The barren trees, the smoke-stained snowscape — all of it faded slowly, leaving Ezra with only one impression of the memory: the sound of Thrawn's racing heartbeat drowning out everything else. Gradually, that ended too, replaced by his own quiet, shallow breaths and a sensation of hollowness, like he'd been gutted while he wasn't looking.
"It's not deserted," he whispered, feeling weak. Thrawn watched him from across the fire, his eyes giving off a faint glow. Ezra's thoughts were in a swirl, his emotions impossible to identify; he could feel the Force crowding in on him, overwhelmingly loud. "You're telling me there are people here," he said, trying to suss that last memory out, "that someone made us crash…?"
A beat of silence passed after Ezra trailed off. It seemed almost like Thrawn was waiting for him to go on, but he couldn't — his head was swimming, he couldn't think of anything intelligent to say. He saw the eerie image of himself abandoning the Chimaera's bridge playing over and over again in his mind's eye. The fear in his eyes, the obvious panic, the child-like loss of control. Everything had happened so fast and up until now he'd thought — he'd told himself — that there was nothing else he could do, that this situation was inevitable — that he'd handled the crash of the Chimaera with the calm, quick thinking of a Jedi.
But he hadn't seen any of that calmness in Thrawn's memories. He hadn't seen a Jedi making a quick decision, the only possible decision. He'd seen a teenage boy jumping out of harm's way and leaving everyone else to die.
Eventually, Thrawn answered, "No. This planet is indeed deserted."
Ezra felt small; his limbs felt weak, unmovable. "But the ruins…"
"There are traces of civilization throughout the planet," Thrawn acknowledged with an inclination of his head. "That is all they are — traces. There are no signs of recent life."
This information joined the troubling swirl of possibilities filling his head. He folded his arms tightly over his stomach like an injured man trying to hold his intestines in; it didn't do anything to soothe his nausea. What could wipe out life on an entire planet so thoroughly? Some sort of plague? A natural disaster? Or was it genocide?
A thought popped into his head suddenly — something Thrawn had mentioned days before, but Ezra had pushed out of his mind. He bit his lip, wishing he could simply dismiss it again, pretend it had never been said. But the thought wouldn't go away, and soon he found himself opening his mouth and heard the question he didn't want to ask coming out.
"You said the Empire had a weapon, right?" he said tentatively, still hunched over himself. "Something the TIE Defenders were supposed to prevent?"
Thrawn gazed back at him steadily. "The Death Star."
It felt like a cold fist had closed around Ezra's gut.
"A massive battle station," Thrawn continued, "estimated to be one hundred sixty kilometers in diameter or roughly the size of a small moon, though I have not seen it myself. Its existence is a secret even from high-ranking military officers. The station itself is built around a hypermatter reactor capable of generating enough power to destroy a planet in its entirety."
Whole planets — that was the part Ezra had remembered, the part that stuck in his mind no matter how hard he tried to get rid of it. Whole planets like this one?
"The purpose of the Death Star," said Thrawn, his eyes drifting away from Ezra, "is to control the Empire and its citizens through fear. I do not believe this to be an effective or honorable solution; when I learned of its existence, I believed that if I proposed a more rational solution, perhaps the Emperor would eradicate the Death Star entirely.
"The TIE Defenders were such a solution; equipped with shields and hyperdrives, they both protected Imperial pilots and allowed them to pursue the enemy more efficiently, reducing casualties while increasing victories. With Defenders in place of the Death Star, the amount of risk to both enemy and ally lives would decrease substantially."
Thrawn's eyes slid back to meet Ezra's, his face impossible to read. "Unfortunately," he said, holding Ezra's gaze, "this is no longer a viable solution."
Kanan. A sharp pain ripped through Ezra's chest, forcing him to avert his eyes. If Thrawn were telling the truth, it meant his Master's sacrifice, the sacrifice he'd admired and striven to emulate, wasn't only unnecessary — it was actively harmful. The Lothal Rebels had been called uninformed, reckless, a hundred times before — not just from Imperial officers like Thrawn, but even from allies within the alliance. If the Death Star was real, then all those people were right; Kanan had given his life to take down a measly TIE fighter, and in the process he'd inadvertently given rise to something far worse, something unspeakably evil.
Ezra had no choice; he forced this out of his head immediately, unable to even consider it, and focused on something else instead.
"Is it possible…" he started. "I mean, do you think…?"
He gestured futilely at the land around him.
"No," said Thrawn evenly, "I do not believe a similar weapon was put to use here. A weapon such as the Death Star does not only kill people, Commander Bridger. There would be no planet left — and it is clear as well this was no natural disaster or plague."
Ezra scrubbed at his face, trying to follow Thrawn's reasoning. Trying to ignore the feeling that Thrawn had just read his mind. "How do you figure?"
"A natural disaster that eradicates sentient life but leaves the animals unharmed?" Thrawn replied. "A plague which eliminates multiple sentient species, all with distinctly different immune systems? Because there is evidence in the ruins of at least three sizable populations of sentient species, one of them insectoid."
"Okay," said Ezra, "so what, you think—?"
"Genocide," said Thrawn simply. He clasped his hands loosely between his knees, gazing off into the forest. Ezra noticed Thrawn's right thumb running over his left palm, over the cut he'd received shortly after the crash. It had long since healed, leaving no scar behind — yet Thrawn still knew exactly where it had been, still traced it when he was thinking. "I think it likely that the sentient life on this planet was eradicated from the inside, with the perpetrators later transported off-planet by a more advanced society," Thrawn said.
From his mind, Ezra caught a flicker of emotion — the barest hint of a memory. Dark tunnels, Chiss commoners trampling each other in their panic to get away. That muted reaction stood out starkly against the landscape of Ezra's own brain, where his emotions were twisting around each other in an opaque cloud, no more readable or coherent than the dust kicked up after an explosion on city streets.
He shut it down; he didn't have another option, not if he wanted to keep functioning tonight. He let himself detach from the thoughts and memories, the emotions — Kanan's face, Kanan's voice, his parents gone and him, against all odds, still here — and felt it all sink deeper down within him, lost to the dark.
Simultaneously, he felt the cool contact of Thrawn's mind fade away. The flicker of emotion and the chaotic memories were replaced by something all too familiar — the distant, unknowable string of ciphers cascading into each other like a computer-generated spiderweb. He'd lost the thread of Thrawn's emotions now.
"I have found the remnants of engravings at the ruins," Thrawn said softly. "They show an invading force far stronger and more technologically advanced than the planet's natives, descending from the sky. They indicate warring factions between the natives as well, factions of which the invaders likely took advantage."
He made eye contact with Ezra, his mind and face utterly unreadable.
"I believe," he said, "this planet has been attacked by the Grysks."
Ezra huddled closer to the fire, cognizant of a sudden drop of temperature in the air. Overhead, the sky was darkening, storm clouds eating up every pale spot of blue. They lingered over the northern forest, swelling there, biding their time. Ezra looked back at Thrawn with a shiver, and when he called up the link between them, he was completely incapable of reading Thrawn's mind.
"You think they killed everyone?" Ezra asked.
"I think they persuaded the people of this planet to kill each other," Thrawn corrected. His hand closed around his oth'ola endzali. "Likely, they divided the societies here into warring factions and assimilated the victors, using them as slaves. Or as weapons to be turned against still other species.
"And," he said, his eyes boring into Ezra's, "if they've been here before, I believe they might come back."
The storms blew in that night and didn't stop for days. In the first few hours, when the wind was high but the rain was light, Thrawn led the way through the forest, away from the river. Ezra followed behind, one of the shelters floating unsteadily in the air ahead of him. It took all his concentration to hold it up and keep it together, but it was well-built and designed for easy transportation exactly because of situations like these.
Besides, with the shelter in front of him, he didn't have to squint through the wind and lashing rain like Thrawn did. He only had to maintain his connection to the Force and keep putting one foot in front of the other, ignoring whatever petty little obstacles came his way. It was the worst time for fresh foliage to be coming in; tall plants surrounded them, wet leaves brushing against Ezra's face with every step and transferring rain drops to his clothes.
They moved the shelters to high ground a little more than a kilometer away from the river. Overkill, in Ezra's opinion — but then again, he was pretty sure from Thrawn's memories that he'd never actually been through a natural flood (how could he, growing up in caves?), so maybe a little bit of overkill was understandable. After the first successful transfer, they worked separately, with Ezra floating the shelters themselves and Thrawn trailing behind, loading the rest of the supplies onto a wooden sledge and pulling it over the forest floor. It took them hours, and by the time they were more or less settled — driving the posts of each shelter deep into the wet ground — the rain was coming down fast.
They were soaking wet by the time they made it inside, each of them ducking into separate huts. The arrangement of fresh-picked moss and tightly-woven thatch on each shelter kept the interior dry, and Ezra sat in the middle of his, all his possessions disarranged, listening to rain tap mutedly against the shelter roof in the dark.
With his eyes adjusting, he plucked at the wet shirt sticking to his skin and pulled it over his head; it was so soaked he couldn't even use it to dry his hair. Half-blindly, he reached for the handmade trunk of dry clothes sitting nearby and dug out a new shirt. He held it out before him, squinting; he could tell by the feel of it that something was wrong. It was made out of softened leather, like many of Ezra's clothes since the crash, but as he ran his hands down the sleeves, it seemed like they went on for too long, like he was holding a small tent instead of a shirt.
Sure enough, once his eyes adjusted a little more, he could tell it was Thrawn's shirt, not his. He tossed it aside for the moment, rifling through the trunk — but this wasn't some haphazard mix of his clothes thrown together with Thrawn's. It was simply Thrawn's trunk, placed in Ezra's shelter by mistake. There was nothing in here that fit him.
With a sigh, he pulled the too-big shirt over his head, figuring it must be better than whatever Thrawn was going through next door. He crawled across the floor on his hands and knees, feeling for the makeshift bed frame. Instead, he found another box; it rattled when he bumped into it, a sound like metal on metal that he could barely hear over the thunder.
Looking inside, he saw Thrawn's box of salvaged parts — loose wires and broken circuit boards, dented comlinks, a single datapad with a melted screen. Ezra pushed the box away from him like it was filled with venomous snakes; he fell backward onto his palms, heart thudding for a reason he couldn't explain and didn't want to examine.
The holoprojector was in there somewhere — the one with all the pictures on it of Kana Pyrondi and her friends in the Chimaera's crew. Ezra buried his face in his hands, wiping the residual rainwater out of his eyes. Wind rocked the shelter, making every post creak with the effort of standing.
He sighed and pulled himself closer to the box, kneeling before it in the dark. The holoprojector seemed to slide into his hand of its own volition as he reached inside, metal slotting coolly against his palm. In the next moment, it was powering on with a whir, though Ezra couldn't be certain he'd pressed the button — at least, not on purpose. He could feel the Force pounding against his temples, invisible hands clutching his head and whispering at him to look.
He scrolled through the images reluctantly, barely seeing them but lingering for long seconds, even minutes, on each one. The Imperial uniforms blurred together; the faces became impossible to distinguish. He scooted backward until he found the bed and pushed himself off the floor without letting go of the holoprojector, collapsing backward onto his thin, woven mattress.
The images suspended above his head flickered and changed. There were two pictures of Thrawn in here — one where he stood at the viewport of the bridge in the dull olive uniform of a lower-ranking officer, his back to the camera but his head tilted to the left, eyes sliding sideways to focus on whoever took the picture — probably Pyrondi, since it was her projector. It was likely she hadn't seen Thrawn watching her at the time, Ezra thought — he wondered if she'd been reprimanded afterward for taking pictures on the bridge. The other photo, more recent, showed Thrawn in his white Grand Admiral's tunic, pinning a new rank insignia on Pyrondi's lapel. Their backs were stiff, Pyrondi's chin held high; she stood at attention, but there was a slight smile on her lips, a certain warmth to Thrawn's eyes that suggested a working relationship better than most Ezra himself had ever been a part of.
A working relationship like the Ghost Crew had, Ezra realized. That's what every single one of these pictures showed — Imperial officers who were friends, who had complex relationships and inside jokes, who complained about their job in short videos and trained their hardest in others, eager to prove they wouldn't let the Grand Admiral down. People who saw each other as family, who loved each other, who could be loyal and kind as much as they could be petty and cruel.
He'd killed them all.
Thrawn's memory was right — Ezra had been the only man on the bridge, the only person who had the power to stop the crash. He couldn't blame a lack of knowledge for his failure. He had experience with Imperial ships, he knew the layout of a Star Destroyer, could have easily located the control board and stopped things in time. But instead, he'd fled the moment he got a chance. Survival skills, flexibility — whatever Thrawn wanted to call it, that was the irredeemable facet of Ezra's personality that led him to jump to safety rather than stay behind to help. He'd seen the purrgils abandoning the ship, felt the tilt of the deck beneath him — he'd been thrown across the bridge into the crew pits and then the bulkhead, and adrenaline had kicked in upon impact and scrambled his thoughts entirely.
And when he'd seen Thrawn — his enemy — being pulled away, he'd gone after him, thinking offensively rather than defensively, like a soldier instead of a Jedi, thinking he couldn't let his target escape, thinking he had to get out of there before the crash killed him and Thrawn got away.
And what had Thrawn been thinking about?
Only his people. He'd done everything he could to escape the purrgils, not so he could get away to safety but so he could help, even trying to warn Ezra the ship was about to crash — believing, perhaps naively, that his enemy would help him save the Chimaera and its crew.
And why would he think that? This was the part Ezra puzzled over, the part he couldn't quite figure out. In any world, it seemed unreasonable to expect a soldier to save his enemies rather than kill them; it seemed only slightly less unreasonable for the enemy to feel no guilt after the fact. But Thrawn had so implicitly trusted Ezra to save the Chimaera that there was still a faint sense of shock and betrayal lingering in his mind each day — and Ezra did feel guilty about it, so guilty that it seemed to simultaneously eat him up and freeze him in place.
Where did that sort of trust come from? It hadn't crossed Thrawn's mind for even a second that Ezra might abandon ship — he knew, because he'd seen it in Thrawn's mind. Was it some sort of unlikely faith in the Jedi? Did his past experience with the Order — or with his brother, who'd been Force-sensitive, too — somehow instill the conviction in Thrawn that Ezra would do anything he could to save enemy lives?
Or did Thrawn believe it simply because that's what he would do? This seemed like the easiest option to dismiss out of hand — he'd heard from Hera about what happened at Batonn, all those civilians killed under Thrawn's command — yet it lingered in Ezra's mind and refused to go away. He remembered how Thrawn had raced to Ezra's unconscious form after the crash, tending to his enemy's wounds even as the ship burned.
Yes, this had been a largely selfish move — Thrawn's own memory of the event confirmed that. But after Ezra told him there was nobody left alive on the Chimaera, what had Thrawn done? He'd stayed awake well into the next day building a shelter for both of them; he'd cleaned the wound on Ezra's forehead and watched it for infection; he'd gone back to the Chimaera when he knew Ezra was safe to search for survivors, building a lever because he knew Ezra couldn't help him remove obstacles from the wreck. Over the next weeks, he'd returned to the Chimaera daily, spending every ounce of sunlight there — pulling charred and incomplete bodies from the wreckage, scavenging clothing for both of them from the mostly-intact cabins, finding Pyrondi's holoprojector and tucking it away in his pocket without a word to Ezra about what he had found.
At that point, hadn't Ezra become useless to him? He couldn't assist in the rescue or the scavenging; on the few occasions he woke, he was exhausted and only semi-lucid, unable to use the Force. Strategically — and wasn't Thrawn always thinking strategically? — that would have been the ideal time to kill Ezra, to eliminate the enemy Thrawn had been fighting for so long.
Assuming, of course, that defeating Ezra was truly his goal.
The holoprojector scrolled automatically through the remaining photos, then went blank with an audible click as it reached the end. Ezra stared at the warm disc of metal in his hands, the rain coming down hard overhead. It was a long moment before he sat up and stretched out his arm, depositing the projector gently in the box of scrap parts.
Kanan had sacrificed himself to destroy the TIE Defender factory, and in the process — if Thrawn could be believed — he'd given the Empire the last excuse it needed to make a weapon capable of destroying worlds.
What had Ezra done by imitating his Master? What had he accomplished by killing almost fifty thousand Imperial soldiers? If Thrawn was the type of admiral who designed an entirely new class of TIE fighter to defend his own men, to reduce unnecessary casualties, to prevent the construction of the Death Star — then what had Ezra accomplished by defeating him? What had he succeeded in, besides stranding one of the few reasonable enemies the Rebellion had, one of the few Imperial soldiers who could have potentially been turned into an ally?
Well, there was one thing he'd done, Ezra thought. He recalled the memory he'd seen in Thrawn's mind — the image of himself as a panicked, injured child not thinking clearly, leaping free from a ship he could have saved. It seemed like the only thing he'd done successfully was exactly what he'd never intended to do when he took Thrawn's ship.
He'd survived.
Ezra slipped into sleep not long after dark. Later, he couldn't be sure how long he drifted, half-dreaming and half-dead in that in-between state where he could almost guide himself through semi-coherent thoughts, but couldn't really claim to be awake.
Maybe he drifted for hours; maybe it was only minutes. Either way, eventually, something changed.
The rain pattered against his roof, invading his sleeping mind. The wind howled, and he could hear that, too; he remembered moving the shelters, the squelch of mud beneath his boots; he worried vaguely about what would happen tomorrow, if the storms would worsen, if they'd be able to find any more fish. He wondered if—
Oh, that's extraordinary, Vuras says. Honestly. It reads like something a schoolmaster would write.
He holds a flat computer in his hands, something that looks like nothing more than a screen; there's no keyboard attached to it like the datapads Ezra's familiar with and no ports that Ezra can see. He studies something written on the screen before him in a script Ezra doesn't understand, and then he nods approvingly and hands it back to his younger brother. You know what I learned in school today? Vuras asks.
Vurawn is positively glowing, clasping the strange computer to his chest. It's too big for his hands; he looks no older than four or five, possibly just starting school himself.
What did you learn? he asks eagerly. Then, before Vuras can answer the question, he hastens to add, Can you check my equations after we help with the mines? Uva'nse'cha said I might test into upper levels, but I have to show him I can do the work first.
Vuras ignores this second part. I learned how to turn people's skin purple, he says, leaning forward and whispering these words in a confidential tone.
Vurawn's grip on the computer tightens. His eyes are wide. Wait, really? he says. Vuras is holding back a tight smile as he nods. The flicker of his eyes is familiar; it indicates a puzzle or riddle, or perhaps deceit. How? Vurawn demands, thinking over the potentialities.
When Vuras punches him in the arm, he flinches back with a scandalized cry, but isn't quite fast enough to avoid the blow.
There, look, Vuras says cheerfully, indicating the bruising spot on his brother's bicep. Now you're turning purple.
The scene fades before Ezra can make out the smaller boy's outraged reply; no other memory rises to replace it. Instead, he gets a sense of swirling thoughts, each one overlapping the next. Ruminations of real-life concerns — the funnel, and whether it will hold throughout the next week or so of storms — give way to ancient, half-forgotten to-do lists.
Tomorrow he must review reports of the hangar bay inspection; he must oversee the coordination exercises with the rest of the Seventh Fleet, a task which will likely last into next week, especially considering the review process and the time he or Faro (most likely Faro; she's better at it than he is) must spend soothing bruised egos amongst the ships' captains; he must answer Senator Bail Organa's invitation to the annual Alderaanian Solstice Ball, which is of course likely to be a far more dangerous endeavor than it seems; he is scheduled to meet with both Governor Pryce and Moff Omacri, and neither of them wishes to meet ship-side, and according to Commodore Faro he is politically obligated to meet wherever they wish. Even if it means taking a shuttle planet-side to Lothal. But with the datawork from their last piracy venture to go through as well, and without Vanto here to pore through it—
—dimly, without emotion, he realizes these concerns no longer apply. Perhaps it is Vanto's name which makes him remember; he thinks, I still have not selected a new aide, and then he realizes he does not need an aide, he does not have a ship. But in any case, his mind turns amiably to other things, a sense of mingled relief and sadness accompanying the abandoned tasks.
Through the fog of sleep, he registers the sound of rain against the roof and for a moment he's on Copero for the first time, trying not to let the adult officers see his awe as lightning flashes outside — and can energy like that be weaponized? he wonders. Surely if it's occurred to him so quickly, it must have already been harvested by older, sharper minds — probably centuries ago — but if so, he's never read about it. He makes a note to mention it to the weapons officer the first chance he gets, assuming of course that she'll listen to a new cadet as young as he is—
—and the temperatures are low enough to penetrate his sleep, reminding him of winters back on Rentor, of the festivals held each year to celebrate warmth. He remembers sitting on the shoulders of an older cousin — Rala'charca, who died in the attack — and stretching out his hands to touch the soft golden glow of an escalfromach lantern hanging from the cave ceiling. He was scolded afterward — technically, what he'd done was considered theft by the upper-class commoners who organized such events — but for a full six months after that festival, he could rub the golden escalfromach stains on his sleeves to reactivate it, the salt on his skin catalyzing the chemical mixture until it glowed and simultaneously emanated a comforting heat—
—but thinking of heat is never wise. His thoughts cascade against one another, bringing to mind a thousand unpleasant encounters — almost all of them from this side of the galaxy:
Human hands clasping his hair painfully and covertly at an Ascension Week party, the drunken senator not realizing where he was, what he was doing, who he was trying to intimidate. The other officers and politicians around him pretending not to see. Vanto silently telling him, with his facial expressions, not to make a fuss.
He remembers too many people crowded together at a governmental event, almost all of them flushed from alcohol, stumbling into him and then sneering as if he's to blame. Short, stubby fingers clamped around his wrist, the human's skin seeming to burn against his; and hot breath hissing into his ear.
You don't belong here, the senator says.
It reminds him of Voss Parck when they first met, viewing Thrawn as little more than an alien weapon capable of elevating his status above that of his cousins in the military — of Eli Vanto and his intimidating horror stories of the Chiss — of Commodore Faro, so displeased at first to have the Imperial Navy's notorious alien officer aboard her ship that she straddled the line daily between unhelpful and simply insubordinate.
Perhaps she was more displeased by the amount of courts-martial under his belt than the peculiar color of his skin and eyes; he's allowed himself to believe that's true for years now, though he knows she doesn't put much stock in the Imperial Military Code. He values her allyship — perhaps her friendship, but would she call it that? He can never tell with humans — too much to entertain the thought that she'd disliked him purely because he's Chiss. The same thought when it comes to Vanto almost scalds him, sets his thoughts to churning once again.
Far easier, really, to hold his acquaintances at arm's length for a time — to create, in a sense, a viable motivation for them to dislike him, giving him reasonable doubt as to their true mental state.
He spins into a fuzzy-edged memory of the Chimaera's corridors, the bulkheads seeming to waver all around him in the strange way of dreams. Distantly, he hears the voices of a group of crewers, all of them just out of sight.
—follow his orders, says one of them. I mean, to a reasonable extent. Just wish he wasn't an alien.
Beside him, Commodore Faro's posture stiffens, but even though he's initially put off by the malice in his crewer's tone and the obvious prejudice of his statement, it still takes Thrawn a moment to remember he's the alien in question. He doesn't let the realization affect his stride. He has heard far worse since entering the Empire, but it seems more piercing now, from his own men — aboard his own ship.
Worse, when they come into view, he recognizes them from their annual performance evaluations — the man who spoke is competent, admirably hard-working, a natural leader for his sector. The enlisted personnel gathered around him are similarly high performers, a mix of excellent athletes and superb minds. The Chimaera's best and brightest.
If he has to choose between competent or kind, of course, he chooses competent every time. He walks past the whispering crewers without a word of admonishment; a subtle twitching of his left hand commands Faro to do the same thing—
And one memory swirled into the next, hazy thoughts of the present mixing in with the past. It wasn't like anything Ezra experienced during the day; Thrawn's mind now was as open and expressive as a well-formatted holofilm, every minor thought beckoning Ezra in closer, urging him to get a better look. It felt raw and vulnerable, every thought and emotion on display, unguarded. He pulled away from it all with great reluctance, pulling himself back into the waking world and leaving the immersive experience of Thrawn's mind behind.
In his shelter, the sounds of the world encroached on him again, now heard fully with his own ears rather than the muted sensations he'd heard through Thrawn. Tentatively, Ezra stretched out with the Force — deliberately this time — and got an almost visual sense of Thrawn in the other shelter, his woven mattress tucked into the far corner, his legs bent up and his body turned to face the wall. He was still fast asleep, his mind evidently reaching out or connecting to Ezra's of its own volition — seeking contact subconsciously in the night.
It was a strange concept to mull over — no stranger, though, than the disconcertingly negative tint to Thrawn's sleeping thoughts, which seemed only one shade away from nightmares. Pulling away, Ezra confined himself to the dull physical sensations from the other hut — the slight chill; the ache of Thrawn's hands, pressed uncomfortably against the shelter wall as he slept, like he was calling Ezra closer and simultaneously pushing him away.
And then, gradually, Ezra let that image go as well, too exhausted to puzzle any of it out.
It would keep till morning, he decided. Hell, it would keep till eternity for all he cared.
He brought a barricade down between his mind and Thrawn's, not even thinking about it, and went back to sleep.
