawn said.
"Very funny." Ezra held onto a knot in the trunk above his head and shifted position, getting his feet underneath him so that he was crouched on the branch and could see the ground better. "How'd you find this?"
Thrawn didn't answer. The pulsing below them stopped for a long moment before resuming again a few inches to the east.
"What do you think it is, exactly?" Ezra asked, changing tactics. Thrawn still didn't look at him, but he gave a slight shrug.
"Some sort of… do you speak Sy Bisti, by chance?"
Startled, Ezra said, "No?"
With an almost inaudible sigh, Thrawn looked away from the pulsing ground and made a strange cupping gesture with his hands. "I believe it's some sort of burrowing creature," he said. "A small and likely furry animal which lives in tunnels of its own making underground. It may be blind. It may also be a large arachnid of some type, although I have not seen much evidence here to indicate the existence of large arachnids." He made the gesture again, one hand scooping into the other. "There is a Basic word for it," he said, eyebrows furrowing. "Some sort of uvikizu or umagqu."
"What, like a mole?" Ezra asked. Then, eyebrows raised, "Are you not fluent in Basic?"
Thrawn glanced at him, poised to ask a question of his own — deflecting, no doubt — but then his head swiveled suddenly and he looked back down at the ground. The loose earth jumped up an inch or two and seemed to scatter, and from beneath it burst a small, furry creature, no bigger than a mouse and evidently blind.
"Uvikizu," said Thrawn with a satisfied nod.
"Yup, that's a mole," said Ezra. Feeling a little silly now for jumping into the tree, he let his legs dangle off the side of the branch and dropped back down. The mole glanced around sightlessly before burrowing back into the earth a few inches away from its tunnel exit.
"Commander Bridger," Thrawn said as Ezra turned away, "why did you not simply look into my mind to confirm what I meant by uvikizu?"
Ezra hesitated, looking back at Thrawn over his shoulder. "What do you mean?"
Still relaxed on the branch, Thrawn said, "Our communication was breaking down due to a language barrier. You held the tools to fix it in your hands. You could have simply used the Force to see which animal I was imagining, and then you could have translated its name into Basic for me. Why didn't you?"
Ezra didn't answer for a moment, temporarily flummoxed. "I guess it just didn't occur to me," he said, feeling a little bit attacked. "I mean, why didn't you bring it up, if it's that important?"
"I wished to see whether you would solve the problem on your own," said Thrawn levelly. He uncrossed his ankles and stepped off his branch; he was tall enough that he didn't have to jump like Ezra had. He crouched low to the ground, skimming his hand over the loose dirt about a meter from where the mole had disappeared.
"If you're about to reach into the earth and literally grab a mole right now—" Ezra started.
Thrawn reached into the earth and grabbed a mole.
"How the hell—" said Ezra.
"This might be useful," Thrawn said, examining the stunned rodent in his hand before placing it back on the ground. It tunneled right back into the collapsed passage from which Thrawn had snatched it. "Do you understand how I located the mole?"
"Uh, no?" Ezra said, eyes tracking over the ground.
"Good. That's ideal." Thrawn stood up, clapping the dirt off his hands. "Use the Force," he said. "Extract the mole."
Ezra frowned at him, but after a moment, he knelt down on the ground nearby, examining the loose earth carefully. It should be simple enough to do; with the Force, he could sense the life-giving energy of any creature nearby. He'd be able to find it even faster than Thrawn had. The scattering of dirt across the surface caught his eye, making a red flag shoot up inside his head. Belatedly, he realized there was no grass growing here, but there was plenty of dead grass, recently uprooted, lying nearby.
"Were you … digging around here?" Ezra asked, eyes tracking over the dirt.
"Yes," said Thrawn simply, collecting the hunting creel from the tree and adjusting the shoulder straps that held it on his back.
"Why?"
"Loose earth attracts burrowing creatures such as moles," said Thrawn.
For Ezra, this raised more questions than it answered. He brushed them aside for the moment, preferring to open himself up to the Force and find the mole. He breathed in deeply, taking in the scents and sounds of the forest, reaching out to the plants, the trees, the insects and birds and…
Nothing. He couldn't sense anything.
Frowning harder, he turned his attention to the one living being he knew for sure was in the area — Thrawn — and tried to sense him. Physically, he could see Thrawn standing nearby, but other than that, he was — in a manner of speaking — invisible. His mind simply wasn't there; it couldn't be accessed in the slightest, like the big, spacious chamber Ezra saw yesterday had simply packed up and left.
As the silence wore on, Thrawn tilted his head and stepped closer, circling around until he stood directly next to Ezra.
"Well?" he asked.
Ezra gave his head a sharp, brisk shake. "I can't sense anything," he said. "It's like it's just gone. And not just the mole, either; it's like everything is gone."
If this information surprised Thrawn, he didn't show it. He walked a few meters to the northeast with his hands on the straps of his back creel, watching the ground and placing his steps carefully. Then he stopped again, apparently arbitrarily, and planted his feet.
"Come over here," he told Ezra, "and try again."
Ezra pushed to his feet with a sigh and hurried over, dropping to his knees again. He stayed engaged to the Force the entire time, but still there was nothing. Grimly, he shook his head. Thrawn knelt down across from him, using one finger to trace slowly through the earth.
"It's here," Thrawn said. "You cannot sense it?"
Ezra focused everything he had on that damn mole, but he didn't get even a flicker of life energy in return. "No," he said. Thrawn eyed him speculatively, his finger still moving gradually across the dirt.
"Do you trust that the mole is where I say it is?" Thrawn asked.
"I don't know," said Ezra with a loud, frustrated sigh. "I guess. Why?"
Thrawn broke eye contact and gave a disinterested shrug. "I suppose it doesn't matter; I was only curious." He stopped tracing the mole's path and stood. When Ezra did the same thing, Thrawn glanced at him and said, "You don't typically join me at this time of day. Why did you come?"
Ezra stumbled over his own feet at this question. For the umpteenth time in the last twenty minutes, he felt like he was losing his grip. "I thought you wanted me to come find you," he said. "I thought this was some kind of test."
Thrawn only tilted his head to the side, regarding Ezra with puzzled eyes.
"You're normally back by the time I wake up," Ezra said, even more baffled than before. "I just thought this was another mind-reading training thing. Like I was supposed to wake up, notice you were missing, and use the Force to come find you."
Thrawn's expression shifted at that, but Ezra couldn't quite read him. He clasped his hands behind his back, looking off into the woods to the south of them, and his expression changed again.
"I am amenable to further training today," said Thrawn, "but I think any training attempts in this particular area would be unwise."
His eyes shifted to the side, catching Ezra's gaze for just a second.
"For the moment," Thrawn added.
Ezra thought of the Chimaera's nearby wreckage and then of the inexplicable loss of his senses and couldn't help but agree. He watched Thrawn re-pack the collapsed tunnel and then they both walked back to the campsite together, circling the wreckage through the trees to avoid the smell. Ezra thought of that large patch of upturned ground, the impromptu burial site Thrawn must have dug all on his own while Ezra was sleeping.
His chest tightened at the thought of that. If anyone should be burying the crewmembers of the ISD Chimaera, it was Ezra. He still couldn't be certain what caused the purrgils to abandon the ship before it was safely landed, but he knew that of the two of them — him and Thrawn — only Ezra had the chance to save everybody that day.
And he hadn't. Enemies or not, those people were dead because of him … but he still couldn't force himself to leave his shelter and help Thrawn bury them for four hours a day, even when he knew that was what Thrawn was doing. Most days, he pushed the issue out of his mind, refusing to think about it, to dwell on Thrawn's whereabouts or activities, but now he had incontrovertible proof.
Thrawn was burying his crew members' bodies; Ezra was letting them rot.
A kilometer from home, Ezra veered into the bushes, grabbing onto the tree as he bent at the waist. Bile crawled up his throat, burning its way through his esophagus as he retched. Behind him, he sensed Thrawn hesitating, hovering a few yards away and coming no closer.
As he vomited, a small part of his brain noted that he could sense things through the Force again. When he wiped his mouth and stepped away from the trees, Thrawn didn't meet his eyes.
They resumed their walk, Thrawn moving a bit slower than before, Ezra moving faster as if he could escape the embarrassment of puking for no reason. After a second, Thrawn sped up to match his pace.
"Are you ill again?" he asked, not glancing Ezra's way.
Ezra sighed. He could taste bile on his tongue. "I'm fine."
Thrawn dropped the subject; it was likely he'd figured out what was really wrong on his own, Ezra guessed. Not like it took a genius to figure it out. They returned to the campsite in complete silence, neither of them really acknowledging the fact that Ezra had puked his guts out a kilometer back. Thrawn unfastened the shoulder straps, letting the back creel fall to the ground behind him.
Ezra saw to the fire while Thrawn dragged the slain animal off to the side. The birds were singing, and as Ezra stacked firewood in the pit he noticed something — when he let his mind drift away, he could sense the insects burrowing under the bark in the nearby trees; he could sense leaves and flowers budding, taking in the sunlight, and small animals — moles like the one Thrawn had caught — making tunnels beneath his feet.
He could use the Force again … for some reason. So that was cool, he supposed, but it felt like a hollow victory. What he'd done back there — the moment of weakness, letting his emotions take him over, losing control — it wasn't behavior fit for a Jedi. if Kanan could see him now, he'd be ashamed.
There is no emotion, Ezra thought. There is peace.
As the fire took hold and Thrawn worked steadily on the slain animal, skinning and preparing it for cooking and preservation, Ezra allowed himself to melt into the Force. He relished the sense of connection, the familiar bond to the energy around him. He hadn't noticed it when it suddenly left him, but now that it was back, he felt like a drowning man getting his first breath of air.
The sun crawled by overhead, edging deeper into the afternoon. When Ezra glanced behind him, he found Thrawn closing the makeshift refrigeration unit they'd buried underground. He hung the animal's hide flesh-up on a nearby log and turned to catch Ezra's eyes.
"Would you like to try?" Thrawn asked, holding his knife out to Ezra handle-first.
Ezra eyed the mess of skin and blood with distaste. "No, thanks."
"You'll appreciate both the knowledge and the practice when I die," Thrawn said in the exact same tone Ezra's parents used to use when they said things like You have to know how to run the dishwasher for when we're gone.
"Ugh. You're not dying any time soon."
Thrawn's lips pulled down in a facial shrug, and with another sigh Ezra pushed to his feet and joined him, staying back a few steps. He crossed his arms over his chest. "You do it. I'll watch."
Thrawn flipped the knife over but still hesitated. "Information is better retained through practice than observation."
"I'll watch," said Ezra firmly. Finally, Thrawn relented and turned away, using the edge of his knife to scrape what little flesh remained away from the pelt. Ezra had only watched him do this once before, and ever since then, he'd made himself scarce whenever an animal was killed.
In the past, he'd half-believed Thrawn didn't really know what he was doing with the hides — that it was some sort of bogus flex, like he was trying to prove he knew more about wilderness survival than Ezra, and he'd figured out that Ezra didn't know enough about tanning hides to call him on it. But now, having seen just a small portion of Thrawn's memories, Ezra was pretty sure this was legit.
"It's important," said Thrawn, "to scrape until you see the pores of the skin, but you must be careful not to puncture the hide." He eyed Ezra, his face unreadable. "This is where continual practice will aid you."
"Yeah, yeah," said Ezra, waving his hand dismissively. "Is the gross part next?"
Thrawn glanced over at the animal's severed head, which he had placed facing north on a nearby stump, like he always did during this process. Ezra suspected it was a cultural thing. "Which part is the—"
"You know which part is the gross part."
Reluctantly, Thrawn admitted, "It's next."
"I'll do the rock-thing, then," Ezra said, deliberately turning away. "I want nothing to do with the brains." Then, hearing a quiet hiss of a sigh from Thrawn, he added, "And don't pull the 'when I die' stunt again. It doesn't work on me. I would love if you died."
Thrawn continued working on the hide with a slight nod of his head. "Shall we train, then?" he asked, scraping off another layer of flesh. Ezra made a face.
"I guess," he said. "Can we do that while you're working?"
"I'm a passive agent in this exercise," Thrawn said, not glancing Ezra's way. Instead, his eyes landed rather pointedly on a large, coarse rock sitting nearby. When the fleshing and braining were done, it would be Ezra's job to rough up the pelt with that rock. "Can you do this while you're working?" Thrawn asked.
Ezra shrugged, half-annoyed by the question and half-curious, but too grossed out to really think about it. "I guess we'll find out."
"Can you simultaneously read my mind and pay attention to the tanning process?" Thrawn challenged.
"Ugh, yes," Ezra said, throwing up his hands. "Okay? Are we doing this or what?"
Thrawn turned his attention back to the hide, committing himself to the gruesome task at hand. That was as much of a yes as Ezra was going to get, he suspected. He looked around for a decent spot to sit down and made himself comfortable, legs crossed, eyes closed.
Mind open.
He followed the threads of Thrawn's mind, the channel between them easier to traverse today than it was yesterday. There were still portions of Thrawn's mind — large portions — that seemed impossible to access, so off-limits that Ezra couldn't even figure out which direction to face in order to chase them down. But the connection came quickly and smoothly, and seemed somehow more full than it had the last time they did this.
And then, just as he was really starting to feel good about himself, something changed.
I don't enjoy doing this either.
The words echoed all around Ezra, overlapping with the familiar ciphers pressing against his mind. His eyes snapped open, thrusting the connection into the background of his brain so he could stare at Thrawn.
"Did you just say something?" Ezra demanded.
Thrawn glanced sideways at him.
"I heard you say 'I don't enjoy doing this either,'" Ezra said. The tight look on Thrawn's face suddenly relaxed a little and he turned back to his tanning.
"I didn't say anything aloud," he said. "I was thinking."
"In Basic?" asked Ezra, delighted and confused all at once. He'd never successfully read a thought off of Thrawn before.
"I do occasionally think in Basic," said Thrawn a tad wryly. "It has been my primary language for many years."
"But did you mean for me to catch that thought?" asked Ezra eagerly. "I mean, was it like the other day when you — when you translated your memories into Basic, or whatever you did, and let me see them on purpose?"
Thrawn had the hide entirely clean now, and was almost done with the final layer of scrapings. Ezra could see the pores in the skin; he felt his enthusiasm die a little when Thrawn deemed the hide ready for the next step and stood up, walking over to the animal's severed head.
"Ugh," said Ezra, looking away.
"I'll answer your question if you assist me with the braining process," Thrawn said.
"Dude," said Ezra.
"Or you can attempt to extricate the answer from my mind," said Thrawn with a one-shouldered shrug.
Ezra frowned and closed his eyes, quickly probing around to do just that. He found nothing; there was no more Basic in Thrawn's mind that he could see. The letters and numbers he saw were unfamiliar and scriptive, nothing like the boxy no-nonsense lines of Aurebesh. When he opened his eyes again, Thrawn was watching him knowingly.
"What do you want me to do?" Ezra asked, eyeing the animal's head with distaste and resignation. Thrawn held it in both hands, facing Ezra.
"Simply use your Force to crush a portion of its skull," Thrawn said, indicating a spot on the crown with his finger. "A small portion will suffice; a hole at the apex of the cranium — right here — would be ideal."
Ezra turned his face away so he didn't have to see the end result. He reached out blindly with his hand, allowing the Force to guide him, and felt a sort of cosmic ripple as a rough hole was punctured in the animal's skull, more or less where Thrawn had wanted it.
"Excellent," said Thrawn crisply.
"Great," said Ezra, still not looking. "And nobody says 'use your Force,' by the way. It's 'use the Force.' You sound like an idiot saying use your Force."
Thrawn didn't seem too concerned about that. He held the animal's head upside down over a deep clay pot, one of the first items they'd made after the crash. Ezra snuck a quick peek at the brains slowly draining into the pot and then looked away again.
"I'll, uh, fetch the water," he said, searching for any excuse to get away.
"Four cups," Thrawn informed him. Ezra hurried to the river, gathering approximately four cups — and taking his time about it. He waited until he heard Thrawn approaching the fire pit before he decided the task was done. He joined Thrawn by the fire, pouring the four cups of water into the clay pot with the brains and then stepping back again as Thrawn set it above the flames to boil.
"It was not deliberate," said Thrawn.
For a moment, Ezra didn't know what he meant. Thrawn glanced at him, caught his eye, and didn't look away.
"I did not intend for you to hear me," Thrawn clarified. "Like you, I find the tanning process distasteful; it was weighing heavily on my mind, and you must have caught it by skill alone, not through my help."
"Oh," said Ezra. He tried not to grin, but it was almost impossible to hold back at least a small smile. He shoved his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight from foot to foot as Thrawn adjusted the clay pot; he wanted to ask more, really cement the fact that he'd done something right, but he couldn't figure out a subtle way to do it.
The flames licked at Thrawn's bare hands as he settled the pot low over the fire. He drew back eventually and glanced at Ezra, a speculative look in his eyes.
"Have you made any progress," he asked, "regarding the subject's emotional state?"
Ezra's smile faded. The subject?
"You mean your emotional state?" he asked.
Thrawn shrugged and nodded, as if it didn't really matter that he saw himself as a test subject. "Did you pick up on anything?"
Ezra could feel his victory sizzling into the void. He tracked back over the last few minutes, trying to immerse himself fully in the memory of what he'd seen — if he'd missed anything important, maybe he could discover it by picking over the data once again.
But there was nothing. He turned to Thrawn with a frown, shaking his head.
"You didn't feel anything as you thought it," he said. "You were just .. thinking."
One of Thrawn's eyebrows twitched upward. Ezra scowled down at his shoes.
"I was thinking the words, 'I don't enjoy doing this either,' with no detectable emotions attached to that sentiment?" Thrawn asked. He studied Ezra, giving him a chance to respond, then prompted him again. "You sensed no irritation or resentment?"
"No," said Ezra. He squinted up at Thrawn, still scowling a little. Thrawn's face was completely placid, his features calm and relaxed; he didn't look like a guy admitting to resentment.
"Regarding physical sensations," he said, allowing Ezra a brief reprieve on the subject of emotions, "did you experience anything worth noting?"
Ezra wrinkled his nose as he thought it over. "I could feel the knife in your hand," he said eventually. "And the sun on the back of your neck."
Thrawn watched him, waiting for more.
"Slight physical exhaustion?" Ezra said with a shrug. "I mean, nothing out of the ordinary. Just like, slight tiredness from, you know, walking to the Chimaera and back, and hunting and all that. And carrying that thing on your back." He gestured vaguely at the pot full of brains.
"No sensation of pain?" Thrawn asked.
Steam rose from the pot over the fire. Ezra furrowed his eyebrows.
"Pain?" he asked.
"Perhaps a sharp spike of pain," Thrawn said, his eyes boring into Ezra's. He reached up and touched his right temple, indicating a headache. "Right here."
"No," said Ezra, baffled. "Why? Were you in — did I —?"
"No," said Thrawn immediately, breaking eye contact. He stared off into the woods for a moment, deep in thought. Even standing there with his hair uncombed and his skin streaked with dirt and gore, he maintained the perfect posture of an Imperial warlord, back straight and chin held high. "I felt no pain, Commander Bridger, and I find that very unusual. I considered the possibility that you were transferring the pain into yourself, from my nerve endings to yours, or perhaps discharging any negative sensation into the Force before I could register it. But evidently, that is not the case."
This explanation didn't really do much to clear things up for Ezra. "Why would you be in pain to begin with?" he asked, struggling to understand. "Are you saying you had a headache before I read your mind and then it went away after, or …?"
"I am saying there was no pain at all," said Thrawn patiently, "but past experience indicates there should have been." He touched his right temple again. "A brief, sharp pain, located here and spreading throughout the rest of the body. The exact duration of the mind-reading correlates directly to the intensity of the pain; the more layers of memory you expose, the more pain I experience."
Ezra blinked and opened his mouth, unsure what to say. He didn't get the chance to organize his thoughts before Thrawn went on.
"Let's hypothesize," said Thrawn, "that you manage to submerge yourself so deeply in my mind that you uncover detailed, specific memories of military secrets — perhaps a strategic plan as well as specific tactical details — laid out in plain Basic. By the time you reach that point, I should be in agony so intense I can no longer stand." He inclined his chin, his eyebrows furrowed and his eyes far away. "Previously, I have assumed this pain was a natural byproduct of cross-species interrogation — I had reason to believe it did not apply to same-species interrogations at the time. However, it now seems more closely related to the polarization of Force abilities you mentioned earlier — the Dark Side and the Light Side."
He glanced at Ezra; Ezra met his eyes, blinking rapidly, the same cautious way he would stare at a bright sun.
"You offered to be my test subject thinking it would hurt you?" he said, feeling dazed.
"I offered to be your test subject assuming your skills would initially be so weak as to evoke nothing more than a slight headache," Thrawn corrected. "Though I was prepared for the eventuality of more severe pain, yes."
Ezra opened his mouth, once again not really sure what he was going to say.
"That is not the issue at hand," Thrawn said before he could figure it out. "To this date, I have been interrogated only by Sith Lords or men who would eventually become Sith Lords. If your technique does not cause pain, it may be indicative of a deficiency in your skills or general level of concentration. It may also mean that your technique is simply different in nature from Darth Vader's or Emperor Palpatine's."
Well, if those were the only two options, then Ezra knew which theory he preferred. He didn't really see what the big deal was; it sounded to him like Dark Side users caused pain when they read people's minds and Light Side users didn't, and that was a good thing. It was as simple as that.
But Thrawn was looking at him speculatively, like it was a big deal. Like there was something going on that Ezra didn't understand in the slightest.
"Let's try again," he said.
